Archive for the 'Windows Vista' category

Microsoft published today a large Security Update for Internet Explorer. This happens nearly every month, but this time, this is really important. Whatever your version of Internet Explorer, you should upgrade now, via Windows Update.

Microsoft is correcting a major bug in all versions of Internet Explorer and it is urgently important that you plug this security hole that could leave your computer totally open to external hackers.

Nota bene: generally speaking, you should try and keep your computer up-to-date for security issues. You may want tot check my previous post about Secunia PSI.

Isn’t it somewhat difficult to continuously check the status of security updates for the many software programs we have installed on our PCs, sometimes not even knowing it? Here comes Secunia PSI to help in this daunting task. It permanently observes the version of the programs on your PC and verifies if there is an available update. Thus, it efficiently protects us against the computer security risks we too often are submitted to.

Secunia PSI

It is always more pleasant to work with a nice wall paper on your PC (or Mac) desktop. Here are two interesting source sof beautiful wallpapers based on photographic quality images:

• dozens of nature-oriented images (including some cartoons) on UsingMac.com;
• ligthning and storms (15 images).

Downright spectacular.

Defragmenting your hard disc drive may not be the latest fad, but it still is useful to improve the performance of a disc drive that’s been used for months or years and now looks more like a mouldy swiss cheese than a nice little techo-gadget. The solution: defragmenter your disc drive(s).

Here are a few ideas of (free) software programs that may be useful here:

• Ultimate Defrag (from DiskTrix) is clearly a defragmenter wet dream. The only trouble? So many options that you won’t be able to sleep.
• Smart Defrag (from IOBit) will help you defragmente several disc or several partitions at the same time.
• Partition Find and Mount will do its best to find again lost data on a damaged hard disc drive.

I always recommended the excellent CDBurnerXP for burning your CD and DVD discs. It’s free and does all the commercial programs do.

Now, the editor publishes CDBurnerXP Portable (download it for free). It goes on a USB stick and can follow you everywhere.

Some have been surprised by one little habit of mine around my PC (I should say ‘my PCs”): I keep a detailled log of everything I do on my PC in a plain old school paper book. It may be a software installation, a parameter change on another software package, the update of a driver. Everything goes in there.

Main advantage: When my PC stops working perfectly, I can easily recognize what changed. Usually, I (like everybody else) say that I did not touch anaything before it stopped working. Bit when I check, I can find wat I did.

It also works for the configuration of a Local Area Network… even in a company. But beware of not writing down passwords that would then be left in an open paper book…

OpenOffice.org 3.0 arrives and this is important. As a matter of fact, the free desktop suite (as interesting as the MS-Office suite) shift in high gear.

OpenOffice.org v3.0

The new features are quite noticeable:

• Support of MS-Office 2007 format for documents
• OOo 3.0 is now compatible with Mac OS X
• New multi-page mode in Writer
• Several users can now simultaneously edit and share a single spreadsheet
• Capacity to use MS Access databases from Writer

To freely download your MS-Word 2007, your MS-Excel 2007, you just have to run to the OpenOffice.org web site. This is free, this is legal!

Photoshop CS4

Newsrooms are full of weird coincidences. For example, we just learned that  two products often presented as direct competition were launched this Fall. To my right, here is Adobe with its boxing champion, Photoshop, loaded up to version CS4. To my left, Linux and its community of free developpers pushing the challenger on the ring, version 2.6 of The Gimp.

I am still convinced that this is not an even fight (and Photoshop is favored by bookmakers, for those still doubting it) but both announces are interesting and should be reviewed shortly.

Photoshop CS4 is a new step forward based on the award-winning user interface that made it a best seller and on top-level performance. To this market reference product, Adobe adds the following image-edition-oriented features:

• Accelerated computation using the modern graphic cards coprocessor and the Windows 64 features (when available, of course), and many tools needed to support a 3rd dimension in graphics design (painting on top of 3Dmodels, 3D compositing, etc.)
• Several new tools
• Adobe Camera Raw v5 is improved again to include complementary tools applicabel to RAW photo files (local editing, gradual correction filters, etc.)
• Bridge CS4 is notably accelerated

The Gimp 2.6

On the other side, The Gimp is now available as version 2.6. Here again, improvements are notable, even if a little smaller:

• A number of improvements to the user interface (but I still thing that this is the weak point of this software program; Recommendation: Look into GimpShop which is a hack to The Gimp in order to make it appear similar to Photoshop)
• Improvements to the selection tool
• Improvements to the drawing brush
• 32-bit GEGL data management (perfectly adapted to keep maximum quality in 12- and 14-bit RAW files)

All this will probably start again comment wars supporting one or the other solution. But remember that The Gimp is simply free. On the contrary, Photoshop CS4 (even if getting the upgrade license and despite the many available options) will still be very expensive (Master Collection at $2,499).

Windows tip

I recently had the problem of an application (DreamWeaver) which had hidden a Windows dialog box. When opening it, it was out of view. But how to drag it back? It appears that this is rather easy (if you know how).

First, you use your keyboard: Ctl-Space to open the system menu of the dialog box. You don’t see anything, but you can hit Enter to select the “Move” option of the menu. Your mouse pointer should have been brought to the dialog window.

Gently click on the left button and drag the window around, you have the window stuck and it should follow the mouse movements. This way, you can find and drag it back.

