Our favorite internet browser, Firefox, has been updated to v3.5. You can update your version of Firefox by opening Firefox and selecting Help > Check for Updates.

Firefox 3.5 is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for the past year. Firefox 3.5 offers many changes over the previous version, supporting new web technologies, improving performance and ease of use. Some of the notable features are:

• Available in more than 70 languages. (Get your local version!)
• Support for the HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio. (Try it here!)
• Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
• Better web application performance using the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
• The ability to share your location with websites using Location Aware Browsing. (Try it here!)
• Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
• Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
• Support for new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, <canvas> text, ICC profiles, and SVG transforms.

Windows Vista SP2 has been released today and is ready for download. You can grab SP2 from either Windows Update, or from Microsoft’s website here.

What’s new:

•SP2 contains Blue tooth 2.1 feature pack supporting the most recent specification for Blue tooth technology
•Ability to record data on Blu-Ray media,
•Adds Windows Connect Now (WCN) Wi-Fi Configuration to Windows Vista SP2,
•exFAT file system now supports UTC timestamps, which enables correct file synchronization across time zones.
•SP2 provides support for new form factors, such as ICCD/CCID. new form factor support –example USB form factor as opposed to PCMCIA).
•Support for the new VIA 64-bit

CPU Security:

•SP2 includes all previously released security updates, and builds on the proven security benefits of Windows Vista
•Secure Development Lifecycle process updates, where we identify the root cause of each security bulletin and improve our internal tools to eliminate code patterns that could lead to future vulnerabilities
•Reliability
•SP2 addresses previously released reliability updates, as well as addressing crashes, caused by Microsoft code, discovered since the launch of SP1 Performance

•Resume performance when Wi-Fi connection is no longer available after resume from sleep
•Inclusion of Windows Search 4 for improved indexing performance, improved relevancy in search, broader indexing scenario inclusion, as well as new Group Policy integration for Windows Search, •Improvements to the RSS feeds sidebar gadget to improve update performance and responsiveness.

Application Compatibility:

•It is our goal that applications that run on the Windows Vista Operating System today and are written using public APIs will continue to work as designed on Windows Vista SP2.
•Previously released Application Compatibility updates are included in Windows Vista SP2.
•Spysweeper and ZoneAlarm now working with POP3 email accounts.

Administration and Support Improvements:

•Customers installing .net framework 3.5 service pack 1 will notice shorter download and installation times with Vista service pack 2 or Windows 2008 service pack 2 already installed,
•Service Pack Clean up tool (Compcln.exe): This tool helps restore the hard disk space by permanently deleting the previous versions of the files (RTM & SP1) that are being serviced by Service Pack 2.
•Single installer for both Vista & Server 2008
•Ability to detect an incompatible driver and block service pack installation or warn users of any loss of functionality
•Better error handling and providing more descriptive error messages where possible
•Better manageability through logging in system event log
•Componentization for Serviceability of the installer

Some Specific Fixes/Additions Include:

•Inclusion of Hyper-V
•Event logging support in SPC
•DNS Server now listens over ISATAP address
•Fixes DRM issues from WMP upgrades
•Windows Vista Feature Pack for Wireless
•Reduction of resources required for sidebar gadgets
•Improved power settings for WS08

We’ve updated our free technical support forums.  Feel free to join and let us know what you think!

On my primary computer, I’m currently running Windows Vista Ultimate.  This computer has three internal SATA2 hard drives.  I have one 140GB primary drive along with two 500GB secondary drives.

Soon after installing and optimizing Vista, I noticed that when I opened a portable application or file on one of my secondary drives, there seemed to be a delay in Vista of about 10 seconds.  I would notice the pause… then the drive clicked a few times before finally opening the desired file.  I started thinking, what the heck is going on?

After some digging around, I found out that Windows Vista — by default — turns off hard drives that are not in use due to inactivity, in order to conserve energy.  If people rarely access their secondary drives, then it made sense.  However, in my case I’m constantly accessing files on these backup drives when using my main PC.

The solution to this frustrating problem?

Read the rest of this entry »

Via our contact form, we received an e-mail from Jim asking us for a recommendation on a free, easy to use video converter. Jim said he has several video files he would like to transfer to his iPod, but that they are in the wrong video format and he hates using iTunes. Can’t say we blame you there Jim

Well Jim, I’ve been using this piece of freeware for a while now and love the simplicity.  WinFF is a frontend GUI (graphical user interface) for the popular commandline video encoder known as FFmpeg. 

