MSN drops parental controls for paying customers

MSN drops parental controls for paying customers

By Scott Dunn MSN Premium, Microsoft’s suite of paid Web services, is dropping some parental controls and recommending that its users switch to the company’s free Windows Live equivalents instead. If this pattern continues, MSN Premium will be left with absolutely no services that aren’t provided free in Windows Live or Microsoft Windows itself, a situation I described in a Jan. 3 article.

E-mail and IM blocking features lost in MSN

MSN Premium dropped the ability to block e-mail and instant messages from certain contacts, beginning on Jan. 8. The announcement came from Microsoft in a letter to customers of MSN Premium, many of whom pay $9.95 per month for the service. (An unspecified number of other customers receive MSN Premium as part of a bundle when purchasing Net access from an Internet service provider.)

In a boldfaced paragraph, the letter urged customers, “If you want to continue to restrict e-mail or messenger contacts via Parental Controls, we recommend installing Family Safety from Windows Live™ One Care™.”

The letter goes on to state that Family Safety from Windows Live OneCare is free and that it “will become your new parental control application.”

The communique also provides installation instructions for installing the Windows Live Family Safety service and concludes, “we apologize for this inconvenience.”

This is the second time in less than a year that MSN Premium has scaled back features for its paying customers in favor of versions of Windows Live, which are free and have only minor feature differences. Last spring, MSN Hotmail was “upgraded” to Windows Live Hotmail, as Microsoft Product Manager Nick White put it in the official Vista blog.

Microsoft continues to charge paying subscribers for MSN Premium, even as the company replaces features in MSN with free Windows Live equivalents. In most cases, features that still exist within MSN Premium are available for free from Windows Live or are built into Windows itself, as I reported in the Jan. 3 issue of Windows Secrets.

In response to that article, a Microsoft representative made the following statement, published in a blog at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

• “While Windows Live includes many comparable services, MSN Premium includes software as part of the subscription, including Encarta Premium, and offers additional functionality such as download manager and SpySweeper. Many customers are also attracted to MSN Premium’s advertisement-free experience, while Windows Live services are ad-funded.”

The similarities between the paid MSN Premium service and free services available elsewhere from Microsoft were cataloged on Jan. 3 in a table, with links to let readers compare the features for themselves.

For example, Windows Live provides no precise equivalent for Encarta Premium, but users can search for scholarly articles and academic publications using the free Windows Live Academic Search beta.

Microsoft also offers a free version of Encarta online. According to a description of the differences on the Encarta site, MSN Encarta Premium is similar to the free version, except for the omission of advertising and the addition of “literature guides, project planners, and the multimedia center.”

Neither version can compare in popularity with the free Wikipedia site, which outpulled Encarta 3,400 to 1 in user visits, according to a Hitwise study last year.

Microsoft’s paid services do carry advertising

The Microsoft statement also raises the question of advertising. It’s true that free Windows Live accounts display an advertising banner at the top of each Hotmail page, and the online version of Windows Live appends a text ad to the bottom of each e-mail message.

However, those who use the free, “desktop” version of Windows Live Mail see no advertisements in the interface. Nor does mail sent from the desktop version include text ads, in my tests. (The desktop version, in one omission, does not support the calendar feature that’s found online.)

Advertising is also present in Microsoft’s instant-messaging service. In the newest version of Messenger (dubbed Windows Live Messenger), both paying MSN Premium users and nonpaying users see banner ads in the main window and text ads in the chat windows.

Windows XP users can avoid these ads by continuing to use the free version of Messenger that’s built into the operating system. Users of the newer Windows Live Messenger may be able to use third-party software to remove the ads, as explained by the My Digital Life site.

Windows Secrets reader Michael D. Hensley points out one benefit that MSN Premium does provide over the no-charge alternatives. The free Outlook Connector, as described on a Microsoft.com page, allows you to receive Hotmail messages in Microsoft Outlook — but only MSN Premium lets you synchronize calendar entries you may create in the two products. If that’s worth $9.95 per month to you, I say go for it.

A Jan. 4 Softpedia article on the controversy says the advantages of MSN Premium that the Microsoft statement cited are “subtle differences.” Conceding that arguments can be made for either MSN Premium or Windows Live, the article, by Softpedia technology news editor Marius Oiaga, concludes:

• “At the same time, MSN Premium, in the context of the much fresher Windows Live Hotmail, is nothing but an outdated service, whose faults will end up surpassing its benefits. And MSN Premium has quite a few faults, starting with the aging browsing client and ending up with the limited amount of storage.”

