Archive for the 'Windows' Category


Making sense of the different versions of Vista

Thursday, February 8th, 2007

Microsoft Vista is now out, the next version of Windows, successor to XP. While Windows XP will continue to receive updates into 2014 there are many that might be eager to upgrade and move to the latest greatest. (Note to those: Service Pack one may be en route THIS calendar year, so unless you like […]

Extended support for XP Home and Media center

Monday, January 29th, 2007

I want to make a note of this here… Microsoft has announced that XP Home and Media center editions will get extended support on par with that of XP Pro. Essentially this means security updates for these versions of the OS should be available until 2014. Previously support for XP Home was to have ended […]

Vista Upgrade version requirements…

Monday, January 29th, 2007

In the past when installing an upgrade version of Windows it meant having your original disk handy to prove that you were REALLY eligible for an upgrade license. What this meant is that if you wanted to follow the advice of MOST in the TECH community you could do a clean install. That’s right, wipe […]

Internet Explorer 7 on linux

Monday, January 22nd, 2007

Haven’t had the chance to try this one firsthand yet, although I’ve been watching for this. You may be familiar with ies4linux which is a script that uses wine to download/install multiple versions of Internet Explorer on a linux install. (But why oh why would you do this?) For many that do web design it’s […]

Microsoft October 2006 patch Tuesday

Tuesday, October 10th, 2006

The first thing I should mention is that this months update from Microsoft is the last for XP SP1 users should plan a migration path to SP2 to keep getting updates to XP. Multiple vulnerabilities this month have been patched in Office There are 4 advisories, but a total of 15 issues covered by those […]

NTFS cloning

Wednesday, June 28th, 2006

Sometimes drives just go bad. Surprise. One recent fresh install of Windows XP had started having real stability problems. On running a chkdsk and looking at the event viewer, it was fairly clear that 16KB of bad sectors and the disk problems had likely been the problem (lots of disk and atapi errors in the […]

Remote tech support with anything – would I do it?

Tuesday, June 6th, 2006

I’ve tried to ask myself if I’d trust someone enough to let them run a remote session on my own desktop to solve a problem. I think the answer is “it depends”. If you think about it, I do tech support for home users quite a bit and they let me come into their homes. […]

The security of remote tech support (ultravnc sc or x11vnc with wrapper script)

Tuesday, June 6th, 2006

Well, I’ve got a nice way of doing “easy” one click (or one cut and paste) light desktop support for windows or linux, one uses ultravnc sc, the other uses x11vnc with a special wrapper script. So, what security flaws are there in this process? Well, for starters, I see the biggest vulnerability for the […]

A closer look at x11vnc

Tuesday, June 6th, 2006

I’ve got to say, one of the things I really like about linux are the myriad of options for remotely administering a system. SSH is the one I use the most, but for the graphical you have x (especially on the LAN), nxserver (which is a compressed and optionally encrypted wrapper of the X protocol….), […]

x11vnc recompiled to be as widely compatible as possible…

Tuesday, June 6th, 2006

As I said in the earlier posts, I was essentially looking for a “Single click” solution for linux VNC remote desktop support. A solution that doesn’t require the remote support client to change firewall settings, install software, etc. What I’ve settled on is closer to a single cut and paste solution, which is fairly simple. […]

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