DIY services for creating simple websites

DIY services for creating simple websites

There are many good reasons to build a website yourself, including avoiding the substantial costs of hiring designers and developers.

Here are two services that make the process of creating a custom site relatively quick and easy; and if your needs are modest, they’re free.

It’s now axiomatic that every business, service, and organization needs a presence on the Web. It’s the place potential customers, clients, members, etc. expect to find you. Not so long ago, your options for creating a website were: pay someone, take the time to learn some HTML and/or a page-creation app such as Microsoft’s now-defunct FrontPage, or use one of the stock templates offered by a few Web-hosting services.

That last option often looked attractive — until you ran up against the limitations of the templates.

Today, even simple sites aren’t simple. Static webpages have given way to database-driven dynamic ones. Better sites now support both desktop and mobile layouts — and know when to use one or the other. Security is also more complex. Without the proper protections, your site might be hijacked and turned into a malware-delivery system. (That experience drove me away from my own handmade sites years ago.) And the cost of hiring designers and developers hasn’t gotten any cheaper.

So for small sites, the best solution is still to use one of the do-it-yourself website-creation and -hosting services. Fortunately, their templates and tools have improved significantly, giving you more control over the look and function of your site.

There are, of course, a few disadvantages to using these services. For example, you can’t easily move your site from one hosting service to another. And if you’re selling something online, the service might tack on fees or limit customers’ payment options.

Some services focus on one type of Internet activity. Blogger (site), for example, is limited to — obviously — blogging. That’s fine, if that’s all you want. WordPress (site) is another platform used extensively for blogging, but it’s capable of much more — if you have the expertise. WordPress hosts both my relatively simple Bayflicks.net blog and the fairly complex WindowsSecrets.com.

There are numerous DIY website-creation services available. After looking at several, I picked two that give you considerable control — via intuitive drag-and-drop tools — over your website layout. You can also add social-networking icons, contact forms, photos — and even blogs.

Both services let you create a free — though quite limited — site. The free option might be fine for a personal site, but for a business/organization site, you’ll want the flexibility and features of a paid account. Without shelling out some money, you won’t be able to use a specific domain name, sell products, or keep the service from advertising itself on your pages.

Before signing up with any DIY-website service (especially for business sites), read its user-license agreement carefully. In most cases, moving from one service to another will require rebuilding the site. Moreover, the domain name you’ve been using might not be transferable — moving to another service could mean losing your own URL. (If you bought a domain name elsewhere, let the service host it — you’ll always be able to move it.)

Weebly: Simple and mobile-friendly

Weebly (site) makes creating a site relatively easy for those of us lacking HTML-coding and Web-design skills. But it also offers a good selection of advanced webpage elements plus tools for displaying your site on small screens.

As with most DIY-website services, creating a new site starts with selecting a template. Weebly offers dozens of templates (See Figure 1) in its Theme Gallery. By default, all themes are displayed, which can be a lot to go through. Fortunately, you can filter the offerings by clicking a category such as Bold, Corporate, Fun, or Simple.

If you edit a theme and decide it’s not working for you, you can easily change it later.

Figure 1. Weebly's many website themes provide the starting point for a new site.

Once you’ve selected a template, you personalize it: change colors and fonts; add text by clicking the text boxes and editing the contents; and move, delete, or add webpage elements from template toolbars. The wide variety of elements and formatting options includes titles, text boxes, images, text boxes with images, photo galleries, slideshows, maps, and contact forms. You can also insert more advanced elements such as social-networking icons and polls, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. New elements are inserted on a webpage by simply dragging them from the toolbars.

While building my new Weebly-based site, I found that not everything worked smoothly. The title area proved difficult to reformat — I couldn’t add a line of smaller-font text below my name. I had to place that text elsewhere on the page — not exactly the layout I wanted.

Some formatting elements are available only with a paid account — an on-page search box, for example. Other pay-only features include slideshows with headers, the ability to remove Weebly’s logo, and converting video to Weebly’s HTML5 format. (Using HTML5 can eliminate the need for Adobe Flash when the video is played in a browser.)

On a desktop screen, your Weebly-based site will look just as you designed it. You can see my final design at the Weebly site. On a smartphone, it’ll have a simpler layout, better suited to small screens — as you’ll see if you visit the site on your phone. You can, however, further tweak the mobile layout to your own satisfaction (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. Weebly automatically adjusts your site for small screens — or you can use the mobility options for more refinements.

