Monday, April 21st, 2008
If you are having problems getting certain updates installed on Vista, there are two places you can look to troubleshoot:
%windir%\windowsupdate.log, a log file for Windows Update events
%windir%\Logs\CBS\CBS.log, a log file that tracks events to the servicing stack
These log files include the following fields: Time/Date Stamp, Message Severity, Message Source, Operation ...
Posted in Internet, Security, Windows | No Comments
Monday, April 21st, 2008
In previous versions of Microsoft Windows, the System Preparation Tool (sysprep.exe) was found in the Deployment.cab file on your product CD. If you’ve examined the Vista DVD however, there’s no such cabinet file present.
So where can you find sysprep now? Turns out, it’s included in the operating system itself now ...
Posted in Networking, Windows | No Comments
Monday, April 21st, 2008
For the past few months, we've shown how Linux has emerged from its early murky reputation of being cool to have but impractical to use. And there's no question it's refreshing to use an entire desktop system with nary a Microsoft or Apple product. But as some of our readers ...
Posted in Linux | No Comments
Monday, April 21st, 2008
In a security alert last week, Microsoft reported a vulnerability which allows local users and users signed on with access to an Internet Information Server (IIS) or MS SQL server to escalate their privileges. Server operators such as hosting providers who allow user code to be executed, for example on ...
Posted in Coding, Privacy, Security, Windows | No Comments
Monday, April 21st, 2008
PreviewConfig is a utility that gives Vista users the power to add file type support to the Explorer preview pane, which can be activated via "Organize." Though the preview pane can be an interesting and useful feature of the OS, it really lacks in file support. It's possible to add ...
Posted in Windows | No Comments
Monday, April 21st, 2008
In January, I posted some Incident Response tips on how to deal with a Vista system with Bitlocker enabled. You can read the initial post here. I was recently doing some training and we discussed Bitlocker techniques in depth and decided to post a follow up with some additional tips.
The ...
Posted in Privacy, Security, Windows | No Comments
Monday, April 21st, 2008
There's a ton of information in your computer's user manual, but it's also hundreds of pages long. To become a real power user, you could read through the entire thing, memorizing the details on each page. Or you could turn to PC Magazine.
For this very special feature, we'll boil down ...
Posted in General BS, Hardware, Internet, Software, Windows | No Comments
Friday, April 18th, 2008
Microsoft is investigating new public reports of a vulnerability which could allow elevation of privilege from authenticated user to LocalSystem, affecting Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 and all supported versions and editions of Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008. Customers who allow user-provided code to run ...
Posted in Security, Windows | No Comments
Thursday, April 17th, 2008
Websense Security Labs research has uncovered a case where a museum's compromised Web server is serving malicious code based on the referrer making the request. A referrer could be, for example, a search engine such as images.google.com.
As interesting as the fact that they're doing this, however, is which referrers trigger ...
Posted in Internet, Security | No Comments
Thursday, April 17th, 2008
I’m not a Windows Vista fan. In fact, my new PC runs on XP, but uses OpenSource applications for most of my business needs. So why do I even care about a trick to get sluggish Vista browsing back to an acceptable speed? My mom uses Vista, and I love ...
Posted in Internet, Networking, Windows | No Comments
