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According to Gizmodo’s Jesus Diaz, Windows Vista sales aren’t helping PC manufacturers a bit. In fact, it’s business-as-usual as a result of Vista’s release, in spite of promise after promise from Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. Business users are likely concerned with Vista’s incompatibility with existing applications; home users are just happy with the XP beast (set of problems) they know. It appears that virtually no one is running out to buy a Vista PC.

Another Windows vulnerability has been found and this time, it’s scary.

Important points on this:
(1) This is an ACTIVE exploit
(2) The solution is to avoid browsing “untrusted sites”, i.e. the INTERNET
(3) It affects Vista on down–virtually every Windows OS
(4) It exploits the animated cursor functionality and can result in arbitrary code execution on the victim’s machine

This is a serious problem. Let’s hope Microsoft has out a fix soon.

NetworkWorld has an interesting article about Apple’s prospects in corporate America. Recent architecture changes, virtualization, clustering, storage networks, interoperability hooks and the price of upgrading hardware for Windows Vista all put Macs under the microscope for careful consideration as replacements to existing Windows and Linux machines.

As has been the case in the past, Apple is not defining a clear course for going after corporate business (the article points this out). Apple’s rebellious, anti-corporate attitude continues in 2007. However, innovative new technologies like Parallels, which allows users to run Microsoft Windows from within Mac OS X on a Macintosh computer are likely to make corporate moves to Mac OS X more likely.

Everytime I go to a computer store and see someone who looks like my mother in line with a copy of Microsoft Office, usually priced in the 300-400 dollar range, I get a little bit sick.  The story is always the same… someone ordered a new computer, but the manufacturer or salesman didn’t bother to tell them that it included substandard or no office productivity software.  When they fired it up and got their first e-mail attachment, shock ensued as they couldn’t open the .doc flyer or the .xls spreadsheet from the PTA.

What really makes me sick is that there is another way!

OpenOffice.Org is a complete office productivity suite that is multiplatform (e.g. it works on Macs and PCs), multi-lingual, and best of all - it is free!  A free office productivity suite is hard to come by.  In addition to this, it is open source, meaning the source code is out there for a savvy community of developers who continue to develop the software and make it better.  For most home users (and a good deal of business users, really) OpenOffice is more than enough to get the job done.  Not only is it compatible with Microsoft Office, but it is also compatible with other formats such as OASIS.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about backups.  I think that the average Joe is finally putting enough valuable data on his PC that backups seem important.  For more and more people, computer=brain.

Microsoft has a pretty good solution for this called SyncToy.  I use it to back up my user folder in Windows Vista. 

SyncToy for Windows XP
SyncToy for Windows Vista

The best way (though not the only way) to handle this for individuals is to acquire an inexpensive external (USB or Firewire) hard drive and setup the hard drive as a target (right) device.  Microsoft’s SyncToy includes great directions on how to setup a synchronization.  Like this, you can manually touch it off any time you want.

For more advanced users, you can set it up as a scheduled task in Windows.