Great Android helper apps for Windows

Great Android helper apps for Windows

By Fred Langa

Some free and low-cost apps make your Android phone and your Windows PC work together as a team.

Use these tools to optimize your home or office Wi-Fi setup, remotely control your PC from your phone (or your phone from your PC), share and transfer files in either direction, create and edit full-blown Microsoft Office documents on your phone, and much more!

First, however, I have a confession to make: I was a reluctant convert to smartphones — in large part because I’m fad-phobic. When I see crowds of people standing in line, glassy-eyed, waiting to get their hands on the latest smartphone offering, my natural inclination is to back away and run in the other direction.

Part of it is seeing how fragile and fussy many expensive smartphones are. And part of it is that I just didn’t initially see the need for many smartphone functions.

Android changed that for me. My Android smartphone isn’t flashy or expensive, but it’s survived mishandling that surely would have cracked the glass of an iPhone. It makes calls reliably, no matter how I hold it. It gives me instant access to e-mail, messaging, my calendar, contacts, news, and weather. It’s handy to have a camera always available for snapshots. I love having always-up-to-date, GPS turn-by-turn navigation available, no matter where I am or in whose vehicle I’m riding. It’s great to have instant access to my music collection, and I’ve enjoyed being able to live-stream my favorite hometown radio stations when I’m on the road.

But one of the biggest surprises I got from my Android phone was the way it could work with and improve my Windows PC use, both at home and on the road. I never expected that.

In the rest of this article, I’ll show you some of the most interesting and promising apps that I’ve found for making an Android phone a highly useful adjunct to a Windows PC, and vice-versa.

All the apps I’ll describe here are either free or low-cost, and none requires high-end phone hardware. In fact, my phone is an ordinary, mainstream unit currently running Android 2.3.3 (a.k.a. Gingerbread). Chances are, no matter what Android-based phone you have or may get, all the apps I talk about in the following paragraphs will run just fine for you.

Analyze and improve your Wi-Fi connections

The first Android app that made me realize that my phone could actually improve my Windows experience was FarProc’s Wi-Fi Analyzer (free; site; see Figure 1).

Figure 1. FarProc’s free Wi-Fi Analyzer is a five-function tool that lets you identify and explore the Wi-Fi signals in your area. The app’s basic Channel Graph mode is shown.

Before I go on, a word about these screen shots. Taking a photo of a pixelated smartphone screen with a pixel-based digital camera is not a happy experience; moir&#233 patterns and other artifacts are almost inevitable. I also had to block out personal, identifying information in some photos. I apologize for the uneven quality of these screen shots.

Back to the software at hand: Wi-Fi Analyzer, as you’d expect, shows you all available access points in your area. But the main attraction of this as a Windows helper app is that it also will figure out what the best and clearest channel is for your home or office Wi-Fi router. It might be able to do this better than your router itself can. It did, in my case! (See Figure 2.)

Figure 2. The Wi-Fi Analyzer’s most useful function as a Windows helper app is its Channel Rating that can automatically tell you the least interference-prone channel available for all your Wi-Fi devices, including Windows laptops and PCs.

I used this app to help overcome intermittent interference from my neighbors’ setups. I followed the app’s advice and locked my router on the channel it recommended, which was not the one my router had chosen automatically for itself. From then on, my connection speed and reliability improved for all my Wi-Fi devices, both Windows and Android.

In addition to the Channel Graph and Channel Rating functions just mentioned, the app also includes a Time Graph (signal strength over time), a simple list of all Available Access Points, and an analog-style Wi-Fi Signal Strength Meter.

Smartphone tethering and hotspotting

Twice last autumn, my home office lost power and communication for a number of days during separate extreme-weather events. I have a generator, so I could produce electricity, but with no functioning phone or cable modem, I had neither ordinary means to go online to research my Windows Secrets columns nor the usual way to submit them (by e-mail) when I was finished.

So I used my smartphone’s standard (and built-in) hotspot/tethering function, in which the phone acts as a temporary Wi-Fi access point or router to let PCs get online via the phone’s data service and plan. It offers many of the same security features of full-blown routers or access points. I completed and turned in a Top Story and two columns this way. (See Figure 3.)

