Unhandled Perception

NSA has developed and distributed configuration guidance for operating systems. These guides are currently being used throughout the government and by numerous entities as a security baseline for their systems.

Link: http://www.nsa.gov/ia/guidance/…

If you’ve ever used NSLookup from the command-line in Windows you’ll surely understand how much data it is capable of putting at your fingertips. I know some people prefer to take the command-line route (as I normally do), but it can also be nice to have a GUI alternative for those that don’t use it enough to remember the parameters and syntax. The free DNSDataView is the perfect GUI companion to NSLookup. 

Link: http://cybernetnews.com/…

Whether you’ve just bought a new PC, upgraded to Windows 7, or reinstalled your OS, a just-installed system is a great opportunity to make some helpful changes and fixes. Here are the things we recommend anyone tackle on a minty fresh Windows.

Link: http://lifehacker.com/5634978/…

This is a clone of the Image Resizer Powertoy for Windows XP — a PowerToy that allows you to right-click on one or more image files in Windows Explorer to resize them. It was created (by me) to extend support to non-XP and 64-bit versions of Windows (including 2000, Vista & 7).

I use this right-click image resize method to quickly and easily resize down large camera images.  Makes it simple to resize before emailing or uploading to a blog.

Link: http://imageresizer.codeplex.com/

Whether you manage computers in a school computer lab or an Internet cafe, a library, or even in your home, Windows SteadyState helps make it easy for you to keep your computers running the way you want them to, no matter who uses them.

Windows SteadyState Features:

• Getting Started – Provides the initial steps to help you during your first time use of Windows SteadyState.
• Windows Disk Protection – Help protect the Windows partition, which contains the Windows operating system and other programs, from being modified without administrator approval.Windows SteadyState allows you to set Windows Disk Protection to remove all changes upon restart, to remove changes at a certain date and time, or to not remove changes at all. If you choose to use Windows Disk Protection to remove changes, any changes made by shared users when they are logged on to the computer are removed when the computer is restarted
• User Restrictions and Settings – The user restrictions and settings can help to enhance and simplify the user experience. Restrict user access to programs, settings, Start menu items, and options in Windows. You can also lock shared user accounts to prevent changes from being retained from one session to the next.
• User Account Manager – Create and delete user accounts. You can use Windows SteadyState to create user accounts on alternative drives that will retain user data and settings even when Windows Disk Protection is turned on. You can also import and export user settings from one computer to another—saving valuable time and resources.
• Computer Restrictions – Control security settings, privacy settings, and more, such as preventing users from creating and storing folders in drive C and from opening Microsoft Office documents from Internet Explorer®.
• Schedule Software Updates – Update your shared computer with the latest software and security updates when it is convenient for you and your shared users.

Link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/…

Long story short, these slide decks are chock full of internal thinking on Windows 8 — everything from customer target audiences to the Windows 8 developer market to the Windows 8 product cycle and much, much more. As a preface, I’ve taken many screen shots of relevant slides for inclusion with this article

I’m still on WinXP.  As soon as things slow down the upgrade to Win7 will occur, just not sure when that will be.  Have you jumped from XP to 7?  How did it go?

Link: http://msftkitchen.com/…

GoodSync is an easy and reliable file backup and file synchronization software. It automatically analyzes, synchronizes, and backs up your emails, precious family photos, music, contacts, financial documents, and other important files locally – between desktops, laptops, servers, external drives, and Windows Mobile devices, as well as remotely through FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, and more.

They even provide tutorials for backing up applications where the locations of the data storage is not always obvious (Outlook, Roboform, Quicken, OE …)

Link: http://www.goodsync.com/

We feature hundreds of different downloads every year at Lifehacker. If all you want is the best of the best, look no further than our annual Lifehacker Pack: One download that installs only our favorite, must-have Windows applications in a few clicks.

As with last year’s Lifehacker Pack (and its much older predecessor), the Lifehacker Pack is intended as both an up-to-date compilation of our favorite Windows apps and utilities, and an actual bundle of software you can easily install.

Link: http://lifehacker.com/…

Google is phasing out the internal use of Microsoft’s ubiquitous Windows operating system because of security concerns, according to several Google employees.

“We’re not doing any more Windows. It is a security effort,” said one Google employee.

Link: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/..

To speed up (which is debated if you research this) your boot process just follow these simple steps.

1) Start the System Configuration Utility – Start -> Run -> msconfig

2) Select the Boot.ini tab

3) Press the Advanced Options button

4) In the Advanced Dialog: 1)  increase the /numproc to match the processors in your system (depending on where it is in the boot sequence this could refer to both physical and logical processors) and 2) increase the /maxmem (maximum memory you would allow to be used at startup).

5) Reboot your system

Post a comment on your results.  My boot process was pretty fast to begin with so any change was hard to notice.

Ever wondered which program has a particular file or directory open? Now you can find out. Process Explorer shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded. The unique capabilities of Process Explorer make it useful for tracking down DLL-version problems or handle leaks, and provide insight into the way Windows and applications work.

What’s New:

This Process Explorer release includes several significant new features, including the showing the web hosted in IE8 processes in the process tooltip, display of a svchost’s service host category in its tooltip, mapping of service names to threads on the threads tab and TCP/IP tabs of the process properties dialog on Windows Vista and higher (thanks to Windows Internals 5th Ed. coauthor Alex Ionescu), a new.NET assembly information tab in the process properties dialog (thanks to Pete Sheill), as well as other improvements and bug fixes.

Link:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/…

Keeping tabs on my machine is something I’ve done for as long as I can remember. I like watching the performance of my applications, monitoring network connections, and all of that stuff most people would never think twice about. One of the most popular utilities for doing this is the Process Explorer that is put out by Microsoft, but there’s another free app that I really love called System Explorer.

This is one application worth checking out…

Link:
http://cybernetnews.com/…

After years of watching its Windows Mobile operating system languish behind sexier products from archrivals Apple, Google, and Palm, Microsoft launched the Windows Phone 7 platform Monday morning. Why is it important? Does it live up to the rumors? And more to the point, what can you expect? Here are the top ten questions about the new Windows Phone 7 OS, and their answers.

Looks like a Zune to me.

Link:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2359365,00.asp