Family Learning Center

Posts Tagged ‘Windows Xp’

Win XP needs some TLC to use next-gen hard drives
Solid state drives may be the fast-moving wave of the future in PC storage, but the technology for bigger and better magnetic media keeps on trucking. Only recently, that truck hit something of a pothole: the 4096-byte sector size that will allow advanced format drives to have more usable space (and surpass the current 2TB capacity limit) doesn’t play nice with the world’s most popular OS — Windows XP. While manufacturers like Western Digital have already introduced software that successfully combats the problem, the new drives perform poorly in Win XP without it, and rival manufacturer Seagate told the BBC that even with software tricks, XP users should expect the occasional 5ms delay, or 10% speed reduction, during write times. Is this the end of Windows XP? Hardly. Should you make sure to install the software that comes with your next hard drive? Absolutely.

Win XP needs some TLC to use next-gen hard drives originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  BBC  | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

Incoming, outgoing Apple employees

Filed under: Apple Corporate, Software, Apple, Security

A few Apple employees played some musical chairs this week. Executive Pablo Calamera, who was in charge of MobileMe while at Apple, is off to work as the CTO of Thumbplay, a company that peddles ringtones and music to mobile devices.

HR shouldn’t have to change the big “35,000 employed worldwide” sign, though: former Mozilla security chief Window Snyder was picked up by Apple this week. She’ll jump in as a senior security product manager, a job that will take advantage of her work both at Mozilla and previously at Microsoft, where she worked on both Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. Sure, she’s got the experience, but has she ever worked for a company that does this for its incoming employees? Didn’t think so.

TUAWIncoming, outgoing Apple employees originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

Microsoft tells IE faithful on Windows XP to avoid F1 key

Still hanging around on Windows XP? Perfectly acceptable. Still using Internet Explorer to browse the world wide web? Just a wee bit less forgivable, but we understand that some of you simply can’t get around it. If we just rung your bell, you might want to rip the F1 key right off of your keyboard (at least temporarily), as a recently discovered vulnerability in VBScript — which can only bother Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 — could allow malicious code to weasel its way right into your life with a single keystroke. As the story goes, some ill-willed web sites are encouraging users to smash the F1 key in order to access a Microsoft Help file, and when said key is depressed, “arbitrary code could be executed in the security context of the currently logged-on user.” Microsoft has promised to fully investigate and resolve the issue in due time, but ’til then, we’d highly suggest avoiding your F1 key like the plague switching to Firefox.

Microsoft tells IE faithful on Windows XP to avoid F1 key originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Switched  |  Microsoft  | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

WD’s ‘Advanced Format’ Caviar Green HDD gets benchmarked, minor benefits found
Western Digital has yet to actively market its “advanced format” hard drives — in fact, there’s a decent chance you’ve no idea what we’re talking about if you weren’t tuned in on December 11th. In short, it’s a technology that alters a hard drive’s sector size from 512 bytes (the standard for the past three decades) to 4096K, which enables the ECC data to be stored in a more efficient manner. Just recently, WD began to ship Advanced Format Caviar Green hard drives, and the benchmarking gurus over at Hot Hardware strapped one in to see exactly how much of the hype was warranted. For starters, they debunked the thought that Advanced Format drives offered more usable space; Windows reported 931GB of free space on both AF and non-AF 1TB drives. They also go on to explain how to make AF drives play nice with Windows XP, and on the testing front, they found that an aligned AF Caviar Green drive could (mostly) hang with the higher end (and more expensive) Caviar Black. Pop that source link for the full skinny, particularly if you’re a WinXP user looking to snag a new drive.

WD’s ‘Advanced Format’ Caviar Green HDD gets benchmarked, minor benefits found originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 27 Feb 2010 02:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Hot Hardware  | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

YouTube Puts Another Nail in the IE6 Coffin

We have to say, you know the end is near when entire countries advise its citizens to move on, but the final kicker comes when Google says that after this date, it will no longer support the browser that’s been with us for nearly a decade.

Google-owned YouTube will end support for Internet Explorer 6 on March 13, just two weeks after ending support on Google Docs.

We suspect that YouTube will affect a larger portion of IE6 users and may be a final tipping point.

