Windows 7: Service Pack 1 (SP1) is Now Available

Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Windows 7 contains previously released security, performance, and stability updates for Windows, and a few small bug fixes and minor enhancements for the OS.  For example, there's a bug fix for HDMI audio devices, a fix for printing mixed-orientation XPS documents, and a fix for "Restore previous folders at logon" functionality.

SP1 is available via Windows Update, downloading from the Microsoft web site or by ording a DVD from Microsoft.

SP1 installs in roughly 30 minutes, and does require that your computer is restarted.  System requirements and detailed installation instructions can also be found on Microsoft's Web site.

Don't forget to backup your computer before installing this update you never know if its going to break something.

Google's 2-Step Verification

"Google's offering a new way to protect your data stored on its servers (e.g. the Google Cloud). The new service is called '2-step Verification'. It’s not radically new, but it does make it harder for a criminal to steal your account. Google has been offering this service for several months to its business customers and now it’s rolling it out to its regular users."

Read the rest of the article here.

Microsoft IE9 Release Candidate: Why You Need to Try It

eWeek reports: "Microsoft shipped its Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate Feb. 10 as a near-final version of the browser that features significant performance enhancements, user experience improvements and standards compatibility advancements. The release candidate, known as IE9 RC, is available at www.BeautyOfTheWeb.com in 40 languages, Dean Hachamovitch, corporate vice president for Internet Explorer at Microsoft, said in a Feb. 10 blog post. Hachamovitch said with IE9 RC, Microsoft has incorporated more than 17,000 pieces of feedback about IE9, and moved the browser forward in terms of performance and standards, user experience, and safety and privacy. Microsoft culled insights from more than 25 million beta testers to update the IE9 technology, including making the browser's 'Chakra' JavaScript engine at least 30 percent faster than it was in the beta version. As for hardware acceleration and interoperability in the latest release, according to the SunSpider benchmark, IE9 RC is 35 percent faster than Internet Explorer 9 Beta—322 ms in the beta versus 209 ms in RC. Meanwhile, Microsoft continues to implement standards as they become stable, and IE9 RC supports geolocation, playback of H.264-encoded video using the HTML5 video tag, and now WebM video, when a VP8 code is installed on Windows."

Software: Snackr: A Cross-Platform RSS Ticker

Snackr is an RSS ticker that pulls random items from your feeds and scrolls them across your desktop.

This is the first program that I have installed that uses Adobe AIR, which is a cross platform runtime environment. This mean that Snackr can run on Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux.

All you have to do click the 'Install Now' button. If you don't have Adobe AIR installed, it will be downloaded and installed for you (if you want).

Web Site: Creating Craigslist Alerts

Craigslist has single-handedly destroyed newspaper classified ads.  To be honest I don't miss them.  Although, with the popularity of this site there are great deal of scams so you have to be careful.

If you're trying to find a great deal, its hard to beat Craigslist. Although, I find it annoying that you can't setup e-mail alerts on the site for my favorite searches.

What I recently discover is that you can get RSS feeds from the site for any search. To subscribe to a Craigslist's RSS feeds:

• Go to your city's Craigslist site.
• Enter your search terms (keywords for what you're looking for), then press the search button 
• Scroll to the bottom of the page, there's an orange button with the letters RSS, click on the button.
• Copy that page's URL and paste it into your favorite RSS feed reader.

Using your RSS feed reader, you can be notified every time an item is posted on Craigslist that matches your search criteria.

If you don't like the suggestion above, search for "Craigslist email Alerts" to find companies that offer this type of service.

