By early 2008, you will not be able to buy Windows XP on a new computer, your only choice will be Windows Vista. Microsoft is doing this because people are still buying XP on their new PCs. I imagine this is because the users want to avoid the compatibility issues and don’t see the benefits of learning something different.
XP works for them.
I haven’t upgraded to Vista yet, and I am waiting for most of the bugs to be worked out. XP does everything I need, is quick, stable, and problem-free.
Microsoft has released a Windows Media Player plugin for Firefox through its “Open Source Lab”. I imagine Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Team isn’t too happy about this, but it looks like this is just another part of Microsoft moving its focus to media from controlling the window to the Internet.
In any case, this should be useful for users of Windows Media Player that are so efficiency-obsessed that they need to control their music through their favorite web browser.
Thousands of users are finding that a recent Windows security update is making new problems. After the update users that have some types of Realtek sound cards are seeing an error message that says:
“RTHDCPL.EXE - Illegal System DLL Relocation
The system DLL user32.dll was relocated in memory. The application will not run properly. The relocation occurred because the DLL C:\WINDOWS\system32\HHCRTL.OCX occupied an address range reserved for Windows systems DLLs. The vendor supplying the DLL should be contacted for a new DLL.”
Microsoft has issued a patch that you can find here
Microsoft has released a patch for a severe zero-day vulnerability in the way it draws cursors.
All versions of Windows are at risk.
Bad guys could put dangerous code in the custom graphical cursors many users use. The vulnerability has already been exploited in web based attacks. You should install the update right away.
Download the Update
Acer has released a patch for an ActiveX control called LunchApp.ocx. Acer’s official intention was to allow for easy downloading of updates and patches, but it has been found that bad guys can exploit it.
The patch is available from the Acer web site (Acer Preload Security Patch for Windows XP).
If your computer is from Acer, you should download this patch immediately.
If you don’t know if Vista will work on your computer, download Microsoft’s Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor. It will tell you about compatibility issues and if your computer stacks up to the hefty system requirements.
There is not an option in the Windows control panel to make the NUM LOCK key not activate at startup,
you will need to go under the hood for a few seconds and do some registry editing.
Open regedit by going to the Start Menu, clicking Run, and then typing in regedit.
Browse to HKEY_USERS\.Default\Control Panel\Keyboard
Modify the string called InitialKeyboardIndicators, change it from 2 to 0.
Close the editor, and you’re done.
Making sure that the NUM LOCK key doesn’t enable itself at startup is.
It’s that time of the month, the day Microsoft unloads a ton of patches for Windows and other products. The highlights include Internet Explorer exploit patches, and fixes to holes in Flash Player and XML Core Services.
Make sure you run Windows Update and get everything up to date.
Today is Microsoft’s ‘patch day’, and a big one at that. If you use Windows, you’ll probably want to run Windows Update to get them. Lot’s of big patches, several of the critical variety.
There were rumblings that Microsoft was going to release Internet Explorer 7 among these patches, but that does not seem to be the case.
If you have ever reinstalled Windows, or had Windows with a totally clean slate, you probably remember how quickly the system starts up the first few times, and you know that after a short while, Windows takes longer and longer to startup.
A site named intelliadmin had a great blog post about some things you can do get Windows starting up at a sprightly pace again.
The tips they give are:
Clean the prefetch cache
Defragment the hard drive
Disconnect Network drives
Remove spyware and adware
and disable file and print sharing
Cleaning the prefetch cache is the most interesting to me as I had never heard of the prefetch cache before. Degragmenting and removing spyware are more obvious but no less important.
All of these tips are good things to try out, and will probably help give you a faster Windows startup time and nice performance boost.
