Replies

That said – with a router blocking probes from outside, and the Avast/MSE scanning for malware in real time – I’ve not had a malware infection on any of the PC’s I look after in a long time. That’s why I was considering doing away with the software firewall on slower PCs.

On another forum, a couple weeks ago, we were discussing the merits of using an OS firewall. There was a very experienced member who was in that precise situation – stopped using a software firewall since he bought the router. Coincidentally, he caught a nasty virus just as we were discussing the issue and caught it from his own local network.
Many people will do fine without a software firewall. It’s just another layer of protection that may be useful or not… The one I use has low resource usage on the pc and what it costs would be offset if I was infected, so it’s a no brainer for me.

I believe it’s more the fact that 7200rpm disk drives run hotter than 5400rpm. That’s why almost all budget notebooks have 5400rpm drives and they ARE relatively slow.

I believe it’s also a matter of faster disks requiring more power, so accounting for shorter battery life.

Just a quick note to add the if you choose to Turn Off Password Protect Sharing, in Network and Sharing Center->Advanced Sharing Settings, you may be able to print without the need for authentication or the existence of an account with the same username and password you use on your pc, on the pc that’s sharing the printer.

That’s the reason for your problems, then. There may be other solutions, I must say I never tried it, but one easy way to handle it would be to create an account with the same username and password you use on your computer, on your wife’s computer. This should fix it.

A quick way to see if it works, or to get the permissions problem to go away, at least until you shutdown your pc, is to try to access your wife’s pc with windows explorer, or simply type \Peggy-Pet in the Windows 7 search box, just above the Windows Start button. You will be required to type a username and password: use your wife’s. You should be able to print, once you do this.

The windows user account in your wife’s pc is different from the one you use in your own pc?

I have a Samsung notebook with win 7 Home Premium (HP) pre-installed. I purchased win 7 Ultimate – a retail version. When I try to install Ultimate, the two options are: use Windows Anytime Upgrade (WAU) on the MS site or clean install (read kill all and reload all from scratch). I like some of the Samsung pre-installed apps and I also do NOT want to reload my other programs. The WAU trys to force me to pay ¡Again! for an activation key. I have googled for a work-around, to no avail. Does anyone know how to upgrade HP 64-bit to Ultimate 64-bit AND save data/ installed programs without paying for the WAU? BTW, MS support does not offer support or contact information for help on installing win 7 Ultimate over win 7 HP.
TIA,
JL

You can simply use your Windows 7 Ultimate key with Windows Anytime Upgrade. You will have the option to do that, I upgraded my laptop that way and I was not forced to buy a new license.

Honestly, I do not really agree with the go portable over the go desktop recommendation. A 17″ laptop is hardly portable, after a few days lugging the thing around. Bang for buck, you can’t beat the desktop and if you do have some task that requires more horsepower, desktop’s do provide the better value. Of course, I may not be the best example, has I do have a desktop and a few laptops to go around, but whenever I need to do most of the dev work, I do it on the desktop. Laptops are always slower, even when you run a good CPU as other subsystems are usually slower, due to cost – disk systems being a good example.

So for really hard work and a real performance configuration, a desktop will always be my favorite. Windows 7 x64 really made this clearer, with full compatibility with everything I use. Contrary to some previously described experiences, even my HP scanner behaves better under Windows 7 x64 than with XP – I love the native driver support and the app that comes with it. 7 x64 works so well that I am actually contemplating going from 7 x86 to 7 x64 on my laptop, thus making the 1.2 GB that 7 x86 does not use available to be used.

I find hardware support in Windows 7 pretty good. I had an old Toshiba Tecra M4 bought on 1994 that run XP very slowly. I decided to try 7 x32 with it and it actually boots and runs faster on 7 than it did on XP. I guess getting rid of a lot of Toshiba’s software helped, but even after boot it behaves better with 7. This laptop had no use for a while until it was rescued by Windows 7 and now it has replaced a XP running netbook as my kid’s computer!

BTW, a firewall does NOT determine whether or not a program is allowed to execute. A firewall only controls whether or not a program is allowed to communicate over a network. The anti-malware components available with most third party firewalls control program execution by detection mechanisms not a general allow/disallow paradigm. In a managed environment, either @ work or @ home, permissions can be granted or revoked to execute programs but this is outside of the scope of a firewall. If a third party firewall claims to be able to control any program execution it is using methods other than the firewall API provided by Windows.

