Many Microsoft Windows 7 users have started to notice a decline in their batteries longevity. At first they were confused thinking it was the BIOS drivers that needed to be upgraded, but then began to notice that others who installed Microsoft Windows 7 had the same problem. (more…)
I just spent the better half of the day upgrading my son’s Dell 1721 laptop from Vista to Windows 7. I have done my share of Linux installs and upgrades on all kinds of hardware configurations but this was one of the toughest I have ever been through. Once I resolved it, the fix is rather easy, but finding the fix was a challenge. I am thankful for the many people who post useful information in forums so that people like me can resolve our problems. Hopefully this post will help some folks and save them a great deal of time and frustration.
Every so often I go to download some software for my Acer Windows PC and have to decide between a 32-bit and 64-bit version of the application. I’m running Windows Vista but when I look, it just says that I’m running “Home Premium”. How do I know if I’m running 32-bit or 64-bit Windows?
Microsoft has possibly pulled a fast one on the European Commission (EC) in its wrestling match to see whether their Internet Explorer browser (IE) will be packaged in the new Windows 7 offering. The EC has contended that by including the browser in the operating system that competition is being squeezed out unfairly by Microsoft. Well, we may be seeing that EC stands for ‘Exceptionally Clueless’ considering how they may have stepped all over their own case against the software giant.
I’m an old-school computer user and when I got my new laptop I decided that rather than overwrite the OS with Linux, I’d actually stick it out and learn Windows Vista. So far, not so bad, but one thing’s bugging me: when I create a file like “test.xls” the system shows it as “test” with an Excel icon. I want to see the filename suffix, though, the “.xls” part. How do I enable that feature / disable that feature in Microsoft Windows Vista??
Microsoft has announced that more than 12,000 movies and TV episodes from Netflix are now available for viewing using Windows Media Center on PCs with Windows Vista Home Premium or Ultimate.
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Here’s a BusinessWeek article about how “Microsoft is Fighting Back (Finally)”. The most interesting part is about Microsoft’s new “Windows Anytime Upgrade” strategy. Here are some details:
The past couple of weeks I have been learning and testing Amazon EC2 with Windows. I wrote another post about just getting started here. When Amazon announced that Windows would be available I started looking for a project since our current infrastructure and developers are all windows based. Now that I have a project I am actually able to work on this on company time ;).
After setting up a couple of servers, one with IIS and the other with SQL server, I see some issues that I will have to overcome before moving the servers to EC2. I will answer the first one in this post; the others will be in future posts. (more…)
Leave it to some smart folks at black hat to work out a way to jump out of the browser, and right into your operating system.
The full paper on the hack is right here, and overall presents some interesting viewpoints into not only how Vista is secured, but how the hackers were able to escape out of the security system to load code of choice through the browser.
In a presentation at the Black Hat briefings, Mark Dowd of IBM Internet Security Systems (ISS) and Alexander Sotirov, of VMware Inc. will discuss the new methods they’ve found to get around Vista protections such as Address Space Layout Randomization(ASLR), Data Execution Prevention (DEP) and others by using Java, ActiveX controls and .NET objects to load arbitrary content into Web browsers. Source: Techtarget
I had this problem before with Windows Media Player 11 (and it seems from searching Google that the problem is widespread) but was hoping someone out there might know how to fix it.
Basically when I try to rip a CD with Windows Media Player 11 it does not populate the album information and metadata. Even when I right click on the album (which shows unknown album when I put it into my PC) and select “Find Album Info” and WMP finds the correct album from their meta data provider, when I click “Finish” and try to apply the metadata it does not get applied to the CD that I’m trying to rip.
This problem happens with all CDs that I try to rip on my brand new Dell PC. I do have “connect to the internet” checked in my settings.
Although I could delete my Windows Media Player folder and try to start over from scratch, I’m hesitant to do this because my media library is large and it takes at least a day to repopulate my library on my PC and another day each for my three XBox 360 extenders.
Does anyone know of a way to force WMP11 to accept the album metadata under the “find album info” command when it won’t accept it?
