Computer Tips -Tech Info

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 […]

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 […]

I should say that George Ou has been trying to put to rest some of the concerns people have about “will xyz program run on vista”. The All About Microsoft blogpost on virtual PC seems to have started all this. I should say that virtual machines seem to be a good way to make sure […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]