Report for Previous Meeting
June 2008
This month we began with a round-robin question session on Fast User Switching in Win XP & Vista. We saw that it’s handily available in the User settings of Control Panel. We also learned about WinKey-L, and “rundll32 user32.dll, LockWorkStation” as a desktop shortcut for the same purpose.
The demo machine was being updated during the session so we were able to see some peculiarities during the process. At times during Microsoft Update Microsoft’s own sites, its domain, may become inaccessible so Microsoft.com needs to be entered into the Trusted Sites section of IE Options (without https security ticked). After restarting IE all is forgiven. Odd, but true.
As braces to go with your updates belt the site askwoody.com was mentioned as somewhere that would oversee each and every update issued by Microsoft and give an opinion as to the author’s evaluation of its readiness to in fact be installed on our systems. Sometimes updates can do harm and they may require updates themselves before they should be installed with confidence.
It seems the antivirus problems have emerged after the release of SP3 – (Service Pack 3) for XP. SP3 is ‘breaking a number of packages. Indeed AVG seems to require a few feature removals after install. I lot of detail is provided of the site reporting this in the group’s WinSIG web pages. This applies particularly to the free AVG package that is hard to find on avg.com.au – but not impossible. Of those issuing false positives for viruses Kaspersky appears to have weathered the new releases best. In any case, have a check in your package for PUPs – Potentially Unwanted Programs – exclusions that can quieten unnecessary reporting – but be judicious. AVG’s free download has an html file that describes this process.
A question was asked about absent sound on video. Like most things this could be many things but the first to check would be the system’s Mixer settings box (bottom corner), Device Manager for gone-wrong hardware, and codecs attached to sound devices.
In discussion it came up that Vista handles Autoplay differently to XP – when things are inserted into your computer. Vista always pops up a box when, say, a USB drive is added, but there’s no Do Nothing the way XP has. However we found out that Vista goes further with the ‘Control What Happens..’ link and it lets you particularise behaviour for different ‘things’, CDs, programs, pictures, movies, etc.
One member wondered whether Nero 7 Essentials suited an older machine. It seems that it has a number of unlikely-to-use additions and can be trimmed of them. These programs accessing the internet was seen as a cuttable function.
Next was What are good tune-up programs? Cited were Registry Robot, XP Antispy, Win-Bubble, and the powerful Xsetup. And XP’s own Properties settings. The story was told of how HP’s memory of its errors after earlier service packs has been forgotten with XP-SP3. There are problems with AMD systems possibly solved in the blog msinfluentials.com.
The night ended with discussion of the German non-MS update site that continually packages all MS revisions. It seemed quite useful. A handy resource.