Figure 3. Tethering/hotspotting lets your smartphone act as a standard access point for any Wi-Fi–capable devices (such as Windows laptops).

In addition to emergency use at home, I’ve also used tethering in motels, restaurants, airports, and other places where the offered Wi-Fi service was poor, nonexistent, expensive, or suspect.

Almost all Android smartphones from 2.2 onward support Wi-Fi tethering; check your owner’s manual for specifics. For general information, see this AndroidCentral article or this Wikipedia article.

View and control your Windows PC by smartphone

LogMeIn’s join.me Viewer (free; site) lets any Android phone securely view any participating Windows desktop. (See Figure 4.)

Figure 4. The free join.me viewer lets you see anything displayed on a participating Windows PC’s screen, via your Android smartphone.

You can use join.me to remotely view presentations, documents, or anything on a remote PC’s screen. (You and the person at the remote PC both use the free software to establish a secure viewing channel.)

But it’s only a viewer: you can’t use join.me to create new documents, nor can you remotely control the Windows PC.

When I need those functions, I use join.me’s more capable sibling, LogMeIn’s Ignition (U.S. $30; site). It’s a smartphone-based remote-control and remote-desktop app that securely gives you total control over any PC that you’re authorized to use, as long as that PC is also running any version of the standard LogMeIn software — even the free version (site)!

Ignition comes with special functions that let you emulate right and left mouseclicks, various keystroke combinations (such as CTRL+ALT+DEL), and so on — from your phone.

Of course, putting a full-sized PC screen on a smartphone can be problematic, but Ignition’s zoom and scroll functions make it manageable.

View, control your smartphone from a Windows PC

Damian Kolakowski’s Remote Desktop (free; site) works in the other direction. It lets you remote-control your phone and access its contents. You get direct access even to your smartphone’s root file system from any Windows PC, using Internet Explorer, Chrome, or Firefox. (See Figure 5.)

Figure 5. The free Remote Desktop app lets you use your Windows PC and any mainstream browser to view, organize, and retrieve documents, photos, videos, mail logs, MP3s — anything — on your Android smartphone.

This app makes sharing and organizing the files on your phone much easier — you don’t have to use the phone’s tiny buttons or screen keyboard. Instead, you can use your standard Windows desktop or laptop system’s hardware to manage the phone.

And, if you know Linux/Android, you also can use the app’s Terminal function to interact directly with the phone’s operating system, for near-total control. (Yes, it’s potentially dangerous. Be careful!)

Use native MS Office documents on your phone

It’s hard to imagine until you see it, but Quickoffice Pro (free trial; $15 to keep; occasional sale prices as low as $5; site) lets you access, create, edit, and share genuine, native-format, Microsoft Office documents, spreadsheets, and presentations on your smartphone. The app supports the file formats used from Office 97 onward, including Office 2010’s .docx and related formats. The app also includes a .pdf viewer. (See Figure 6.)

Figure 6. Quickoffice Pro puts a mini Office-compatible suite into your smartphone.

After you’ve created or edited a document, you can e-mail it right from inside Quickoffice. Or you can share it through a variety of built-in connections to your accounts on Google Docs, Dropbox, Box, Evernote, Catch, Egnyte, Huddle, SugarSync, MobileMe, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, SlideShare, Docstoc, Scribd, Yammer, and other services.

The app also includes a file manager that lets you create, copy, move, delete, rename, and sort files and folders in your phone’s memory. Quickoffice’s other features are far too extensive to list here; see the site for the full spiel.

When you use this app with a tool such as Remote Desktop (discussed previously), you can drop live Office files created on your Windows PC to your phone (or vice versa) and always have current, editable versions of your important files available at your fingertips. In some cases, this means your smartphone can take the place of a laptop or netbook on a trip.

As of this writing, a $15 price is current — a remarkably modest amount for an Office suite. However, there’s a free trial available, and I also recently picked up a copy of QuickOffice on sale for just $5, which is positively astounding. At either $5 or $15, I think this is a truly great app.

