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I’ve written recently about my upgrade to Vista, and i have to say, I’m disappointed.  To be honest, I should have expected it given the exposure in the media and the professional press, but I always felt that it was maybe all too critical.  Well, I can tell you that from my own experience, Vista is a frustrating OS to have as your main system!

One of the reasons I went to Vista was that I liked the look and feel - it’s a clear improvement over XP - but I get the impression that all this visual wizadry is at the expense of system performance.  I have a 512Mb graphics card and 4Gb of main RAM, but my system is at best sluggish!

This presents me with a dilema:

• Either I revert back to XP and stick with an unsatisfactory Microsoft environment, but which gives me the same, fully compatible office suite as I use at work, as well as my preferred development environment - Visual Studio;
• or I make the move to Linux as my main OS, but sacrifice my office suite (OpenOffice is great, but not 100% compatible - particularly when using graphics) and my development environment!

I’ve been looking more into Linux recently, and found that the UI is way better than Vista, so from this angle, the move would be beneficial, however, I can’t go for looks alone!

So my call goes out to you - my loyal readers.  What would you do?  How can I overcome my own objections and be free to move to Linux?  How can I have my cake and eat it???!?

I look forward to your comments…. 

As an IT professional, I consider myself to be more careful than your average Internet user when it comes to things like viruses.  I only download things from trusted sources, I have a virus scanner running all the time and I try to restrict myself to known, safe sites.  This last point though, becomes more difficult whe you’re using something like Entrecard.

Like many Entrecard users, I have around 300 bookmarks that I use in order to maximise the number of sites that I visit, and to restrict myslef to those that I’ve visited before that I deemed both “intersting” and “safe”.  This allows me to open the sites in blocks of 10 and quickly scan them for new, interesting content and to drop my Entrecard on their widget.

This worked really well until yesterday, when one of my regular sites suddenly hit me with a full-screen popup ad, which bypassed my Firefox popup blocker!  By the time I’d closed the popup, there was a new window open telling me that I needed to install some new XP Antivirus software, which had only a “Accept and bgein install” button!

From the task manager, I found that this was a real program that was running so I quickly killed it, only to find that I had a new desktop wallpaper, with a replica of a dialog showing that I had a virus threat!  At this point, I tried to put my original wallpaper back, only to find that the tab on the dialog box had been removed!

Further investigation revealed a whole host of new applications, with seemingly random names, and some new entries in my registry.  I cleaned the PC by hand, but it was too late and the damage was done - my PC was useless!

Facing the prospect of delivering a training course next week from my laptop, but being in Birmingham at a client, I had no choice but to change my plans and make the 2 hour drive to my office to re-image my laptop.  This process was relatively painless, but has left me wary and missing a few key applications.  FUrther research seems to suggest that some form of trojan made it onto my PC, which tried to then install the XPAntivirus virus.

I would urge you all to be ultr-cautious at the moment, and to watch out for some research that I’ll be doing into personal firewalls!!!

I used to work for a with a guy who was paranoid about keeping his laptop secure - even amongst friends.  He was also a heavy smoker so was forever needing to run out of internal meetings for a quick smoke, and every time he went, he’d lock his laptop (Ctrl-Alt-Del, then click on “Lock Computer”).

Now, one day, he’d been running a session that had over-run making him wait longer than normal for his cigarette.   When we did finally break, he hit Ctrl-Alt-Del and went out - leaving the menu visible to be canceled and the PC unlocked!  Our boss spotted this and found it quite amusing, so he went into the guys email and sent a message Read the whole article - How-To: Lock Windows XP

One of the most common questions that people these days ask me regarding their home PC’s is how to have it startup and go straight to the desktop.  This used to be the only option, and when Microsoft did us the favour (!) of allowing us to have multiple accounts, very few people embraced this enhancement. Read the whole article - How-To: Vista Autologon

My desktop PC that I use for software development has been taking longer and longer to boot recently.  It got to the stage that I could start it, go downstairs to make a coffee, come back upstairs with the coffee, and drink it before I could do anything useful with Windows.  (OK, so I *know* that there’s an argument that trying to do anything useful with Windows is an exercise in futility, but that’s not the point of this post….!)

The moment that I’d been dreading over recent months finally came, when I couldn’t stand this startup rubbish any longer.  It was time to reinstall my operating system!!!

Read the whole article - I Finally Bit The Bullet…