October 11, 2007
Get Fred Langa's wallpaper for your desktop
Our editor-at-large, Fred Langa, is back from a 5-month motorcycle tour of the U.S. and Canada. Through Oct. 24, all paid subscribers are eligible for a bonus download, Wallpaper of the Journey — 25 high-quality images Fred that you can use as desktop wallpaper. Read more »
Carry a flash drive instead of a laptop
You can avoid lugging a laptop everywhere installing your favorite apps on a USB flash drive and running them on any computer you want. I'll guide you in selecting a flash drive that's best suited for portable software and tell you which apps you should install. Read more »
Microsoft releases Excel fix but skirts issue
Microsoft has released hotfix packages to correct an Excel 2007 error that makes cells that contain values close to 65,535 act as though they contain 100,000. There's still some confusion, however, on whether these hotfixes should also be applied to older versions of Excel and whether they resolve all Excel 2007 calculation errors. Read more »
Is it time for Tomb Raider to die?
Even those who've never touched a gaming console in their digital lives have heard of Tomb Raider, the influential video game featuring the exploits of the heroic — and seemingly indestructible — Lara Croft Read more »
Part three: reduce caches to speed performance 
This week, I travel through the Wild West to help our second Housecall winner hunt PC space hogs in Tacoma, Wash. My trip west took me from dramatic, wind-sculpted landscapes, whose colors ranged from deep red to muted adobe, to the lush green of the Pacific Northwest. Read more »
Several unpatched vulnerabilities this week
Microsoft released six security updates this week, so be sure to update your systems as soon as possble. Unfortunately, Microsoft left a few security problems unpatched in its products, and there are unrelated problems with Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Reader, and Sun Java that you definitely need to be aware of. Read more »
Hold off on patching MS SharePoint
A pretty bumpy patch has just been released for SharePoint, but the rest of this week's patch lineup is pretty tame. We do have a few tricky issues to deal with, regarding updates for IE 7, Office 2003, and Vista, in addition to the other monthly security patches. Read more »