An app in development that bears watching

BlueStacks is a free Android emulator/virtual machine that lets you run your Android apps directly on your Windows PC. It’s in late alpha, so there are many rough edges, but when it’s finished, it will complete the circle. You’ll be able to use BlueStacks to run Android apps on your PC. You’ll also be able to use the apps I described previously to access or remotely run your Windows apps from your phone as well as to seamlessly pass documents back and forth.

BlueStacks has two components: Cloud Connect (free; site) runs on your Android phone, and the BlueStacks virtual machine itself (free; site) that runs on your Windows PC.

Definitely worth watching!

These Windows helper apps are only the beginning

Android use is growing exponentially now, and new apps — free and commercial — are pouring into the marketplace. Some pundits are predicting that the number of Android apps will surpass the number of iPhone apps this year.

You can choose from among many places to scope out what’s available, but the sites I find most useful are Google’s own enormous Android Market, with some 400,000 apps currently available; AppBrain, which filters, reviews, and rates Android Market apps to help you separate the wheat from the chaff; and Amazon’s Appstore for Android, available in the left-hand navigational bar on Amazon’s home page. In addition to offering some apps unavailable elsewhere, Amazon also offers one normally commercial app free each day.

Windows is a great OS, and Android is very good and getting better. Together, they make an awesome combination.

Fred Langa is a senior editor of the Windows Secrets Newsletter. He was formerly editor of Byte Magazine (1987-91), editorial director of CMP Media (1991-97), and editor of the LangaList e-mail newsletter from its origin in 1997 until its merger with Windows Secrets in November 2006.

Continuing ed: VBA programmers like books

By Kathleen Atkins

Longtime programmers accustomed to one conceptual model for writing code can have difficulty embracing different models.

That’s why Lounge member Dick-Y asked for recommendations for books about VBA object-oriented programming. He’s a COBOL, “verb-oriented” programmer.

Happily, Loungers in the Visual Basic for Apps forum are giving him lots of suggestions: More»

The following links are this week’s most interesting Lounge threads, including several new questions to which you might be able to provide responses:

☼ 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 into today’s discussions in the Lounge.

The Lounge Life column is a digest of the best of the WS Lounge discussion board. Kathleen Atkins is associate editor of Windows Secrets.

Illusions in an ice-and-water world

By Tracey Capen The world beneath the waves is strange and beautiful; things behave in unusual and unexpected ways — especially for visitors from terra firma. In this curious and novel video of divers working and playing underwater, what we think we see is actually a world turned on its head. Play the video

Secure your browser from homepage hijacking

By Fred Langa It’s always annoying — and sometimes dangerous — when software changes your browser’s homepage without your consent. Here’s how to prevent malware, or any software, from making unauthorized changes to your browser’s homepage.

Steps for locking down a browser homepage

Reader Harry Norkin needs a better way to prevent homepage hijacks.

• “About those programs that, when installed, hijack your homepage. Thereafter, when you go to the Internet, their page is what you get.

  “Not knowing how to prevent this, I put my desired homepage into my favorites (bookmarked it). Now, if my homepage gets hijacked, I click my Favorites tab, scroll down to my preferred page, and click it. With my page back, I click the Tools tab, select Internet Options, and click Use Current, which makes the browser open to that page.”

That’s one way to do it, Harry, and it does let you recover from a homepage hijack. But a better technique is to prevent hijacks from happening in the first place.

Here’s how to do it in Windows XP, Vista, and Win7 with Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer 8 and 9.

Internet Explorer with Vista and Win7: (See the next section for additional instructions needed for Vista and Win7 Starter and Home versions.) IE’s Home Page controls are located within a secure portion of the Local Group Policy settings — a well-guarded portion of the operating system that’s difficult for unauthorized software (or persons) to get to. Only admins can access and change Policies.

Changing the settings — such as locking down the homepage — looks complicated when all the steps are spelled out, but it takes only a minute and a few clicks using the Local Group Policy Editor, gpedit.msc, from an admin-level account.