By default, you get a subdomain of weebly.com. For example, my site is http://windowssecretstest.weebly.com/. You can also create a real domain name — as I’m reminded every time I change and republish my site — or transfer a domain name you already own. (This also works with the free service, though of course, you’ll have to continue paying for the domain separately.)

Weebly’s professional version costs U.S. $59 for six months, $99 per year, or $159 for two years. A more limited Starter plan costs about half as much, but it lacks search and other features.

Wix: Good-looking designs, right from the start

As with Weebly, you start your new Wix website by selecting a template. Wix’s templates are, however, better organized than Weebly’s, making it easier to find the right one for your needs.

Wix (site) also has a much larger selection of templates. Narrowing my selection down to Computing & Apps, a subdivision of Business & Services, I was offered 32 templates, most of them professionally designed. With Wix, you pretty much start out with a great-looking website.

Figure 4. Wix offers an impressive selection of well-organized templates.

Each Wix template includes a price — disheartening until you realize that the price for nearly all templates is Free. The others are priced as “eCommerce” (see Figure 5), which is rather confusing at first. It means you can’t use the template’s e-commerce functionality without a paid account.

Figure 5. Wix's pricing terminology can be mystifying initially.

Wix’s well-designed templates come at an additional cost. Once you’ve picked one, you’re stuck with it, for the most part. There’s a complicated process for changing templates, but it’s available only with a paid account.

When you’re ready to personalize your site, Wix’s editing screen works well — despite the beta logo in the upper-left corner of the editing screen. According to a Wix representative, the “HTML5 editor is still officially in beta…. We launched it March 2012, and it’s still being refined and developed….”)

The editing tools and widgets are plentiful, generally intuitive, and easy to find. You can insert buttons, menus, images, image galleries, social networking icons, lists, and so on. To edit text, you click a text box and then click Edit Text in the popup menu. Big buttons let you move between preview and edit modes.

There are a few imperfections with the tools. Resizing or cropping an image was a confusing pain. Making changes by grabbing image corners and sides had unpredictable results. Let’s hope that’s on the list of beta fixes.

Figure 6. Wix's clean design makes it easy to find and apply new webpage elements.

Wix’s mobile makeover doesn’t match Weebly’s. On a phone, my site looks just like the desktop version — except it’s tiny and hard to read. A mobile navigation option makes it easy to move from one illegible page to another.

Figure 7. Wix does a poor job of automatically reformatting sites for small screens.

Wix offers numerous subscriptions, depending on what you need and are willing to pay. Fifty dollars a year will get you Google Analytics, support, and the use of a real domain name. To remove the Wix logo, you have to pay more. A full e-commerce site will set you back nearly $200 a year (or more if you want to pay monthly).

With free subscriptions, you can’t use your own domain name — even if you already own it.

Wix can help you create a great-looking site, but its limitations can be frustrating. You’ll find my test site at http://lincolnspector.wix.com/windowssecretstest.

Best of breed: Of the nine DIY website services I tested, Weebly and Wix were the best. The two services are about equally easy to use, but with its extensive library of templates, Wix will likely give you the better-looking desktop website. Weebly, on the other hand, is a better bet if you want a site that looks good on both the big screen and a phone.

The drawbacks of Weebly and Wix are typical of all DIY website services. Others have different sets of tools and options as well as different user experiences. I suggest you try their free versions first to determine your comfort level. Remember: Once you’ve built your site at one service, moving it to another could be painful.

See whether the dinosaurs come out for QBasic

Lounge member flavet still uses QBasic (Microsoft Quick Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, for readers too young to remember its appearance in 1991).

His problem with this program brought out self-described dinosaurs to help him consider it. They seemed pleased to ponder code they hadn’t seen in 20 years.

