Computer Tips -Tech Info

Tag: review

  • Network Security guide for the home or small business network – Part 17 – The Security Mindset

    This may be one of the most important entries in this series. An important defence against those that would try to access your network is to constantly have the “security mindset”. Ask yourself “do I need this, how could it be exploited, what are the implications of this”… When it comes to people asking you to click on a link… “do I trust the person, am I sure it’s from the person that it claims to be… how sure? is it normal behavior for this person to ask me to click on a link?” I guess what it comes down to is developing some healthy critical thinking and skepticism…

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  • Mandriva 2006 slow KDE performance

    Somewhere along the line, there was a review up of Mandriva 2006 where the reviewer mentioned extremely slow performance in KDE, but on loading GNome instead, things were just fine. I’ve seen some slow KDE performance on the laptop that I upgraded and thought I’d pass along some of what I’ve done to help the situation. For starters, it’s probably a good time to review the main system services (yes I know it seems to be just KDE, but it never hurts to ask “do I really need to leave the webserver running all the time?”)

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  • Xubuntu for older systems

    I can’t recall trying Ubuntu (maybe a livecd), but I’ve heard quite a bit about various variations on it lately. I’ve seen articles on business desktop use, certification by IBM (?) for running one of their applications and other various positive articles. I’m going to have to give it a try soon. Anyway, with all that this article caught my attention.

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  • Mandriva 2006 review

    Madpengiun now has a review up of Mandriva 2006. I’m still hoping soon to have time to sit down and upgrade on at least the laptop. The biggest problem the reviewer had was (slow?) performance under KDE which he suspected could be hardware specific. Overall it sounds like things are VERY well done, it looks like a nice interactive firewall, a la zonealarm is in there which the reviewer was pleased with.

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  • Sony’s OTHER DRM software uninstaller will be pulled

    According to zdnet.com, Sony and SunnComm are pulling the OTHER DRM uninstaller from the web and it will be replaced with a safer version of the uninstaller. Researchers blogging at freedom-to-tinker.com had detailed serious vulnerabilities in the uninstaller for the DRM software made by SunnComm (called MediaMax). The companies say an effort will be made to contact the 223 users who had downloaded the uninstaller for the MediaMax software.

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  • Part 2 of the Mandrake or Mandriva 2006 review

    I’m still not used to the name Mandriva, Mandrake is just what I remember… anyway, mandrake.tips.4.free.fr has the second part of their mandriva 2006 review up. It sounds as though in the last week the iso’s of the free edition are now publicly available as well. This time around special attention is paid to hardware support, and multimedia capabilites focusing on image handling/editing software.

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  • Transgaming winex 5 cedaga cedega

    I’m going to have get used to that new name. Frankly I liked winex – simple and to the point, it was like DirectX, only WineX…. then they went and changed the name to cedega and I can never remember how to spell it cedaga / cedega / cedege… anyway, Whatever it is, I’ve installed version 5.0 now. And here are my first impressions. For starters let me say that I usually don’t test based on the latest greatest games, but the older games I’ve installed and left in my point2play setup to see what improements are made.

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  • Firefox vulnerabilities and 1.5 Release Candidate

    I know there’s been at least one and probably a couple of Mozilla Firefox vulnerabilities announced in the last month or so. There are currently (according to Secunia) 3 unpatched Firefox vulnerabilities.

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  • OpenSuse 10 beta 3 review and screenshots

    Yesterday (or day before) Mandriva had a beta 3 come out, today I see OpenSuse has released the third beta in the release cycle for version 10. It sounds like most of the changes have not been user-visible, but more “under the hood”. There is a bit of a review at tuxmachines.org with some nice screenshots.

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  • Get paid for the mistakes you make….

    It seems that some companies are fortunate enough to be able to make money even from their faults. The Monterey Herald details an account of a woman who was informed by Choicepoint that crooks had accessed some of her personal information. This was apparently due to a lapse in security at Choicepoint. They then offered to sell her access to her own information to see what might have been compromised.

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