• Step 1. Exit Internet Explorer.
• Step 2. In the Start menu’s text box, type gpedit.msc and press Enter. In most versions of Win7 and Vista, the Local Group Policy Editor will open. If it doesn’t (or it opens and is empty), you might have a Windows version in which gpedit.msc is disabled. I’ll cover that condition in a moment.
• Step 3. Assuming the editor opened correctly, navigate down the left pane to User Configuration/Administrative Templates/Windows Components/Internet Explorer.
• Step 4. In the right pane, scroll down to Disable changing home page settings. (See Figure 1.)

  
  Figure 1. Navigate through the Windows Local Group Policy Editor to lock down your IE homepage.

• Step 5. Double-click Disable changing home page settings, and a new dialog box will open.
• Step 6. Click as shown to enable the setting; that is, to disable changing homepage settings. (Yes, the language is awkward; you’re enabling your ability to disable homepage changes.)

  If you wish, you also can enter a URL for a master homepage in the dialog’s lower-left pane. Any URL you enter there will take precedence over homepages specified in any and all user account homepages. (Highlighted in red in Figure 2.)

  
  Figure 2. In the Disable changing home page settings box, click Enabled and enter the URL for the homepage you prefer.

• Step 7. Exit the Local Group Policy Editor.
• Step 8. Restart IE; your selected homepage should now be immune from hijackings.

IE with Vista and Win7 Starter and Home editions: These two Windows versions use the same settings but don’t natively support use of the Local Group Policy Editor. Microsoft says it’s because gpedit is meant for corporate use. (As if home users don’t also need security and control … sigh!)

Microsoft does, however, offer a kind of clumsy workaround on an MS Download Center page. There, you can download (for free) a series of large spreadsheets called “Group Policy Settings Reference for Windows and Windows Server.” You can look up any setting in the spreadsheet to determine what the associated Registry entry is, then use Regedit (or any other Registry editor) to add or alter the setting as needed. As I said: clumsy.

If you’re more adventurous, you can add support for gpedit.msc via the back-door trickery described in the TechMynd article, “Enable GroupPolicy GPEDIT for Windows Vista Home.” The same technique should work for Win7 Starter and Home, but I can’t vouch for it. (The method they describe is logical, but I simply haven’t tried it.)

IE 8 with Windows XP: You use a different, less-secure method of locking the homepage in Internet Explorer 8. (IE 9 won’t run in XP.) It’s described in the Techie Corner article, “How to disable or enable homepage setting in Internet Explorer.” There’s a bit more detail in MVP Sandi Hardmeier’s page on the same topic.

Firefox: This browser uses a completely different way of managing its user preferences such as the homepage settings — it stores everything in a JavaScript file. If you make that file read-only, no changes can be made to any Firefox user preferences until, and unless, the file is made read/write again. It’s kind of an all-or-nothing way of locking down that browser.

Fortunately, it’s easy to do:

• Step 1. Close Firefox.
• Step 2. Click the Windows Start orb and, in the search box, enter:

  %appdata%mozillafirefoxprofiles.

• Step 3. Press Enter, and your Firefox profiles folder will open. You should see a subfolder named {something}.default (for example, uza29oft.default). Open that folder and navigate to a file called prefs.js. Right-click on that file, select Properties, and change its attribute to Read-only. (See Figure 3.)

  
  Figure 3. If you make Firefox’s prefs.js file read-only, all your user settings (including your homepage) will be locked down.

• Step 4. Restart Firefox.

Google Chrome is odd man out among the big three browsers. I can find no way at all to lock your homepage in Chrome. Neither can the participants in an official Google Chrome support forum, where the participant-selected Best Answer states: “None of Chrome’s settings can be locked ….” See that page for more info and possible workarounds.

A more complete screen-snipping tool

Ed Altman sent in this suggestion in response to my Dec. 1, 2011, item on Vista’s and Win7’s built-in screen-capture tool.

• “Hi Fred! You noted Win7’s built-in screen-snipping tool, and I agree it’s good. But I find it to be very rudimentary when compared with the many other free tools out there.

