Computer Tips -Tech Info

Tag: updates

  • Panda and Vince – Googles latest updates

    And… there was also a caffeine update.  Well, mid October there was an update to Panda – somewhere in there was a Vince update and then caffeine saw an update in early November.  Did you notice a change in the search results?  Do you feel like they’re better or worse?

    Panda Gao Gao in San Diego Zoo, USA
    Image via Wikipedia

    I’ve had several sites that have “fluctuated” through these updates, some better, some worse.  One or two were dramatically worse.

    I don’t seem to be alone in seeing some impact and here’s a summary of what the issue is and what to do about it.

    Panda is about lowering the importance of sites that are thin in content.  It has been easy to rank sites without much content for some time.  Just throwing a few back links (in many cases also thin on content) and you could do quite well.

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  • Is it a Hardware Problem or a Software Problem?

    Last night I was working with an older HP laptop and things hit the fan very quickly. I discovered I couldn’t write a file to disk and before I knew it the system had thrown up to a black screen and needed the power cut to reboot. I immediately realized that there was a serious hardware problem. Then I spent the better hours of the evening trying to salvage everything from the old drive to a new drive, only to have the new drive seemingly show the same symptoms. It is a laptop of course and so I assume it’s the bus for the drives or the cdrom. I pull out the cdrom and it seems to behave itself just fine. This morning as I was checking the last of the package updates it dawned on me how different things would have been if it were a windows laptop. The laptop runs linux and when the system froze I immediately assumed it was either the hard drive or the drive adapter to the mainboard. Why?

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  • Updates – Rogues and Security….

    I’ve been running a series of how to remove articles related to some of the current nasty rogue security applications that has really been getting a lot of traffic the last week or so. I can see that there’s definitely demand for more. Frankly, I hate these programs that claim so many problems (that it brings) and offer to fix it if you pay. I’ve made some links to these recent ones at the bottom of my antivirus removal tool page. I’ve also put up a page on ppt security – mostly centered around powerpoint security.

    So, what might you expect to see in coming days? I’ll probably be doing some more in the malware removal series because there are some particularly nasty bugs out there and a thirst for some sort of guidance in removing them. I suspect beyond that I will be focusing more on antivirus and firewall areas because those seem to be in the highest demand right now (judging by the traffic I see here.)

  • Massive Windows Update Tuesday

    Microsoft had a mammoth patch Tuesday this month with 28 bug fixes (23 critical). (Computerworld article linked above. This is one of the largest update releases in five years (!) Those fixes were wrapped up in 8 updates for Internet Exporer, Office, Sharepoint, Windows media player and visual studio and Visual basic. (Oh and it looks like there are two more they SHOULD have fixed – reports of 0-days in the wild.)

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  • Adobe Reader 8.1 has Encountered an Error and Needs to Close

    So, the adobe reader version 8.1 should be a straightforward install. On one particular XP system it wasn’t and from what I can tell, there are several that have run into the same problem. The installer seems to work well enough, but when I try to launch the application I just see the windows error reporting dialog that says Adobe Reader has encountered an error and needs to close. So, I did a full uninstall and tried to clean out everything, but on reinstall it still complains even before the splash screen.

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  • Internet Explorer Mandatory Update

    Internet Explorer 7 is going to be an automatic upgrade through WSUS (Windows Server Update Services) on February 12. This was announced last fall, but is now about to become reality. According to Microsoft there will no longer be a requirement to prove the copy of Windows installing IE7 is legitimate. Windows Genuine Validation would have prevented the install on copies of Windows that were not officially licensed. Many of those “not officially licensed” copies are pirated, but there have been problems with the reliability of Windows Genuine Validation. Some users have reported legitimate copies of Windows failing the test in the past. So how do you avoid Internet Explorer 7?

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  • Windows XP repair install problems

    I’ve run into a few problems with a windows xp repair install in the last few days that I wanted to detail the problems and what the resolution was. First, it was someone elses laptop needing a hard drive replacement. The drive was imaged, but windows still would not boot, so I broke out the XP Pro disc for a repair installation *(after trying to chkdsk from the recovery console first and fixboot /fixmbr…) Anyway, I went through the repair install process and the system booted up just fine. My next task was windows update and here’s were I started running into problems. Typing an address in the address bar of internet explorer caused a new window to open, which seemed to hang. Opening the home page seemed fine (i.e. the page that loads when you first open explorer), but you couldn’t navigate to another address.

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  • Symantec Internet Security 2007 antispyware protection off….

    and you can’t turn it on without an error… Oh boy… last week I first saw this system and it was running less than the minimum amount of memory, so I thought that could be part of the issue. (It certainly made it slightly less than tolerable to work on.) So, now, with new memory installed. Norton still shows problems, Antispyware is off, phishing protection is off and the catch is when trying to enable either there’s a cryptic error message….”internal program error” and a string of numbers which is nowhere to be found in symantecs online support. But the online support does say to try and use symantecs utility to “fix” the problem and if that fails or is unavailable uninstall using the Norton remover that they provide as a free download and reinstall…. thanks Symantec…. (You might find the antivirus removal tool list helpful.)

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  • Windows updates for February could set record

    There could be a record number of vulnerabilities addressed next week when Microsoft releases an expected dozen updates for its Windows and Office products. (According to Brian Krebs at the Security Fix.) Tuesday February 13th is the date scheduled for the release of updates. One critical udpate will affect Microsoft’s security software (onecare/defender/etc.) 3 patches will affect Office. Most of the updates to be released are rated as critical.

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  • Windows 98 and the upcoming daylight savings time change

    Of course, you

      shouldn’t

    be using Windows 98 anymore, it’s unsupported (i.e. no security updates.) However the reality is that there are quite a few Win 98 installs out there perking away. But, with the recent law change with regards to the start/end of Daylight savings time in the US… many Windows 98 users may have to resort to changing the time manually. There is another way though..

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