WinCustomize Forums » RSS Feed » Personal Computing Posts

First Stuxnet, now meet Flame.

DrJBHL — Mon, 28 May 2012 2:24:51 PM -0400

Kaspersky has reported discovering a really super piece of spyware after being requested to investigate suspected malware causing information loss at the Iranian oil refinery/depot. They believe it’s been around since August 2010.

Photocredit: Kaspersky Labs The countries affected appear to be Israel, Iran, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.

There are three classes of malware/spyware producers: Hacktivists, cybercriminals and nation states. The backt...

Notable – Chrome Overtook IE in Market Share.

DrJBHL — Mon, 28 May 2012 1:40:19 PM -0400

Not designed to start a ‘browser war’ here. Hankers sent me the link, and I thought it worth mentioning.

Browsing the graph by geographic area showed some very interesting stats. It would seem that the most impressive gain for Chrome and loss for IE comes from South America. I didn’t see any place in which Chrome actually lost to IE, but there are several areas where IE holds a steady lead – Australia, Germany… interesting.

It’s interesting to browse the site. Use the drop ...

Instant messaging

ElanaAhova — Mon, 28 May 2012 4:14:16 AM -0400

I am looking to install basic instant messaging (ala text messaging with a cell phone). I'm not interested in chat rooms, etc. I'm looking for a basic way to replace the texting functions of a cell phone with a similiar thing PC-www-PC. Just me and tow or three others. Don't want to get exposed to all the spam IM, and "people" trolling with IMs for "contacts" personal or otherwisae.

Any suggestins to sort out the 100s' of hits I get wh...

An Interesting Browser - Lunascape

DrJBHL — Sun, 27 May 2012 7:24:50 PM -0400

To continue with browsers and again non-competitively, I’d like to mention Lunascape. Lots of browsers do interesting things, like Opera’s managing email and ‘Turbo’. Other browsers have their special features a well. Maxthon can switch between 2 rendering engines.

Lunascape can jump between three rendering engines – Trident (IE), Gecko (Ff) and WebKit (Chrome and Safari). It does that effortlessly. Depending on compatibility, the rendering of a given site might suffer. If tha...

NirLauncher: Free For Your Rescue Needs

DrJBHL — Sun, 27 May 2012 7:45:46 AM -0400

Anyone who’s nuts about utilities and their importance in rescues of your computer or, more often your family’s and friends’ has to have this.

First of all, it’s portable and can be put on a zip drive or burned to disk, as well as put on the primary disk.

The Nirsoft Launcher is a package of more than 100 freeware NirSoft utilities in a logical and organized (and compact) format:

Needless to say, I grabbed it, and I strongly recommend you do so as well....

What monitor to replace Dell 2209WA

Kamamura_CZ — Sat, 26 May 2012 7:02:58 PM -0400

I have a question for y'all self-taught experts in things shiny and coloful (lcd displays, not dwarven gems), so gather round and listen my sad story.

In 2009, I saw that a pearl among the monitors is coming to the market - Dell 2209WA, a true 8-bit color e-IPS, with wunderbar colors, slightly larger input lag, I give you that, but otherwise an excellent panel. We lived happily since then, but recently, an ugly yellow vertical line of non-functional blue sub-pixels have scarred ...

CCleaner v3.19 is Available

Island Dog — Fri, 25 May 2012 2:02:35 PM -0400

An update to CCleaner is out. Definitely one of the best apps to have on your PC.

Added option to bypass annoying UAC prompt. Added support for Firefox 13.0 beta. Added Thunderbird cleaning as a separate rule. Added cleaning for BitDefender. http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download

I miss the days of Microsoft borrowing other people’s ideas

Draginol — Wed, 23 May 2012 3:38:38 PM -0400

From the day we migrated from OS/2 to Windows, every new version of Windows meant Microsoft was going to lift some ideas for the next version of the OS from Object Desktop. And we would have to adapt.

Think I exaggerate?

Look at Object Desktop for OS/2 (which was developed prior to Windows 95) with its ZIP files that worked as folders, DesktopX with its widgets and gadgets, Control Center with its side bar of “gadgets”, GUI Skins (where uxtheme.dll so blatantly borrowed from th...

3 Favorite Features of WindowFX 5

Island Dog — Tue, 22 May 2012 6:20:20 PM -0400

I’ve been playing around with WindowFX 5 a lot this week, and although there’s many cool features in it, I wanted to highlight 3 of my favorites that I have found useful. WindowFX 5 is currently in beta and more info can be found here.

http://www.stardock.com/products/windowfx/

Follow @stardock Darken Inactive Windows This is a feature I don’t think you will turn off once you start using it. Enabling this feature will make the windows under the active window darken so you...