  “I’ve been using PicPick (info page) for quite some time, and its screen-capture options are far superior to Win7’s Screen Snipping. Rather than having to invoke it and then select an option, there are hotkeys for each option — and they’re all user-configurable.

  “The screen capture is opened in PicPick’s built-in editor, where you can easily manipulate as you like (or annotate with arrows, titles, etc.) and then save the file in many different formats such as JPG, PNG, etc. The editor is not as full-featured as Paint.NET, but it’s much better than MS Paint.

  “I hope this helps someone out there.”

Thanks, Ed. I’m sure it will!

Registry snapshot-and-compare utilities

Greg Anderson’s interest was piqued by a software tool mentioned in the Dec. 15, 2011, LangaList Plus column.

• “The article references a piece of software to take snapshots of the registry and compare output. I’ve been looking for something that will do this, and I’m frustrated with the lack of available tools.”

There are several ways to capture Registry information, Greg, including using Windows’ built-in tools.

First, open Regedit and select the entire contents of your Registry by clicking Computer at the top of the left pane. Right-click and then select Export. Save the resulting output as either a .reg or .txt file. Give it an obvious name, such as before.reg or something similar.

When you want to see what’s changed in the Registry, do the same thing — except name this second exported file something like after.reg.

Now, use Windows’ built-in file-comparison tool, fc.exe, to dig out the differences. Open a command prompt and type:

fc /u before.reg after.reg > differences.txt

(If you used different file names for your exported Registry contents, change the above accordingly.)

Double-click the differences.txt file, and you’ll see exactly what’s changed between the before and after versions of the Registry — simple as that.

Other, more automated options include the free Windows Sysinternals Process Monitor (download page); RegShot (page), a small, free, and open-source Registry-compare utility; and the similar (and also free) What Changed (page).

Happy comparing!

More about CPU-temperature utilities

Will Pearce solved a system problem with a temperature-taking utility.

• “Earlier this year, I had a reason to get intimately acquainted with the usefulness of such utilities. My system’s liquid–cooling system pump started vapor-locking, causing my CPU to overheat and my system to shut down. It took me a while to figure out what was going on and to replace the CPU cooler.

  “During this episode, I tried out a number of different temperature-monitoring utilities. Ultimately, I decided that the only good monitor is one that I can always see and quickly read. This led me to Core Temp (info/download page), which I have not seen mentioned.

  “With CT and its gadget loaded, I’ve got an easily scanned display of core temps — and core operational loads. With it always running (and, with a dual-monitor setup, always visible), I should never get caught unawares by a CPU-overheating issue.”

Thanks, Will!

Actually, Core Temp was one of five utilities I discussed in the Oct. 13, 2011, Top Story, “Take your PC’s temperature — for free!” Links to all five free utilities are included in the above article. Check out these sites for additional free temperature-monitoring tools:

• Speccy
• Real Temp
• CPU Thermometer

Surely one of these will fit your needs!

Fred Langa is a senior editor of the Windows Secrets Newsletter. He was formerly editor of Byte Magazine (1987–91), editorial director of CMP Media (1991–97), and editor of the LangaList e-mail newsletter from its origin in 1997 until its merger with Windows Secrets in November 2006.

Storage Spaces might be Win8's best feature yet

By Woody Leonhard In following Windows 8’s somewhat painful road to fruition, I’ve found a lot of things to lambaste. But one new feature — Storage Spaces — might by itself justify the jump to Win8. It’s a killer application.

A valuable tool rewritten and renamed

What’s crazy about Storage Spaces is that Microsoft has already shipped a fully functional version in its original Windows Home Server, released way back in July 2007. It was called Drive Extender, and it was very similar to what Microsoft is describing in its Building Windows 8 blog, “Virtualizing storage for scale, resiliency, and efficiency.”

The really crazy part? Microsoft yanked Drive Extender from the second version of Windows Home Server, released in April 2011. The company claimed at the time that the technology had bugs deep inside that couldn’t be exorcised in the normal course of upgrading from Version 1 to Version 2. (I hollered and moaned about that excuse at the time, but to no avail.)

