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Windows Secrets & LangaList • Issue 87 • 2006-11-30 • Circulation: over 265,000
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For links to every subtopic in this issue, scroll down to the
Index |
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INTRODUCTION The challenges of one newsletter vs. two
What you said about the combined issue The following quotes are typical of the comments we've been receiving since the two titles merged into a single publication:
Answers to your most frequently asked questions Here are some answers to the top comments we've received since our Nov. 16 issue: 1. "I'm not receiving any issues." The only way to ensure you receive your newsletters is to put our "From" address into your e-mail program's address book and any "safe senders" list it uses:
Editor (at) WindowsSecrets.com
(insert an "at" symbol)
2. "I didn't receive the last issue."If an errant spam filter (or whatever) trashed your current issue, it's easy for you to resend it to yourself. To do this, simply visit your preferences page and click the Resend link. You can do this repeatedly until you've tuned your filters and your mail is being delivered. (Remember, there'll be no issues on Dec. 21 or 28 for our holiday break!) 3. "I didn't receive the issue dated YYYY-MM-DD." Free subscribers can see any free issue — and paid subscribers can see any paid issue — that's ever been published. Start with the following links to see past issues of Windows Secrets and LangaList. 4. "You haven't replied to my comment/problem yet." The first combined issue buried us under a wave of tips and queries from new readers. A week later, our staff spent a 4-day break with family during the long Thanksgiving holiday weekend. But messages from readers kept pouring in. We've now responded to most of the subscription glitches that were reported before Nov. 28. We'll eliminate the rest of the backlog soon, we promise. 5. "I'm receiving duplicate newsletters at two different e-mail addresses." You can easily merge the two subscriptions. If you're a paid subscriber to one or both publications, your remaining paid days will be combined so you won't lose any. Simply use this link to merge the two subscriptions. 6. "I haven't received a renewal notice yet." Renewal notices to paid LangaList subscribers stopped originating from Fred Langa's server last month and started originating from the Windows Secrets server this month. Every paid subscriber should have received a notice of renewal possibilities by now. If your paid subscription has already expired (or you've never had a paid subscription) use the Upgrade link in the menu atop any newsletter to get the paid version. 7. "Your site is too slow." The enthusiasm of our new, larger audience revealed to us some choke points at our site. It's now common for about 60 times more traffic to be processed by our server on publication dates than on slow dates, according to an Alexa chart. We apologize for any slowness you may have experienced on peak days. To fix this, we're off-loading our database to two fast new 400GB hard disks and implementing RAID in hardware rather than software. If you don't understand what that means, just be glad you don't have to actually make it work! 8. "More tips are in the paid version than in the free version." Many people remark that our free version is surprisingly good (for a free newsletter). At the same time, our goal is to put about 1/3 of our information in the free version of the newsletter and the other 2/3 in the paid version. That makes the paid version valuable for the paying subscribers, and the price is right. We don't charge any set fee for the paid newsletter — anyone can upgrade by making a contribution of any amount. 9. "There are ads in the newsletter." Revenue from the ads supports our research. This frees us from having to charge a fixed fee for the paid newsletter. Fred formerly left ads out of the paid LangaList, but he added ad links later because paid subscribers wanted to see what they were missing. Our ads have useful information for our readers and appear in both the free and paid versions. Similarly, most newsstand magazines that you pay for have ads. 10. "Are you still supporting underprivileged children?" Fred and I are making sure that a portion of our paid subscription revenue continues to feed hungry children around the world. Fred's site documents the list of "adopted" kids. Our combined newsletter will start linking to periodic status reports soon. Fred and I are proud that we've been able to bring you the expertise that's represented in the combined newsletter — with very few technical difficulties so far. We promise to work hard to deliver even better Windows tricks in the future. Thanks for your support. The next weekly issues of Windows Secrets & LangaList will be Dec. 7, Dec. 14, and (after a Christmas/New Year's break) Jan. 4. Brian Livingston is editorial director of WindowsSecrets.com and the coauthor of Windows Me Secrets and nine other books. |
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LANGALIST TIPS When your Recovery Console goes bad