SSD Tips and Tweaks

RedneckDude — Mon, 21 May 2012 2:22:04 AM -0400

Guys, I know a few of us have SSDs. I'm pretty sure more do than we know.

What say we all share any tips or tweaks we might have so we can all benefit from each other's knowledge.

Or maybe we can ask a question, someone else may have the answer.

I'll start by saying I have an OCZ Vertex Plus 120 GB. Sata II on a Sata II Mobo.

Currently, I get the following stats when testing. I wonder how this compares with yours and if it can...

ESET free malware removal and change removal tool available

DrJBHL — Sun, 20 May 2012 4:10:58 PM -0400

“Rogue applications are malware that try to fool the user in believing that they are legit programs.” – gHacks.com

It’s in its infancy, yet because it’s not clear which and how many varieties of malware it can remove just yet. It does have a restoration tool to fix any changes the malware might have made to your system. This tool is run in dos. The command lines can be run from a variety of command switches using /r or /? to display the help file which lists all the command ...

List of features removed in Windows 8

JcRabbit — Sat, 19 May 2012 12:08:11 AM -0400

According to THIS article in The Register, Microsoft will remove the ability Windows Media Player has to play DVDs in Windows 8.

But that is NOT by far the only feature that will be removed from Windows 8. We all know about the missing Start Menu already, but THIS list is a real eye opener. I think we can safely say that Windows 8 will be the biggest flop since the invention of square wheels.

iPhone 4 (old model) Deal

DrJBHL — Fri, 18 May 2012 5:40:27 PM -0400

If you’ve been hankering for an iPhone, well here’s a 50% discount for you: Best Buy is going to be selling the older model iPhone (black and white 8 Gb model) for $49.99. A factoid: Best Buy sells as many iPhones as Apple does.

Best Buy is clearing inventory before the next iPhone arrives later this year (September-October) and which is rumored to have a screen that’ll be 1/2 in. larger than at present.

If you have gambling blood… wait. Best Buy did give away iPhones for...

creaTTor.com - A great resource site!

DrJBHL — Fri, 18 May 2012 3:49:24 PM -0400

While tooling around this morning, I came across this site which has tons of free graphics goodies like stock photos, textures, vectors, icons, fonts, brushes, psd files, psd templates, illustrations, fireworks files, stuff for Flash, and templates for Wordpress themes, Joomla, Website, Drupal – special for Betty), and Magento templates.

You can see lots of what’s available here:

All you have to do is subscribe (free).

Go here, artists: http://w...

Check out if you’ve been “Injected” with the “I Want This” browser extension

DrJBHL — Fri, 18 May 2012 11:18:29 AM -0400

If you’re seeing advertising where it shouldn’t be – like in the Wikipedia, you’ve been injected. The Chrome Extension “I Want This” is one of the tainted extensions. It’s easy to check for (Wrench>Tools>Extensions). I checked my Chrome and Comodo Dragon, and these aren’t injected.

Similarly, you can check your Firefox (Orange Rectangle>Add ons>Extensions), IE (Tools>Manage add-ons>Toolbars and Extensions).

So, if you see advertisements on the Wikipedia, y...

After Steve Jobs: What’s next?

Draginol — Thu, 17 May 2012 9:06:11 AM -0400

I wrote awhile back how the death of Steve Jobs affected me. This is kind of an update on how things have progressed since then.

Now, I don’t consider myself in the same league as Steve Jobs. I’ve been fortunate enough to meet some of the titans of our industry and their force of intellect has been humbling.

Capability aside, certain types of people are motivated by very similar things. We all have our demons.

In my case, I grew up with very little. I never felt I was good enough...

Screensavers Uploaded

LizMarr — Wed, 16 May 2012 11:48:34 PM -0400

I put three of my slide-show type screen savers on the server. One was rather old but the other two I had worked on recently. I might re-work them some in the future, but they are pleasant as they are. One is very large file size due to the number of photos and because it has music. Music always adds size. The subjects are Favorites (travel and such) Roses (lots of roses) and Flowers (not as many, the oldest one) Please check them out and let me know how you like them.

Beware Latest Avira (Paid) Update: Will Cripple Your PC!

