Newsletter Archives

• Beyond Compare is beyond comparison

  Posted on July 18, 2022 at 02:43 CDT by Will Fastie • Comment in the Forums

  SOFTWARE

  

  By Will Fastie

  A good utility program can greatly improve productivity. A great utility program is often indispensable.

  One capability that has always been essential, especially to developers, is file comparison. Surprisingly, few utilities existed to perform that task. I remember printing core dumps in octal from a machine that had crashed and comparing them, visually, to a dump from another, working machine. And I mean on paper.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.29.0, 2022-07-18).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Software, Utilities AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Comparison, Software Review, utilities

• Tasks for the weekend – July 24, 2021 – what’s your password?

  Posted on July 24, 2021 at 23:27 CDT by Susan Bradley • Comment in the Forums

  [Youtube video here]

  Just the other day I was helping someone out with setting up a new laptop and they didn’t know what their wifi password was. Fortunately the person who installed their internet connection had left behind a piece of paper that had a username and a password. I figured this was the account set up info and sure enough I was able to log into their Comcast account and figure out what their existing wifi password was. Does your ISP provide you with a web interface to review your wifi? Or an app that allows you to troubleshoot the Internet connection? Often rebooting devices is a great way to make the television or Internet magically get fixed and these apps can make it easier to determine if the issue is you or them.

  Also while you are poking around the ISP account, see if they have any shared hotspots turned on. In this wifi interface is often the place to disable this “shared hotspot” that many ISPs turn on by default.

  So have you logged into your ISP’s web account or downloaded their app? What do you do regularly with it?

  Utilities Patch Lady Posts

• Tomorrow is World Backup Day

  Posted on March 30, 2021 at 19:38 CDT by Susan Bradley • Comment in the Forums

  Tomorrow, March 31, is World Backup day, a day that you are supposed to take stock and make sure your computers are truly backed up.

  “I solemnly swear to backup my important documents and precious memories on March 31st.”

  So what do you use for backing up your device? Personally, I’d urge you to do more than just backing up your documents and memories – you need to have a full image backup of your computer because you never know when a hard drive will fail, a patch will cause issues, or you accidentally save over the top of a file you didn’t intend to save over.

   

  Utilities Patch Lady Posts

• AskWoody Ultimate Utilities List — Fall edition

  Posted on November 22, 2020 at 21:05 CST by Tracey Capen • Comment in the Forums

  UTILITIES

  By TB Capen

  Playing with new utilities for Windows PCs can be fun.

  Many are free, and they show an inventive range of solutions to common — and not-so-common — problems and tasks.

  And let’s face it: there are some apps built into Windows that are still rather … underwhelming. Photos? Groove Music? Mail? No thanks.

  The topic of essential utilities came up recently when I upgraded a relatively old ThinkPad.

  Read the full story in AskWoody Plus Newsletter 17.46.0 (2020-11-23).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Utilities AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Essential utilities, Third-party apps

• Following a trail of utilities

  Posted on November 8, 2020 at 21:00 CST by Tracey Capen • Comment in the Forums

  SHORTS

  By TB Capen

  It’s always a bit surprising how researching one topic can lead you to others.

  In this case, it started with an AskWoody Lounge post about the classic FTP app FileZilla.

  A forum member was concerned that the FileZilla download files reportedly contain malware. That’s unlikely, but a free version of the app currently does include “sponsoring” software

  Read the full story in AskWoody Plus Newsletter 17.44.0 (2020-11-09).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Utilities AskWoody Plus Newsletter, FTP, system information, Virus scanners

• Windows PowerToys — returns!

  Posted on September 13, 2020 at 21:10 CDT by Tracey Capen • Comment in the Forums
  

  UTILITIES

  By Nathan Segal

  When it comes to utilities for Windows, most of us are conditioned to look either inside the OS or beyond Microsoft

  We forget that the folks in Redmond offer a wide variety of accessory tools and utilities online. When was the last time you visited Sysinternals, home of the classic Sysmon and Process Explorer?

  Another example is Microsoft PowerToys (GitHub page), which has been resurrected as an open-source app for Windows 10. This collection of useful tools is designed primarily for power users, but the average Windows jockey might want to look at them, too.

