There are only two newsletters that I read from beginning to end issue. The best one is Windows Secrets newsletter which is edited by Brian Livingston and Paul Thurott. Brian has written many books and writes for several magazines. Paul has also written some books, and is well know from his Supersite for Windows web site. They both write for this excellent newsletter. There is a free version, and then an extended paid version.
This latest issue was great. There was a lengthy article about how poor all commonly used anti-adware software is. Apparently the best one is the Giant Anti-spyware (now Microsoft Anti-spyware). But even then, at best it removed only 70% of the adware on the system. You should definitely check out the newsletter on the web and then subscribe.
FYI… the other newsletter I read beginning to end is Scot’s Newsletter.
From Yahoo! News Australia:
Excessive text messaging may be bad for you, or at least for your fingers.
That’s what some Italian doctors think. They are telling people, particularly the young, that furious typing on mobile phones could lead to acute tendonitis.
From eWeek:
Internet Explorer is continuing to lose share to the open-source Firefox Web browser.
In the past month, use of Microsoft Corp.’s dominant browser fell another 1.5 percentage points to 90.3 percent. Meanwhile, the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox browser rose 0.9 percentage points to reach 5 percent, Web analytics provider WebSideStory Inc. confirmed Thursday.
The numbers reflect shifts that occurred between Dec. 3 and Jan. 14. WebSideStory samples more than 30 million daily Internet users from more than 200 countries to determine the browser-usage shares.
The percentage of users browsing with IE has steadily fallen since June, while Firefox and some other competing browser have shown gains. Over that time, IE use has dropped a total of about 5 percent from its perch at 95.5 percent.
Ok, so 90% of the marketplace is still incredible. But at some point Microsoft will need to do something. I wonder how low they are comfortable going before they actually improve IE…
A while back we mentioned Yetisports.org, a site featuring online flash games featuring Yeti, an abominable snowman. The site was relaunched yesterday with a few new games, a multiuser game and tournament featuring the first 5 games. They also have the games available for purchase for use on your mobile phone.
Published on
January 19, 2005 in
General.
This is a great from from the latest issue of the LangaList newsletter. If you aren’t a subscriber to either the free newsletter or the paid one, I would highly recommend you get moving!
Ghostbusting In Device Manager
Hi Fred, Really enjoy the newsletter. I searched the archives and didn’t see any mention of this, so thought I might actually have something to contribute.
Windows keeps a Device Manager entry for every piece of hardware that’s ever been recognized by the system, regardless of whether it is currently present in the machine or was even set up correctly in the first place. The “View Hidden Devices” option in Device Manager won’t show you these “residual” drivers. You can force it to show you everything by going to My Computer Properties, the Advanced tab, Environment Variables, and adding a new system variable with the name “DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES” and a value of 1. Now opening Device Manager and choosing “Show Hidden Devices” really will show you everything. Standard practice at the factory is to use a single image and just move it from model to model, letting it plug and play all the new hardware along the way. This leaves you with an impressive list of hardware still in the Device Manager, but no longer in the system. You also see this to a lesser degree when you restore a system from an image you created for backup purposes. These “residual” drivers can sometimes cause all kinds of weirdness and are best removed by right-clicking on their entry in the Device Manager and choosing “uninstall”.
This works on Windows 2000/XP (and I assume Server 2003, though I haven’t tried it). Anyone running a factory loaded Compaq or Dell will be amazed at the amount of junk left over from this process.
Best Regards, Jon Pickle
Thanks, Jon. Indeed, Windows has a thing about hanging on to ghost entries in Device Manager and also in the Registry. (This is one of the reasons why Registries inflate so much over time.) A little judicious ghostbusting lets your PC run cleaner and leaner!”
Google has released the next version of Picasa. The software allows you to find, edit and share your photos. It automatically creates categories based upon the folders images are stored in, as well as by date. Create web galleries, photo CD’s; order prints online and posting images to a blog are only some of the features in this new version. You can also create your own categories (labels) to help you catalog and sort your images the way that you want.
Update: Picasa indexed my computer this morning. I don’t know how long it took, but it did go pretty quick. Indexing JPG images was very fast, even larger images. Indexing RAW images took longer though. It doesn not appear to be related to file size as some of my JPG’s are the same size and large than my RAW files.
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