Archive for May, 2008
More on hard drives
I am nowhere near to filling up my 400 GB hard drive but others with video and music collections may need all the storage they can get. The PC Doctor recommends a couple of 750 GB and 1 TB drives. (Note that these are internal drives.)
Buyer’s guide to external hard drives
Personally, I think that everybody should have some sort of external backup system. Also, an external drive may be needed if you are a collector of video or audio files. Large capacity USB (or Firewire or even eSATA) drives are now pretty inexpensive. InformationWeek has a buying guide for external hard drives and reviews 25 [...]
Microsoft Office Labs
If you are a user of Microsoft Office, the company has an interesting site at Microsoft Office Labs. Information, tips, and software can be found there.
Change the background for desktop icon labels
It is not always apparent but the labels for desktop icons have their own background area, which may be a different color from the general desktop background. Normally, the icon label background is transparent but the setting sometimes gets changed to the system color. Icon labels will then appear in little rectangular boxes that may [...]
Adobe Flash not vulnerable after all
In a previous post, I pointed to a warning that Adobe Flash had an unpatched security problem. Now it seems that the warning was mistaken:
Symantec Corp. today said that “suspicious behavior” by a captured exploit had led it to mistakenly conclude that the most up-to-date stand-alone versions of Adobe System Inc.’s Flash Player are [...]
Problems with Windows XP SP3
As I have noted before, the latest service pack for Windows XP has no compelling new feature. As far as the home user is concerned, it is mostly a handy rollup of previous patches to XP. There are, in fact, reasons to hold off installing it. I had no trouble when I installed it on [...]
Microsoft and the cloud
The quote from Bill Gates mentioned in the previous post was brought to mind by all the current Microsoft efforts that fall under the rubric of “Windows Live” and the Redmond chatter about “cloud computing”. It is reminiscent of similar big talk from Microsoft about “Dot-Net”. At the meeting reported in the previous post, [...]
Thus spoke Bill Gates
Bill Gates often makes speeches and below is an excerpt from one that I found interesting. Can you guess when this speech was made? I can’t give any prizes for correct guesses because it’d be too easy to look it up on Google. I’ll give the reference tomorrow but in the meantime play along and [...]
How to check out DLL files
One of the pains in the Windows operating system is the multitude of DLL files. (I explain more about these files at vlaurie.com/computers2/Articles/dll.htm) Sometimes troubleshooting system problems involves finding out what a particular DLL file does. Microsoft maintains a database where you can find out where a particular DLL comes from and what version conflicts [...]
Another security problem with Adobe Flash
Here we go again: there’s a new security problem with Adobe Flash. More details at this link. Until a patch is issued, the safest procedure is to disable Flash.
Why won’t home PC users back up?
One feature that I hope Microsoft includes in Windows 7 is better backup software. Redmond made a step in that direction in Vista with the so-called “Shadow” copies. Unfortunately, this feature is not available in the Vista Home editions. What is needed in Windows is something that is automatic. As I have learned over the [...]
