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1) Password Security
The issue of password security is very broad--- just think of how many systems, programs, and web sites require a login name and password. Password security also came up as a very specific issue in our discussion of XP's "Remote Control" software, because--- obviously!--- you don't want just anyone to be able to take over your PC by guessing a too-easy password. Dave's letter-substitution method is based on a solid idea, and in fact, I described a more secure variation of that technique in the InformationWeek.Com article now running at http://informationweek.com/story/IWK20030221S0012 :
... and the rest of the article goes on to discuss additional steps you can take to help ensure you stay secure even with something like Remote Desktop enabled. (See http://informationweek.com/story/IWK20030221S0012 for the full story, including the info on passwords.) Besides Roboform, there are many tools available for managing your passwords--- helping to keep them straight, and to recall them on demand. For example, see: http://content.techweb.com/winmag/columns/explorer/2000/24.htm But how can you be sure that any password is really
safe to use? See next item Click to email this item to a
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--------------( the above is an advertisement )-------------- 2) Safely Test Your Passwords
Thanks, Marcel. The site has a form in which you can input passwords for evaluation. The site tells you how easy or hard it might be to guess a given password. Note: The site specifically says not to test your real passwords, but passwords that are *like* your real password: You don't want to be broadcasting your for-real passwords over open web links! <g> The same page also lists Do's, Don'ts and suggestions for selecting strong passwords. Good info! BTW: My sample password from the previous item--- !r3ad!nf0rmat10nW33k, based on the easy-to-remember phrase "I read InformationWeek"--- gets the highest possible rating. That kind of phrase-and-substitution method really *is* a good way to generate easy-to-remember, yet quite secure passwords! Click to email this item to a
friend 3) Need A Quieter PC Fan?In your Information Week article on Low-Cost PCs ( at http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20030206S0014/2 ), you wrote (regarding a CPU fan) > It was, in fact, so noisy I replaced the stock CPU fan with a $15 unit especially designed for low noise... As someone with a very noisy computer myself, that sounds to me like a _great_ idea. Do you have any suggestions for where to purchase such a fan or which ones to look for? Thanks! Kathryn Sure, Kathryn! Indeed, PC (and some Mac) fans can be hideously annoying--- like a mosquito that never alights and never goes away. Sound is measured in decibels, or dB, and the dB scale is logarithmic: each 10 dB increase represents in a doubling of the sound level. Thus, getting a fan even a few dB quieter than what you now have can make a noticeable difference in the overall noise level around your PC. Fortunately, there's a huge aftermarket of fans and blowers of all kinds, capacities, and prices. No exotic tools or skills are needed: Fan replacement is usually a simple screwdriver operation. The first step is to power off your PC, open the case, and look inside to see what's there. You may want to have a metric ruler handy: Most fan sizes are given in millimeters, and are based on the fan housing, not the diameter of the blades. Note that a PC usually has two or more fans these days: The power supply itself usually has a fan. This is often the main source of noise, but it's also the most expensive to replace because it's integral with the power supply--- a single sealed unit. But on the plus side, power supplies are easy to replace (usually involving just 4 screws and a couple of electrical plugs that are "keyed" so they literally cannot be plugged in the wrong way), and they're not expensive for common sizes. But don't automatically assume that a new power supply will be quieter than what you have unless the vendor specifically makes claims about the relative quietness of a unit, and ideally backs up the claim with a specific sound rating. Any replacement power supply should match or exceed the electrical rating of the unit you're replacing (the specs will be stamped or printed somewhere in the unit); and--- although you can get a power supply for a few tens of dollars--- the more expensive units usually will be more robust, have some level of built in surge-suppression, and come with a quieter fan than cheap units: You usually get what you pay for. See http://www.google.com/search?q=quiet+silent+pc+power+supply CPU fans are usually the next-noisiest fans in a PC, although they can be the #1 noise source in some systems. This is sometimes due to the fan design itself, and sometimes is due to the heat sink: Heat sinks with the highest resistance to airflow create more noise than others. You can often get the quietest results by replacing the stock fan and