The following links are this week’s most interesting Lounge threads, including several new questions for which you might have answers:

Office Applications
General Productivity	Moving Office 2010 apps from one machine to another
Word Processing	How many special characters in string?
Spreadsheets	Options for recovering deleted sheets within Excel file?
Databases	ODBC table-size limit
Visual Basic for Apps	Can’t remove VBA project
Microsoft Outlook	Font changed in preview pane in Outlook 2010
Non-Outlook E-mail	Want reliable, stable email program
Windows
General Windows	Disabling MS Security Essentials
Windows 8	Updating Defender automatically without automatic downloads
Windows 7	Is it Windows or my PC?
Windows Vista	Windows Update failure: Unable to upgrade to IE 9
Windows XP	XP Start Programs shortcuts gone
Internet/Connectivity
Internet Explorer	Internet Explorer 10 is blank screen
Networking	Ethernet cable vs. wireless connection changes
Social Media	Trouble posting to Google Groups
Other Technologies
Non-Microsoft OSes	Using Linux for my needs
Security & Scams	Malware: Can’t remove it
Hardware	Keyboard weirdness
Graphics/Multimedia	Need help equalizing volume on single MP3
Other Applications	QBasic program problem

starred posts: particularly useful

If you’re not already a Lounge member, use the quick registration form to sign up for free. The ability to post comments and take advantage of other Lounge features is available only to registered members.

If you’re already registered, you can jump right in to today’s discussions in the Lounge.

Egyptian statue turns its back on the world

Although the 4000-year-old Egyptian statue had been standing quietly in a glass case in a Manchester, England, U.K., museum for 80 years, it has lately commanded the attention of almost everyone who watches the news. The statue spins. The museum has released a time-lapse video that shows the rotation of the artifact in the case — all by itself. None of its companion pieces in the case moves. Many theories are offered for this strange new animation of an ancient stone statue, but the phenomenon hasn’t been explained yet. Play the video

Hard drive shows wrong icon type

On the rare occasions when Windows represents an internal hard drive with the wrong icon, a free utility can set things right.

Plus: Recovering from a backup-restoration failure; creating a basic, no-frills, bootable flash drive; and another reader-recommended search tool.

Windows uses wrong icon for hard drive

Reader “D&S _ R” needs a fix for an annoying system error.

• “Hi. My Windows 7 laptop developed a strange quirk yesterday. The icon for my C: drive changed to one representing a thumb drive. I don’t know why or how. I’ve now spent eight hours trying every recommendation I could find on the Net — with no success.

  “Although I’m running the laptop in admin mode, Win7 won’t let me change the icon. I even tried modifying the Registry.

  “Can you offer any help?”

There are a number of ways to change a drive icon. The simplest method I know is to use the freeware/donationware utility My Drive Icon (site). Run the tool, select the icon you want, and you’re done.

(Warning: As with many free apps, My Drive Icon’s installer offers unrelated toolbars. There’s no real subterfuge, but you’ll want to make sure you use the right download link. During installation, uncheck the quick-install option, select Advanced, and then uncheck the added-software offers.)

My Drive Icon lets you use any icon you have access to: system icons, icons included with installed apps, and custom icons downloaded from online icon libraries such as SourceForge’s free Open Icon Library (site).

If My Drive Icon doesn’t work, try resetting the icons by deleting the system’s icon cache.

In Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8, the icon cache is:

C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Local\IconCache.db

In XP, it’s:

C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\Local Settings\Application Data\IconCache.db

Simply delete the IconCache.db file and reboot; Windows will rebuild the cache from scratch — hopefully, with the correct icons.

But if the icons are still wrong, look for a misplaced or erroneous .inf file.

An autorun.inf file can, among other things, tell Windows which icon to associate with a drive. The autorun file is typically located in the drive’s root folder (e.g., C:\).

The relevant subsection of an autorun.inf file might look something like this:

[autorun]
icon = usbdrive.ico

In this case, Windows will use usbdrive.ico as the icon for that drive.

The .ico icon file can be in any accessible location, as long as the full path is spelled out in the normal way, such as:

[autorun]
icon = driveletter:foldername…iconname.ico

If a path isn’t specified (e.g., icon = usbdrive.ico), Windows will look for the icon file in the drive’s root folder.

Most external USB and flash drives ship from the factory with an OEM-produced autorun.inf file installed in the drive’s root folder. Often, the OEM’s custom .ico will also be somewhere on the drive, and that icon will be referenced in the autorun.inf. This is how different drive manufacturers get Windows to display custom icons and logos for their drives.

If the icon = … line points to an icon file that’s unavailable, missing, or damaged, Windows normally will use its default system icons, based on what it knows about the drive.

Likewise, when a drive doesn’t have an autorun.inf file at all, Windows normally will use its generic, default icons.