Drive Extender was one of two really cool features in Windows Home Server I relied on all the time. (The other was automatic backup.) But Microsoft threw it away. I felt so strongly about the possible loss of Drive Extender that I’ve refused to upgrade to WHS Version 2. To this day, I run the original version because Drive Extender is truly that important to me.

So now I know why MS took Drive Extender out of Windows Home Server 2: it’s building the same technology, reworked from the ground up, into Windows 8 and Windows 8 Server. It looks great.

The “virtualization” idea behind Storage Spaces

If you’re following the development of Windows 8, you’re going to get sick of the term “virtualization.” Guaranteed. You’ll see the term over and over in Microsoft’s Win8 marketing material. (I expect to see a claim that virtual BSoDs are now superior to the nonvirtual versions we unfortunately know and love.)

But in the case of Storage Spaces, there’s a solid core of real-world, useful stuff in its application of virtualization technology.

Windows 8’s Storage Spaces takes care of disk management behind the scenes so you don’t have to. You’ll never even know (or care) which drive on your computer holds specific folders or files. Volumes and folders get extended across multiple physical drives as needed — and you don’t have to lift a finger.

When Windows tells you you’re running out of disk space, simply install another drive — it’s automatically absorbed into the Storage Space Borg, er, pool. There are no new drive letters or partitions to think about, no copying or moving massive numbers of files from one drive to another, no homebrew backup hacks. For those of us accustomed to Windows’ whining and whinging, the Storage Spaces approach to disk management feels like a breath of fresh air.

(When you add a hard drive to the Storage Spaces pool, any data on that drive is obliterated — automatically and irretrievably. That’s the price the drive pays for being absorbed into Storage Spaces.)

Data safety is a key component of Storage Space. If you have two or more physical hard drives with sufficient capacity, the Storage Space pool is automatically mirrored between two or more independent hard drives. If one of the hard drives dies, you just stick in a new one and wait an hour or two while Win8 rebuilds the mirrored files and folders. It’s really that simple.

How Storage Spaces hangs together

Microsoft hasn’t provided full details about Storage Space and its idiosyncrasies, but the Building Windows 8 blog mentioned above provides a thorough overview of how things are supposed to work. Here’s a summary:

To set up Storage Spaces most effectively, you’ll need two or more hard drives permanently dedicated to a data storage pool. That lets Win8 keep two copies of all your data automatically (the mirroring mentioned above) — there’s no effort on your part.

Within the pool, you can create one or more spaces. Each space behaves much like a regular disk: it has a drive letter (although there’s no physical drive involved), you can format it, copy data to it, even repartition it. But you don’t need to worry about running out of space in a space — spaces expand as needed until you physically run out of hard-drive capacity. Add a new drive to Storage Spaces pool every time it says “Feed me,” and you have, in effect, nearly infinite storage that never needs to be shuffled from drive to drive.

You can designate individual spaces as mirrored, giving you the flexibility to protect often-used, critical files while saving overall disk space. (Your programs never have to make a distinction between a real and mirror file; Storage Spaces handles that behind the scenes.)

For unmirrored files, Storage Spaces also provides parity spaces, which can also recover data from dead drives. Parity spaces use less physical space than mirroring but require more I/O processing. They’re best used for large files that aren’t updated very often — videos, for example.

If all of this sounds like a RAID implementation, well, it isn’t. The end result is similar to RAID, but the internal technology Microsoft uses is completely different. There’s no need for specialized hardware — no weird drivers strapped in the middle. Storage Spaces is built into, and implemented with, the NTFS file system. All you need to take full advantage of Storage Spaces is two or more hard drives, in addition to your boot drive, and they can be of any size, any type, internal or external. Yes, you can even use that old 100-GB drive you have lying around to get fully redundant backups of all of your data in real time, and all you have to do is install the drive. The hard-drive manufacturers are going to love it. Solid state drive manufacturers probably will, too, because SSDs are an obvious choice for the boot drive.

