I saw your earlier article about how to set up your Mac so that it requires a password when waking up from sleep or from the screen saver (see password required to wake Mac from sleep). Nice. Now, how can I do that with my Microsoft Windows Vista PC laptop?

Dave’s Answer:

Glad that other article was helpful. I think it’s pretty darn important to be aware of these privacy and security issues on your computer, whether you’re running Windows or Mac OS X. It’s just too likely that between kids, colleagues, pranksters and actual delinquents that someone can spin your laptop around and do something you don’t want while you’re in the bathroom, ordering a new drink at a cafe, or even at the store, computer sitting on the table at home.

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I want to turn off all the miscellaneous sounds in Windows that make noise when I carry out some action — like the clicks whenever the web browser goes to a web page, or the dings whenever a box appears on the screen asking me a question. I can turn my speakers off, but I still want to be able to play music or watch movies. Can I disable all the annoying Windows sounds, without turning off music that plays through my computer?

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I know how to open a command prompt in Microsoft Windows, but the normal methods for cutting and copying and pasting — like Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V — don’t seem to work inside a command prompt window. How can I do copying and pasting with a command prompt?

Dave’s Answer:

It’s possible to copy and paste within a Microsoft Windows command prompt, and to copy and paste text to/from other programs, but the commands and keyboard keys to do so are different from most other Windows programs.

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I took some photos with my digital camera and I want to e-mail them to friends or upload them to my Facebook, but the files are enormous, and uploading them takes forever! Can I make them smaller while still having the photos look the same?

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Got a problem with my Proscan 32″ LCD TV would love some help. Been trying to hook my PC to my TV like a monitor I see the boot up even the main screen but once I log in it goes back to the other monitor. I tried using the tv it wont I am using Vista unfortunately might be the prob any help would be appreciated

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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??

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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

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I haven’t seen it yet, but ZDNet’s Ed Bott has - the teaser image below on Microsoft’s home page that, when you click on it, takes you to a section on the website called Windows Vista: Look how far we’ve come.

I’ve been using Vista in one edition or another since April 2007 and did some of the early beta testing. Largely, I’m pleased with it, even in the face of some pretty bad experiences last year, resolved thanks to Dell a few months ago.

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After many years of using a PC, I’ve finally switched to a Mac and am now running Microsoft Windows Vista within the VMware Fusion environment. I have heard from a bunch of people that it’s better than Parallels. Anyway, be that as it may, can you tell me how to install the VMware Tools, which apparently I need?

Dave’s Answer:

I’ve used both Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion for quite a while and have had generally good success with both of them so I don’t know that one is dramatically better than the other. One good thing: both companies are determined to win this race so both are constanlty pushing out updates, tweaks and performance enhancements, which is a great boon to customers.

Having said that, I will also say that my experience with Windows Vista is that it requires so many resources that it’s a tough operating system to run with any sort of decent performance within a virtualization environment. I have much better luck with Windows XP, as do most Mac users who need to delve into the PC universe on occasion.

The good news is that the general steps required to install the VMware tools — which let the Windows OS interact more successfully with your Mac peripherals and lets you have any arbitrary size window as your Windows screen size — is the same for just about any version of Windows you might want to run.

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Time shifting is an honored tradition, being able to record TV shows is something that makes time shifting something that you want to do, unfortunately reports are coming in that NBC has started using the broadcast flag, and Vista is obeying it.

This screen cap is coming from justinjas, a blogger who was trying to record “American Gladiator” using his Vista PC. If this had been a regular old TV to Tape, he would not have had this problem, but since he was using Vista, the setting that NBC used “no allowed recording” kept him from time shifing his Television show to a time that he could have sat down and watched it. Justin states:

Since when did over the air NBC start putting broadcast flags on their programs. I don’t know if this is specific to my local station (WNCN) but this is the first time I’ve ever ran into this message. I can pause, rewind, fast foward (and still skip commercials) but no recording for viewing later. Thanks NBC. Source: Justinjas

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