Most internal drives do not ship with an autorun file. Windows normally represents these drives with a default system-drive icon, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Windows' system-drive icons in XP, Vista/Win7, and Win8

If an internal drive does have an autorun.inf file, Windows might try to use whatever icon the autorun specifies. Win7 and 8 will sometimes correctly ignore a foreign autorun file, but that’s not guaranteed.

At this point, you can probably see where this is going. If an external drive’s autorun.inf gets copied or moved to an internal drive, that internal drive might suddenly start displaying whatever icon the autorun points to.

I suspect that’s what’s happened in D&S _ R’s case. A flash drive’s autorun.inf somehow got copied to the C: drive, and Windows started using the flash drive’s specified icon for the system drive.

If that’s the case, it’s easy to fix — either remove or edit the incorrect autorun.inf.

Your system might have an autorun.inf file, but you can’t see it. Check that Windows is not hiding system files.

In Win7, click Start/Control Panel and then Appearance and Personalization. Under Folder Options, click Show hidden files and folders. In the Folder Options dialog box, click the View tab and scroll down to Hidden files and folders. Make sure that Show hidden files, folders, and drives is checked, as shown in Figure 2. Apply the changes and exit. Other versions of Windows work in a similar manner.

Figure 2. To access or edit an autorun.inf file, confirm that Windows is set to Show hidden files, folders, and drives.

Typically, it’s safe to delete an Autorun.inf. But I recommend keeping a copy of it somewhere, just in case it’s actually needed.

By the way, if you have trouble deleting an autorun.inf (or any file) see the Dec. 4, 2008, LangaList Plus, “Give the boot to files that refuse to delete.”

Alternatively, if you want or need to keep the autorun.inf file in place, you can at least edit the icon = line to point to the icon you want.

Autorun.inf files are plain text, so they can be edited in Notepad. Simply right-click the autorun file, select Open with, and then select Notepad. Make your edits and save the edited file.

After editing or deleting the troublesome autorun, reboot your system; Windows should then revert to either its default icon for that drive or the icon you chose.

There are other icon-tweaking methods (for example, see a Microsoft Answers discussion), but D&S _ R says he’s tried most of them — including Registry tweaks. If after all that, your icons are still incorrect, it might be time to cry “Uncle!” and roll back Windows (e.g., using System Restore) to a pre-error state.

But with luck, something simple — such as using the My Drive Icon utility — will solve the problem in one easy step!

Recovering from “… restore failed”

Jeffrey E. Flory solved a problem he encountered when trying to restore a backup.

• “I’ve been using the built-in, Windows 7 backup for a while now. But, when trying a restore from a startup/recovery disc, I ran into the cryptic messages, ‘The system image restore failed’ and ‘No disk that can be used for recovering the system can be found.’

  “I found this answer on the Web, in a Microsoft forum:

  ‘After the failure you’ll see a dialog box with multiple choices. Choose the command prompt choice. Type diskpart and press Enter. Next, enter list disk to check and be sure your system drive is disk 0. Enter select disk=0. Then enter detail disk to make sure you have the right drive. Enter clean to clear the drive and then enter exit to get out of DiskPart.’

  “Rerun the backup recovery, and it should work as expected.

  “I thought you might want to share this with your readers who might or have — like me — run into this issue.”

Nicely done, Jeff! The DiskPart subcommand — clean — zeroes out the specified hard drive, giving Windows a clean slate on which to restore your backup.

Clearly, clean is a dangerous command. It should be used only when you want to wipe out a hard drive’s previous partition/format information. (For more on DiskPart, see the MS TechNet article, “DiskPart command-line options.”)

But in your case, wiping out the drive was exactly what you needed to do. Good work!

Creating a no-frills, bootable flash drive

Curtis K. Neimeister is seeking a better way to build a basic boot drive.

• “How do I create a boot drive on a USB drive? I tried it once using a process described on another site, but it didn’t work.

  “I thought the April 25 LangaList column, “Tools for creating a bootable flash drive,” might be applicable, but the tools in that article are for when things go wrong. They don’t apply to the steps I used.

  “So, how do I do it?”

You don’t say what software you’re trying to put on the bootable USB drive, but the tools mentioned in that article are all capable of making a bootable thumb drive from any bootable .iso image — not just .isos of standalone antivirus tools.

