Get a little more oomph out of your Windows 7 box by turning off search
Friday, February 05th, 2010 | Author: msauers

19SearchI love Windows 7. One of its best features is the speed of searching the entire content of my more than 2TB of storage on the start menu. However, indexing all this content does take some processor power. But what about your public computers? Users are storing data there so they’re not looking for that file they’re not sure where they saved. Yes, typing “exc[enter]” is a bit faster than finding Excel in the menu system (but maybe not if there’s not an icon on the desktop) but that’s a minor convenience.

So, why not turn off the search box and all that indexing and give the processing power back to running programs? (I would especially recommend this if you’ve upgraded an older computer which not as much power to begin with.) The folks over at How-To Geek have full instructions with screenshots on how to do just this. (The short version is: Control Panel | Programs and Features | Turn Windows features on or off | Uncheck Windows Search | Confirm | Reboot.)

End result: no search box on the start menu or in Windows explorer along with some recovered processor cycles from the lack of indexing.

Category: windows7  | Leave a Comment
Don’t reuse passwords!
Thursday, February 04th, 2010 | Author: msauers

Twitter birdIf you’re a Twitter user you may have noticed that this week you might have been forced to change your password. Why? Because so many people use the same password for multiple sites that Twitter was getting hacked as a result. Turns out that so nefarious people were setting up other sites that required users to create usernames and passwords specifically to collect those passwords and try using them on other sites! Please, please, please, do not use the same password on more than one site!

Use a password generator, store your passwords in some secure software or Web site, create a passphrase that you can modify on a site-by-site basis. I don’t care how you do it, just use a different password on different sites. Still going to be lazy about this? Then at least use a different password on the really important stuff like your bank account.

Cross-posted on the ITART blog, The Travelin’ Librarian, and the NLC blog.

Category: passwords, security, twitter  | Leave a Comment
WordPress issues
Tuesday, February 02nd, 2010 | Author: msauers

Overall, the transition has gone smoothly. Looking back at some old posts it looks like any one with an embedded video lost the embed in the transition. Oddly, or luckily, the URL of the embedded video still appears in the post. (Not a live link of course.) I’ve re-embedded some of the more recent videos but I’m not sure I’ll bother to go back and re-embed all of them.

Also, there’s a few completely blank posts. Not sure what’s up with those. I’ll see what I can do about those in the future.

Category: Uncategorized  | Leave a Comment
Hello world!
Tuesday, February 02nd, 2010 | Author: msauers

If you’re reading this via RSS, you won’t notice a thing. If you’re actually on the site however, you’ll notice the new look of the site. We’ve moved from Blogger to Wordpress with Emily’s help and I’m just trying to learn a completely new system. So, I’ll do my best to get back on to the nearly-daily posts ASAP but bare with us as we try to tweak the layout and features to our needs.

Category: Wordpress  | Leave a Comment
A short hiatus
Monday, January 25th, 2010 | Author: msauers

image I was out sick all last week so I didn’t feel like posting much of anything. Yesterday I found out the the geniuses at Google have decided to abandon the .5% of their user base that knows what they’re doing and using FTP to publish to their own domain. Guess what? This blog is part of that .5%. So, chances are this blog will be moving to a different URL, probably something like ITART.blogspot.com. So, unless someone else starts posting I don’t think I’ll be doing much here until I get this all figured out in the next week or two. (If you’re interested in the gory details as to why, start with this article from Quick Online Tips and follow the links for even more details.)

Category: ITART  | Leave a Comment
Inside Windows 7: The Mark Russinovich Interview
Friday, January 15th, 2010 | Author: msauers

russinovich_200x165 Here’s an interesting interview with Mark Russonovich done by Paul Thurrott. Russinovich knows more about how Windows works than most people will ever know. What he talks about is a little on the under-the-hood technical-side but not too much. For example:

Paul Thurrott: So from an upgrade/migration picture, one of the easy complaints for Windows 7 is it doesn’t provide for in-place upgrades from XP. What went into that decision and what are the real issues there?

Mark Russinovich: Well, when you do an in-place upgrade, the test matrix for that is enormous. So, obviously, if we’re going to do an in-place upgrade, the most recent operating system is a higher priority than an older operating system that people are going to be coming from. From an enterprise perspective, it’s really not an issue because people don’t upgrade their systems, they do clean installs. From a consumer perspective, if you look at people running XP systems, they’re probably running older hardware that’s not even in the class of Vista/Windows 7 where it would make sense to do an upgrade.

In addition, if you look at trends in the past, consumers don’t upgrade either-they buy new PCs and get the new version of the operating system. So if you look at the return on investment of supporting the XP to Windows 7 upgrade path, versus the people that would actually benefit from making it easier than it is with the migration tool, it didn’t seem to make sense.

Category: interview, windows7  | Leave a Comment
Ubuntu Tweak
Thursday, January 14th, 2010 | Author: msauers

images If you’re looking for a program that will make Ubuntu just a little easier to use when it comes to tweaking settings and installing software (not that it’s all to difficult in the first place) then check out Ubuntu Tweak.

“Ubuntu Tweak is an application to config Ubuntu easier for everyone. It provides many useful desktop and system options that the default desktop environment doesn’t provide. With its help, you will enjoy with the experience of Ubuntu!”

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Category: linux, software, ubuntu  | Leave a Comment
Children face barriers to successful Internet search
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 | Author: msauers

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Category: audio, children, searching  | Leave a Comment
E-Book Buyer's Guide to Privacy
Monday, January 11th, 2010 | Author: msauers

images“A few weeks ago, EFF published its first draft of a Buyer’s Guide to E-Book Privacy, which summarized and commented on the privacy-related policies and behaviors of several e-readers. In that first draft we incorporated the actual language of the privacy policies as much as possible, which unfortunately created some confusion since companies generally use different language to address similar issues. We also did a few other things clumsily.

“Since then, thanks to the feedback and corrections we’ve received, we’ve made some updates and corrections to the guide which we hope will make it more useful. First, we’ve re-written many of the questions and answers to provide more clarity about the behavior of each e-reader. Second, we’ve tried point out where companies’ privacy policies themselves are unclear on particular issues. And finally, we’ve made the whole thing easier to read by changing its visual layout.

“This guide continues to be a work in progress. So, please continue to let us know whether it’s helpful and what additions you’d like to see.”

Category: ebooks, privacy  | Leave a Comment
Unlock Windows 7's "God Mode"
Friday, January 08th, 2010 | Author: msauers

It’s not really “God Mode” as much as a single hidden folder that you can create in Windows 7 that contains shortcuts to pretty much anything you can do to control and configure Windows. How do you get this folder?

  1. Create a new folder. (I created mine on the desktop)
  2. Name the folder GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

Feel free to use any other text in replacement of “GodMode” just don’t include spaces in the name unless you rename it later.

Everything here can be found either via the Control Panel or by typing it’s name into the start menu but just looking at the options here you might discover something you hadn’t heard of before.

GodMode

Category: windows7  | Leave a Comment
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