Today, MSN Premium is lopping off features, from instant messaging to mail to parental controls, and replacing them with free Windows Live equivalents without upgrading its own offerings. If this practice continues, it’ll become even more difficult for Microsoft to make the case that MSN Premium customers should continue to pay for services the company is offering elsewhere for free.

Readers Don Dewiel and Michael Hensley will each receive a gift certificate for a book, CD, or DVD of their choice for contributing to this story. Send us your tips via the Windows Secrets contact page.

Scott Dunn is associate editor of the Windows Secrets Newsletter. He has been a contributing editor of PC World since 1992 and currently writes for the magazine’s Here’s How section.

Get still more built-in performance tools

By Scott Dunn

My Jan. 10 story explained how to assemble within XP most of the same performance tools that are found in Windows Vista.

This week, clever readers go the extra mile, pointing out even more free tools for monitoring and improving your system speed.

Get a pre-fab aggregation of XP system tools

A number of readers recommend third-party applets that make it easy to launch from a single window several somewhat geeky and hard-to-find tools in Windows XP. Of the nominations that were submitted, I find a couple to be particularly interesting for other tweakers out there.

Reader Thomas Rose points to the freeware Windows in a Box, whose four menus provides quick access to dozens of Windows built-in system tools and folders.

John Harper recommends XP SysPad, which is better-organized and more attractive than Windows in a Box. SysPad, a free tool, divides its functions into eight menus and a number of submenus. SysPad also has a rudimentary process list, like the one in Windows’ own Task Manager, and a feature that lets you “roll up” its main window with a simple right-click of the title bar, leaving only the title bar and menus. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. XP SysPad organizes hidden and hard-to-find Windows features into a collection of menus.

I haven’t done an exhaustive test of the two products’ hundreds of features. You may find that Windows in a Box actually supports some functions that cause you to prefer it over SysPad. Judge for yourself.

Find computer management tools in My Computer

Russ Bartels has an interesting observation about giving XP the performance tools found in Vista:

• “Great job; however, you missed one that I have used for a long time. In Windows 2000 and XP, you can right-click My Computer and select Manage to see a great selection of these tools. This would be a good addition to your directory of niche tools.”

The Computer Management window brings together many Microsoft Management Console snap-in controls that would otherwise have to be launched individually. (These Microsoft controls can be recognized in the Windows System32 folder by their .msc extension.) This windows gives you access to a couple of tools that I recommended on Jan. 10.

If you want to add Computer Management to your collection of tools, the executable file name to create a shortcut to is compmgmt.msc. Alternatively, you can open the Computer Management window by clicking Start, All Programs, Administrative Tools, Computer Management.

If you don’t see the Administrative Tools option on your Start menu, try this: Right-click the Start button and choose Properties. Click Customize.

If you’re using the Classic Start menu, check Display Administrative Tools in the list at the bottom and click OK.

If you’re using the default Start menu, click the Advanced tab, and scroll through the Start menu items list until you see System Administrative Tools. Select whether you want it to appear on the All Programs menu or both the All Programs menu and the Start menu. Then click OK twice.

Although the items on the Administrative Tools menu are about system maintenance and configuration, a few of them (like Services and Performance) can also be useful for tweaking system efficiency.

Some MS utilities that aren’t in Windows

Reader Ken McLeod draws attention to a couple of useful Microsoft products that don’t come with Windows:

• “1. Replace Task Manager (ugh!) with Sysinternals’ Process Explorer. There are a number of other Sysinternals utilities for users and developers alike. They’re so good, Microsoft bought them up.

  “2. Use BootVis to manage startup. It has an optimizing feature that optimizes startup and improves startup time quite dramatically. I use it after every new install.”

Thanks, Ken. Process Explorer (kind of like a Task Manager on steroids) and the other Sysinternals utilities are available from Microsoft’s TechNet site.

Windows Secrets contributing editor Ryan Russell wrote extensively about Process Explorer in two columns in the paid version of the newsletter on Dec. 6 and Jan. 3. His column today unveils the secrets of a related tool, Process Monitor. How to get our paid content

BootVis, a tool designed to help you improve the startup time of Windows XP, was originally developed within Microsoft, but the company no longer offers it at the Microsoft.com site. However, you can get it from the BootVis page of Major Geeks and other software-download sites.

