Windows Tips and Tricks

Tomorrow is April Fools’ Day and that always spawns malware attacks. See the information at Sunbelt.

Via the PC Doctor.

There’s been speculation (wishful thinking?) that Windows 7 might have a reduced kernel and be more modular (like Linux) but Ed Bott makes a good case that this is not likely. Oh well, I had hopes but it did seem like a big change of direction for Microsoft. Maybe some day.

You may not be a lawyer but you might want to look up a legal point some time. Lawyer or lay person, a new site called justia.com looks like a useful resource. AppScout says:

Legal information can be difficult to find: You have to dig through piles of books, page through thick court decisions, or know a lawyer. Justia is a search engine that can help you find the court decisions and legal rights that matter to you. The service was designed to make digging through complex legal information as easy as a Google search and to open the door to everything from active dockets in front of federal courts to legal blogs and podcasts that might interest you.

PC users aren’t the only ones not reading the turgid legalese present in End User License Agreements (EULAs). The companies themselves aren’t either. Apple recently released a version of its Safari browser specifically for Windows systems but included a EULA that said the software could only be used on Apple systems. That has been corrected but it was a little embarrassing. Now Adobe has released Photoshop Express with a EULA that the company is having to rewrite. Ars Technica comments about the EULA:

In other words: uploading photos to the Photoshop Express site gives Adobe the right to do whatever it wants with them. The company could begin selling your shots as stock photography or use that killer family pic as the box art for Photoshop Elements 7, without giving you so much as a credit for the image or a dime of royalty dues.
When we contacted Adobe about the policy, a reply confirmed that someone at Adobe didn’t think this was a very good policy either.

It’s income tax season in the US and many filers are using the Internet to prepare their returns. This provides a hunting ground for the scam artists so beware. PC World has some details:

Scam artists exploiting tax season have devised a range of new online cons: fake tax documents that contain malicious surprises; mass distribution of keyloggers aimed at snatching the identity of PC-based tax filers; and e-mail messages containing links to Web sites that promise new tax code information but instead push malware onto your PC.

That’s not all, according to the Internal Revenue Service. This year, identity thieves are not just trying to gain access to your bank account or to open lines of credit in your name. Scammers are on the prowl for ordinary citizens’ identities that they can they can use in filing phony tax returns and fraudulently claiming refunds, as well as to swipe rebates associated with the 2008 federal economic stimulus package.

Windows Vista has not been a big success with businesses and that has helped Mac sales. The Mac has been largely absent from business use and is primarily a consumer and niche product. Recently, however, corporate interest has picked up. What I find interesting is the level of satisfaction expressed by the actual users of various operating systems as shown in the figure below:

In a previous post I discussed some common file types and scenarios that cause average PC users to have trouble opening an email attachment. A file type that I didn’t mention is the Microsoft Works file WPS. This type of file is created by the word processor that Works used to have instead of Word. WPS files are less common now but they may show up from time to time. If you have Microsoft Word, there is a converter for opening and converting WPS files. The procedure is described at this link.

There’s a debate going on over at this ZDNet link about the relative merits of the user interfaces in Windows and Mac computers. The author says that Apple pays more attention to the user interface than Microsoft and that the Mac interface is much more elegant. There are a lot of comments posted and there are many who disagree. Personally, I think the Mac interface is less clumsy but I am so used to the Windows way of doing things that it’s hard to judge if the Mac interface would be easier for a newcomer to computing. A computer is complicated and neither interface is as easy to use as pushing a button or two on a household appliance.

Here’s another post from Scot Finnie. He gives his opinion about service pack 1 for Vista:

Unless you have to install Vista SP1, I’d at least wait for the dust to settle. Vista SP1 has only one true reason for being — to help Microsoft sell Vista to enterprise customers, among whom the conventional wisdom has been “wait for the first service pack.” What’s actually new and not available separately is, to my perception, more marketing hype than reality. There’s nothing wrong with SP1, but there’s absolutely nothing compelling about it either.

In his latest posting, Scot Finnie gives the results of tests of firewall software that he has been carrying out for some time. His recommendation is Online Armor. He prefers the commercial product (around $40) although there is a free version. The free Comodo Firewall Pro is the runner-up although Finnie thinks it’s too complicated for many average users. Read Finnie’s blog for a number of details. He begins:

The decision is in. After a year and a half of testing, and with the help of more than a thousand Scot’s Newsletter readers who’ve written detailed descriptions of their software firewall experiences, I’m happy to announce that Tall Emu’s Online Armor 2.1 is The Scot’s Newsletter Blog Best Firewall Software of 2008.