Google Chrome

How could we ignore the launch of Chrome, the new browser from Google? Every is babbling about it, everybody tried it (it can be downloaded here).

But after one test run, I believe that I should explain something. Yes, this is a marvellous browser because it takes most of the good things from FireFox, Opera or Safari (all IE competition). I immediately noticed:

• No space is lost in useless graphical waste, everything is concentrating on user display,
• The good tab management,
• The impressive performance,
• The name-completion in the address bar.

Some will also have noticed the more technical features like:

• The separation of applications running in different tabs,
• The very small footprint (including for the Javascript).

But, all this is hiding a very critical reality: Google did not even try to make a mere browser (it even lacks a simple RSS feed manager). They are more interested in doing more than Internet Explorer competiton. Much more.

Chrome (tasks)

The impressive advantage of this browser is elsewhere: it will fight against Microsoft applications allowing to work online in the best possible conditions. Chrome is nearly an Operating System competing with Windows. Yes, because where Windows offered a vehicle to sell Microsoft Office, Chrome will allow Google to develop a wider range of online tools in the path opened by the Desktop applications and GMail.

It will hurt Microsoft real bad. Chrome is obviously the best browser to support this approach. Rock solide, fast (very), reliable and able to support application crashes.

Here comes a small freeware utility program that does only one thing, but does it right. Trayconizer is used to put any Windows program into the icon tray (not only the ones allowing it explicitly).

For example, you can put the NotePad program in the tray icon with a single shortcut containing something like:

C:\Path\To\Trayconizer.exe C:\Windows\Notepad.exe

• AceBackup: Free Windows backup
• Ad-Aware 2008: Free anti-spyware
• StarBurn: Free disc burning, audio ripping utility (download Nero for free)
• LogoEase: Create your own logo for free
• AutoGK: Rip your DVDs to DivX and Xvid formats
• Opera 9.5: an excellent replacement for Internet Explorer
• Comodo Friewall Pro Free: Free Windows firewall for Windows XP
• Antivir: Free anti-virus for Windows
• Avast: Free anti-virus for Windows
• AVG 8.0 free: Free anti-virus and anti-spyware for Windows
• Replace data backup with data sync, thanks to these articles from Tom’s Hardware: [1] and [2]

Have a good Summer working on installing and testing all these.

After years of preparation and beta-phase, finally, Wine has been able to reach launch as Wine 1.0. Why is it significant? Because this is the software package designed to be able to run many Windows applications from a GNU/Linux distribution. If you want to switch to Linux, you may not be willing to abandon some of the applications that were developped for Windows.

Wine is there to solve the problem. It runs many games and it runs Photoshop CS2 and CS3 from the box (I did not test it myself, though). It was the plain objective of Google when they allocated money and developers to support this project. They reached their goal.

It is probably the right time to try OpenSuse 11.0 (one of the best new Linux distributions) with Wine.

See also: Run Windows Apps in Linux with Wine 1.0.

As you certainly already know if you follow regularly this web site, the Internet addresses will soon be depleted (all used). The end of the Internet world as we know it should be reached around 2011 or 2012. That is the reason why some companies are working to push out the most common Internet protocol (IPv4) and to make space for its successor (IPv6).

This is why, while the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) was preparing a night without IPv4 to reach the largest possible public, Google launched a version of its search engine reserved to IPv6: ipv6.google.com (If you are like almost everybody, you will not see anything at the end of the link).

Now, we all have to switch as soon as possible.

Usually, I would not comment about upcoming software applications and tools, but today there is an rumour that may be very important. We all know that switching from Windows to Linux is a difficult move because we have been used to so many applications available on one Operating System but not on the other (in my case, how could I do without Photoshop?)

Here comes Wine, an open source tool supposed to allow you to run native Windows applications in your Linux PC. In beta during years, Wine was incomplete and unable to provide the ultimate dream of OS migration, but things seem to be changing. Google invested a lot of effort, and it is said that version 1.0 of Wine is upcoming.

One of the important things I noticed, of course, is that there are plenty of games now supported (Baldur’s Gate II – Throne of Baal, Call of Duty 2, World of Warcraft, etc.) and I see that both Photoshop CS2 and CS3 are also in the list.

You (and I) should be trying this…

There a re zillions of disk defragmenters for Windows. Most are free and nearly all of them do unknown actions with no perceptible effect. UltimateDefrag is not the ordinary defragmenter for (at least) two reasons:

• It is beatifully presented as you can see below.
• It groups the most used files in the fastest access location of your disk drive. It does not make the computer faster, but it helps in loading faster those applications that you use most.

We never can get enough of them, but our computers are sometimes overflowing. Software applications are everywhere, but how to choose the right one for the task at hand? I built a real collection of pages where you will be able to find nearly all you can dream for nearly all computers:

• Five important security apps for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows
• Superior Alternatives to Crappy Windows Software
• The Windows Apps You Never Need To Install
• Battle of the Free Windows Software Firewalls; We have to admit that there is no longer any good reason to pay for your computer security under Windows.
• Top 100 of the Best (Useful) OpenSource Applications
• Logiciels gratuits from TutoWeb.
• Now, to look into the future, Sneak peek at OpenOffice.org 3.0
• And, last but not least, for old dinosaurs, let’s remind you that you can still use VAX-VMS on your Linux PC. If you don’t know what I am saying, either you’re too young, or you never received a hacker education. Or both.