Author Archives: Woody Leonhard

When you’re the designated alpha geek for your family, friends — and maybe the office, too — you know certain duties come with the territory.

One of those duties is setting up new PCs. Here’s my quick-and-easy checklist of tasks to do it right.

Last week, somebody broke into Gawker.com and stole 1.3 million account names, e-mail addresses, and passwords — and then posted all the booty on the Internet.

Your online security might not be at the top of your mind this time of year, but most likely you’re doing more Internet shopping. In light of the Gawker break-in, take a few minutes to assess your passwords.

With Black Friday a fading memory and Cyber Monday deals still fresh on the Web, visions of a new PC may be dancing in your head.

But before you go out hunting for that shiny new Win7 machine, take a deep breath, sit back, and consider these tips on buying a PC.

In his Oct. 28 In the Wild column, Robert Vamosi showed how easy it is to snoop a Wi-Fi connection using a clever Firefox add-in called Firesheep.

If you’re serious about protecting your surfing from prying eyes while on an unencrypted public Wi-Fi connection, the onus is on you to lock down your connections. Using virtual private networking (VPN) is one of the best ways I know to do that.

In a move that surprised many Windows watchers, Microsoft last week handed its online bloggers an eviction notice: they get six months to pick up and move — to WordPress.

Windows Live Spaces is now vacant, bequeathing Spaces users some tools to help them migrate to WordPress.

Internet Explorer has been a distant third-string player to Firefox and Chrome for so long, we thought it could never catch up.

But with a slick new interface and enhanced Windows 7 features, IE 9 — now in public beta — just might put Microsoft back at the top of the browser game.

Microsoft’s new version of Windows Live Hotmail brings several new features to the online-mail table.

Some of you have written me with tales of woe, cursing the new version and the Windows Live horse it rode in on and begging to get your old Hotmail back. Sorry, you can’t.