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I prefer PDF’s to open outside the Browser (directly into Adobe’s app or Foxit’s PDF reader) but this does not seem to happen within IE9 or the latest Google Chrome (14.0.835.202 m).

Only if you ‘save’ them and then open, will they open outside a browser.

After many years of paying for Norton, McAfee , etc. I switched to the free version of AntiVir about six years ago. Blocked their ‘Nag-Screen’ and had excellent service for two years, then I purchased the full suite (including their Firewall) for three systems/three years. This worked great until they loaded version ‘nine’ after two years and that gave me BSOD’s every two days on all systems until I uninstalled it.

I have now been using MSE with no problems at all ever since.

It is not recommended by any expert that I have seen to ever run two different Anti Virus protections as that can cause conflict and problems. At the very least, make sure that only ONE is active. The expert opinions do allow multiple use of Anti Trojan, Anti Spyware and Ad Blocking.

I would expect that if you just went and changed your email password, that the problem would go away.

Select a difficult to guess password containing some characters other than all letters and numbers (like #, %, ^, etc.).

Woody’s column mentioned that a ‘feature’ with Windows 7 is an automatic defrag scheduled weekly.

I checked my SS HD install and found it and disabled it (has been running for eight months) 🙁

Thank you for this article.

I was not aware of the scheduled de-frag ‘feature’.

I have a Solid State Hard Drive and defrag is not only unnecessary, but can be harmful.

I followed your lead to the scheduler and disabled it after a right-click.

Art

edit:- see this thread:

http://windowssecrets.com/forums/showthread//134242-De-Fragging-SSDs?highlight=solid+state

and IObit Security 360. easy and effective restoring a friends machine recently. Although IObit constantly tries to set itself to run @ startup (I only allow 4 apps to run @ startup one of which is the absolutely essential StartupMonitor, and I never allow real time monitoring), it will very easily set up a portable version of itself for you, and I’ve come to like it a little better than AVG for the occasional scans I do on my own machine

Absolutely agree on the necessity of using “StartupMonitor” although IObit Security 360 never asked again after I had configured it and it even drops off my SysTray after its Scan is finished. (RealPlayer never seems to give up on StartUp.)

I depend on Avira’s AntiVir Premium Suite which is excellent, as long as you make it wait to update new Program Version Releases until other users have reported that all the bugs are gone.

MalWareBytes has never found a spec of malware, but io360 removes a few tracking cookies a month, AntiVir never bothers with Tracking Cookies, but it takes care of all the rest.

I have used hotmail for over ten years, never used WM at all. (I Also don’t bother with FaceBook or Twitter .)

All that was there when I went and signed in to my account (I did have to temporarily allow ‘wlxrs.com’ for scripts using Woody’s Link) was this:
__________________________________________________________
“Suggestions for your network

These are people in your contact list. If you add them to your network….”

Just four, These were:
YAHOO! GROUPS, exciteMail excite, Pratt&Whitney Canada and one individual’s name that I did not recognise.

It has been years since I had any contact with any of the above.

I do have many, many real people on my Contact List and was happy not to see any ot them.

Below the ‘Suggestions….” was an empty Box called “notes” and I was able to turn that off with one click, whatever that was.

Now, after Hotmail discontinued the Outlook, Outlook Express and Entourage Service in August ’09, I did install the “Windows Live Hotmail” Service and they imported All my Contacts (with my permission) to enable viewing other email accounts within WLH.

(Only) big problem there was where other email services can be set to leave downloaded emails on the server for a few days (I have several portable systems, not online all the time) WLH could not and would not ‘leave them on the server’;

thus another portable would no longer get the emails downloaded into WLH.

I should have been Ok if I had just limited WLH to my hotmail only, but I just don’t use WLH at all now.

Since I don’t need WLH, I am quite pleased with my hotmail service and have never had any other problem with it.
____________________________________________________________________________________

You want to talk about a Real Pain Free Email Service, try exciteMail, I would have to Scan (and remove a lot) with EVERY VISIT, only solution was to visit from inside a Sandbox and finally gave them up completely, several years ago. They required your Browser to be completely wide open for any sort of attack, or they would not allow you access to your account.

Art

The above link to Kelly’s Korner is an excellent source for the HAL missing problem. 09/15/2006, it showed up in my Dell D800 following a MS Update with the first BSOD seen in twenty months. I used a recovery utility to boot to a previous (to the MS Update) load.

Recovery with the XP disk did not solve the problem, since Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL.dll) had several versions; XP, SP1, SP2 and the ServicePack version that somehow never made it into System32 from a two year ago MS Update..

I did use a portion of the “Final Solution” at bottom of Kelly’s page:

“…Hal.dll may or may not be found in WINDOWSSystem32 either way it’s no good.
A working copy of hal.dll WILL be found in “C:WINDOWSServicePackFilesi386” … COPY THAT FILE
And Paste it to “WINDOWSSystem32” folder; if it asks to overwrite say YES.”

The one existing in my System32 was a month older and 70% of the size of the version in my C:WINDOWSServicePackFilesi386, copy/paste/reboot ended in a reinstall of every single hardware driver.

System runs faster with less than half the average load on the CPU now and the reason it runs faster and with less ‘CPU Load’ is that it now no longer loads ACPI, (only “Power Option” is to show an icon) CPU now stays at 2GHz unless SpeedStep is disabled and then it stays at 599MHz.

Ever since my first “Phoenix Power Management” I have always thought that “Power Management” was more troublesome than it was worth, Standby was never used if I wanted best stability on next use anyway, I have not seen another BSOD (on this system) now for over three years.

Just in case anyone else gets the ‘HAL’ Crash, a better repair (than the ‘Kelly’ method linked above) would be a repair of the boot.ini from Recovery Console.

I have now run as a ‘PIC’ instead of ‘APIC’ (as I value stability over battery life) for the past 41 months and this five year old Latitude still runs longer on its original battery than I ever need it to.

Joe,

Thank you for the links to reinstall .NET

Some years ago, seeing no need for me to have .NET, I had removed it completely.

Then a program’s installer complained and so I went to MS download and saw .NET 2 and installed it,
only to find later that you still needed .NET 1.

I now have 1, 2 & 3.5 and everything works fine, so I can’t see any need to worry about Service Pack or updates.

Especially since I would still want to use CCleaner….

For several years, I have been using the tool called EULAlyzer which is free for personal or educational use.

It is an easy job to analyze any EULA quickly and flag any text of interest as well as to save that EULA within the app.

For WinXP Pro, EULAlyzer included fourteen paragraphs flagged to read and it said:

Details: The license agreement above has a high calculated Interest ID.
It’s extremely long, and there were many detected ‘interesting’ words and phrases.

On addition, you can *submit online* any EULA:

Built by our users, for our users.
The EULA Research Center is built by the kind submissions from users like you. Submissions are used to enhance and improve EULAlyzer’s detection of potentially “interesting” words and phrases, to better the experience for all of our users.

I never accept or agree to any EULA without first doing a ‘drag & drop’ of EULAlyzer’s [+] icon over it to capture it for analysis.