Sponsor

Internet Explorer 6 was first released in August, 2001 and has since come pre-installed with Windows XP, which still accounted for over 60% of browsers world-wide in December of last year.

Ars Technica explains that Microsoft refuses to force its users to upgrade, even tho it “has stated time and time again that it wants to see IE6 disappear as much as anyone else”. Currently, IE6 accounts for about 20% of surfers worldwide, with IE8 currently the most popular version.

According to Google, users running IE6 and other old browsers will still be able to watch videos, but will be shown an interstitial, as seen above, to remind them to upgrade every two weeks. Some features will not be available to these users until they upgrade. Google considers old browsers to be anything older than IE7, Firefox 3.0, Chrome 4.0 and Safari 3.0.

In other news, we can only hope that this is a signal that we will be seeing some cool new features rolling out in the near future for YouTube. And perhaps more companies will come out against the now-ancient browser and help to put it out of it’s, and web designers’ everywhere, misery.

Discuss

Read the whole story…

Windows XP patch fiasco gets even crazier, Microsoft now scrambling for solutions

If you ever needed a reason to go Linux, here you go. The noise surrounding this patently obscure Windows XP bug / patch fiasco has just reached a fever pitch, and now we’ve got engineers within Redmond scratching their heads, too. As the story goes, Microsoft recently patched a security hole that took care of an antediluvian DOS vulnerability, and in doing so, some users began to see BSODs and endless reboots. Today, we’ve learned that the patch has been yanked, and Microsoft is suggesting that malware is to blame. But here’s the skinny — the patch simply disturbed the malware, which called a specific kernel code that directs your PC to keel over; in other words, any application that calls that same code could theoretically leave your machine in dire straights. And that, friends, probably explains the software giant’s following quote:

“In our continuing investigation in to the restart issues related to MS10-015 that a limited number of customers are experiencing, we have determined that malware on the system can cause the behavior. We are not yet ruling out other potential causes at this time and are still investigating.“

Rock, meet hard place.

Windows XP patch fiasco gets even crazier, Microsoft now scrambling for solutions originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 13 Feb 2010 00:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Yahoo! Tech  |  TechNet  | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

Patch for ancient DOS bug in latest Windows XP update causing blue screen errors

Looks like Patch Tuesday turned into BSOD Tuesday for some Windows XP users — Microsoft’s latest security updates for the venerable OS are causing blue screens and endless reboots for people. That’s the word according to a growing support thread on Microsoft’s site — and making matters just slightly worse / funnier, it’s apparently the patch for that 17-year-old DOS vulnerability that’s causing all the trouble. You win some, you lose some, right? Microsoft’s identified a fix for those with access to an XP install disc and an optical drive, but that leaves most netbook users out in the cold — and considering netbooks are where most of the recent XP action’s been going down lately, we’re hoping a better solution comes down the pike soon.

P.S.- That’s the BSOD tattoo guy in the photo — remember him?

[Thanks, HyperSl4ck3r]

Patch for ancient DOS bug in latest Windows XP update causing blue screen errors originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Feb 2010 19:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Computerworld  |  Microsoft Answers  | Email this | Comments
Read the whole story…

Windows 7 eclipses Vista on Steam, 64-bit dominating 32-bit

We already know that Windows 7 is growing faster than Vista was when it was released, but how fast are gamers adopting it? Pretty darn quickly, according to January 2010 data from Steam, the leader of the digital distribution market. Last month, the percentage of users on Windows 7 eclipsed the number of users on Windows Vista. Windows XP is still leading the pack, but it is under the 50 percent mark:

Data source: Steam

It’s also worth noting that Windows 7 is the first version of Windows where gamers are adopting 64-bit faster than 32-bit. In fact, there are more users on Windows 7 64-bit than any other flavor of Windows, except for Windows XP 32-bit. Overall, XP dropped 2.63 percent from the previous month, Vista dropped 2.8 percent, and Windows 7 gained 5.47 percent. At this rate, we would expect Windows 7 to take the crown before the end of the year.

Each month, Steam collects and compiles data about the hardware and software its customers are using so that game developers can ensure they are making good decisions about what technology should take priority in their support plans. If you’re wondering, Intel is still beating AMD and NVIDIA is still beating ATI. To check out more details and the rest of the statistics, which are primarily hardware-based, head over to the link below.

Read the whole story…