Brought to you each week by the PC Gurus, a loose collection of volunteers from around the Kentuckiana region.
You can interact with the team via chat room or BBS at www.thepcgurus.com. There are usually members present in the chat room after 8:00 PM every evening and you can post computer questions, comments, rants etc. on the bulletin board 24/7.
If you’re new to the Newsletter you can read back issues at Team member JP Durbin’s website at http://www.jpdurbin.net. There are links to all the old 84 Online issues as well as the new GuruNews missives.
The WHAS Crusade for Children provides year round support for needy children throughout the Kentuckiana region. Visit http://www.whascrusade.org to make donations online.
4-7-05
Next Tuesday Microsoft will disable the feature that has been blocking installation of SP2 on corporate clients. This feature allowed other updates to be detected by Automatic Updates but basically hid SP2. Many large corporations used this feature to give them more time to test SP2 and determine the best way to roll it out on their networks but come Tuesday, it’s out of the IT department’s hands.
If you work at a large company you may want to check your system first thing tomorrow morning to see your current Service Pack level. To do so, right click on My Computer and choose Properties. AT the top of the General tab you’ll see the OS name first, then Home or Professional on the next line. The third line is the version (2002) and line four is the Service Pack level. If that says Service Pack 1 it’s time to do some serious backups.
Your IT department likely has a plan already laid out for this event but just in case it can’t hurt to back your important documents up to the file server as well as burning them to CD if possible.
This won’t affect home users directly, but indirect results could be pretty ugly.
First of all installation on a PC infested with spyware or viruses will usually cause the upgrade to crash during the process, corrupting the original Windows load and rendering the machine useless. As a repair technician myself I can pretty much guarantee that most end user PCs have undetected spyware installed.
The date of the sudden forced distribution is another issue. Not only does it coincide with the regular monthly updates from Microsoft, it’s also three days shy of April 15th which is, of course, tax filing D-Day. If many large financial or accounting firms experience problems on Tuesday we could see some major chaos this year.
Hopefully this will be a non-issue, much like Y2K, but I don’t think so. The main reason is that SP2 has not been installed on roughly 76% of corporate PCs using Windows XP. http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=160403344 cites a survey of 136,000 PCs at 251 companies in the US and Canada that showed a very low percentage of SP2 uptake.
I guess all we can do is wait and see, and hope IT departments around the country work through the weekend to make sure things go smoothly come Tuesday.
I’m glad I just have to fix the things ;)
Kevin Mefford, Editor
Have you ever
wanted to smell what Emeril or Jamie Oliver are cooking?
Soon, you may
be able to via the miracle of smell-o-vision:
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_1347132.html
And
you thought your old beater was reliable: NASA has extended the
Mars
Rover missions for 18 months:
http://www.cbc.ca/story/science/national/2005/04/06/Mars-rovers050406.html
Just
in case Microsoft is beginning to feel lonely, we now find out
that both
Firefox and the Mozilla browser suite are vulnerable to
attacks through
flawed JavaScript engines:
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=160403724&tid=5979%2C5989
Think
most of the spam you receive originates overseas? Think again. The US is responsible for more than a
third of all spam worldwide:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/07/spam_shame_chart/
Copy
us in on the good stuff ;-)
Matthew Dattilo
thepcgurus@gmail.com
www.opaquelucidity.com
Online gaming has become a huge business on the Internet. This technology enables game players from all over the globe to enter a multi-player game, assume an identity proceed to help their “team” to compete against others.
Often these groups of players will form permanent teams, usually called “guilds”, and they’ll always play the game of choice together. An example would be with Battlefield 1942, one of my favorite first person shooter style games. In it you can be a ground soldier, drive a tank or jeep, fly a fighter or bomber or even pilot a battleship.
My guild is called The Dark Masters and we have a website at http://www.tdmclan.com. You can find other guilds at http://www.xtremetop100.com/battlefield among other listing sites.
BF 1942 is a lot of fun if you’re a FPS fan and it’s a good entry into multi-player Internet games. You can get a free demo of the game at http://www.gigex.com/gp/dlexe.asp?packageid=0054000008&gameid=&source=00001_00092&sourcelist=, although it’s just a single player game with only one mission.
Chris Cook
If you’ve ever emptied your Recycle Bin only to discover you have mistakenly deleted something important, you know the definition of panic.
Fortunately there are a couple of free utilities that can stave off that panic attack. Restoration from http://www.dvhardware.net/software/358 is a quick and easy tool to recover those deleted files. PC Inspector File Recovery from http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htm is an even more powerful program, enabling you to recover files even after a format of your hard drive.
PC Inspector also has a utility called Smart Recovery to help with damaged or deleted files and photos from memory sticks and other electronic mass storage media.
All are free, naturally ;)
Q: I would like to download some songs and
pay per song. What would be a
good, inexpensive site to
use?
A: I'm not sure what you have for a player,
but I use MusicMatch
Jukebox... the basic player itself is free and there's a
feature on it
that lets you buy songs for as little as $.99 per.
You could go to
Musicmatch.com and read about the things they offer. You do
NOT have to
get the add-ons that cost more if you don't want to. I've used it
for
a while now and wouldn't have anything else. I have to admit that I
don't
buy songs, but the capability is there if you want it. Read the
system
requirements before you try to download.
Hope this
helps...please let us know!
Harriett Parton
If you have tech support
questions or ideas and/or submissions for our newsletter please submit them by
visiting www.thepcgurus.com and click
on the “Email the Team” icon.
Copyright 2005, The PC
Gurus. All rights reserved.
Publication, rebroadcast or storage is prohibited without prior consent,
however you may freely forward this publication to friends as long as A) it is
forwarded in its entirety and B) no fee is charged.
Information provided in this
publication is provided "as is" without warranty of any kind, either expressed
or implied. Although the
information provided is known to work on most systems, it may not work on ALL
systems. Make use of any
information supplied at your own risk.
The PC Gurus are a group of
volunteers who provide support for the PC, Mac and Linux users in the
Kentuckiana region.
To unsubscribe from this newsletter send an email to microdome@seidata.com with the words “unsubscribe newsletter” (without the quotes) at the top of the body of the message.