Microsoft’s Channel 9 at MSDN is airing a pilot episode of a new show called Help Desk this week. It’s a live show with a call-in format. The host is Chris Pirillo, and he’s backed up by a "brain trust" of support superstars from Microsoft–two Senior Windows 7 Test Engineers and a Senior App Compat Engineer. The panel’s challenge is to troubleshoot viewers’ problems and solve them live, on the air.
Questions can come in via Twitter (@ch9live), or you can e-mail them to ch9live [at] microsoft [dot] com.
Put it on your calendar:
- Address: http://live.ch9.ms/
- Date: Wednesday January 27th 2010
- Time: 2PM (Pacific Standard Time)
Good luck, Chris!
I guess today’s my day to write about Adobe. Over at ZDNet, I’ve posted detailed instructions on how to completely remove and reinstall Adobe’s Flash Player to stop crashes and fix slow performance in IE8.
Here, I want to circle back to a topic I bring up every few months, and that’s Adobe’s broken PDF Preview add-in for Windows Explorer Outlook. If you run 64-bit Windows 7, Adobe’s default installer configures itself incorrectly, which means you get an error message if you try to preview a PDF file in the Preview pane of Windows Explorer or in the Reading pane in Outlook 2007 or 2010. On a 32-bit system, both types of preview work perfectly, but both are broken on 64-bit systems.
Back in September, I pointed to a page that Leo Davidson had put together documenting the cause of the problem and providing a fix for Explorer previews. This week Leo asked me to test a fix that someone had passed along to him. I tried it on 64-bit Outlook 2010 running Windows 7 x64 and it worked perfectly.
It is really baffling to me how Adobe has allowed this behavior to persist for so long. I first wrote about it in May 2008, for heaven’s sake. Do they just not know? Can anyone at Adobe please help me understand what the problem is here?
At any rate, it’s nice to finally have a simple (and free) fix for this annoyance. I recommend you read Leo’s backgrounder first (Adobe PDF preview handler 64-bit fix), paying special attention to the section about the Automatic fix tool. If you’re comfortable with it, then run the x64 fixer utility and click the Apply Fix button. Boom! Done. You can rerun the utility anytime to confirm that the settings are still correct (you will probably need to run it again after each update of Reader or Acrobat). Here’s what the settings look like on my working system:
And if you’ve been interested enough to read this far, then be sure to read Leo’s rant. Money quote: "I wish I could bill Adobe for my time fixing their mess."
Oh, and the community here should take a bow too. Leo says he unearthed some useful information and incorporated feedback from the comments on my last post back in September into the latest release of the fix tool. If you have any comments or suggestions for Leo, leave them here. I know he’s reading.
Seriously, Adobe, what’s up?
Because of a recent widely publicized exploit, Microsoft has broken with its normal update schedule to release a cumulative update to Internet Explorer for all Windows versions. It’s being delivered through Windows Update and through Windows Software Update Services (the managed corporate version of Windows Update). For details, read Microsoft Security Bulletin MS10-002.
If you check Windows Update manually you’ll find it categorized as Important, with details specific to your Internet Explorer and Windows versions.
If you do nothing, the update will be delivered automatically, sometime in the next 24 hours.
Should you update immediately? There’s no harm in doing so, but there’s also no urgency for the average Windows user running a modern browser on a modern Windows version. At this point there are no reports of successful attacks against Internet Explorer 7 or 8 using this exploit code, and both Windows Vista and Windows 7 include important mitigations that seriously limit the effectiveness of any attempts to exploit it. In short, there’s little harm in waiting for the automatic update.
If you are using Internet Explorer 6, you should update to a later browser version as soon as possible, preferably IE8. If you must continue using IE6, then make sure this patch gets installed as soon as possible.
Over at ZDNet, I’ve got a new post on the details behind the recent successful cyber-attack on Google, Adobe, and dozens of other large corporations. After looking at the evidence, I’ve concluded that the risks of using IE6 outweigh the costs of switching:
Any IT professional who is still allowing IE6 to be used in a corporate setting is guilty of malpractice. Think that judgment is too harsh? Ask the security experts at Google, Adobe, and dozens of other large corporations that are cleaning up the mess from a wave of targeted attacks that allowed source code and confidential data to fall into the hands of well-organized intruders. The entry point? According to Microsoft, it’s IE6.
The good news is that IE7 and IE8 are dramatically more secure, especially when run on Windows Vista or Windows 7 with Protected Mode and Data Execution Prevention.
For full details, go read It’s time to stop using IE6.
I just took a look at some analytics for the last couple of months on this site and was surprised by one slice of that data. Here’s the first page of the aggregate stats for the default screen resolution used by the most recent 250,000 visitors:
I drilled into the data for a few more pages and found that approximately 59% of all visitors are using widescreen monitors, with aspect ratios between 16:9 and 16:10. Presumably that includes nearly everyone using a notebook, plus a smattering of LCD monitors attached to desktop PCs.
I was surprised, though, to see that 41% of visitors are using old-school square monitors, mostly at resolutions of 1024×768 and 1280×1024 (#1 and #3 on the list, respectively). I’m guessing most of those are CRTs, which tend to last a long time.
I run some virtual machines at 1024×768 resolution, especially when snapping screen shots for a book. It isn’t a lot of fun, especially with XP and Vista taskbars.
What resolution are you using? Are you happy with it? If you could change screen resolutions right now and cost was no object, what would you change to?
I’ve been waiting a long time for a desktop system that can handle more than two monitors. (In mid-2008, I got some great suggestions from readers, but none of them were worth the hassle or expense.
Finally, two weeks ago I found an HP Pavilion Elite m9600t at an irresistible price. The i7-920 processor and capability to expand to 12GB of memory were nice, but what sealed the deal was the presence of two PCI-Express x16 slots. The system came with an Nvidia 9600GS display adapter. I cannibalized an Nvidia 8600 GT adapter from a system that I had previously used as a Media Center and, voila! Here’s what I’m now using: two 24-inch LCDs at 1920×1200 and a 23-inch unit at 1920×1080.
I expect my productivity to zoom to unheard-of levels in the next few months.
That fourth DVI connector is looking a little forlorn. Should I pick up a touch-enabled LCD for it?