CounterSpy Monster of a Sale
Windows XP SP3 delayed to 2008
With the emphasis on IE7 and Windows Vista, Microsoft has announced that the next Service Pack for Windows XP will be delayed until 2008.
2008?
Already some of the press is speculating that this is part of a Microsoft push to get people and businesses to upgrade to Windows Vista.
Like that’s going to happen… Microsoft is going to have to do a real sales job on WHY we ought to upgrade to Vista — given that we’ll have to spend a fortune on the latest video cards and memory to upgrade our current computers.
Of course, notebook users like me will be out of luck. We’ll stay with Winodws XP until we replace our notebooks for other reasons. Vista’s cute graphics won’t be usable on our notebooks, since most of our notebook video cards don’t meet the graphics requirements for “AeroGlass,” so Vista would revert to XP-style graphics.
With Microsoft saying 512MB memory minimum, you know that means you need 1GB if you want to run one program — and 2GB if you like to multi-task like I do.
Windows XP is here to stay for a long time.
Computer Running Slowly — Adware & Spyware
In the article before this (Computer Running Slowly), I wrote about extra programs running in the background, slowing up your computer.
Sometimes, those programs are malicious. They may want to reroute your searches to their own site. They may want to spy on you. They may want to use your computer to send spam. They may pop up advertising. They may block access to certain sites. Or they may do other things you wouldn’t want, either.
Some of them even replace the advertising that you would have seen on a web site.
Why are they doing all of this? Money.
Continued in Computer Running Slowly — Adware & Spyware
Computer Running Slowly?
Most of the time, when our computers are running slowly, it’s because of all the things we have running in the background. Computer manufacturers seem to delight in loading up computers with 10 to 12 programs that run automatically and put little icons in the Windows Status Bar.
One would hope that these programs didn’t interfere with our other computer activities. But, all too often, that is not the case.
So, how can you get them under control?
There are a number of tools that will let you control programs that start automatically — if you can figure out which ones you don’t need…
Read more in Computer Running Slowly
Hidden File Extensions in Windows
One of Microsoft’s attempts at “user friendliness” is that recent versions of Windows are set to hide file extensions. What’s a file extension? As an example, it is the “.exe” that is at the end of a program’s name.
Unfortunately, Microsoft decided that we don’t really need to know what file extensions are. Even worse, they decided that Microsoft programs including Windows might not always consider the file extension, when deciding which program to use with a file.
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Huh? That was a lot of words. Let’s take it in shorter sentences.
A file extension is the ending of a file name.
For example, Microsoft Word’s file name is WINWORD.EXE. Word, by default, declares to Windows that it owns files with the extension “.doc”.
So, if you double-click on a file ending with .doc, Word will try to open it. Similarly, the Notepad program “notepad.exe” declares ownership of the .txt file extension.
[By the way, Windows is not case sensitive, so it views Notepad.exe and notepad.EXE and NoTePaD.EXe as the same thing.]
Finally, by default, you do not see file extensions — Windows hides them.
OK, so what’s the problem?
Find out in my article Hidden File Extensions in Windows