How to recover from Recovery Console We've discussed Windows' Recovery Console many times. (Here's a search-engine listing of a few dozen of my past articles on the subject.) As a quick refresher, the Recovery Console is an optionally-installed tool that's included with every full version of XP. (Alas, some OEM versions omit it, though.) The Recovery Console lets you perform the XP equivalent of "booting to DOS." This allows you to log on as Administrator and perform low-level analysis, maintenance and repair. It's an incredibly useful tool for troubleshooting, and installing it is on my list of "must do" tweaks for XP. Although you can run the Recovery Console from the setup CD of any full version of XP (again, not all OEM CDs allow this), the faster and better way of accessing it is to install it on your hard drive. That way, it's just a click away when you need it. Recovery Console is really just a subset of XP, minus the graphical user interface. But XP's boot system treats the Recovery Console as if it were an entirely separate operating system. Thus, after installing the Recovery Console, your boot screen will give you a dual-boot option: Booting to the normal, full XP you started with, or booting to the Recovery Console. Normally, the boot-option screen gives you 30 seconds to choose which OS you want to run. If you make no choice in the allotted time, the system boots to the default OS, which — again, normally — is your original, full version of XP. But the key word there is "normally." This reader's Recovery Console installation somehow got very badly messed up:
There are several ways to fix things. Perhaps the simplest is to use msconfig, which lets you set your system's default OS, edit the boot option menu, set how long the boot options remain visible, and more. Click Start, Run, type msconfig in the Run dialog box and press Enter. The msconfig utility will open. Select the boot.ini tab, which shows you the contents of the file of the same name. The boot.ini file is what controls which OS boots, what order the OSes are shown on the screen, and more.  Figure 1. Some startup problems can be fixed easily by editing the boot.ini file. Note that the lines in the boot.ini files are broken in two sections, one called [boot loader] and one called [operating systems]. In the [boot loader] section, note the timeout=3 line. This is how long the boot option screen remains visible on my system. The default is 30 seconds, but I prefer a very short boot delay. With a boot timeout of just 3 seconds, I can jump in and select the Recovery Console when I need it, but otherwise the boot continues automatically in very short order. You can set your boot delay (timeout) to be whatever you want via the Timeout entry box in the right center of the dialog. Just type in the number of seconds you prefer. The next line in the [boot loader] section identifies the location of the default operating system that will automatically boot at the and of the timeout. In my case it's: default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS If I'd chosen the Recovery Console to be the default boot option, the line would read: default=C:\CMDCONS\BOOTSECT.DAT. If your PC has a default OS set (and it most likely does), your "default" line probably looks like one of the examples above. But if, like Theo, you have no default set — or if you have the wrong default set — don't worry, it's a snap to fix. In the [operating systems] portion of the dialog, click on the OS you want to make the default, and then click the Set As Default button. That's all it takes! Once your [boot loader] section contains both a timeout= and a default= entry, your system should boot normally to whichever OS you set as the default, and after whatever timeout delay you indicated. If you still want to uninstall the Recovery Console, you can, although not from inside msconfig. Instead, you manually edit the boot.ini file with Notepad and delete the following line from the [operating systems] section of the file: C:\CMDCONS\BOOTSECT.DAT="Microsoft Windows Recovery Console" /cmdcons Microsoft provides full instructions in the Knowledge Base document How to edit the Boot.ini file in Windows XP, so I won't repeat the details here. Once you've eliminated references to the Recovery Console from the boot.ini file, you can delete the Recovery Console files themselves, usually located at C:\cmdcons By the way, while you're poking around the Microsoft Knowledge Base, you also might want to take a look at Description of the Windows XP Recovery Console and How to install and use the Recovery Console in Windows XP. It really is is a must-have tool! How to automatically defrag your paging file In LangaList issues just prior to me joining Windows Secrets, we were discussing the whys and hows of performing maintenance on two parts of Windows that normally operate below most users' radar. For example, I discussed defragging the MFT or Master File Table (as defined at NTFS.com) in "MFT Needs Its Space" on Oct. 9. I also discussed manual methods for defragging the paging file (aka "swap file") in "Can Swap Files Cause Blue Screens Of Death?" on Sept. 21 and "How to Keep Your Paging File Defragmented" on Nov. 2. Reader Chris wrote in to remind us of a free tool that can automatically defrag your paging file — even at every boot, if you so desire. It's Sysinternals' PageDefrag. A full explanation and the free download are available via that link. Thanks, Chris! Try unplugging if you're stuck offline Reader Don Pooley found that, in PC's, "off" doesn't always mean "off."
