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Getting Laptops Ready for Classroom Use Teaches Some Good Lessons

This year, school is getting serious for my 8-year-old son, Gregory: he’s in the third grade. For the first time, he’s having to deal with real grades for his homework, plus regular quizzes and tests. And later on this year, he’ll face his first standardized test (the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, or TAKS) as well. He shares a classroom at Cactus Ranch Elementary with 18 other kids, but they have only one general use laptop for the whole group there (the kids do have more general access to computers in the library, and some classes issue laptops to students from cart set-ups for their use as well). His classroom PC is an elderly Dell D630 Latitude that’s on the last phases of its lifecycle — I volunteer in the library once a week, and the school IT guy also works there; he tells me they’re getting ready to upgrade to Vostro models running Windows 7 in 2013.

So I’m loaning my son’s teacher a couple of additional laptops for the kids to share in his classroom. One is my old and trusty Dell D620 Latitude that’s been upgraded with an OCZ Agility 3 SSD, 4 GB RAM, and a T7200 CPU (which puts it on par for processing with the D630, but where its SSD blows the doors off that unit). The other is my equally old and sometimes not-so-trusty HP HDX9203, aka “The Dragon.” I decided to roll the Dragon back to Vista SP2 and it’s been running like a champ ever since. However, Vista’s odd and seemingly random Windows Update behavior hasn’t let me believe I’ve finally caught up with all the updates: with 148 of them installed over the past two days, it’s been a dizzying sequence of download-install-reboot the entire time. Even so, Windows Update now claims I’m completely caught up. We’ll see.

The D620 has an adequate 14" screen.
The D620 has an adequate 14″ screen.
The HP has a huge and vibrant 20" screen.
The HP has a huge and vibrant 20″ screen.

I’m still debating as to whether or not I should install Paragon’s terrific $20 Migrate OS to SSD utility on the Dragon, and then use it to move the OS over to the spare OCZ Vertex 2 nominal 120 GB (actual 111 GB in Windows Explorer) drive I’ve got lying around. There’s no doubt this would speed things up significantly on the Dragon, just like the Agility 3 did for the aging D620, which laughably melds a processor rated at 5.1 in Windows Experience with a drive rated at 7.8! But there are few things you can do to an older laptop to keep it usable that are better than this, so my real question is: do I want to let the Vertex 2 walk out the door, or do I have something better I can do with it? Right now all of my laptops and desktops boot from SSDs already, so perhaps not…

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Hallelujah! Production Vista System Finally Behaves Like One

All I can say when it comes to finally getting my production Vista desktop working as I think it should be is “It”s about (expletive deleted) time!” After building this system over the summer and dealing with the usual shakedown issues involved in getting all the software and settings installed, I found myself fighting a series of mysterious and frustrating hardware problems that lasted from the end of August through the first week of November, 2008.

Continue reading Hallelujah! Production Vista System Finally Behaves Like One

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Patch Tuesday For December 2008

The second Tuesday in each month is when Microsoft schedules its patches, fixes, and security updates. Recently, Microsoft has begun to offer Advance Notification for its Security Bulletins, which makes it a lot easier to tell what”s coming down the pike. For December, 8 updates have been pushed to the Windows Update servers

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Thermaltake NBcool T3000 Notebook Cooler

Because of their cramped cases and modest ventilation, most notebook PCs tend to run significantly hotter than desktop PCs. Recently, case and cooling specialist ThermalTake sent us one of their notebook coolers to look at, promising some “interesting results” from its use. With that tantalizing promise to test, we decided to check it out with our trusty Dell D620 Latitude notebook PC.

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Grab this great, free rootkit detector if you need it!

A rootkit is a particularly stealthy and nasty form of malware designed to take over complete control of a system (root level access in UNIX terms means “access to everything, no holds barred”). Rootkits seek to hide from detection via standard operating system based security mechanisms, and require special tools for detection and cleanup.

Continue reading Grab this great, free rootkit detector if you need it!

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Secunia Personal Software Inspector Does a Bang-up Job

As somebody who”s been researching and writing about malware since 2003, I”ve come to recognize Danish information security firm Secunia as a reliable source of good intelligence about what”s happening on the threat landscape. When a malware alert, proof of concept exploit, or news story shows up with their name on it, I will invariably pay attention. That”s why I was very interested to read in a a recent issue of PCWorld (November 11, 2008) about the Secunia PSI vulnerability scanner.

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Begone! Dratted (Old) System Files: Begone!

When one member of my mirrored pair of system drives failed earlier this year, I replaced that pair of Seagate 7200.10 320 GB drives with a pair of Samsung SpinPoint HD501LJ SATA II 3.5″ drives with 16MB Cache. I also installed the still-working member of that pair in my system, so as to retain access to all kinds of files and information from that machine.

Continue reading Begone! Dratted (Old) System Files: Begone!

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A Change of Memory Makes a Difference?

In writing about my trials and tribulations with Windows Vista on my production PC over the summer, I summarized my situation in a blog entitled “Time for a new motherboard?” on September 20. By the beginning of October things with the system had quieted down enough, thanks to switching to a single-vendor security solution (PC Tools Spyware Doctor with Antivirus, plus the PC Tools Firewall, and their ThreatFire behavioral malware blocker) and making some other software and configurations changes, that I thought I had the hiccups behing me. I was down to random problems once a week, and went three whole weeks without a single BSOD.

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Snapshot: PC Tools Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus

I”ve been using Spyware Doctor to handle spyware on my machine for over two years now, with great success in handling spyware. In the past three months, I have switched to PC Tools Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus thanks to issues documented in my story “Best-of-Breed Apps Aren”t Always Best for Vista” –namely, incompatibilities between AVG AntiVirus 8.0 and Spyware Doctor 6.0 that kept causing blue screens on my primary production machine.

Continue reading Snapshot: PC Tools Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus

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