Nevertheless, here are more alternatives:

If you’re trying to make a thumb drive act just like a bootable Win7 setup/repair DVD, the following might help:

• Ars Technica article, “How to create a bootable Windows 7 USB flash drive”
• wikiHow article, “How to create bootable Windows 7 thumb drive”

If you’re seeking to create a more generic bootable flash drive, try these free utilities:

• MakeBootable (download site)
• UNetbootin (site)
• Lexar BootIt (site)
• Rufus (site)

One of those should get you going!

Another excellent search-tool alternative

Rodney Nicholls adds to the discussion started in the June 6 LangaList Plus item, “Free search tool finds files by title — fast.”

• “Like you, I find that Everything (site) is a useful tool. But if I want to find something inside a file, I use Agent Ransack.

  “You can get the free version or pay for a more advanced copy with additional functions. So far, the free version has satisfied all my needs.

  “You can get it at the Mythicsoft site. The free version requires applying for a registration code, but that’s no drawback.”

Thanks, Rodney. I remember Agent Ransack from years ago, but it had fallen off my radar. Nice to see it’s still out there!

Understanding styles and themes in Word

The themes in Microsoft Word 2013 promise a new level of quick and coordinated colors, styles, and more when applied to documents.

But getting a theme’s full set of features requires understanding how Word defines theme and style — and also how they’re applied.

The basics of Word styles and themes

In page-layout parlance, a style is a set of formatting instructions applied to the elements of a page: heads, body text, captions, sidebars — the various components that make up a document. A style can be made up of many specific format settings such as typeface, font size, and color; margin width, line length, and leading (the space between elements on your page); bullet style, etc.

Themes, found in both Word 2010 and 2013, are predefined sets of coordinated styles users can select if they want to speed up and simplify the process of formatting a document. Word themes aren’t new — they first appeared in Word 2007 — even in Word 2013, they continue to bewilder users.

Recently, a Windows Secrets reader wrote in, asking for help with a peculiar Word 2013 problem. She was learning about Word themes and, after adding her text, was confounded by the theme process. When she hovered the mouse over Themes gallery selections, her text didn’t change to the color shown in a particular theme. Other styling elements in the text changed, so she assumed the theme was being applied. No matter what she tried — even with the help of Microsoft tech support — she couldn’t get a theme’s colors to show up.

Depending on decisions made sequentially

Although Microsoft would like you to think Word formatting is simple — and in some ways it is — applying themes and getting the outcome you expect requires learning some specific steps. For example, to have a theme automatically change fonts and font colors, you have to apply styles to the various elements in a document so Word knows what to change.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at Word’s formatting tools — and you’ll see how they interrelate, so you can get the full benefit of themes when giving your document a makeover. I focus on Word 2013, but the process is similar in Word 2010.

Wading through a morass of formatting tools

One of the good-news/bad-news aspects of Word is the daunting number of formatting tools. They range from simple and local (italicizing a word, for example) to complex and comprehensive — such as custom styles you create and apply to items throughout your document with one click. Occasional Word users often assume that creating and applying styles is more trouble than it’s worth. But those who use Word daily, giving documents a cohesive look-and-feel, know that using styles can be a real time-saver.

Before getting into specifics, let’s start with a quick review of Words formatting-tools categories:

• Use the Formatting toolbar or the Font group in the Home tab to change typeface, size, and color of characters.
• Use the Styles gallery to apply a particular style — a saved collection of formatting settings that display the text in a certain font, size, style, and color — to selected text.
• Use the Document Formatting group in Word 2013’s Design tab to apply a new set of font styles to text that already has an applied style.
• Use the Themes gallery (also under the Design tab) to give text, shapes, and colors a cohesive look.

How Word uses your formatting choices

When you type new text into the document, Word applies the Normal style by default. If you want to turn text into a heading, you select the text and choose one of the Headings styles in the Styles gallery.

Applying styles is a critical first step for controlling what’s changed when you use a theme. For example, if you want a theme to automatically turn specific document headings green, those headings must have a related heading style selected from the Styles gallery.

Let’s try this out:

• Step 1. Create a blank Word document and type any text you choose. You might enter something like the text shown in Figure 1, so you can try out the various styles.
• Step 2. Select the line you want to format as the title (or simply click to position the cursor within that title line) and click the More arrow on the bottom left corner of the Styles gallery. This opens a list of all available styles.
• Step 3. Click the Title style — the selected text should immediately change to reflect the new format.
• Step 4. Continue entering additional text and apply other styles from the gallery. Be sure to choose at least one (such as Intense Emphasis) that displays your text in a different color.