Even when nominally "off," most PCs continue to draw a trickle of power to keep the ACPI system alive. This allows the PC to wake up in response to external events such as a mouse click, key press, network activity, and the like. The system's real power switch — the one that actually stops power from flowing into the PC — is usually on the back of the power supply. Flipping that switch (or pulling the plug from the wall socket) is the only way to be sure that your PC (or similar device) is really, truly off. And, as Don found, that kind of total power-off is sometimes the only way to get a device to "snap out" of an error state it's stuck in. A must-see video on laptop batteries You've probably heard about the recall of Sony-made laptop batteries that affected millions of owners of machines, with the bulk being Dell and Apple. The problem was that the defective batteries could overheat, causing burns or even starting fires. (Talk about your tools turning against you!) Not all Sony batteries were included in the recall, and — statistically speaking — the odds of a fire are pretty slim. But this dramatic video from PCPitstop shows what can happen when the power in a laptop battery is released in an uncontrolled way. (Note: The video does not auto-play. It uses the YouTube convention for activating a video window that's becoming a de facto standard online: You have to click twice to get it to play; once in the movie window where the enlarged Play symbol appears, and then again on the actual Play button below the movie window.) Despite the potential seriousness of the battery problem, some laptop owners are ignoring the recall. In fact, Dell has had to issue a second notice to registered laptop owners to try to get everyone to check. If you haven't already done so, check the Web site of your portable gear's manufacturer (Dell or otherwise) to make sure that you don't have any of the recalled batteries. If you do, the manufacturer should have a mechanism in place to get you a free replacement. Fred Langa is the editor of Windows Secrets & LangaList. He edited the LangaList e-mail newsletter from 1997 to 2006, when it merged with Windows Secrets. Prior to that, he was editor of Byte Magazine and editorial director of CMP Media, overseeing Windows Magazine and others. The following LangaList Plus tips are in today's paid newsletter: • The case of IE 6 eating your downloads • FTP sites pose problems for Internet Explorer 7, too • Windows Defender is no antivirus program • How to encrypt files for greater privacy • Reinstalling XP the slipstreaming way • No easy way to update an Internet-free computer • Are Linksys routers overrated? • What happens when you replace XP Pro with Home • Moving MP3 files to a phone via a camera • Microsoft tweaks its Vista license |
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THE SECURITY BASELINE Shavlik ends 1-year free trial offer By Brian Livingston Shavlik Technologies, the maker of NetChk Protect and other patch-management software, quietly discontinued last month its one-year, free trial offer for the 10-user version of its product. The one-year offer for NetChk Protect was first revealed in my top story on July 13, 2006. The long trial period attracted a great deal of interest at a time when Microsoft Update was deceptively installing a spyware-like version of Windows Genuine Advantage, as I described on June 15, 2006. Big changes in patch management Since that time, Microsoft has significantly changed WGA. The company released an improved version this month, which makes installation optional and provides clearer status messages, as described in a Nov. 29 blog by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes. WGA still has a reputation for false alarms, as documented by Ed Bott, among many other writers. For this reason, I recommend that you opt out of installing WGA, if it's not necessary for some update you want. If you do install WGA, it can be configured to disable its warning messages — at least until Windows Vista, in which WGA seems to be part of the operating system's DNA. Windows users who want to install Microsoft's various security patches automatically can go back to using Microsoft Update (an improvement on the older Windows Update). Microsoft Update patches major Microsoft applications in addition to Windows itself. I recommend that knowledgeable users configure Automatic