Core Dump

Many Windows users have never upgraded from XP to Vista, and likely never will. (I'm in that group - I may upgrade to Windows 7 at some point, but I won't go to Vista.) XP is good enough for my purposes and is likely to remain so for a while.

If you're of like mind, PC World has put together a slide show that has tips on how you can keep your Windows XP up-to-date so that you don't need to upgrade. Many of the features in Vista and Windows 7 are available as separate downloads or as equivalent third-party applications. For example, you can install Windows Defender, Google Desktop, and TweakWindow. And even if you don't want to add anything more, there are system maintenance tasks like disk defragmentation and registry cleanup that will keep your system running smoothly for a long time.

Labels: Windows XP

Re-installing Windows is something that most Windows users end up doing sooner or later. Installing Windows itself is the easy part, but how do you preserve all of your data and application settings? Maximum PC has put together a guide to doing it the right way. Although it's written for Vista, the advice is good for Windows XP too.

Before you make a clean start, you need to consider the applications you’ll be bringing with you. First, make sure you have all of your application discs. One of the most important tasks is to take stock of any registration codes that you need for your software. Locate and record the registration keys that you will need. If you can’t find the keys, try Magic Jelly Bean 2.0, a free utility available at Download.com or Sourceforge.net. The application will search through the registry for application keys. It won’t find all the keys you need, but it might help you locate that one key you can’t find.

Magic Jelly Bean 2.0 is sometimes identified as a hacking tool by antivirus apps, but if you download it from a reputable site such as Download.com, you should be fine. If you can’t locate a particular key, contact the vendor for a replacement key or a copy of your original key before you proceed if you know you’re going to need access to the app. You did write down your Windows XP or Windows Vista key, right?

Labels: computing, Vista, Windows XP

You have to feel sorry for the people working for Barack Obama in the White House. They ran one of the most technically-savvy political campaigns ever, but when they get to take power, they're faced with (by computer standards, anyway) a Stone Age working environment.

White House staff are banned from communicating by instant messaging, according to Andrew Rasiej, co-founder of the blog TechPresident. That's for the sake of preventing casual talk from leaking out of the White House and onto the web.

That's understandable, but some chat clients, such as Adium, offer the option to encrypt chats, turning your chat logs into unintelligible characters and numbers if accessed without authorization. Plus, the Obama team has already proven with the president's Twitter account that it's pretty good at handling its own PR, right?

In other words, it sounds just like working for most large corporations.

Labels: politics, Windows XP

If you're one of those people who likes tweaking Windows to improve performance, then you've probably implemented several of the tweaks discussed in this article on LifeHacker. But you've probably been wasting your time.

Disabling QoS to Free Up 20% of Bandwidth

This tip made the rounds with people believing that Microsoft always allocates 20% of your bandwidth for Windows Update. According to the instructions, you were supposed to disable QoS in order to free up bandwidth. Unfortunately this tip was not only wrong, but disabling QoS will cause problems with applications that rely on it, like some streaming media or VoIP applications.

Rather than taking my word for it, you can read the official Microsoft response: "There have been claims in various published technical articles and newsgroup postings that Windows XP always reserves 20 percent of the available bandwidth for QoS. These claims are incorrect... One hundred percent of the network bandwidth is available to be shared by all programs unless a program specifically requests priority bandwidth."

Labels: Microsoft, Windows XP