Joe

An OS firewall, or what is so frequently called, does just this: allows you to determine whether any given program should be allowed to run or not. This type of monitoring is typical of Host Intrusion Prevention Systems (HIPS), another name for the OS firewall products, probably mor apt. ZoneAlarm, Online Armor, Comodo (I believe as I have never used it) do just this and this is precisely what gives them an advantage over the non HIPS firewalls, such as the windows firewall. It’s not just a matter of controlling outside access, but indeed of preventing unknown or known rogue apps and components from being executed.

My opinion is that running such HIPS systems provides a type of protection you can never get from a router’s firewall, and thus such systems are a very interesting additional layer of protection against malware.

I think software firewalls are a recommended additional protection level, not so much for the network firewall function, but much more because of what is commonly described as an operating system firewall. An OS firewall will control which programs and components are allowed to execute, regardless of whether they want to connect to the internet or your local network, if you have one. The windows firewalls do not provide any protection of this type, even if on Vista and Win7, the UAC does provide some degree of control over programs.

I have used both ZoneAlarm and Online Armor, the latter being my current preference. I really like the additional protection it provides. There is a free version, but I go with the additional protection of the ++ version, which uses anti-malware signatures to identify any program or component being executed on your computer.

Thinking a hardware firewall gives you all the protection you need, with the evolving threats on the net today, may be a very dangerous idea.

Chuck,

What I like when doing this is that OneNote becomes the sole source for your info, as you don’t really need the original file (you can simply delete it). Not sure what Office version you are using, on OneNote 2010 all you need to do select the Insert tab, choose Attach file and pick the file you want. After doing this, you can even right click the resulting icon and choose Insert Printout and all the pages of your document will be added to the page you are working on. If you do this, you will have a copy of each page of the document or each slide, etc, into a single page of your OneNote notebook, so no million tabs as you described.

Of course, when you want just a few of many slides, a simple suggestion would be to delete all the slides you’re not interested in and attach or link just to the resulting file.

I have done this mostly with Word, Powerpoint and Zip files, but OneNote lets you attach pretty much the files you want.

While Undo is indeed the option to remove something you have done, you can also select and remove anything else you add to a OneNote page. In a quick test , after Insert a word doc printout, all I needed to remove the 34 printout pages was to click Shift + End to select them all and press Delete, so no big effort to remove that either.

You have the possibility to insert a whole file into a One Note page. The result is an icon that you can click to open the full document. Is that what you want?

I must say that I uninstalled IE 9 Beta from Win7 32 bits, just as described in this thread and had no issues. After the reboot, IE 9 was gone.

Have you made sure it’s gone from Control Panel?

Hi Lynn,

I don’t think restoring from an image that may have errors will damage your disk. The data written to the new disk may have errors, but it won’t harm your disk from a physical point of view, so if you do have errors with the latest image, restoring a good image will sort any issues.

As to the procedure for recovery, whenever I needed to apply an image, I just booted with the Acronis boot CD and choose the recovery option, choosing the image file from which to recover and Acronis takes care of it all.

I have never done a clone operation as such. I just backup my disks, that creates a .tib file and I use that file by choosing it during the Recovery operation. My advice would be to boot from the Acronis boot CD, which you should have created by now, with the external USB disk containing your image connected and powered and then choose Recover, when acronis boots. Acronis will ask you which image file you want to use and you will need to pick the .tib file you want to use. Acronis will then ask to where you want that image recovered into and you will choose the new disk with your XP3 new installation. Acronis will replace that with the contents of your .tib file.

Hope this helps and all goes well.

Not sure if the thread is old enough, but anyway. I used Mover to upgrade a 32 bit XP to a 64 bit Windows 7 a year ago and most programs migrated quite well. If I remember well, I had an issue with Office, but that was easily reinstalled. All other programs were migrated nicely and that saved me a lot of work.

IMHO, PC Mover is a very well done product and it just works.

I have used Online Armor with either MSE (my desktop, Windows 7 x64) or Vipre (laptop, Windows 7 x86). Online Armor has a ++ version, where you will get malware signatures from Emsisoft (used with their Emsisoft Anti-Malware). OA only uses the sigs when files are executed, thus ensuring double protection with the AV, without overburdening the PC. OA also has a free version (which is a great firewall on its own, but that has no malware sigs to go with).