Firefox's Problem with Windows

Microsoft WebMatrix Shortens Path to Running Open-Source Web Apps on Windows

eWeek reports: "Microsoft's WebMatrix is a freely available development tool that lowers the barriers to creating Websites atop the company's Windows operating system and IIS Web server tandem, both in terms of locating and installing needed components, and coding data-driven Websites. While running Websites on the Windows stack is the central purpose of the product, one of the most impressive aspects of WebMatrix turns on its support of these and other open-source projects, which the product exposes in the form of a Web Gallery feature that offers one of the simplest paths I've seen to minting new Websites based on popular open-source projects such as Wordpress or Drupal. Despite the handful of snags I experienced during my tests of WebMatrix with MySQL, I can recommend WebMatrix without hesitation to Windows users interested in exploring the wealth of open-source Web-application projects available and in getting started with Microsoft-centric Web development. To see WebMatrix in action, check out the slide gallery below, and be sure to read my full review."

LibreOffice 3.3 Suite Advances While Staying True to OpenOffice Roots

eWeek reports: "In September 2010, a third of OpenOffice.org developers (about 20) objected to the open-source office suite falling under the custodianship of Oracle after the company completed its buyout of Sun Microsystems. They feared that Oracle wouldn't provide whole-hearted support to an open-source application project that didn't significantly contribute to its bottom line. They created the Document Foundation and forked the office suite code to create another open-source suite they dubbed LibreOffice. A little more than four months later, the developers unveiled on Jan. 25 a stable release of their first product, LibreOffice 3.3 (the numbering sequence conforms to the OpenOffice product chronology)." (see the slide show)

If you're an OpenOffice fan like I am, then I thought this was worth noting here.

PC Makers Dealing with Intel Chipset Fallout

eWeek reports: "Intel executives announced Jan. 31 that a design flaw in a supporting chipset tied to the company’s “Sandy Bridge” Core-i processors is forcing a recall of the chipset. The recall could cost Intel $1 billion in lost revenue and related expenses and delay the release of a fixed chipset until late February, with full production coming in April at the latest."

The problem is a design flaw in the chipset that could cause performance problems in the SATA (Serial ATA) ports over time with SATA hard disk drives or optical drives.

Software: Ultimate Windows Tweaker

A web site called The Windows Club has created a tool they called Ultimate Windows Tweaker which in summary is a "TweakUI for Windows 7 & Vista". It basically is a GUI tool for modifying the operating system and internet explorer user interface settings

Originally TweakUI was an unsupported utility created byMicrosoft which was part a set of tools called PowerToys that allow you to modify to Windows XP system user interface settings, but was never updated.

Ultimate Windows Tweaker is a portable application (e.g. doesn't require installation), and supports the 32 and 64-bit versions of the OS.

Software: Microsoft Mathematics (Free)

Tackle math and science problems quickly and easily, using Microsoft Mathematics from Microsoft Education Product Center. Here is an excerpt from their site about the product: "From basic math to precalculus, Microsoft Mathematics 4.0 can help you visualize and see mathematical concepts as you’ve never seen them before. This free downloadable tool includes step-by-step instructions and explains fundamental concepts. The wide range of tools to help students with complex mathematics includes a full-featured graphing calculator that’s designed to work just like a hand-held calculator and ink handwriting support to recognize hand-written problems."

Software: Attack Surface Analyzer BETA

Microsoft releases new security tool for IT security professional: "Attack Surface Analyzer is developed by the Security Engineering group, building on the work of our Security Science team. It is the same tool used by Microsoft's internal product groups to catalogue changes made to operating system attack surface by the installation of new software.

Attack Surface Analyzer takes a snapshot of your system state before and after the installation of product(s) and displays the changes to a number of key elements of the Windows attack surface.

This allows:
- Developers to view changes in the attack surface resulting from the introduction of their code on to the Windows platform
- IT Professionals to assess the aggregate Attack Surface change by the installation of an organization's line of business applications
- IT Security Auditors evaluate the risk of a particular piece of software installed on the Windows platform during threat risk reviews
- IT Security Incident Responders to gain a better understanding of the state of a systems security during investigations (if a baseline scan was taken of the system during the deployment phase)"

GFI Malware Minute

Malware Minutes are short videos (1-2 minutes) that provide a weekly roundup of top stories from the GFI-Labs Blog, the GFI- Rogue Blog and anything else they think might be of interest.

