In the past when installing an upgrade version of Windows it meant having your original disk handy to prove that you were REALLY eligible for an upgrade license. What this meant is that if you wanted to follow the advice of MOST in the TECH community you could do a clean install. That’s right, wipe the disc and start from scratch, provide the disks when asked and then the installer would be on it’s way. Well, sorry, the joy is over. (Actually… there wasn’t a whole lot of JOY in it… but… it’s now worse.) Now, with Vista, it is required that you have the previous version of Windows that you are upgrading installed on the disk.
Tag: xp
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Dell “open source” PC’s for sale
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 that they don’t support a non-dell installed operating system. (i.e. even if you put XP pro on it well make you prove that it’s a hardware problem.) Still, it’s good to see the option becoming available.
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Microsoft October 2006 patch Tuesday
The first thing I should mention is that this months update from Microsoft is the last for XP SP1 users should plan a migration path to SP2 to keep getting updates to XP. Multiple vulnerabilities this month have been patched in Office There are 4 advisories, but a total of 15 issues covered by those four. Powerpoint, Excel, Word and Office/Publisher there are a variety of exploits, some public (like the powerpoint) others that were privately reported. Also, Incidents.org gives a nice summary of the advisories and the severity of each (urgency of updating.) The setslice vulnerability is patched in this batch by the way.
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Microsoft Update day for September…. AND Flash… AND Apple
Yesterday, of course, Microsoft released it’s monthly patches. I found the Windows update site to be painfully slow (and in some cases unresponsive.) It wasn’t quite a huge update day by recent standards, but here’s the summary…. Incidents.org has a nice chart showing the two re-released patches (one is actually re-re-released…) They are MS06-040 (server service patch – critical) and MS06-042 (IE 6 patch). Both of those vulnerabilities addressed are well known and could be actively exploited. The “first release” updates from this month affect Microsoft Queue System MS06-052 which is the most important of the releases….
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Windows XP lost administrators password
Some time ago, I’ve talked about chntpasswd as a great utility for when you’re locked out of a Windows 2000 or XP installation because you’ve either forgotten (or weren’t informed) of the valid password to get in. It turns out there is a different approach… well yes, you could format and install from scratch blowing away all data on the drive, OR you could do a second installation in the same partition – that could be messy though and waste space. If you just need a few files off, you could boot up a linux livecd and copy the files to another disc before wiping and rebuilding, but there is yet another possibility….
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Hiding a user from the Welcome screen in Windows XP
So, in the last article I detailed a solution to getting a legacy application to run under a limited user account in XP. This legacy application wasn’t working correctly without administrator priviliges and in this situation, upgrading to a newer version wasn’t a great option. So, I created a new user account with higher priviliges and used runas to launch the application with greater priviliges. But that left me with another problem…. how do I hide the new priviliged user from the Welcome screen?
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Windows Run as to let a legacy program run in XP limited user mode
Several months back I had to figure out a way to get Create a card gold (5.0?) run on an XP system. The only real problem was that I had setup the account with limited user privileges (shared machine, several users, all with limited account priviliges.) But, somehow the program didn’t work well without administrator priviliges. Giving the account full administrator priviliges all the time was not an option and try as I might, I couldn’t find the right program directory to give expanded permissions that would solve the issue.
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Exploit out for MS06-040
The big computer security news of the day is the release of exploit code publicly for MS06-040. The patch of course was released Tuesday and it is fairly critical to get the update installed. This is “wormable” It CURRENTLY affects all Windows 2000 systems and XP (with no service pack) as well as SP1. It currently doesn’t seem to work with SP2 of Win XP, or with Windows 2003 or NT4. A bit more information is at the incidents.org link above.
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Windows XP and IPP printers
I really like printers with their own built in print server. They can be plugged into the network and some operating systems can just find them. Unfortunately most of the time Windows doesn’t just find an IPP printer. One tool that can be handy for such a time as this is a free tool like softperfect network scanner or you could substitute your own tool in to find where the printer is on the network. If you’re lucky enough to have designed the network or setup the printer yourself, you may know. But, in my job I may have information on some parts of a customers network, but many times I’m called in after the fact and get the “I need that network printer to work on this desktop” kind of assignment.