One of the most common search engine queries I get hits from is "open-source ghost clone" or something similar. There's no doubt in my mind why; Ghost is probably the most useful utility I've ever found, but not everyone can afford it or its competitor, DriveImage.
I ran into a problem yesterday with a VPN client not working in XP. After a Usenet search, someone suggested that removing the QoS client (which does nothing useful anyway) fixes the problem about 80% of the time. In my case, that worked.
There's been a lot of talk on the Web lately about Palladium. If you don't have strong feelings about it, it's probably because you're not a bleeding-edge computing enthusiast. That's OK. You'll hear about it in time.
Since there was no Windows 2000 version of my book Optimizing Windows, sometimes people ask me what tweaks they can use to improve Windows 2000's performance.
Mail from Frank Gross. I don't know if I've ever outlined a process for installing Windows 98 cleanly, at least not here. There's little need to do a clean install if the system works right, but if a system just won't play nice, it's not something one should be afraid of.
My video editing box bit the dust earlier this week. I loaded a rather large image into Photoshop LE, and it hung. I killed Photoshop LE, and all appeared to be well. Then the desktop and Start menu went away. A few seconds later, they reappeared. They went away again, then reappeared. The cycle continued like a beating drum.
We needed an XP box at work for testing. Duty to do the dirty deed fell to me. So after ghosting the Windows 2000 station several of us share, I pulled out an XP CD. It installed surprisingly quickly--less than half an hour. The system is a P3-667 with 128 MB RAM and an IBM hard drive (I don't know the model).
Some l337 h4x0r is watching this as I type. Yeah, I got the new virus. Fortunately it doesn't look like it's smart enough to look at an IMAP store, so it didn't replicate. That'll be the last time I use Outlook at home, and maybe at work. Yes, Linux has security vulnerabilities, but they're benign compared to this crap. Especially if you're behind a firewall with Telnet and even SSH access turned off. A root exploit on a machine disconnected from the world doesn't do any good.
