Usually, when people ask me about spyware detectors or removers, I will definitely recommend Spybot Search & Destroy and AdAware Personal to them. Both are freeware, yet powerful and reliable in detecting and removing most spyware programs.

Now I would recommend another more advance tool, HijackThis. HijackThis is written specifically to detect and remove browser hijacks, or software that takes over your web browser, alters your defaut home page and search engine and other malicious things.

Once you install HijackThis and run it to generate a log file which allows you to analyze the log data and let you on which items to remove and which ones to leave alone. Using HijackThis is a lot like editing the Windows Registry yourself, but you should definitely not do it without some guidance unless you really know what you are doing.
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Guide To Use HijackThis

Well, this is not about telling you how to get free Microsoft products, but to share with you why, how and the tradeoffs to be Microsoft-free these days.

From the article written in ExtremeTech, it covers 4 parts, which are :-

Part 1 – Why switch to Linux?

• Life without Microsoft: What You Gain
• Life without Microsoft: What You Lose

Part 2 – Linux home file server and basic client PC

• A Three-Tier Approach
• Building a Home Server

Part 3 – Gaming PC

• Design Considerations and Component Choices
• Component List
• OS Setup

Part 4 – Build Your Own Linux Home Theater PC

• The Challenges
• Candidate Applications and Components List
• Installation/Configuration
• Up and Running

By the way, I’m still a windows user. Thought of getting into Linux world long time ago, but just don’t have much time to try it out. :-< Anyway, hope you guys enjoy those interesting articles.

Microsoft have releashed a Word document regarding the enhancements and changes they have done to their newly launched 64bit Windows XP Professional over over Windows XP Professional SP2.

The enhancements of 64bit Windows XP Professional include the following:-

• Data Execution Prevention (DEP) – 64bit enabled users should know this. It is basically an enhanced security that enforced by both hardware and software to protect against malicious code exploits.
• Files and Settings Transfer Wizard – Help previous Windows-based computer users to migrate their files to WinXP Pro x64.
• Internet Protocol security (IPsec) – Ensure private, secure communications over Internet Protocol (IP) networks.
• Outlook Express – Surprisingly in WinXP Pro x64, spell checking is not supported in Outlook Express.
• Remote Assistance – No Voice Session (VoIP), in other words, voice conversations is not supported. No escalation using e-mail in Remote Assistance too.
• Remote Desktop – Unicode keyboard input support, Client-side time-zone redirection, GDI+ rendering primitives support, FIPS encryption support, Fallback printer driver and Auto-reconnect.
• Search Companion – Well, again spell checking is not supported. :-?
• Windows Installer – This will help you in installing applications.
• Windows Media Player – Windows Media Player 10 (WMP10) is installed. Microsoft claimed that WMP10 is the most secure version of Windows Media Player and it has been updated to work with the other security enhancements contained in WinXP Pro x64. Please be aware that this WMP10, handles licenses differently than previous WMP.

Those bolded are the enhancements that interest me.
Thinking of installing it to my dust-collecting harddisk.

For more detailed information you can either download the document from here, or visit the source.

According to networking guru, George Ou from ZDNet, Sony Play Station Portable (PSP) is bad enough to ruin wireless Local Area Network (LAN) in the home, due to its lack of support to WiFi Protected Access (WPA) security.

Currently, Sony PSP supports only Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) encryption security for wireless LAN, but too bad this encryption technology was found to be completely broken five years ago.

The Wi-Fi Alliance in 2003 mandated that all Wi-Fi products comply with the new WPA standard and use the new TKIP encryption algorithm yet Sony somehow feels exempt from this responsibility.

So, for PSP user, they will have to lower their wireless LAN security to only support WEP instead of a more secure WPA, in order to connect using PSP. The following is one of the suggestions from George :

Sony needs to rectify the situation as soon as possible by retrofitting all new PSPs off the factory floor with WPA capability and offer a free upgrade to the PSPs that are already out in the wild.

[Source]

We have seen the introduction dual core processors, first Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) Opteron, then come Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 840.

Intel’s vision of a future chip design which are moves that are necessary to improve overall system performance as the chipmaker packs more cores onto a single chip.

The new head of Intel’s Corporate Technology Group, Justin Rattner, described Intel’s evolving vision of what its chips might look like around 2015 in an interview at Intel headquarters Thursday. Intel, like much of the chip industry, has decided that multicore designs are the way to go to improve performance in the future.

Some the early fruits of Intel’s project are evident in Intel’s I/O Acceleration Technology, announced earlier this year at the Spring Intel Developer Forum, Rattner said. This technology essentially improves the I/O performance of Intel chips by dedicating excess processing resources to I/O functions. It will be available next year with Intel’s first dual-core Xeon server chip, code-named Dempsey.

However, Intel is urged to move away from its frontside bus design by analysts and customers due to the advent of multicore processors. This is because in Intel’s current chips, the interaction between the processor and a system’s memory bank is handled by a memory controller on the chip set that feeds data to the processor at various speeds ranging from 400 MHz to 1066 MHz, depending on the chip. This design has served the company well for many years, but as chips start to take advantage of multiple processing units, they require increased amounts of memory bandwidth to perform to their true potential.

Some aspects of moving away from its frontside bus designs will start to become possible as Intel introduces its 45-nanometer and 32-nanometer processing technologies, which will be capable of producing smaller transistors than Intel’s current 90-nanometer processing technology, Rattner said. At the moment, those introductions are scheduled for 2007 and 2009.

45nm & 32nm ?? :-O

While we are realizing the next computer world will be 64bit enabled soon, Microsoft is migrating many of its internal servers to the new 64bit version of Windows Server 2003.

“Our MSN search engine is actually built on several thousand systems running the x64 version of Windows,” Danny Beck, Microsoft Windows client senior product marketing manager said. In addition, “the entire Microsoft.com site has been migrated, and we serve 30 million unique visitors every day.”

It’s to believe that 64bit system can definitely improve overall performance of their services. As Beck said, performance of the MSN Messenger servers has improved 10 times since they went 64bit. (But how come I always don’t receive email-received notification? :p )

However, some application like Outlook Express and Windows Media Player will not have 64bit version anytime soon. This is because some applications such as non-memory intensive applications, do not necessarily benefit customers by being 64bit native.

Furthermore, Microsoft’s Beck said most Microsoft applications such as the Office suite will not be available in 64-bit versions until the end of 2006, when the company’s next-generation operating system, Longhorn, is due for release.

[Source]