Year: 2008

Another great FREE utility

Well no so much a utility as a setting I suppose. What is it? It is OpenDNS. What does it do? It allows you to point your DNS to much bigger, faster, better featured, highly reliable, etc service for retrieving the domains you type into your web browser. Why is it better? Well apart from being all the things I just mentioned it allows you to monitor all your DNS requests, for all your networks from a web console (cool). Also, it can be configured to prevent requests to phising and “adult content” web sites. This means that if a user inadvertently clicked on an email that contained a link to a phising site (to obtain their banking details for example without them knowing) then the request would be automatically dropped and the user would get a nice warning page.

By using OpenDNS on your network you’ll ensure that not only will your users get a faster response to their request for web sites but they’ll also be better protected. Even better you can access all you DNS statistics from a web console and lots more features. To cap it all off OpenDNS is TOTALLY FREE! So there is no reason not to use it.

Take a look at OpenDNS and I think you’ll find that it has plenty of really cool benefits for a price that is hard to match.

Don’t believe Windows Vista ain’t selling?

Heard recently that last year PC (excluding Macs) manufacturers shipped 260 million PC’s. Microsoft also announced that in the same time frame it sold 88 million copies of Windows Vista.

Say what??? 260 million PC’s and only 88 million shipments of Vista. But wait it get’s worse for Microsoft. It is my understanding that the 88 million shipments of Vista include upgrades (ie not destined for new hardware anyway).

Now Vista does have some excellent features that do make it a worthwhile purchase BUT for the average consumer it means they are going to HAVE TO buy new MORE POWERFUL hardware to run Vista on. Strangely, most consumers ask WHY? To them apart from the flashy Aero interface (which is a resource hog anyway) what benefit makes it worthwhile now? NOTHING! They’ll just wait until they upgrade their PC in 3-4 years and get it then. If we go into recession then this may blow out to 4-5 years.

In my books another mistake from Microsoft not looking at what customers ACTUALLY WANT rather than telling them WHAT THEY SHOULD HAVE. The market has spoken Microsoft and I certainly hope you are listening. But ….

Look what I found out after I…

Have been apply Office 2003 SP3 in swaths across customers while they are all away being merry and I can access every workstation unrestricted. That was until I found this blog post!  Turns out that by installing Office 2003 SP3, the ability to open and save older legacy file formats will be blocked. Hmmm…why? The reason for this decision is strictly for security reasons.  Some older file formats including some from Microsoft are insecure and do not satisfy new attack vectors that hackers can use to execute malicious code.  The decision to block the formats is strictly to protect your machine from being compromised. Hmmm…the old security excuse eh? I wonder how many of my customers this is going to piss orff? Hopefully, not too many!

If you need instructions to re-enable certain file formats, please read this article KB 938810.  It involves registry modifications so, as usual, backup your registry before altering. GREAT! Another fantastic Microsoft solution – HACK THE REGISTRY! Is there ever a solution that doesn’t involve this for pity’s sake??

Hmm…sounds to me like Microsoft wants everyone to upgrade to Office 2007,

Because it is better? Because the ribbon interface makes using it so much better? Or because Microsoft needs the cash? I wonder!

When will company’s like Microsoft start looking at this sort of stuff from what is best for the customer? Not while they have stockholders I’ll bet!

2 worthwhile utilities

Ok, let’s start off the New Year with 2 interesting and helpful utilities.

Firstly IEPassview – This utility will allow you to display all the passwords stored by Internet Explorer. Yes, that’s right boys and girls, all those passwords for login to protected sites and things like ADLS routers.

IE PassView utility can recover 3 types of passwords:

  • AutoComplete Passwords: When you enter a Web page that contains a form with user/password fields and a login button, Internet Explorer may ask you if you want to save the password, after pressing the login button. If you choose to save the password, the password is saved as AutoComplete password.
    Be aware that some Web sites (like Yahoo login page) deliberately disable the AutoComplete feature, in order to avoid password stealing by other users.
  • HTTP Authentication Passwords: Some Web sites allow the user to enter only after typing user and password in a separated dialog-box. If you choose to save the password in this login dialog-box, the password is saved as HTTP authentication password.
  • FTP Passwords: Simply the passwords of FTP addresses (ftp://…)

Next WindirStat – will calculate and display disk usage.

WinDirStat reads the whole directory tree once and then presents it in three useful views:

  • The directory list, which resembles the tree view of the Windows Explorer but is sorted by file/subtree size,
  • The treemap, which shows the whole contents of the directory tree straight away,
  • The extension list, which serves as a legend and shows statistics about the file types.

This is a great tool for determining what is chewing up all your disk space and then actually going in and cleaning it up.

Best of all both utilities are free for download. How’s that for a New Year’s present?