Be aware that there is a controversy over whether BootVis is needed to optimize a machine’s startup time. Microsoft posted an explanation on Feb. 12, 2004, stating that BootVis is for developers and doesn’t improve performance for end users. Windows XP, for example, automatically runs a boot optimization every three days.

A 2003 commentary by Eric Vaughn at the TweakHound site indicates that running a command manually can accomplish the same optimization as BootVis. A LangaList article from Sept. 9, 2003, explains that the command for a quick boot optimization is:

defrag c: -b

Readers Rose, Harper, Bartels, and McLeod will each receive a gift certificate for a book, CD, or DVD of their choice for sending tips we printed. Send us your tips via the Windows Secrets contact page.

A modern-day love story

Maybe it was the glow of his LCD flat screen or the curves of her hard drive. Whatever it was, these two can’t keep their megabytes off of each other. In this quirky one-minute video, even the most basic of human functions has gone electronic! Play the video

Super-size your right-click context menus

By Woody Leonhard Although it’s become fashionable to knock Windows Vista, I readily admit that I like the beast, cantankerous as it may be. Vista sports lots of hidden, little-known gems that can help you get real work done, real fast — if you know where to find ’em. Here are some of my favorites.

The hidden power of the context menu

By now, just about everybody who uses Windows (XP or Vista, or one of the earlier versions, for that matter) knows about the context menu: right-click on a file or a folder, and Windows shows you a list of actions you can take.

Depending on the kind of file or folder you click, and which applications have “registered” a program associated with that specific type of file or folder, you’ll see a different list of actions. You get the same list if you highlight an object and then press the Menu/Application key. (On most keyboards, this key looks like a tiny menu with a mouse pointer, down by the right-hand Shift key.)

The list of available actions won’t surprise anyone. Folders, for example, typically support a list like Open, Explore, Search, Cut, Copy, Create Shortcut, Delete, Rename, Properties and usually a handful more. These options haven’t changed much since Microsoft, uh, borrowed the approach from the Smalltalk/Xerox Alto team more than a decade ago.

Use Shift+Right-Click for enlightenment

In Windows XP, if you hold down the Shift key and right-click a file or folder, you usually see one additional entry on the context menu: Pin to Start Menu. This gives you a quick way to stick the chosen file or folder on the top left side of the Start menu. This may not exactly be a breathtaking capability, but I sometimes find it useful.

I say you “usually” see this entry because installing any number of programs (including Microsoft’s own TweakUI for Windows XP) alters the appearance of the context menus, whether or not you hold down the Shift key.

The fun starts with Vista. A simple Shift+Right-Click in Vista conjures up several time-saving options that I use all the time.

Extended context menus for power users

Microsoft intentionally hid a handful of Vista’s context-menu capabilities to make it harder for the uninitiated to shoot themselves in the feet. Now that you know the little secret, you might try Shift+Right-Clicking around a bit in Vista to see what you find.

As with Windows XP, your results will vary depending on which applications you have installed and the phase of the moon. But as you Shift+Right-Click various objects, look for these gems:

• Copy As Path takes the full path of the folder or file you’ve selected, puts quote marks at the beginning and end of the name, and pastes the quote-enclosed path name into the Windows clipboard. If you Shift+Right-Click on a network drive or file and choose Copy As Path, you get the fully qualified path with double quotes. For example:

“SANUKBigfilesA Big One.xls”

• Add to Quick Launch puts a shortcut to the selected file or program on the Windows’ Quick Launch Toolbar. I’m not sure why, but on my Vista machines, this option isn’t available when you Shift+Right-Click a folder.

• Open Command Window Here shows up on the list when you Shift+Right-Click a folder. If you choose this option, Vista opens a DOS-like command window with the folder as the default location.

Wait. It gets better. If you Shift+Right-Click a network folder and choose Open Command Window Here, Vista creates an ad-hoc mapping for the parent folder and opens the command window based on that mapped drive. When you “X” out of the command prompt, the network drive mapping goes away. Cool.

The command window that you get with Open Command Window Here runs with lowly user privileges. (Thank you, User Account Control. Pffffft.) Daniel Petri, on his justly famous Petri.co.il site, gives detailed instructions for hacking the Registry to create a similar but more powerful Administrator Command Prompt Here option.

More goodies for Office 2003 and 2007 users

If you have Microsoft Office 2003 or 2007 installed on your computer, Open as Read-Only appears as an option when you Shift+Right-Click Excel 2003 and 2007 workbooks or templates, Word 2007 documents or templates, and Word 2003 documents. It doesn’t show up on Word 2003 templates, or on PowerPoint presentations.