heatsink with a custom unit designed for optimum airflow. But it's fine just to replace the fan, too. http://www.google.com/search?q=quiet+silent+cpu+fan "Case fans" or "system blowers" either blow air into or out of the case as a whole. As these fans usually fit predrilled holes, you'll probably want to match the existing fan size, unless you want to drill new holes. If you have a choice of sizes--- some PCs have multiple mounting holes to accommodate different size case fans--- you'll find that, in general, larger-diameter fans can spin slower while moving a given volume of air, and so can be less noisy than smaller fans: http://www.google.com/search?q=quiet+silent+pc+fan+blower+case Various other components--- especially video coprocessors--- may have their own tiny fans. Unlike the other fans we've discussed, these tiny units usually are not as easily user-replaceable. (Hard core hobbyists do it all the time, but it's usually not as simple or quick a screwdriver operation as with the power supply, cpu and system fans.) All the above fans also can come in single-speed, multi-speed manual, or thermostatically regulated versions. The multi-speed and automatic versions are more expensive, but can offer better sound control because the fans only spin as much as is needed, rather than going full tilt all the time. Fans also come with several types of bearings: Needle and sleeve bearings are the cheapest, nosiest, and shortest-lived. (You can get cheap fans for literally $3-4 or so--- but you'll get just that: a cheap fan.) Ball bearing fans cost a little more, but are quieter and last longer. The fanciest fans actually use magnetic levitation bearings, so there's no physical contact between the rotating fan shaft and the motor itself. These fans make almost no mechanical noise at all--- just air noise. When buying fans, comparison shop for units with the lowest dB rating possible for a given size and airflow. For quick comparison, a whisper rates about 20dB and normal conversation is about 60dB. The sources above can help you find literally thousands of fan options, but the best single source I know of is LangaList advertiser Cyberguys. Their catalog has a table that lists dozens of fans by size, airflow, plug type, and decibel rating, making it very easy to find *exactly* what you want: http://www.langa.com/sponsors/cyberguys.htm But, they are an advertiser, and some readers may suspect collusion, so I also offer the general links above so you can do your own digging, too.<g> Click to email this item to a
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--------------( the above is an advertisement )-------------- 4) WinDriversBackupOne of my test PCs here contains a perfect, error-free installation of every current version of desktop Windows--- Win98, WinME, Win2K, XP Home and XP Pro. Whenever I'm working on some complex topic, I'll fire up the OSes in sequence to explore the issue from the vantage of each major flavor of Windows. With Win98's scheduled demise later this year, I decided it also would be good to have several other installations of that OS locked away for safekeeping: an "as initially installed" version, fresh off the setup CD, an "as patched" raw version, with all current patches and updates, but otherwise unaltered; and so on. In building a fresh install of Win98, I got to the point where the OS was trying to set up the network card. It asked for the driver floppy, and--- I was stumped. Oh, it was around here someplace, but the floppy wasn't where it was supposed to be. Worse, I also discovered that I hadn't backed up the drivers to hard drive or CD. Man, I must have been having a bad day to have missed all the steps I normally take to preserve important drivers. I could have torn the office apart to find the floppy, or gone on a web hunt for a replacement driver, but the easiest solution was to use the "WinDriversBackup" tool we discussed here last year ( http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2002/2002-11-04.htm#7 ): I booted a working copy of Win98 (one that already had the driver installed), used WinDriversBackup to copy all the drivers in use on that setup, then re-started the new copy of Win98, and simply pointed its setup process at the folders full of known-good drivers created by WinDriversBackup. It worked perfectly. There are other tools that do the same thing, too, making it easy to back up all the drivers in use on a given system against future need. See http://www.google.com/search?q=driver+backup If you use a tool like that now, when everything's working on your PC, it may mean you'll never have to go hunting for drivers again when it's time to reinstall or upgrade your system--- especially if, like me, you sometimes don't put your driver floppies away where they're supposed to be! Click to email this item to a