Putting together a typical Storage Spaces PC

The aforementioned Microsoft blog steps through an example of setting up Storage Spaces on a typical PC. (It must be noted that this typical PC includes five hard drives running more than 12TB of disk space. I guess that’s typical in Redmond.)

Here’s how its example configuration works:

• The boot drive, C:, has Windows on it. Windows 8 can’t boot directly from a space, so the C: drive hasn’t been put into the Storage Spaces pool. There are ways around the restriction, but it looks like the simplest approach is to just leave the C: drive out of the Borg.
• All other hard drives go into the Storage Spaces pool. They’re a mixture of different sizes and use different methods for connecting to the PC — Storage Spaces doesn’t care whether you mix and match internal and external drives of any size.
• The example steps through setting up a space called Documents and assigning it to drive letter D:. The Documents space is set up as a mirrored space, which is the kind of redundancy you would usually want with documents.
• Finally, the example sets up a second space called Multimedia, assigned to drive letter E:. The Multimedia space gets only parity redundancy — appropriate for spaces that hold big files that are rarely changed.

With a PC set up this way, you can put files in either the Documents or the Multimedia spaces (i.e., on the virtual D: or E: drives) with complete assurance that, should a hard drive crash, all your data will survive intact. Moreover, the two spaces will expand independently to occupy all the room on all the drives — except the C: drive.

Amazing. This is the way storage should’ve been implemented ten years ago.

Finally, the necessary caveat: At this time, there’s no guarantee that Microsoft will ship a full and robust implementation of the Storage Spaces feature described in the blog. But if it does, it could be at least one powerful reason for upgrading to Windows 8.

I might even recycle my Windows Home Server box.

Woody Leonhard writes computer books, primarily about Windows and Office, most recently the award-winning Windows 7 All-In-One For Dummies. He’s a Senior Contributing Editor at InfoWorld, where his Tech Watch columns bring some common sense — and a jaundiced eye — to the latest industry shenanigans.

Starting 2012 with a typical Patch Tuesday

By Susan Bradley We start 2012 with the usual suspects: media-player patching, Windows Kernel, and MS Office. Most of the patches this round are not critical, but the most unusual is a much-anticipated fix for an SSL vulnerability called the BEAST attack.

MS12-004 (2631813 and 2636391)
Media vulnerabilities kick off 2012 patches

Our lone critical update from Microsoft for this Patch Tuesday fixes flaws in Windows Multimedia Library, and it applies to various media-file formats. It impacts MIDI files played by Windows Media Player, as well as maliciously coded files that show captions. It’s expected that this exploit will soon be used in the wild.

The patch applies to all supported versions of Windows, but it’s of less risk to Windows 7 platforms, as noted in a Microsoft Security Research & Defense blog. Also, Windows Media Player 12 turns off closed captioning by default, so it’s less vulnerable to attacks. The patch is rated important for MS DirectShow.

► What to do: See MS12-004 for more information and links to patches. With Windows XP, you’ll get both KB 2631813 and KB 2636391; with Win7, you’ll get just KB 2636391.

MS12-001 (2644615)
Another Kernel patch to fix a security feature

In an unusual twist, Windows XP SP3 users get a bye on this patch; for everyone else, it’s an important update.

This relatively obscure exploit targets only those software applications compiled with the now-outdated Visual C++ .NET 2003 and using a security protection called SafeSEH. In this specific circumstance, an attacker could bypass the SafeSEH code installed in an application and then use other exploits to compromise Windows systems. You can find more information than you probably want to know about this exploit on the Accuvant blog, “Old meets new: Microsoft Windows SafeSEH incompatibility” and in a Microsoft Security Research & Defense blog.

► What to do: Install KB 2644615 when offered, or go to MS12-001 for links to the appropriate patch download.

MS120-002 (2603381)
Patch Windows XP for unwanted packages

Packager.exe is used within XP to pack together icons and embedded data into a single document or file. When a malicious packager file is placed on a file share or remote WebDav (SharePoint) location, it can be used to take control of Windows XP and Server 2003 systems.