Figure 1. The Styles gallery is the starting point for controlling document formatting with themes.

After you’ve applied styles to the various elements in your sample document, click the Design tab and choose Themes. (In Word 2010, Themes is under the Page Layout tab.) The Themes gallery (see Figure 2) opens with previews of all currently available themes. (Some come with Office; others are downloaded from Microsoft.) As you roll over the various previews, all styled text in the document will automatically change to match the theme. Simply click the theme you like in order to apply it. Figure 2 shows my sample document when I preview the Facet theme.

Figure 2. The Themes gallery offers numerous coordinated sets of styles for giving documents a more cohesive look.

Applying a theme opens another set of formatting choices. In the Document Formatting group, you’ll find a gallery of style sets you can apply to make more-refined changes to the document. The style set lets you choose various styles within the theme. Whichever style set you select will appear in the Home tab’s Styles gallery.

For example, each style set shown in Figure 3 looks slightly different. Each has its own style for titles, headings, normal text, etc. along with boxes, shapes, and lines. Click the style set you like, and Word applies it to all the styled elements in your document.

Figure 3. Style sets give you additional formatting choices within a theme for headings, text, shapes, and more.

Only the tip of the formatting iceberg

In short, to work with themes and style sets, the various elements in a document must have the proper style applied to headings, titles, captions, etc. Once you have that step down, you’ll find that using themes saves time — and swapping themes is, well, fun! You can give documents the proper business style — or apply a whole new look to your personal correspondence — with a couple of mouse clicks.

Once you’re comfortable with the default styles, the next step is to create custom themes, style sets, styles, and color palettes. Then use shortcut keys to apply them. But those are subjects for another day.

Think twice about installing Windows 8.1 Preview

On June 26, Microsoft unveiled Windows 8.1 as a public preview; but before installing Win8.1 Preview, you should know a few important facts.

Plus: It’s time for the end-of-the-month, nonsecurity patch cleanup; and if you’re running Java, check that it’s up to date.

Preparing for Windows 8.1 Preview’s release

As anyone who reads technology news must know by now, Windows 8.1 makes its initial public debut at this week’s MS Build Conference in San Francisco, Calif. Reportedly, Windows 8.1 Preview will be a free download from the Windows Store. The final version is due out sometime late this year.

But before you click that download button, keep this firmly in mind: migrating from Win8.1 Preview to the final Version 8.1 release will require reinstalling all apps not downloaded from the Windows Store. Reportedly, you’ll need to use the Windows 8 Refresh feature to remove Win8.1 Preview.

For Windows RT users, a Windows 8.1 Preview FAQ has a special warning: “If you’re running Windows RT you won’t be able to restore Windows RT after you install Windows RT 8.1 Preview. You’ll be able to upgrade to the final version of Windows RT 8.1. If installation of Windows RT 8.1 Preview fails on your PC, you may need to contact your PC manufacturer.

Two Microsoft articles detail what’s in Windows 8.1. The May 30 Blogging Windows post lists changes for end users, and a TechNet story, “What’s new in Windows 8.1,” provides an IT perspective. As has been widely reported, the Win8 Start button has been modified — but not the way most Windows users had hoped.

I was surprised that Explorer 11 is among the updates in Version 8.1. Most of us are still grappling with IE 10 for Windows 7. There’s no information yet on whether there will be an IE 11 for Win7.

What to do: Given the eventual updating issues, Windows 8.1 Preview is suitable only for test systems. Your best bet is to set it up in a virtual machine. There will be an .ISO-based Win8.1 Preview (download info) just for that purpose. But before going to the Windows 8.1 Preview download site, carefully read the update’s FAQs.

MS13-048 (2839229)

Update causes problems with Chinese AV product

As I’ve stated repeatedly, kernel updates can conflict with third-party apps — especially antivirus products. That proved to be the case with KB 2839229 and Chinese security software, Kingsoft, as noted in MS Support article 2839229 (MS13-048).

This update is rated important for all current versions of Windows.

What to do: Check that your antivirus software is fully up to date, and then install KB 2839229.