In other words, WinFF makes it very easy to convert your video files to DVD, AVI, WMV, VCD, Quicktime, cell phone format, etc.  Yes, you can convert your video files to MP4 as well for use on your iPod. A great thing about WinFF is that is supports batch jobs, so you can queue up all your files at once. Keep in mind though that depending on the size of your video files, they can take a while to convert.

You can also use it to convert your audio files to MP3, M4A, WMA, WAV, Ac3, etc.

It should also be mentioned however, that while WinFF is a great file converter, it will not transfer your converted files to your iPod. Since you dislike iTunes, you can use the free Winamp + the ml_ipod plugin to accomplish this task.

Download it here and give it a shot.



Have other suggestions? Leave us a comment!

If you’ve been noticing lately that your system seems to be slowing down, it could be an indication that it’s time to cleanup and defragment your hard drives as well as your computer’s registry.  A lot of people spend money on expensive software to help keep their computers running healthy.  While some software is almost necessary to purchase, I prefer freeware over shareware whenever possible.  I use three pieces of freeware once a month that do just that.

The first program I run is called CCleaner by Piriform. CCleaner is great for cleaning up accumulated junk on your hard drives.  It also includes a registry cleaner.  You can check out all CCleaner’s features here.

The second program I use is called Disk Defrag by Auslogics. With this you can defragment each hard drive installed inside your computer.  It also supports USB hard drives (you’ll have to enable this option in settings) and has a built-in scheduler.

After I run Disk Defrag, I run a third free program from Lars Hederer called NTREGOPT. This small program will defrag your registry on your Windows machine. Once you run this program, it will ask you to reboot to complete the registry optimization process.  However, if you are running Windows Vista, you will need to run NTREGOPT with administrator privileges, otherwise you will receive an error message.

While there can be many more processes to run through when cleaning up and optimizing your computer, this is a good place to start.

Our favorite internet browser, Firefox , has been updated today to v3.0.9.  You can update your version of Firefox by opening Firefox and selecting Help > Check for Updates.  Several security and stability issues have been patched in this latest version.

This update includes:

• Fixed several security issues.
• Fixed several stability issues.
• Many users experienced an issue where a corrupt local database caused Firefox to “lose” its stored cookies. (bug 470578)
• Fixed an issue where, starting with Firefox 3.0.7, inline image attachments on popular webmail services (like AOL and AIM) would not display. (bug 482659)
• Large forms would sometimes take a long time to submit. (bug 426991)
• In certain cases, new windows would not have proper focus. (bug 446568)

We’ve had a few people ask us how to download a video from YouTube and save it to their local hard drive.  There’s a really easy way to do this.  It’s called save2pc and best of all it’s freeware.  According to save2pc, you can save YouTube and Google videos in AVI, MPEG or FLV video format.  It’s also free of adware and spyware — plus, it’s portable.

You can download the portable version of save2pc here.

Have other suggestions? Leave us a comment!

We’ve had a few customers asking about IE 8 and whether they should upgrade or not. While we think IE 8 will be better than it’s predecessors, there appears to be enough issues with it that it would be smart to hold off for a while — at least a month or so until these issues are resolved.

A few of these reported issues are:

• A zero day security exploit.
• Issues with Spybot-S&D’s immunization tool and IE-SPYAD , which adds unfavorable sites to your IE’s restricted zone.
• Some users have reported that after installing IE 8 and applying Windows’ hotfixes, IE 8 has inexplicably reverted back to IE 7 .  Very strange…

Hackers no doubt will also be hammering this browser hard, looking for additional exploits since it’s brand new — another reason to hold off until Microsoft has time to patch these issues.

Know of more issues? Let us know!

Hopefully, this doesn’t apply to you.  As mentioned before, Conficker is a nasty worm spreading at a high rate.  Today is no April fool’s joke.  It’s the day many believe that the creator of Conficker will trigger all the infect machines — around 15 million worldwide.  This worm has the ability to harvest and record credit card numbers, user names and passwords, etc.

If you’ve been keeping your anti-virus and anti-malware software up to date, you should be in good shape as most detect it by now.  It’s also important to run Windows Update to ensure that all the latest Windows patches have been installed on your machine(s).  However, if you try and run your updates, but are unsuccessful, it could be a sign that your machine is already infected.

Here is a list of some Conficker symptoms:

• If you are unable to run Windows Update

• If you are being locked out of a directory

• If you are being denied access to your admin account or password

• If you cannot get into security websites and services, or update your installed anti-virus and anti-malware software

• If you notice a high rate of internet bandwidth being used on your computer while the computer is supposedly idle

If some of these symptoms are occurring, visit our Conficker forum thread for ways to remove this nasty worm.  If you need further assistant, don’t hesitate to contact us.