Windows Tips and Tricks

My often repeated hope for a low-cost appliance PC is coming closer to realization. Wal-Mart will be selling an Ubuntu system from Everex for $200. Whether it will be as easy to use as a TV, I don’t know but it’s a step in the right direction. Will anybody buy it? Probably not, unless it gets some marketing muscle. Anyway, PC World reports:

The Everex gPC (the “g” stands for Google), goes on sale tomorrow at Wal-mart and is being touted by the company as a close collaboration between the PC maker, the open source community and Google that is intended to “bring Linux to the masses.”

The machine uses a 1.5GHz Via C7-D processor, Via UniChrome Pro IGP graphics core, and comes equipped with 512MB of memory, an 80GB hard drive, a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive, and has built-in Ethernet.

Update: I should add that the price does not include a video display.

The readers of this blog are probably too savvy to fall for the type of scam described below but you may know some less knowledgeable PC user who should be warned. Here’s an excerpt from The Blade:

The FTC is warning that a fake email is being sent out which appears to be from their agency, but in fact is a virus. Contained in the fake email is an attachment, that if opened, can unleash the viral pest.

The Web is full of sites with specialized information and here is one called http://www.timeanddate.com/. The name tells the story. The site has various kinds of time and date calculations and calendars. Want to know what day of the week, May 24, 1934 fell on? Want to know when sunset in Kabul, Afghanistan occurs next Wednesday? This site will show you.

One of the most common reasons for computer performance to suffer is too many programs running in the background. Very often a lot of things get loaded at startup and cause the system to run slowly. It’s a very bad habit of many programs to stick themselves into the background whether you want them there or not and I have discussed managing startup programs and services at my education site. There are a number of utilities to help with this problem but one called Autoruns from Sysinternals is certainly one of the best. It may be more detailed than many average PC users want to deal with but experienced users will certainly like it. It’s free and can be downloaded here.

Another program for controlling what starts up and a lot of other things is one of my very favorite utilities, WinPatrol. It’s also free but you really ought to support BillP and buy a license. It’s well worth the price of $30. The program has recently been updated again and can be obtained here. This program will help guard your system against spyware and other problems.

Some see the future of software to be Web apps. Others see some sort of combination of desktop and Web. The talk is still mostly speculation since there are many imponderables. However, Scott Spanbauer has done a real live experiment for PC World and he likes working just on the Web. In an article, Life Without Desktop Software, he reports:

PC World asked me to give up desktop applications for a week and work solely on the Web–and I still haven’t gone back to the desktop.

My own experience in this area is mixed. I write a lot of this blog at the site. This is fine except when Verizon drops my DSL connection or the MySQL servers at my Web host have a hiccup. If I don’t back up my compositions frequently, I sometimes lose my work. I also write a lot of email on the Web at Yahoo. It isn’t uncommon for a glitch at Yahoo to happen when I’m writing and I have to start the email over again. There are certainly times when Web-based applications offer advantages - collaborative work, for example. Also, Web email is great if you travel or use several different computers. However, I am still going to do things like writing articles, coding, and creating Web pages on my local computer.

Email and Internet postings often contain abbreviations or jargon words. There are even made-up languages like “leet-speak”. A lot of this is from the age-old inclination of teenagers to try to baffle their elders but many acronyms and abbreviations are in pretty general use. If you want to know what some of this stuff means, one good reference is the Internet Slang Dictionary..

Normally, the results of a command-line operation are displayed on the screen. However, a more permanent record can be created by sending the results to a new text file with the redirect symbol “>”. If the file already exists, any previous contents will be replaced. You can append results to the contents of an existing text file with the symbols “>>”. In a post some time ago, I discussed how to use the “dir” command and the redirect to list files of a certain type. As noted in that post, the command dir “C:\my folder\*.ext” /s /q > C:\list.txtwill list all files with the extension EXT that are in my folder and its subfolders and place the list in a text file list.txt that is created by the command.

Another example of possible use of a redirect is provided by the case of selective deleting discussed in tip #3. The command lists the files being deleted on the screen. Perhaps you would like a record of what was deleted. In that case, you can modify the delete command by adding a redirect to a file. For example:del /s /f /q C:\*.tmp > C:\templist.txt

The file to be used for the list can be located anywhere you want as long as you designate the full path. Any file or folder name with spaces will require that the path be enclosed in quotes as indicated in the example of my folder in the first command above.

I hope I will be forgiven for posting a small personal plug but I can be heard on Connecticut public radio on Sunday, November 4, at 3 pm on NPR station WNPR, at 90.5 FM in Hartford/New Haven and at other frequencies throughout the state. The subject is tips for taking care of your PC. Or you can download and listen to an MP3 file from this link.

It’s the weekend and this post has only peripheral relevance to computing. At least it may serve as an example of how video sites like YouTube are supplanting TV as a source of amusement. Anyway here’s something that made me smile. I like to watch birds and this clip reminds me of my struggles to outwit the squirrels that kept trying to raid our bird feeder. I’m glad I never encountered this particular specimen! Watch him go.

It turns out that the PDF reader ActiveX security hole mentioned earlier is only part of the problem. The real problem is with Windows XP and IE7. Ryan Naraine at ZDNet reports:

In the wake of this week’s malware attacks using rigged PDF files, Microsoft has updated its security advisory to stress that the underlying flaw — in the Windows operating system — is still not fixed.

The advisory, first issued on October 10, points to an unpatched code execution hole in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 (with Windows Internet Explorer 7 installed). While applications like Adobe Reader/Acrobat are currently being used as the vector for attack, Microsoft is making it clear that patches from third-party vendors aren’t a cure-all for this bug.

When might a fix be forthcoming? Microsoft is mum.