MS13-050 (2839894)

Print spooler fix gets a green light

KB 2839894 fixed a vulnerability in the Windows Print Spooler that could lead to a local attack (the attacker must sign in to the target system). Windows XP users are off the hook for this patch; it’s rated important for Vista, Win7, Win8, Windows RT, and some Windows Server systems.

What to do: I’ve not seen nor heard of any issues with KB 2839894 (MS13-050). Select it in Windows update or download it from the Microsoft Download Center.

Cleaning up nonsecurity .NET Framework updates

Now’s the time to install those nonsecurity .NET updates released on Patch Tuesday and that I recommended putting off until the end of the month.

You should see one or more of the following:

• KB 2836939 for .NET 4 on XP, Vista, Win7 plus Windows Server 2003, 2008, and 2008 R2
• KB 2836940 for .NET 3.5 SP1 on XP and Vista plus Windows Server 2003 and 2008
  
• KB 2836942 and KB 2836943 for .NET 3.5.1 on Win7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1
  
• KB 2836946 and KB 2836947 for .NET 3.5 on Win8 and Windows Server 2012
  

For the most part, updates for .NET Versions 3.5 and 4 are better behaved than previous .NET versions. And when there are problems installing Version 3.5/4 patches, you can usually fix them by selecting the Repair option in Windows’ Programs and Features applet.

What to do: These .NET updates reportedly fix some esoteric compatibility issues. If they were offered in Windows Update, select and install them now.

Office 2013 gets more fixes for SkyDrive

One new feature of Windows 8.1 is more integration with SkyDrive. In preparation for that enhancement, several nonsecurity fixes in Office 2013 were released on June’s Patch Tuesday. They include:

• KB 2760538 Shared Excel file in SkyDrive opens with wrong application
  
• KB 2760610 Add-ins incompatible with Office 2013
  
• KB 2810014 Various fixes, including possible faulty tab display in Office when screen is set to 150 percent
  
• KB 2810017 Numerous Office 2013 fixes
  
• KB 2810018 Clicking shared file in SkyDrive opens wrong Office app
  
• KB 2817320 Changes default UI text to larger font when Office 2013 is set to Punjabi.
  

What to do: I’ve not run across any reports of problems with these Office 2013 updates. Install those offered.

It’s the end of the road for Oracle’s Java 6

If you’re still running Java 6, it’s time to update to Version 7. Oracle will no longer fix security flaws in Version 6. But before you upgrade, test whether any mission-critical apps are incompatible with Java 7.

The most recent release of Java is Version 7 Update 25, which (as noted in the Java Update Java Release Notes) fixes over 34 vulnerabilities and adds new security enhancements. For example, Java now has certificate-revocation checking enabled by default. You might notice slower processing in Java-based apps. The Release Notes state:

“Under normal circumstances revocation checking will have a slight impact on startup performance for applets and Web start applications. Enterprises with managed networks and without access to the Internet (resulting in no access to the revocation services provided by Certificate Authorities) will see a significant delay in startup times.”

I believe the best practice is to try to live without Java on your system. But if you must use it, I strongly recommend leaving this revocation process enabled.

What to do: Check whether you have Java installed. If you’re still on Version 6, update to Java 7 Update as soon as possible (and watch out for unwanted software offers). The Verify Java Version site will tell you whether you’re on the most current version.

2813430

An optional update of interest to admins

KB 2813430 is an optional update that lets enterprise admins manage Certificate Trust Lists on their client systems via Windows Update. Standalone PCs don’t need the update and will not get any enhancements from it.

Automatic Certificate Authority (CA) updating in Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8 works fine, most of the time. When the security-certificate system fails, it’s typically with the services that generate the certificates — part of the system that end users and IT admins have no control over.

I plan to keep an eye on this update. My opinion of it might change as CA security evolves.

What to do: Windows users not connected to a corporate domain server can ignore KB 2813430. For more info, see its MS Support article.

Regularly updated problem-patch chart

This table provides the status of recent Windows and Microsoft application security updates. Patches listed below as safe to install will typically be removed from the table about a month after they appear. For Microsoft’s list of recently released patches, go to the MS Safety & Security Center PC Security page.

See our “Windows Secrets’ master Patch Watch chart” post for a more extensive list of recent updates.

Status recommendations: Skip — patch not needed; Hold — do not install until its problems are resolved; Wait — hold off temporarily while the patch is tested; Optional — not critical, use if wanted; Install — OK to apply.