Garry's Technology Corner

In my day job I deal with many questions regarding email and spam and considering how important people think email is they really don’t know much about it. Here I’ll try to go through some of the more common questions I get and try to dispel some of the more common myths. Read more…

Skype is great it allows me to keep in touch with many of my family and friends that live far away. Recently I’ve run into a bit of an issue with the video, I’ll start a conversation with someone and after about 5minutes the video will freeze and my webcam will just hang, the audio still works and I can continue the conversation. The real problem starts when I try to end the call, when trying to close the conversation window Skype just hangs and causes my whole system to just freeze. The only resolution is to restart Windows, this is the only problem I’ve run into with Windows 7 since started using it back  in Beta. Read more…

Microsoft’s release of the new operating system, Windows 7, has many people looking to either upgrade their current systems or run out and buy the latest and greatest in hardware. Whether you are looking to upgrade or buy new there are specific hardware components that are required to get the most out of the new operating system. From the processor to the hard drive each piece needs to fit together to give the best performance. According to Microsoft’s website the minimum hardware required to run Windows 7 are: Read more…

Everyone has probably heard by now about the Google/China hacking incident that happened a couple of weeks ago. The issue revolved around a security hole within Internet Explorer and has raised a number of questions as to whether people should stop using it in favour of more secure browsers. Before going into the discussion some important points need to be brought up:

• the attack was a well crafted social engineering scam aimed at several different companies including Google
• specially crafted emails were sent to specific individuals at these companies purporting to be from legitimate sources
• the emails contained a link to a website  that downloaded the malicious code to the users computer through a security hole in Internet Explorer
• Microsoft has issued a hotfix to patch the hole

Read more…

More and more everyday you hear about people who’ve had their computers hacked and pieces of their identity stolen. Whether it be the password for online banking or something as simple as their facebook username and password this can be a major issue and people need to take more action to protect themselves. Seems every site on the internet needs a username and password to access and if you’re like me, I have so many passwords that I forget which one goes where. The solution was to either use the same password for everything or write them down somewhere, both of these are a major no-no when it comes to security. Security best practices dictate that passwords should be at least 4 – 8 characters long, contain a combination of upper case, lower case and special characters and be changed on a regular basis. Unfortunately, my memory is really bad and there would be no way for me to remember all the passwords needed for all my accounts.  It’s been stated several times over the years “Privacy is dead, get over it”; you don’t need to “get over it” you have to learn what’s needed to protect yourself. Read more…

In part 1 I looked at Areo, Search and the new TaskBar. In part 2 I’ll go through a couple more that make Windows 7 a very good OS.

4) Libraries

This is new for Windows 7 and it replaces the My Documents, My Music, etc folders and they are awesome. Read more…

I’ve been using Windows 7 for quite some time and it’s by far my favorite OS. Over the years I’ve used everything from Apple to Linux to Windows and even a couple that probably no one’s ever heard of.  I think Microsoft has a hit on their hands with this one, I really disliked Vista  BTW, and hope they expand on some of the new features.

In no particular order these are the features of Windows 7 that I find to be my personal favorites:

1) Aero

I didn’t play with Aero much in Vista, like I said I just couldn’t get Vista to work for me very well but under Windows 7 Aero it’s amazing. Glass effects, transparency, flip windowing, Read more…

Like many geeks, I have several machines at home that I use for different things, with the release of Windows 7 I decided it was time to upgrade a laptop I’ve got hooked up to the TV. The laptop is an older Compaq but has an AMD 64bit processor and 2GB of RAM so running Windows 7 should be fine, or so I thought. Read more…