Seven Remix XP is a theme for Windows XP that will make it look eerily like Windows 7. So if you’re not yet ready to jump into running full on beta software but you want to get used to the look and feel of Windows 7 you can download Seven Remix XP at this site.
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Night Before Conficker: A Poem
Twas the night before April Fools day, when all through the IT department Not an admin was stirring, asleep with hands on their mouse The scans had been sent to the desktops with care, To ensure across the enterprise no conficker was there The users were nestled all snug in their beds And dreams of switching to Mac OS X danced in everyones heads. Don’t forget to run those scans before you go home today!
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Dell Mini 9 and Mini 12 -> Hackintosh
The Dell Mini 9 comes with a small solid state drive, not a massive amount of firepower and running Ubuntu, but for $199 starting you can change all that (and the color) and still get away with an inexpensive and ultra-light system for less than $500. The Mini 12 starts closer to the $400 range, but comes with a lot more features (and weight). Why should this matter much? Well, they’re now on the hackintosh list, meaning you can install 10.5.5 on them. Imagine a less pretty, less flashy MacBook air, 64 GB solid state drive, 2GB of RAM for about $400 (plus Leopard license).
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SMB: Name Mangling
Windows 3.x and earlier used what was known as an 8.3 naming scheme, meaning that files had eight places for a name, three for an extension and a dot in the middle. Name decorating is programatically how Windows 3.x and DOS clients interact with files that have more than 8 characters followed by a dot and then three characters for a file extension. Those of us who can remember doing mass migrations of data from Windows 3.x to Windows 9x and/or NT will remember well the naming changes that had to happen to maintain backwards compatibility during this trying time. Especially if we had been using *nix boxen to store…
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Lo/Jack
It’s Friday and I’m feeling fairly non-technical after a call earlier today with actual end users (I’d forgotten we had those). So I’m going to talk about Lo/Jack. Tangent time: One of the great parts about being involved with MacWorld is the schwag. The speaker bags are full of stuff that, to be quite honest, I would almost never think to buy myself. Not that the vendors who throw crap in there don’t get me hooked on their phonics. But one of the few things that have caused me to think about security strategies from that bag is LoJack for Laptops. The thing is, I don’t really need it for…
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Asus Eee 1000HE – Best Netbook for Price?
I have got to give it to Asus, they’ve knocked themselves out. At $375 the Asus Eee 1000HE is an awesome NetBook. Acer has one that is a little cheaper and Dell has one as well, but the Asus is a serious notebook for not a lot of cash. You can swap out the drive with a solid state drive and bump up the RAM for still less than a MacBook is going to cost you starting out. I’ve been test driving the Eee, which by the way is the actual screen shot used on wikipedia’s NetBook article, and not only do I like the machine but I also like…
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Windows Steady State
The typical school lab: We want to update an image once a quarter or once a year, deploy it and have nothing change between quarters. In Microsoft Windows, there are about as many ways to go about this as there are IT guys. Some will use Altiris or something like that to reimage the machines every night. Others will use policies to lock everyone out of everything and trust that. But what if you don’t have a dedicated IT staff and honestly don’t really have the time to deal with it in a smaller lab environment. Well, introduce Microsoft’s Steady State (it’s actually been around for awhile, getting renamed every…
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USB Sniffing
Some projects are stranger than others. Today I embarked on reverse engineering a certain wireless device. In order to do so it became apparent that I would need to intercept my USB traffic and then be able to analyze it and likely send my own traffic over the USB. I ended up using a Beagle USB Protocol Analyzer and was very happy with it (it’s pretty inexpensive for what it does), given my specific requirements. I also ended up using the Wireshark’s USB analysis tool available here, although with more limited success. But while looking for a tool appropriate to my task I did find a few other tools out…
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Windows 7 Alpha
Windows 7 is slated for a 2010 release, although we could see it as late as 2009. Much like the reports coming out on Snow Leopard, Windows 7 is slated not to come with a variety of new features but rather on buttoning up the existing features and in some cases Microsoft will be reducing the number of features in the OS. Well, maybe not removing features, but rather moving them into Windows Live and making them as easily accessible as possible using the newly revamped Windows Live toolbar. Applications moved to the Windows Live-style a la carte menu: Windows Live Family Safety (replaces the former parental controls options) Windows…
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Windows XP: Reset Product Key
Microsoft is getting more and more picky about that product key and the Genuine Advantage program. So if you’re finding that the warnings and annoy-ware are getting to be too much to handle then reset it. To do so, first edit the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESoftwareMicrosoftWindowsNTCurrent VersionWPAEventsODBETimer registry key to be some number or letter. This will overwrite your existing product key and allow you to enter a new one. Next, click on Start and then Run and enter the following command (assuming Windows is installed in the c:Windows directory): C:Windowssystem32oobemsoobe /a This will bring up the Activate Windows wizard. Here, select to update using a telephone service representative. Here, select a location and…