Computer Tips -Tech Info

So, I finally got down to about 5 tabs left in my firefox window and decided I could kill it off and restart it without really losing my place so I could get a good look at the Google Notebook plugin. First impression is that it’s fairly unobtrusive and is in the notification bar with […]

I feel like I’ve done this article so many times in the past…. there are so many things I’m hoping to post and time seems to evaporate before my very eyes. This afternoon I hope to be posting a few things that have been on that list. I also have a few other projects that […]

If you use Internet Explorer to browse the web, I’d suggest finding the instructions to disable active scripting, or drop it and use something else in light of the recent exploit floating around. It seems that in spite of Microsoft’s infinite wisdom that “Microsoft has determined that an attacker who exploits this vulnerability would have […]

How many times have I had this kind of phone call…. “my computers not working”… “the light on the monitor is on, but there aren’t any lights on the keyboard. everything seems connected, but there’s nothing on the screen.” Usually, my first question is along the lines of… “have you tried turning it off and […]

Last week sometime I was doing maintenance on an OLD Windows 95 machine (yes there are some still out there….) and noticed the Antivirus had not updated in a good while. They were using Grisoft’s AVG and so I tried to force an update. I was greeted with an error message… “Cannot Launch AV internet […]

This is going in the basics category. Quite often I visit a computer that has a mouse which is just a trial of patience to use. I mean, you have to pick it up and move it, shake it a bit, turn it over and clean out the lint from the “ball” area…. The good […]

One of the vectors that has been mentioned early on is the infection of a system through the WMF exploit even when the exploited file was downloaded through a dos command shell. At first this seemed absurd, but it appeared that Google Desktop search was indexing files dynamically and once the file was downloaded it […]

There are ways that risks can be avoided. Recently, there was what was called a zero-day exploit for Internet Explorer. As I write this, the exploit surfaced 3 weeks ago and tomorrow there will be a patch. The vulnerability would allow remote code execution through a vulnerability in the way javascript is handled. So, for […]

We don’t live in a quiet world, cars, equipment, alarms, fans, tv’s radios, etc. etc. etc. We have a very noisy Radio Frequency world as well. All sorts of electronic devices can add to the cacophony that is natural RF noise. In my shortwave listening I’ve “crusaded” against RF noise in the house where at […]

One of the things about running KDE in linux is it can be a big resource grabber and be slow starting. By contrast “light” window managers can be up and running in a relative flash (xfce). OSnews has a story on SUSE/Novell KDe developers that have managed to get down to 4-5 second start time […]