Blog entry found at The Windows Club. Explore as Administrator PowerToy released | The Windows Club

Have you ever tried to use Windows Explorer to create a folder within or copy a file into a protected folder such a Program Files or Windows and had to deal with the confusing “File Operation” dialog box before you could complete your task. This is one of the most confusing and poorly understood features of User Account Control.

When running as a administrator with UAC enabled, your standard user token does not have write permissions to these protected folders.

Unfortunately, because Windows Explorer was not designed to run in multiple instances in the same desktop session, Windows cannot simply throw up a UAC prompt and then launch an elevated instance of Explorer.

Instead, you get one or more elevation prompts (if full-prompting is enabled) and Windows completes the operations using the full administrator token. This can be annoying if you have to make repeated operations in these folders.

To work around this annoyance, you may want to check out the Explore as Administrator PowerToy. For this PowerToy to work, the Elevate Command PowerToy must also be installed.

Why four Googles? GoogleGoogleGoogleGoolge lets you search Google x4 times on the same open tab!

The developers were chatting on Google Talk one night, and they wondered if googlegoogle.com was taken. It was, but googlegooglegooglegoogle.com was available. In a impulse buy, they purchased the domain and someone had the idea of putting four googles on the page. Thus, googlegooglegooglegoogle was born.

Try it for yourself. GoogleGoogleGoogleGoolge.com

What things to do when bored on the Internet?

A great article from the Computer Hope Administrator with all sorts of time killing things to do sitting at your keyboard.

Enjoy and thanks Nathan!

This is a great website with online safety information for everyone from the home user, school children to businesses. Take some time to look around and you will find plenty of information and activities to occupy your time and help you learn to be safe online all at the same time.

Welcome to Stay Safe Online | STAYSAFEONLINE.org

Repair Microsoft Security Essentials with Fix MSE Utility from The Windows Club.

We are pleased to release the Fix MSE Utility v 1.0. This freeware portable utility will reset all the Registry and other settings of Microsoft Security Essentials to default value.

Microsoft Security Essentials is a new antivirus from Microsoft. It provides real-time protection for your home PC that guards against viruses, spyware, and other malicious software.

Microsoft Security Essentials is a free* download from Microsoft that is simple to install, easy to use, and always kept up to date so you can be assured your PC is protected by the latest technology. It’s easy to tell if your PC is secure — when you’re green, you’re good. It’s that simple.

Microsoft Security Essentials runs quietly and efficiently in the background so that you are free to use your Windows-based PC the way you want—without interruptions or long computer wait times.

Microsoft Malware Protection Center

A lot of forums and boards provide very small textareas for postings. If you type a long post you have to scroll up and down to read and edit what you have written. This can be very annoying!

The Resizeable Textarea extension lets you resize most textareas in online forums and message boards. Works great! Give it a try. Resizeable Textarea for Firefox

UPDATE: Mozilla has now removed the extensions from the block list after Microsoft clarified some information in its bulletin on how Firefox users were affected. More information: Mozilla unblocks one sneaky Microsoft add-on

I just got a pop up in Firefox saying it’s blocked some Microsoft add-ons because of high security risks.

Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant 1.1
Windows Presentation Foundation 3.5.30729.1

The two add-ons were automatically added to Firefox as a part of recent Windows updates without approval from the user (us) or explaining what they do and if they are actually needed. Microsoft even goes so far as to change the user agent string of Firefox by appending the user’s current .NET framework version to the end of the existing string!

Now it looks like Mozilla has had enough with Microsoft’s antics and have decided to fight back by disabling these unneeded and unauthorized add-ons. Here is the page you go to when clicking ‘More information.’ Add-ons Blocklist | Mozilla

I wonder if this is a big war in the making? As long as our browsers don’t become the battle field then let them go at each other. Ultimately a war should make a better, stronger browser for everyone no matter if you use IE or Firefox. At least that’s my hopes.

Edit: The officail Mozilla blog post. .NET Framework Assistant Blocked to Disarm Security Vulnerability

MojoPac turns any USB 2.0 storage device, such as iPods, USB flash drives, portable hard drives, USB-enabled cell phones, and USB-enabled digital cameras, into a portable computing environment. The term “MojoPac” is used by the company to refer to the software application, the virtualized environment running inside this software, and the USB storage device that contains the software and relevant applications. MojoPac supports popular applications such as Firefox and Microsoft Office, and it is also high performance enough to run popular PC Games such as World of Warcraft and Half-Life 2.

It looks and acts like a new install of Windows, it has it’s own Desktop, My Computer and also any programs that you install into it. I found the easiest way to install a program into it, is have it all set up and then drag the .exe onto your Pen drive using your host computer, then go back into Mojopac and double click the .exe.

The video explains it much better than I can. http://www.mojopac.com

MojoPac Installation instructions.

From my earlier blog post.

The Mozilla Plugin Check Is Now Live. It has a new URL and no more security warnings about the certificate being out of date.

The official Mozilla announcement is as follows.

A little over a month ago, I talked about a project we had started to inform users when their plugins were out of date. This is a really important project for us, because old versions of plugins can cause crashes and other stability problems, and can also be a major security risk. In the first phase, we focused on the popular Adobe Flash Player plugin, and we were thrilled to see more than 10 million Firefox users click through to Adobe’s download page to get themselves updated in the first week.

Today, we’re bringing the rest of the story. Our web team has just pushed the full plugin check page live, checking the status of more than 15 popular plugins, with more still in the works. Visitors to the page can see which plugins they have installed and, for any that are outdated, follow an easy link to the update site.

In the upcoming release of Firefox 3.6, we’ll also include built-in support for helping users keep up to date. When you visit a page with Firefox 3.6, we’ll use this same service to let you know if any of the plugins used on the site have updates available.

We’ve got a pretty strong list of plugins and versions already but we’ll continue to maintain and grow it based on our conversations with plugin authors and our users. If you want more information, or are interested in helping out, check out the web team’s post. Did the plugin check uncover any surprises for you?

Johnathan Nightingale
Human Shield

On a computer that has a Windows Installer based product installed, you may receive an error while installing an update for the product and the installation of the update may fail. Installation errors caused due to incorrect patch registration may be corrected using this tool.

System Requirements

• Supported Operating Systems: Windows 2000; Windows 7; Windows Server 2003; Windows Server 2008; Windows Server 2008 R2; Windows Vista; Windows XP

Additional Information