windows

Last week's Visitor Feedback question asked, "How how can I tell what programs are taking all my space in my hard drive?" My first thought to this question was to use a minimalist approach, because I believe in "doing things myself" -- providing ... that the proposed solution is relatively simple. If you recall, my answer to the above question was straightforward: right-click on a folder and display its folder Properties, and have Windows display its disk usage. This gives a very general idea as to how much space was being used by an installed program. Fact: Programs that are ... (view more)

My last attempt to show how to remove MSN Messenger from Windows XP appeared to worked fine for me, but I received emails from folks who have MSN Messenger popping up in their face *still* whenever AOL is loaded or whenever there is an update. Death ... to MSN Messenger -- for good. Jeff R. sent me his thoughts and a final solution to remove MSN Messenger from the Windows Registry: " It appears that your previous article is confusing Windows Messenger with MSN Messenger*. These are both separate programs. Windows Messenger is the one that installs with Windows XP. * The "Windows ... (view more)

Yesterday's Visitor Feedback of the Gazette addressed why two program files ( internat.exe and ptsnoop.exe ) might be present in the Windows msconfig startup. To be honest with you, I have never encountered these programs before. The name ... "internat.exe" seemed to me that it was a purposely misspelled version of the word "Internet" -- most likely misspelled to dupe users into thinking that it was a friendly Internet-related program. In all likelihood, I thought, the program name "internat.exe" could have been a trojan. I was right. Sort of. As always, I use Google ... (view more)

I had a few people email me with regards to the Alexa Registry Key (Spyware) that Chris B. submitted yesterday. OK, So is the Alexa registry key Spyware or not? There is much debate . Let me try to outline some of the issues. 1. It has been said ... that the "Spyware" part of the tool will only activate if you choose to use the Alexa tool provided in Internet Explorer. Long story short: you can't activate the Spyware component used in Alexa if you don't use the Alexa tool. You have the ability to change this (see below). 2. Spyware software is considered "Spyware" because ... (view more)

If you share files online the Internet (trading MP3s, movies, software), you have undoubtedly already heard of Kazaa -- maybe even Kazaa Lite . In a nutshell Kazaa uses its own P2P (peer to peer) technology which allow users across the Internet to ... share files online. The last time I checked, there were about 2.2 million users online Kazaa, sharing some 5 million files. That's a lot of files. I'm not going to get into the complexities of how things work, because I've already discussed that in a previous issue of the Infopackets Gazette. Kazaa is free software which gets its funding from the ... (view more)

This issue of the Gazette is dedicated to "tying up a few loose knots" from our ongoing discussions about Hackers and Security threats . First, I'll give you all an update to Gazette issue dated October 10, 2002 (Windows Security Threat -- NTFS ... Alternate Data Streams ). To recap: an anonymous reader (John Doe) sent in an email that discussed a potential security risk in Windows which might allow a hacker to take a screen capture of a computer with the NTFS file system installed. I realize that this article was a bit on the "technical side", but I did my best to clear up ... (view more)

It appears that the last issue of the newsletter sparked some real interest amongst many Infopackets Readers (RE: tracert.exe and ping.exe ). At this time, I would like to address the problem that Infopackets Reader Stephen C. wrote to me about not ... being able to access any MS DOS commands from the command prompt under Windows. He writes: " When I [attempt to] run [MS DOS commands, such as ping.exe or tracert.exe] under the command window, I get an error message which reads: 'ping' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file. Any ideas? I have ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader - J Lerch. writes: " Dear Dennis, I have an ethernet card (network card) and external Cisco modem installed on my old computer. I recently purchased a new computer, and would like to transfer my network card and modem to the new ... computer. Could you give instructions on how to do this? I would like to do this myself (this time) because the last time cost me almost $200 dollars! " My Response: Anything to do with networking a computer can be highly involved. I will outline the steps taken, but will not go into too much detail: Open your old computer. Take out your ... (view more)

As some of you may know, I recently installed Windows XP on my system. So far, not so good. My computer system has one of those cutting-edge video cards (NVidia GeForce 400 MX w/ 64 meg) that allows me to output the video to my monitor and my big ... screen TV. I use my DVD drive (inside the computer) to play videos on my TV. Yeah, it's a pretty sweet setup. I have the latest NVidia drivers (30.82) for my video card (for Windows 2000 / XP). When the driver is installed, I get a message that "this video driver has not been certified by Microsoft ... blah blah" warning. Basically, this ... (view more)