Computer Tips -Tech Info

Windows users know chkdsk, linux users know fsck… users of each MIGHT have heard of SMART. These are different ways of TESTING hard drives. Well, there’s also a utility called TestDisk that looks promising for recovering data… Here’s the clip from their site. “free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost […]

The release date for the 7.10 Ubuntu release is coming soon. I’ve installed a beta into a virtual machine to see what’s what and so far haven’t had much time to play around. I seem to recall the localization question being new in the installer, but then it’s been a while since I used the […]

Might should have typed this up sooner, but… a while back I did an article on the daylight savings changes with regards to Windows 98 and how timezone editor tzedit could be used to make sure these OS’s kept the correct time. Well, on the linux side of things there’s not a lot to the […]

You had to know it would be a matter of time. Not long after I wrote about the limitations of Vista’s upgrade version I found this. First let me reset. Previous versions of Windows upgrade versions would allow you to do a “clean” install (format the drive) if you had the previous versions install media […]

This is something that really looks interesting. Recently Linspire announced their intent to open source the CNR (Click N Run) concept for installing software, launching a wiki based web site that would allow supported linux distributions to install software (open source or commercial) with as easy a process as possible (visit web site, browse, click). […]

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 […]

I saw yesterday that Dell has a page advertising computers with NO preinstalled OS. Dimension line… n series and they are targetted towards people that want to install an Open Source operating system like Linux. They do ship with a freedos install disc, but come without formatting/preinstalling anything on the hard drives. They do note […]

I should say that George Ou has been trying to put to rest some of the concerns people have about “will xyz program run on vista”. The All About Microsoft blogpost on virtual PC seems to have started all this. I should say that virtual machines seem to be a good way to make sure […]

For starters, if you’re using Windows 98 or ME still in a production system, you REALLY need to be looking at migration options and you should realize that the architecture of those systems is NOT conducive to a good secure platform. No XP isn’t perfect, but it is an improvement in many areas. That much […]

The Register sums up the Black Hat briefings pretty well. The Operating System level has received a lot of scrutiny in recent years for security flaws and as a result there has been a good deal of improvement there and so now, researchers are heading to the low hanging fruit of the REST of the […]