Sometimes this option appears on the screen as OpenAsReadOnly, sometimes Open as Read-Only. Ah, consistency.

If you choose the option, the appropriate Office application gets launched, and the file is opened in read-only mode. This prevents you from writing over the original file. You can make changes to the document, but in order to save the changes, you have to use a new file name.

As best I can tell, Open as Read-Only is implemented by Office, not Windows. I’ve only seen the option on Vista computers on which Office is installed.

You Office customers may be surprised to know that all of the other Shift+Right-Click shennanigans (except Open as Read-Only) work equally well inside Office’s dialog boxes, such as Open, Save As, Insert File, and others.

Consider. How many times have you wanted to insert a picture into a document, and also wanted the picture’s fully qualified file name? Remember to use Shift and it’s easy.

In Word 2003, click Insert, Picture, From File. In Word 2007, click the Insert menu (er, tab) and then click Picture.

In either case, navigate to the picture you want to insert, Shift+Right-Click the file, and choose Copy As Path. Then click the Insert button.

Quick as a wink, the file’s inside your doc. After this, a deft Ctrl+V pastes the file name immediately after the pic. Slick.

Woody Leonhard‘s latest books — Windows Vista All-In-One Desk Reference For Dummies and Windows Vista Timesaving Techniques For Dummies — explore what you need to know about Vista in a way that won’t put you to sleep. He and Ed Bott also wrote the encyclopedic Special Edition Using Office 2007.

Process Monitor logs program activity for you

By Ryan Russell Microsoft’s free Process Monitor tool allows you to log any specific file and Registry activity a process is performing. My last two columns on Dec. 6 and Jan. 3 dealt with Microsoft’s Process Explorer, but today I’d like to introduce you to an even more powerful tool: Process Monitor.

Process Monitor is for logging, not snapshots

Process Monitor (PM) is a tool for monitoring file and Registry activity. I’ve mentioned older tools in this family (Filemon and Regmon) in my column on Nov. 22, 2005. You can download PM directly from Microsoft.

Figure 1. Process Monitor can log every call that any Windows process makes.

If you’ve used the older tools before, Microsoft will tell you the advantages of the newer tools over the older ones right on the download page. The immediately obvious improvements are that you only need one tool for both file and Registry monitoring, and you get much better filtering capabilities.

The big difference between a tool like Process Explorer (PE) and PM is that PE only shows you the current information, whereas PM will keep a running log.

The advantage of the latter is that you can catch brief events, keep copies of the logs, and ship them around for others to look at. If you’re using just PE — and a process only flashes on the screen for a second — you’d have to be quick enough to click on it and select its properties before the process disappeared.

Because PM can log all activity over as long a period as you like (or as least as much as you have storage for), you can catch activity that happens too fast or only once in a great while. As you might imagine, this can produce a lot of logs. This is where filtering comes in.

Configure filtering to get the most usability

If you download and run PM, the first thing you’ll notice is that it immediately starts logging thousands and thousands of lines of activity. Let it run for a few seconds, and then press Ctrl+E (or click File, Capture Events) to turn it off.

Perusing the list of events, you’ll find Registry and file-access events for processes like explorer.exe, lsass.exe, csrss.exe, services.exe, and many other Windows system processes that probably aren’t terribly relevant to what you want to see at the moment.

PM makes it very easy to exclude the “noise” so you can look at what you want to see. For example, if you right-click explorer.exe, you’ll get a context menu item named Exclude explorer.exe. Select that, and Explorer is removed from the list.

You can do this for any of the processes you don’t want to see in the list at the moment. If you’re thinking ahead, you’ll realize that you’ll probably want to exclude the activities of PM itself. The developers are way ahead of you: it’s not shown by default. If you want to include PM, go to Options, Enable Advanced Output.

Once you have most of the noisy Windows processes excluded, you’ll start to see programs that are (hopefully) familiar to you. This includes things running almost invisibly in your system tray, as well as programs displaying full windows. In my case, I see things like steam.exe, firefox.exe, and ipodservice.exe.

Use Process Monitor to catch install hang-ups

Now that you’ve had a very brief tour of what PM looks like, let me tell you about some of its possible uses. I’ve used this tool (and its predecessors) for reverse engineering, system troubleshooting, identifying malware, and even for simple timing and testing.

For example, on many occasions I’ve had to troubleshoot a program that wouldn’t install or that wouldn’t start up properly. With PM, you can monitor the process and see when things start to go wrong.