friend 5) XP Home vs ProI'm not the only one prepping for Microsoft's coming abandonment of Win98: A lot of readers are asking about their upgrade options. Among those looking at XP, the most common question is "Which version; Home or Pro?" The Home version is OK, and it costs substantially less than the Pro. But it does lack some features found in the Pro version. Dell actually has a good, though limited, summary page that shows what's *not* in the Home version, here: http://www.dell.com/us/en/fed/topics/winxp_000_index.htm Paul Thurrot's excellent site goes into more detail: And there's even more detail here: Less useful, but worth a look, is the Microsoft "how
to buy" site: To me, the key difference is that the Pro version has better security. For example, Microsoft considers the Encrypting File System (EFS) to be a "corporate" feature, and so took it out of the Home version of XP. But file encryption is actually a good thing overall, for anyone. There also are significant differences in networking that can matter a lot on larger networks, although most of these differences aren't important on the relatively small network in my office. All else being equal, I prefer the Pro version, although the $100 (or so) price difference may be show-stopper for many. In any case, the above resources, plus these ( http://www.google.com/search?q=features+Windows+XP+Professional+Home ), may help you figure out which version is best for you. Click to email this item to a
friend 6) New Month, New ChancesIt's a new month, and right now your chances are the
best they'll ever be! To have a shot at winning a no-strings $30 Gift
Certificate for any item at Amazon.Com--- books, software, hardware,
kitchenware, toys, and more--- just use the following link to recommend the
LangaList to a friend. Your friend just may find a new source of useful
information; I just may gain a new subscriber; and you just may win a
mini-shopping spree! (Full details also available via this link): The more times you make a recommendation, the greater your chances are of winning! Or, if you'd like to try to win $10,000(really!), try this link (full details also available here): http://www.recommend-it.com/l.z.e?s=143182 Either way, thank you, and good luck! Click to email this item to a
friend 7) TinyURL Test FailsSigh. My initial, small-scale tests of TinyURL went fine, but when I used it a *lot* in a recent issue ( http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2003/2003-02-24.htm#4 ), problems surfaced. The site seemed to die for a while, and some of the links went dead. Oh well. I really like the idea of TinyURL and other sites that work similarly, such as http://makeashorterlink.com/index.php and http://snipurl.com/index.php . These sites provide a redirect link via a server-side script, which is transparent to end users. This can be more reliable than the standard approach that uses a client-side, browser-powered redirect link, via an html "meta tag" or a small JavaScript. Many, many "security" tools assume that all client-side redirection is evil, and cause it to fail, often with a dire security warning. Users who've disabled redirection on their own, or who have disabled scripting likewise may case the client-side redirect to fail. That's why I don't simply build my own redirect links for long URLs--- they won't work for many readers. And that's why the server-side approach (like TinyURL's) seemed promising--- because it was invisible to the end users, and would not be defeated by hyperactive security tools. Alas, it doesn't seem to be ready for prime time. So, I'll go back to using all the link-shortening tools sparingly, and only for truly monstrous links. Click to email this item to a
friend 8) They Loaded The CodeDo you have a home page or website? (It doesn't matter what size.) Please click over to http://www.langa.com/code.htm , and maybe you can join the hundreds and hundreds of LangaList readers who have "Loaded the Code!" (If you've already "Loaded The Code" and are wondering if your site will appear here or on the Langa.Com web site, please see http://www.langa.com/link.txt ) Speaking of which: Here's another eclectic sample of reader sites--- some professional, some very personal: View A Randomly-Chosen Reader Site Manually Browse All Posted-to-Date Sites Starting At Accurate Premium Audits The Lake, Family & Friends Rock Valley Ski Association Sponagle Genealogy DeLad's Place (offers Gator download) Jones Family Homepage Lawrence Web Site The Daugherty Files Baby Names Plus by Impressions of Life Ships of Destroyer Squadron 45 Nearly New Books Click to email this item to a
friend --- ( Your Clicks On Ad Links Help Keep The LangaList S.E. Free! ) --- "Fred, I , like so many
others in the industry (computer geeks) get in the habit --------------( the above is an advertisement )-------------- 9) Security Flaw in WinMeYet another "unchecked buffer" problem in Microsoft software has come to light:
More info and patch: Click to email this item to a
friend 10) Just For GrinsKen Thomson sends along these "Things Asked Of/Suggested To US Park Rangers:"
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--------------( the above is an advertisement )-------------- 11) Plus! Edition Highlights:
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