Computer Tips -Tech Info

Tag: the end

  • Microsoft Support extensions for XP

    Good news for Windows XP users (especially XP Home). Microsoft has extended the support period for XP Home and Pro. Originally, security patch related support was expected to end December 31st of this year. According to the article for XP Home…

    So for the consumer versions of Windows XP, mainstream support was going to end on December 31, 2006 and there was no guarantee of any security hot-fixes beyond that time. Microsoft has now extended the mainstream support deadline for the consumer versions to an undefined date that is two years after the release of the follow-on operating system.

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  • Windows 98 WMF patch

    This hopefully will be my last post on the whole WMF exploit stuff…. It’s prompted in part by a comment on one of the articles on Windows 98 and the vulnerability. I realized that I hadn’t really brought things to a full conclusion for the Windows 98 users. Of course, Microsoft has released an official patch for Windows 2000 and XP and 2003, the sky is no longer falling quite as quickly and all is well right? Well, not exactly for pre-2000 Windows users. They’ve just been told, they have a vulnerability, it’s not as critical as it is for XP/2000/2003 and if it were critical – “oh we’d fix it there too”, but it’s not, better luck next time (and who knows the same vulnerability could come around more critical for earlier Windows versions next time…) Anyway, there IS a patch for Windows 98 systems.

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  • XP Home support period

    This is something you should consider if you are looking to abandoned a pre-Winxp operating system in favor of a flavor of XP. The product life cycle. In their infinite wisdom, Microsoft has different support plans for consumer products than “business-products”. As such… arstechnica.com has a post explaining why support for Windows XP Home will end the end of this year 12/31/06 and Windows XP Pro will continue to be supported perhaps as long as December of 2013.

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  • The D-Link DWL-800AP+ as a wireless repeater to extend wireless range – Part 6

    Ok, so here’s the synopsis… I’ve spent the last few articles setting up a D-link DWL-800AP+ as a repeater for a linksys WAP11 (v. 1.1) As of the end of the last entry I had a bit of a problem with WEP but that seems to have been resolved now and here I am to fill you in on what went wrong. It was really a simple mistake. When I copied and pasted over from the linksys….

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  • Sunbelt Finishes Kerio Firewall acquisition

    Sunbelt Software has announced the completion of their acquisition of the Kerio Personal Firewall. They’ve also acquired the Kerio Server Firewall. The products have temporarily been rebranded…

    We have acquired both the Kerio Personal Firewall and the Kerio Server Firewall. Both products will be re-branded on an interim basis as the “Sunbelt Kerio Personal Firewall” and “Sunbelt Kerio ServerFirewall”.

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  • Microsoft may pay for search users?

    Infoworld has an interesting article this afternoon, that suggests that Microsoft may pay users of their MSN search out of the ad revenue that Microsoft earns from their new adertising service. Speaking of Google, Bill Gates says…

    But they don’t share these advertising revenues with the end users who help them get the revenue, Gates said. “Google keeps all of the money with itself,” he added.

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  • 16,000 new viruses this year

    This is for all those people that say to me. “There haven’t been any new viruses lately have there?” It’s really amazing to me that people think if it’s not on the national news it doesn’t happen…. According to Pc Pro, Sophos has reported that 16000 new viruses have been added to their database this year. Along with that comes a flood of 1940 new viruses last month added to Sophos’ virus signatures. (That mark is a record for one month.)

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  • Sunbelt acquiring Kerio Personal Firewall

    Kerio Personal firewall will be acquired by Sunbelt according to the sunbeltblog. It looks as though the acquisition will be complete within a month. They hope to offer downloads “within weeks”. There will be a price reduction and discounts for Sunbelt users, and discounts for Kerio users on Sunbelt software. Also it looks like the free edition will continue.

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  • Running UltraVNC viewer under wine

    I talked in the last entry about using UltraVNC and UltraVNC Single Click (ultravnc sc) as a means of doing remote desktop support. The idea is that you (the technical support person), setup vncviewer to listen for connections, then the end user with pc problems can download your customized ultravnc server that will connect to your viewer through firewalls/etc. This has a lot of things going for it. 1) ease of use by the end user 2) only one network to make firewall configuration changes on, 3) small quick download. The biggest downside I see is that the ultravnc viewer doesn’t run on linux.

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  • Easy linux installs a “klik away”

    Now, I am not one of those that finds linux software installation an arcane and difficult path. However, I use mandrake (mandriva) whose urpmi tool (if setup with the correct source repositories) is usually enough for the software I’m looking for. Anything else is usually easy to either recompile from a source rpm or compile from source with a couple of fairly easy steps. That much said, those two steps do take you to the command line and for many people that means you may as well be using 0’s and 1’s to write the binary code yourself….

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