In the case of a QuickTime install failure, I could see that it picked up a file buried under the c:windows directory. This turned out to be a piece of InstallShield that had been cached previously. Deleting this file allowed my install to continue properly.

In my next column, I’ll go over a few simple “case studies” to help familiarize you with this tool. I’ll also let you know about some of the scary-sounding things it logs, and why they aren’t really problems. Download the tool and be ready to follow along.

The Perimeter Scan column gives you the facts you need to test your systems to prevent weaknesses. Ryan Russell is quality assurance manager at BigFix Inc., a configuration management company. He moderated the vuln-dev mailing list for three years under the alias “Blue Boar.” He was the lead author of Hack-Proofing Your Network, 2nd Ed., and the technical editor of the Stealing the Network book series.

IE 7 and Silverlight downloads planned by MS

By Susan Bradley Microsoft is planning to download to corporate sites a new build of Internet Explorer 7 on Feb. 12, and a new application called Silverlight on Jan. 22, according to a post by ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley. If your company uses Microsoft deployment tools to download and install updates, you may be wondering, “What if I don’t want everyone in my company to have the new IE 7 installed?” and “What the heck is Silverlight?”

Silverlight and IE 7 to get wide deployment

If you surf any Microsoft Web sites, such as the new, beta Microsoft Download Center or any of the tech forums, you’ve probably seen a prominent offer to download Silverlight (see Figure 1), which is a competitor to Adobe’s Flash media player. So far, in my early testing of Silverlight, Microsoft’s player has been slower than Flash.

Figure 1. Microsoft is using pop-up ads on its Web pages to push downloads for Silverlight, the Redmond company’s competitor to Flash.

On one system that I’m testing — or rather attempting to test — Silverlight on, I’ve been struggling just to get it to install. Even the suggestions from the Silverlight forums haven’t helped me to get it working on this one particular machine. The standard suggestions to help Silverlight install properly include disabling your antivirus and antispyware programs during the setup attempt.

The Geek Lectures blog reported on Jan. 14 that Silverlight will be available for download via Microsoft’s WSUS (Windows Server Update Services) beginning on Jan. 22. However, the Microsoft blog entry that Geek Lectures linked to has been altered from its original language and now is inconclusive. As far as I know, Silverlight will be an administrator-approved option that you will have to select in order for the player to be installed on your workstations, not an automatic install as with some updates.

The same apparently is not true of Microsoft’s plans to install a new version of IE 7 to companies that use WSUS 3.0. Those companies will find the new IE 7 being installed automatically on Feb. 12, according to a notice posted on Jan. 14 by the MS Manageability Team. The install will be automatic because the download is considered an “update rollup,” not an optional application.

You may very well want the new version of IE 7, because it will eliminate Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) checking, make the menu bar appear in the browser by default, and ask first-time users to select their preferred search engine, phishing filter, and ClearType settings. This is explained in Knowledge Base article 940767.

If you really need IE 6 instead of IE 7 for some reason, however, you’ll need to configure WSUS not to auto-approve the update. (IE 6 and 7 cannot co-exist on the same machine.) If you wish to postpone the IE 7 auto-install, more detailed instructions than were provided on the Manageability Team blog are in KB article 946202.

New patches for Apple QuickTime problems

Apple released on Jan. 15 an upgrade to Quicktime 7.4 to patch security issues in its movie-viewer product. More information can be found in Apple security bulletin 61798.

In addition, another Jan. 15 patch that updates Apple’s iPhone and iPod to version 1.1.3 is available from the same bulletin. I’ll report on my tests of these patches in my regular column next week.

943899
Dell machines need TLC with patch 943899

Several Windows Secrets readers are having issues with Vista’s performance patch 943899. Most of those who are reporting in appear to be Dell customers. So far, it appears that updating the base system may help to fix the issues we’re tracking.

In the Windows Update newsgroup, one poster has already shared his recommended series of steps to fix the issue. He installed a BIOS update from Dell, the Intel Mobiel chipset drivers, and the Intel Matrix Storage Manager v7.

If you’ve been suffering ill effects from patch 943899, make sure you contact Dell’s support, and also let me know what happened via the Windows Secrets contact page.

The Patch Watch column reveals problems with patches for Windows and major Windows applications. Susan Bradley recently received an MVP (Most Valuable Professional) award from Microsoft for her knowledge in the areas of Small Business Server and network security. She’s also a partner in a California CPA firm.