DrJBHL — Tue, 15 May 2012 7:20:45 PM -0400

The latest Avira update which bumps your version to 8.2.10.64 and definitions file to 7.11.30.24 will detect

\windows\system32\dllhost.exe \windows\system32\explorer.exe \windows\system32\iexplorer.exe \windows\system32\notepad.exe \windows\system32\regedit.exe \windows\system32\rundll32.exe \windows\system32\taskeng.exe \windows\system32\wuauclt.exe as being “positives” and will prevent Windows Boot, MS Office, MS Works (or doesn’t in this case...

Stardock’s visitor stats tell interesting picture

Draginol — Tue, 15 May 2012 10:03:10 AM -0400

Let’s look at 3 web stats that tell us a little bit about the demographics of who visits us.

First, we’ll use our homepage: Stardock.com.

Then, we’ll look at our most popular game, SinsOfASolarEmpire.com

And lastly, we’ll look at our most popular desktop utility, Fences.

These stats are for the month of April, 2012.

Who visit Stardock.com?

By Browser: Firefox (34%), Chrome (32%), Internet Explorer (24%) By OS: Windows 7 (58%), XP (34%), Vista (6%) Top Resol...

Well Shaunna's Puter Finally Shat Itself

starkers — Mon, 14 May 2012 6:54:48 PM -0400

As the title suggests, Shaunna's desktop PC went guts up and is in dire need of some replacement parts to get it up and running again. I've ordered the necessary parts and hopefully they'll be here later today so's I can rebuild it for her.

Yeah, it has been acting up intermittently for quite a while now, so I wasn't at all surprised that it decided to kark it yesterday.... tho I reckon it was a stubborn bastard for not dying sooner and saving me endless hours of pul...

Excel Puzzle

LizMarr — Mon, 14 May 2012 9:24:52 AM -0400

Before anyone spouts off with, "Excel isn't a spread sheet" I know that. If I could afford it I would get Access. I'm remotely familiar with Access having created a couple of commercial apps in the far past. But, alas, I have Excel. I taught and acted as a instructor aide, also in the far past, so I can do just about anything normal (did I say NORMAL?) with Excel. If I can't do them, then I know it can be done and research them. We're talking plan ol' office type stuff, nothi...

Windows 8 RT (ARM Version)? “No 3rd Party Browser For You!”

DrJBHL — Mon, 14 May 2012 5:42:53 AM -0400

Unbelievable.

Talk about shooting one’s self in the foot. For me, Windows 8 has gone from bad to worse.

So now, in the ARM version of W8, there will be no possibility of installing a third party browser, per the MS blog (1). So, for x86 systems, free access to all browsers. For tablets with ARM, “No soup for you!” and no “Come back one year.”MS forgot it said quite the opposite in the past (2). Asa Dotzler won’t let MS forget the page they disa...

Finally! Zappix Will Really Change Customer Care

DrJBHL — Mon, 14 May 2012 12:16:19 AM -0400

I hate calling any kind of company: “Please pay attention as our help menu has recently changed.” Bull. It never changes…but even worse, you make a mistake or get lost in the menu system which is and endlessly frustrating algorithm designed to induce homicidal rage … even in Nuns on Valium.

So, Saadia Ozeri an Israeli biotech exec had to call his m-i-l’s cell phone company and ended up totally frustrated. Welcome to the club, Saadia.

Only he did so...

Who's Talking About Stardock's Start8

Island Dog — Sun, 13 May 2012 12:40:30 PM -0400

Start8 was introduced this past week. Who is talking about it?

http://www.engadget.com/2012/03/08/start8-download-resurrects-the-start-button-on-windows-8-niche/http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Windows-8-Start-Menu-App-Stardock-Brad-Wardell,14931.htmlhttp://www.ghacks.net/2012/03/06/stardocks-start8-brings-back-the-windows-8-start-menu/http://www.techspot.com/news/47695-stardock-releases-free-start-menu-app-for-windows-8.htmlhttp://www.neowin.net/news/interview-stardock-ceo-brad-wardell...

"Drag and Drop" Free Chrome Search Extension

DrJBHL — Sun, 13 May 2012 7:31:54 AM -0400

Lots of folks use Chrome as their personal browser. What I hate doing is stopping what I’m working on to type (or I admit, more often than Zu) mistype what I’ve come across into the search engine’s search area. It’s a P.I.A.

So, I’m on the prowl looking for goodies for you all and I came across this: Drag and Drop. You can find it here. It’s rated 5 stars and I agree.

Nothing’s easier than choosing, clicking and dragging the phrase, name, or picture into whichever search en...