Updates to Notify me but don't automatically download or install. Then read our free and paid newsletters to learn which patches not to select. To automate the patching of other applications as well as Microsoft's, you'll need to purchase third-party patch-management software. NetChk Protect now offers a 45-day free trial for 50 machines. Version 5.8 will soon be available for $90 for two machines. But this product is overkill for most individual users and small-office businesses. For information, see Shavlik's NetChk Protect page. I requested a comment from Shavlik on Nov. 3 regarding the company's previous statements that it planned to launch a free or low-cost Web-based service this fall as an alternative to Microsoft Update. Jill Teut, a company spokeswoman, said nothing at that time about NetChk Protect's one-year trial offer being withdrawn, but did indicate that Shavlik has lost interest in serving the consumer market. "Unfortunately, we have not had the bandwidth to work on a Windows-like update service for patches that we originally considered as a possibility," Teut said. "Our main focus for the last several months has been on the expansion of our product family for corporations and businesses." In a future newsletter, I'll re-examine the gamut of patch-management solutions for individuals as well as businesses. As I stated on Nov. 16, the specific hardware and software packages that are currently top-rated by major testing labs are now listed on our Web site rather than in each issue of the e-mail newsletter. A minimum of four products are necessary to give your PC comprehensive protection against hackers. These are (1) a hardware firewall, (2) a software security suite, (3) a specialized antispyware application, and (4) Microsoft Update or a third-party patch-management solution to stay current with patches. We don't operate a test lab and don't rate products. Instead, we summarize the top ratings of trusted reviewers. To see the latest ratings, visit the Security Baseline section of our Reviews Overviews. |
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USEFUL LINKS Behavior blocking coming to (some) PCs A major U.S. Internet service provider plans to offer a novel security technology to its millions of customers within the next month. (By Brian Livingston, Datamation) More info Holiday gifts for the executive geek We play Santa by providing you with a helpful gift guide listing new tech gizmos that your friends are very unlikely to already have. (By Brian Livingston, Datamation) More info |
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WACKY WEB WEEK Which is funnier: YouTube, Google Video, or Revver?
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YOUR SUBSCRIPTION Windows Secrets & LangaList (after Jan. 1, 2007, the Windows Secrets Newsletter) is published weekly on the 1st through 4th Thursdays of each month, plus occasional news updates. Vacation breaks occur in late August, Thanksgiving Week, and Christmas/New Year's. Publisher: WindowsSecrets.com LLC, 300 Queen Anne Ave. N. #456, Seattle, WA 98109 USA. Vendors, please send no unsolicited packages to this address (readers' letters are fine). Editorial Director: Brian Livingston. Editor: Fred Langa. Contributing Editors: Susan Bradley, Scott Dunn, Woody Leonhard, Chris Mosby, Ryan Russell. Research Director: Vickie Stevens. Program Director: Brent Scheffler. Trademarks: Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. The Windows Secrets series of books is published by Wiley Publishing Inc. The Windows Secrets Newsletter, WindowsSecrets.com, LangaList, LangaList Plus, WinFind, Security Baseline, Patch Watch, Perimeter Scan, Wacky Web Week, the Logo Design (W, S or road, and Star), and the slogan Everything Microsoft Forgot to Mention all are trademarks and service marks of WindowsSecrets.com LLC. All other marks are the trademarks or service marks of their respective owners. HOW TO SUBSCRIBE: Anyone may subscribe to this newsletter by visiting our free signup page. WE GUARANTEE YOUR PRIVACY: 1. We will never sell, rent, or give away your address to any outside party, ever. 2. We will never send you any unrequested e-mail, besides newsletter updates. 3. All unsubscribe requests are honored immediately, period. Privacy policy HOW TO UNSUBSCRIBE: To unsubscribe from the Windows Secrets Newsletter,
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