NASA - The Frontier Is Everywhere

Amazing and unusual places in Google Earth

To download links to all the places in the video, you need the following .KML file. To download it, right-click, select Save Link As..., save it to your desktop, then double-click the file to open it with Google Earth.

Teach Parents Tech

Google is offering a new service called "Teach Parents Tech" that allows you to send training videos to your less-tech-savvy family members. All you do is fill-out the form and select the training video you want to send them. There are several different videos available. When you choose send, the recipient will receive a link in an email to the content you selected for them.

Networking: Enabling/Disabling Network Protocols

To view the available network protocols installed and active on the various network adapters installed on your computer, follow the instructions below:

• Click the Start button, right-click Network, and then select Properties.
• In the left pane click Change adapter settings link. This will display a list of all the network devices installed on the local computer.
• Right-click any of the devices and select Properties.

This will bring up a list of the network protocols installed and active on an adapter. The protocols that are installed but are inactive are indicated by the absence of a check in the box next to them.   To enable or disable a network protocol, check or uncheck the checkbox next to it.

The list below includes names of the default Windows networking protocols and a brief description of what they're used for:

• Client for Microsoft Networks: Allows access to shared network resources (such as, file and printer sharing that utilize this Microsoft protocol) on the local LAN.
• QOS Packet Scheduler: Provides network traffic management on the network for applications and devices that support this service.
• File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks: Used for sharing printers and files attached to the local computer with other systems on the local network.
• Internet Protocol Version 6 (TCP/IPv6): Next generation TCP/IP network communication protocol for communicating on LANs, WANs or the Internet.
• Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4): Primary network communication protocol for communicating on LANs, WANs or the Internet.
• Link Layer Topology Discovery Mapper I/O Driver: Used to discover computers connected to the local network.
• Link Layer Topology Responder: Used to identify computers connected to the local network.

Web Site: Groupon

Groupon is a deal-of-the-day website that is localized for major geographic markets around the world. The deals generally range from 50 to 90 percent off on dining, events, attractions, and more.

The way the site works is it offers one "Groupon" per day in each of the markets it serves. If a certain number of people sign up for the offer, then the deal becomes available to all.

For more information check out their web site.

Troubleshooting: Account Lock Out Issues

If an account keeps getting locked out whether its on a local computer or a domain controller (depending on the type of network the machine is on).  There are some basic steps you can follow to try to troubleshoot the lockout issue. 

One of the first places to start is to search the event logs on the local computer or a domain controller for account lockout problems. 

Below is a list of common problems that can cause an account to get locked out: 

• Is the account logged onto more than one machine?
• Check the following area for processes that could be running under invalid cached credentials:
• Mapped drives
• Task Scheduler tasks 
• System services 
• Proxy or firewall authentication 
• Run a malware scan on the local computer.

Note: This problems can also be caused by badly configured security policies on a large network.

Microsoft also offers the Account Lockout and Management Tools that can be used to help troubleshoot these types of problems.  Check out a tool called EVENTCOMBMT.EXE.

Command Line: Display File Attribute with WMIC

If you do any command line scripting occasionally you need to get some extended file attributes, such as version information from an .EXE file. The WMIC command line utility allows you to extract this information and whole lot more.  Over the next few weeks I hope to highlight some of it's power.

I have included some examples of how to use this command below.

Displays All Attributes of the NOTEPAD.EXE
(This command generates a space delimited table of values)
wmic datafile where name='c:\\windows\\system32\\notepad.exe'
- OR -
wmic datafile where name='c:\\windows\\system32\\notepad.exe' > output.txt

Displays Select Attributes of the NOTEPAD.EXE (e.g.: Version Info) 
wmic datafile where name='c:\\windows\\system32\\notepad.exe' get version 

Displays the help information
wmic datafile get /?