Replies

A hair stuck on the bottom of the mouse, intermittently interfering with the mouse’s light beam?
Sounds silly, I know, but I’ve known it to happen.

view.atmdt.com is an advertising site that is collecting click-through information. …

That’s the clincher.
Thank you.

Why not go directly to the [winhelp2002] site:

Indeed I did.
But no reply yet.

FYI.
WOT too warns one away.
http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/atdmt.com

stealth all your ports and no one can see your IP Address.

Warning! This is NOT TRUE!

With a regular internet connection (cable), Steve Gibson’s Shields up reports my NAT-router and my computer behind it fully stealthed, but still exactly reports my IP address.

But when I connect through Vypr Virtual Private Network, then my IP is effectively hidden for everybody else (Shields Up reports the Vypr server’s IP).

Don’t take my word for it. Test it.

Dear Fred,

In your article “How to sort desktop icons — for keeps” you state:

you’ll be able to set up — and keep! — your Desktop just the way you want

(emphasis is mine)

Well, I beg to differ. IMHO and years-long experience, the way Windows manages the desktop icon layout has always been a problem.

… many times the computer will rearrange these icons for no particular reason.

But to keep a long story, started with Windows 95, short, I’ll just give this link to solutions:
Save and Restore Windows Desktop and Icons

or Google for ”save desktop icon layout”

Finally, this function may be bundled with the utilities of higher-end graphics cards.

P.S. Melissa Nguyen’s EzDesk worked up to XP, but no more since Vista.

Thanks, guys, for your comments, but I’m afraid they’re pretty useless to me.

Let me rephrase the parameters of my thought experiment.

@ Gerald Shepard

1. My portable has a 17 inch screen and an air intake on its underside. One can hardly call it a laptop, because it’s too large and it needs too much cooling air to be comfortable on a lap. Underneath it, the portable absolutely requires a totally rigid surface, with at least 2 mm clearance all around; so no tablecloth, no couch, nothing soft, fuzzy, sexy or whatever could obstruct its ventilation.

2. A short power failure ( just a second or up to 90 minutes) is irrelevant to the portable because it does have rechargeable batteries that kick in when needed.

3. My external eSATA HDD needs its own separate power supply plugged into an AC power outlet.

4. I faithfully and regularly make full partition images to that external eSATA HDD + daily back-ups of important data to USB memory sticks.

@ Clint Rossmere

5. Activating “Safely Remove Hardware …” is my standard operating procedure before disconnecting any external drive, be it a HDD, a USB memory stick, an SD memory card, my camera, Garmin GPS navigator, cell phone, whatever device with storage memory.

6. If the data loss is just the file being written at the power loss, then recovery is trivial and the cost of a UPS and its limited-lifetime batteries is not justified.

@ JoeP

With Acronis True Image Home 2011, I tested the writing speed of my external eSATA disk, with performance options switched ON and OFF.
I had Acronis TIH make, write and validate an image file of my Vista partition, which, with normal compression, resulted in an image of 14.23 GB.
With performance options OFF (unchecked), it took 39.5 minutes, versus 9.5 minutes with performance options ON (checked). Multiply that by 4 partitions that need imaging.
In my humble opinion, this is not just a noticeable difference, it is an overwhelmingly dramatic performance gain.

So my question remains:

Would a power loss to my external eSATA drive damage only the file being written, or would all the disk’s contents be trashed?

P.S.
JoeP? Have I seen you haunting Steve Gibson’s news server?

Dear Fred,

I generally agree with your advice in your article “Beware bogus ‘Security Essentials’ downloads!”. But I think that you omitted to mention an invisible trap.

I’ve seen so-called pop-ups which in fact were graphics with a link leading to the malicious site. Even the little exit button of the pop-up (the white X on red background) is not really a button, but part of the graphic linking to the malicious site.

My advice would be: don’t touch any part of the pop-up, do NOT click the white-X-on-red-background exit button of the pop-up, but close the browser’s tab, or close the browser, or, if either tab or browser refuse to close, ruthlessly kill the browser session completely in Windows’ Task Manager.
Of course the experienced user will totally ignore and avoid clicking such a pop-up and just continue reading the rest of the page.

What do you think?

Regards,

Francis Kennis