Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on November 27, 2007 by CyberNet.

… or so that seems to be the general consensus among many of the reviewers out there. The latest buzz is in regards to CNet UK’s Top Ten Terrible Tech Products, where they place Windows Vista at number 10. Is it deserving of such a pitiful ranking?

Personally, I don’t think it is. My experience with Vista has been rather good, but I strongly believe that every operating system has its own benefits:

• Windows XP – It’s small in size and requires little in terms of system requirements. It’s also been out for over six years and has two Service Packs under its belt, which attributes to the wide compatibility and stability it has to offer.
• Windows Vista – Whether you want to believe it or not, Vista utilizes system resources better than any other version of Windows. If you constantly monitor the memory usage in Vista you’ll quickly see that it eats up a lot of your RAM, but that’s because it wants to use it! It’s not that it requires 2GB of RAM to run, but it will use as much as it can to increase the performance of the system. One of the ways it uses your memory is to preload the most used applications so that they launch almost instantaneously. If another application needs the memory, however, Vista will release what it can to meet the needs of the application.
• OS X Leopard – I’ve never had much hands-on experience with Mac’s, but I know one of the reasons that people love them is that they work without needing a lot of configuration. A large reason why things just work is that the selection of hardware is limited in comparison to what’s available for PC’s. The near idiot-proof technology does come at the expense of your pocketbook though.

And guess what, Vista’s reception is no different than XP! Six months after XP was released here’s what CNet had to say in 2002:

Microsoft’s latest operating system just turned six months old, and most would say that it’s neither a failure nor a raging success. While XP promised the latest and greatest multimedia, security, and ease-of-use features available, many users have not yet upgraded, fearing the hefty system requirements and potential compatibility disasters inherent in a major OS upgrade.

If you replace the instance of “XP” in that article with “Vista” you would essentially sum up what people are saying about Vista right now. Kinda funny, huh?

There are over 88 million people already running Vista (as of October 2007), which is double what XP had in the same time frame. Microsoft has also said that there are tens of millions of corporate volume licenses out there that have not been included in the 88 million users mentioned above. It’s estimated that 13% of businesses have already adopted Vista, which is quite good considering many enterprises will wait until Vista SP1 is released next year.

I think it’s safe to say that people are getting sick of all the Vista-bashing that is going on. I know Ed Bott is, and many of the readers over at Neowin are as well, so I think it’s time to bring an end to it.

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on May 21, 2007 by CyberNet.

I feel pretty bad for those people running the Chinese version of Windows XP SP2 along with Norton Antivirus. It appears that last Friday around 1:00AM Beijing time Symantec updated Norton’s antivirus definitions which flagged two system files, netapi32.dll and lsasrv.dll, as “Backdoor.Haxdoor” trojans.

If the user restarted the computer after receiving the update they are going to have a fun time recovering those two files. After the computer restarts users will be prompted with a Blue Screen of Death (BSoD), and trying to boot into safe mode won’t do them any good. Symantec has posted instructions (translated to English) on using the Windows XP recovery console to restore those two files from the installation CD.

Those people who didn’t restart their computers after the updated definitions are much more fortunate. Symantec released a corrected version of their definitions that same day at 2:30PM Beijing time, and if you update the definitions to the latest version it should counteract the effects.

The number of computers affected has been reported to be between 7,000 and several hundred thousand. It has caused that much damage, and yet Symantec has nothing posted on their front page about the event. The only article they have regarding the situation is for the instructions (posted above) and is only in Chinese.

There is another sticky situation to be talked about now, and that is what people will do who are running pirated copies of Windows XP. They probably don’t have the installation CD anymore, which means they will look for the files online to download them. This could be extremely bad because they may end up downloading files that contain viruses themselves, which would just result in an even larger mess.

Symantec definitely took the wrong approach on this. In my opinion they should have done many things differently:

• Updated their virus definitions sooner than 13–hours later after the destructive update was released.
• Have a nice big link on their homepage so that people looking to solve the problem can easily locate the solution.
• Finally, they should offer some sort of downloadable patch that users can put on a floppy disc or CD. Then they could boot-up the utility on their computer, press a button, and it will automatically copy the two needed files over to the proper location. That way Symantec can verify that the two files being used are legitimate, and that the proper steps are being taken to correct the issue.

All I can say is…what a mess!

Source: ComputerWorld

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

Microsoft really wants to be sure that people who are still running Windows XP know that the end is neigh. The end of support for the old operating system is … Continue reading

This article was written on September 03, 2009 by CyberNet.

I think that in the future we will be encrypting a lot of our data because, well, most of it probably won’t be located on our own machines. When all our files are in the cloud encryption will be important to ensure the security of our data, but up to now most people have never worried about encrypting anything.

Free solutions for encrypting files and hard drives are available, such as TrueCrypt, but it’s not always the most user-friendly thing to set up. The free (and open source) DiskCryptor is pretty straightforward though. This solution will encrypt hard drives, flash drives, and even CD/DVD’s. Unfortunately DiskCryptor is restricted to encrypting entire drives, but for some people that won’t be a problem if the sensitive data is kept on a secondary drive. Or, of course, DiskCryptor supports the encrypting of your boot drive if you want to go that route. Personally I encrypt all my drives except my primary (bootable) one.

What about performance? Here’s the claim they make on their site:

On the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPU, data encryption speed amounts to 104Mb/s per core. The maximum speed of reading the data from a single hard disk, equals to 80Mb/s, thus consequently, one can work with up to 5 different disks without the loss of performance, when using the aforementioned type of processor. In case if your disks are not operating under a constant high load, then it is possible to work with even higher number of disks, and on a weaker system, without losing the performance.

That’s pretty impressive, but those particular stats are for a quad core processor. On a dual core that should still mean you can read from two drives simultaneously even if they are at maximum load. So you shouldn’t see too much of a performance hit just because you’re encrypting your data.

Here’s a list of some other features they highlight:

• Disk partition encryption of any configuration, including boot and system partitions.
• Choice to select an encryption algorithm: AES, Twofish or Serpent. Cascaded modes are available as well.
• Full support for dynamic disks.
• Full support for encryption of external USB storage devices.
• Ability to create encrypted CD’s and DVD’s.
• High encryption performance, comparable to efficiency of a non-encrypted system.
• Support for hardware cryptography found in VIA processors.
• Support for disk devices with large sector sizes, which is important when working with hardware RAID.
• Automatic mount of disk partitions and external storage devices.
• Extended configuration possibilities of booting an encrypted OS. Support for different multi-boot scenarios.
• Full support for 3rd party boot loaders (LILO, GRUB, etc.).
• Ability to place boot loader on external medium and to authenticate using the key medium.
• Support for key files.
• Support for hotkeys to dismount partitions, initiate emergency system stop, etc.

DiskCryptor works on Windows 2000 up to Windows 7, and is compatible with both 32-bit and 64-bit systems.

DiskCryptor Homepage (Windows only; 32/64-bit; freeware)
[via FreewareGenius]

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

If you can’t make people buy your new OS , why not give it away for free? At least, that’s what Microsoft is thinking of doing with Windows 8.1, according to rumors.

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