Computer Tips -Tech Info

Tag: Windows

  • Microsoft February Patch day advance notice

    Microsoft has given advance notice that next Tuesday they will be releasing 7 updates for Windows, as many as 5 of these will be tagged as critical. The Security Fix has a bit on the advance notice as does Sans. Looks like one of the critical updates will be for Media Player, 4 for Windows itself and 2 updates for Microsoft Office. A reboot will be required for some of the updates.

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  • F-Secure patches security vulnerabilities

    I’ve seen several reports on F-Secure’s security bulletin about a code execution vulnerability. The announcement on the f-secure blog mentions that it affects several versions of their products on Windows and Linux.

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  • Several ways to launch the task manager in Windows

    I was doing a remote connect to a machine today and the “send ctrl-alt-del” for some reason didn’t work to bring up the task manager, so I had to get to it another way. For those that never noticed (or don’t recall), if you right click on the taskbar, you should see an option to launch the task manager. (I was looking to kill off a program that was being uncooperative.) Another way to get it is to press ctrl-shift-esc and it will popup.

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  • Outlook Express Cumultaive Security Update KB837009 will not install

    I’ve run into this in the last few days too. (In spite of the fact that it’s an OLD update (April 13, 2004?) MS04-013…. I think on the last visit (and my first one to this machine) we had probably forced a visit to Windows update (which I think it may not have seen before…) Anyway, this is a Windows 98 system and the last update probably brought along Internet Explorer 6 SP1 along with Outlook Express. There was one update that would appear as being necessary on every visit to the Windows update site. The update was KB837009 and was listed as “Cumulative Security Update for Outlook Express 6 Service Pack 1″…

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  • AVG – Cannot Launch AVG Internet Update

    Last week sometime I was doing maintenance on an OLD Windows 95 machine (yes there are some still out there….) and noticed the Antivirus had not updated in a good while. They were using Grisoft’s AVG and so I tried to force an update. I was greeted with an error message… “Cannot Launch AV internet update” Which was puzzling since we were online with no connectivity problems. On looking, this is known to be an issue with Grisoft AVG on Windows 95…..

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  • Outlook archive error message

    Saw this today…. “Error while aging folder “Inbox” in store “Personal Folders”. File access is
    denied. You do not have the permission required to access the file
    C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\archive.pst.”

    It was on an older Outlook 98/Windows 98 system, but it was something that might be applicable to others as well.

    Basically, this system has two different profiles, both of which are password protected.

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  • Upgrade your mouse

    This is going in the basics category. Quite often I visit a computer that has a mouse which is just a trial of patience to use. I mean, you have to pick it up and move it, shake it a bit, turn it over and clean out the lint from the “ball” area…. The good news is that mousing does NOT have to be like this. If your computer has a PS2 (small round plug) for your mouse, or a USB (small rectangular plug) for your mouse, it should be VERY easy to replace that old ball style mouse with an optical mouse.

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  • Windows XP SP3

    Well, in the article the other day about the Windows wireless problem/(feature that could be exploitable?) there was a mention that the default behaviour for Windows would be changed with the next service pack, for XP users that’s SP3. So, when can we expec this? It seems that service pack three for Windows XP probably won’t be publicly available until the second half of 2007.

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  • Microsoft was aware of the WMF vulnerability “for years”

    Bugtraq has an interesting post which picks up on a note in Stephen Toulouse’s latest entry on the WMF vulnerability. When I first read the post I was more interested in the way he was responding to allegations of the flaw being an intentional backdoor, but the above bugtraq post points out and makes points on an implication that I missed….. (emphasis is mine…)

    “The potential danger of this type of metafile record was
    recognized     and some applications (Internet Explorer, notably)
    will not process any metafile record of type META_ESCAPE,
    the overall type of the SetAbortProc record.”

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  • Juice – formerly ipodder podcast client for Linux (Windows and Mac too…)

    I’ve been playing around a bit with podcast clients the last couple of days. I’ve been finding online news feeds for the onlineradiotv.com site and for many of those I have bash scripts to handle downloading or streaming the audio available from shortwave broadcasters. I did run across a few podcasts too though and thought it might be time to take another look at linux podcasting clients…

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