  Read the full story in AskWoody Plus Newsletter 17.36.0 (2020-09-14).

  AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Utilities AskWoody Plus Newsletter, Color picker, Keyboard remapping, Power-user apps, PowerToys, Windows shortcuts

• Patch Lady – Teams background needs AVX2

  Posted on May 3, 2020 at 19:25 CDT by Susan Bradley • Comment in the Forums

  So if you are using Microsoft teams and for a week or so it supported custom backgrounds and now it doesn’t it’s because Teams now requires AVX2 in order to support the blurred background/custom background feature.

  Bottom line AVX2 is a certain newer chipset.  You can download CPU-Z to determine if your computer supports it … or not.

  I’ve seen the number of green backgrounds you can use for online meetings, but just as important is the security features of each video conferencing platform.

   

  Utilities, Windows 10 Patch Lady Posts

• Patch Lady – protecting your loved ones

  Posted on March 16, 2020 at 15:38 CDT by Susan Bradley • Comment in the Forums

  Spotted this twitter post and loved it…

  A message from me and my dad, @Melbrooks. #coronavirus #DontBeASpreader pic.twitter.com/Hqhc4fFXbe

  — Max Brooks (@maxbrooksauthor) March 16, 2020

   

  Also on CSOOnline I have some tips for businesses suddenly having to work from home.

  (edit:  Note if you don’t want to sign up you can view the video here)

  Everyone keep safe and sane out there.

  (and after this always have toilet paper in stock so you don’t have to go crazy and buy out Costco)

  Utilities Patch Lady Posts

• Comparing three file-compression tools

  Posted on February 24, 2020 at 01:00 CST by Tracey Capen • Comment in the Forums

  GENERAL COMPUTING

  By Lance Whitney

  Windows includes its own tool for compressing and uncompressing single files, multiple files, and entire folders.

  But the two most popular third-party compression tools — 7-Zip and WinZip — are far more powerful and capable.

  Windows’ built-in ZIP tool will get the job done for basic compression tasks, but it has some important limitations. For example, it has no option for creating or unzipping encrypted files. You also can’t control the compression format or level. Those are all options 7-Zip and WinZip handle with ease.

  Read the full story in AskWoody Plus Newsletter 17.8.0 (2020-02-24).

  Utilities 7-Zip, AskWoody Plus Newsletter, encryption, File compression, WinZip, ZIP files

• Born: Reported profile problems with the newly updated Firefox

  Posted on December 4, 2019 at 06:35 CST by woody • Comment in the Forums

  Günter Born reports that the new versions of Firefox, released yesterday — version 71 for most people and ESR (Extended Service Release) 68.3.0 for those on the extended track — have prompted problem reports. It isn’t clear if these are one-off, or if they’re indicative of a larger problem.

  • Upgrading to ESR 68.3 damages the default profile (C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default).
  • Upgrading to ESR 68.3 or Firefox 71 removes the policies.json file (C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\distribution\policies.json).

  In addition, Born has a report that the picture-in-picture function for video playback keeps gobbling up memory.

  Can you confirm any of those reports?

  Utilities Firefox

• The new new PowerToys are here

  Posted on September 6, 2019 at 08:04 CDT by woody • Comment in the Forums

  Time to resurrect this post from May:

  The rebirth of Windows PowerToys. Not.

  Now we’re hearing about new, new, new PowerToys, which is to say (1) an overlay list of Windows key shortcuts (lame) and (2) a window manager that lets you snap to any location (possibly useful).

  Last May, we were promised the Windows key shortcut utility (which has changed in design since May), and a “Maximize to new desktop” feature, which seems to have fallen by the wayside.

  Utilities PowerToys

• Patch Lady – looking for options?

  Posted on September 4, 2019 at 12:56 CDT by Susan Bradley • Comment in the Forums

  I stumbled across this site the other day:  https://alternativeto.net/ and in particular https://alternativeto.net/software/microsoft-office-suite/

  For those of you looking for alternatives for …. fill in the blank older software that is no longer patched… you may want to check out that site for ideas of alternatives.

  Utilities Patch Lady Posts
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