This patch is rated important for XP SP3, XP Professional x64 SP2, and current versions of Windows Server 2003.

Installing this update ensures you’ll be protected — but not clicking on unknown remote-file locations can also go a long way toward keeping you safe. In an itpro.co.uk posting, Davey Winder talks about relative browser security and points to the real threat — us, the browser users who indiscriminately click Web links.

► What to do: Install KB 2603381 when offered or go to MS12-002 for patch downloads.

MS12-003 (2646524)
A regional fix for Windows XP and Vista

Rated important, the exploit patched by KB 2646524 applies only to systems running Windows XP, Vista, or Windows Server Versions 2003 and 2008 that are configured with a Chinese, Japanese, or Korean locale.

So if you don’t live there, why are you getting this update? It’s a proactive patch, should you ever change your location or use Unicode characters.

► What to do: If you’re certain you’ll never set your machine to Chinese, Japanese, or Korean locales, skip KB 2646524 (MS12-003).

MS12-005 (2584146)
Compromised Office files could lead to attacks

ClickOnce is a technology from Microsoft that you’ve probably seen a million times and never realized what it was. As documented on a Wikipedia page, it’s typically seen by users as the security warning message you get when you download an application from the Web.

A maliciously coded ClickOnce application can also be embedded inside an Office document and used to launch an attack. Microsoft Help and Support article 2584146 notes that you might see a change in the security warning after installing this update. The patch is rated important for all current versions of Windows.

► What to do: Install KB 2584146 (MS12-005) as soon as possible.

MS12-006 (2643584)
Secure Socket Layer patched for BEAST threat

Back in September, a new SSL BEAST (Browser Exploit Against SSL/TLS) attack was revealed by two security researchers at the 2011 ekoparty security conference, held in Argentina. As reported in a Kaspersky Lab threat post blog, the presenters demonstrated how attackers could insert themselves into an SSL transmission and steal encrypted cookies.

I expected this patch to ship last December, but testing revealed problems with SAP software, forcing Microsoft to delay release until the new year. To ensure there are no issues with the update, Microsoft has shipped it with a Fix it — posted in Help and Support article 2643584 — to enable and disable the security update. Microsoft also states that KB 2618444 (MS11-099) must be installed along with the patches in MS12-006 (a recent cumulative IE update), if not installed already.

► What to do: The update in MS12-006 is rated important for all current versions of Windows. Security experts are recommending that users test this patch for possible as-yet-undisclosed problems. (There are various patch numbers, depending on your install version of Windows.) I suggest holding off on this patch until at least the end of January.

MS12-007 (2607664)
A special security patch you’ll likely never see

If you’re keeping track of Microsoft security bulletin numbers and are wondering what happened to MS12-007, it’s an update you’ll probably never see. This update, rated important, is only for administrators using the Microsoft Anti-Cross Site Scripting Library to protect their websites.

► What to do: Test the impact of KB 2607664 (MS12-007) on Web servers using Anti-XSS and deploy as soon as possible.

Adobe Reader X and Reader X finally get fixed

Back in December, Adobe released an out-of-cycle security update for Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9 for Windows. At the time, there were reports of actual attacks using the related vulnerabilities.

But the company waited until its next regularly scheduled update-release date (January 10) to patch Adobe Reader X, Acrobat X, and older versions of Reader for OS X and Windows. You’ll find the details for these latest patches in Adobe Security bulletin APSB12-01.

Note that Adobe Reader 8 and Acrobat 8 are no longer receiving security updates. If you can’t — or are not inclined to — upgrade to the latest versions of Adobe’s PDF products, it’s time to look to alternative PDF platforms such as Foxit Reader, PDF-XChange Viewer, and Nitro PDF Reader.

► What to do: All these Adobe patches are rated critical, so apply them as soon as possible by using the Adobe updater app or going to the Adobe New Downloads site.

Regularly updated problem-patch chart

This table provides the status of problem patches reported in previous Patch Watch columns. Patches listed below as safe to install will be removed from the next updated table. For Microsoft’s list of recently released patches, go to the MS Safety & Security Center PC Security page.

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.

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