Along with the launch of the Online Remote Access service, we're announcing support for Windows Vista with our Online Backup service. We've had a lot of requests from our customers to get Vista support out there, and it took a little bit longer than anyone liked, but we wanted to make sure it was as reliable and stable as our existing Online Backup agent.

For current subscribers, just add a new computer to your account and the new agent you download will now support Vista; for potential subscribers, I encourage you to sign up for a trial at https://signup.spn.com and see if the service is a fit for you.

Thanks for your patience while we worked to deliver this; we have lots more in store and I can't wait to talk about it over the coming months!

(P.S. for those that aren't used to using RSS to subscribe to blogs, you can easily subscribe to get an email update when new posts are made here. Just click the "Email" link and icon in upper right hand corner of the sidebar and you'll be good to go!)

Update: For those asking about what happens when you upgrade an XP machine to Vista, just make sure you try and run LiveUpdate before or afterwards. If your agents have been online they should be automatically updated anyway, but you can do a manual update if you want to be certain.

Ok, Windows Vista Start Button - Connect To - ... what? Where's my VPN connection?

I tried the easy solution, creating a new connection and tried to fire it up. Bam! Instantly I was told that connection failed, and the Diagnose button in the message box that popped up didn't work. So I rebooted, logged in, and tried it once more. Same thing happened.

Let's turn the clock a couple of days back; In order to free up system resources, I had looked through the started NT services, and decided that some of them were redundant, so I turned them off / disabled them. One of the services was Telephony. I turned it off, since my computer doesn't have any analog modem.

Well, it turns out that a lot of the RAS-related services depends upon this service. So since it was disabled, a lot of other services up the chain didn't start properly.

So, after setting the startup mode to "Automatic" and starting service, my VPN connection reappeared in the Connect to a network dialog.

The morale of this story? Well, don't just go about disabling a lot of system services without checking their dependency chains thoroughly.

When Dell hopefully releases the E-series this month, I will order a Latitude E6500 which will be the successor to the D830 model. It sports an eSATA port, GPS, DisplayPort, 1920x1200 WLED Display and is capable of managing 8GB of RAM.

I'm not sure yet if I'm going to order a new 24" or the 27" monitor yet, it may be that the 24" is large enough for my desk (I have 2x 19" Eizo doing 1280x1024 on it now).

More Information: Microsoft Pro Photo Tools
Download: Microsoft Pro Photo Tools version 2 [Validation Required]
Homepage: Microsoft Professional Photography

The search engine in Windows Search 4.0 is a Microsoft Windows service that is also used by programs such as Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 and Microsoft Office OneNote 2007. You can use this search engine to index a program's content and to obtain instant results when you search in a particular program.

More Information/Download: Windows Search 4.0 [KB940157]
Homepage: Windows Search 4.0

• Multiple Package Transaction: In a multiple package transaction, you can create a single transaction from multiple packages. In a multiple package transaction, a chainer is used to dynamically include packages in the transaction. If any of the packages do not install as expected, you can roll back the installation.
• Embedded UI Handler: You can embed a custom user interface (UI) handler in the Windows Installer package. This makes a custom UI easier to integrate. You can also invoke an embedded UI handler from the Add or Remove item in Control Panel. Or, you can invoke an embedded UI handler during a Windows Installer repair process.
• Embedded Chainer: You can use the embedded chainer to add packages to a multiple package transaction. You can use an embedded chainer to enable installation events across multiple packages. For example, you can enable the install-on-demand events, the repair events, and the uninstall events across multiple packages.
• Update Supersedence Resiliency: This feature enables you to correct for changes in the FeatureComponent table during supersedence.
• Shared Component Patching Resiliency During Uninstall: This feature makes sure that the most recent version of a component is available to all the products.
• Custom Action Execution On Update Uninstall: This feature enables an update to add or change a custom action so that the custom action is called when an update is uninstalled.

After installation of this package, the version of Windows Installer on the system will be upgraded to 4.5.

More Information: Windows Installer 4.5 [KB942288]
Download: Windows Installer 4.5
Blog: Windows Installer Team Blog

WMP11 Aero Black for windows media player 11 (latest 11.0.5721.5145) version and (11.0.5721.5230 BETA) for Windows XP

Desde siempre uno de los grandes problemas de Windows ha sido que se usa como administrador de sistema, con total control para hacer y deshacer lo que quieras, y eso es un gravísimo riesgo a la hora de sufrir ataques. Hasta Windows XP no existía la posibilidad de una cuenta sin permisos de administrador (creo que con Windows NT había cuentas de invitado, pero no estoy seguro), aunque lo hicieron tan mal que, o eras administrador, o no podías hacer casi nada. Por el contrario, en Linux o Mac, que llevan muchísima más trayectoria en entornos multiusuarios siempre se ha podido usar comandos y permisos de administrador de forma puntual aún no estando funcionando como administrador, de forma que la mayoría de usuarios no son administradores.

Microsoft es consciente de su falta de seguridad y de la reticencia de los usuarios a no usar cuentas de administrador, por lo que en Windows Vista han introducido el famoso "Control de Cuenta de Usuario", que te regunta confirmación para todo lo que haces, con el fin de "molestar a los usuarios", según declaraciones textuales de uno de los directivos de Microsoft. Y es que con esto pretenden que los usuarios no usen cuentas de administrador para así facilitar la reducción de problemas de virus, ataques, malware...

Realmente creo que la técnica usada es malísima, ya que aogbia a los usuarios y hace que muchos estén muy descontentos con el sistema. Creo que la solución sería una ventana de información sobre los riesgos de ser administrador y mejorar muchísimo las cuentas de usuario, al estilo de Linux.

Download:Vista4XP

Download:Vista4XP

Download:Vista4XP

Download: Vista4XP

Download: Vista4XP

Essa é pra quem curte games Lançamento Oficial do Grand Theft Auto - GTA 4 está previsto para o dia 29/04/2008 nas prateleiras de todas as lojas no mundo, para os consoles PC, Playstation 3, Xbox 360, mesmo com o atraso já que a RocksStars Games anuncio para o ano 2007, GTA IV é um dos games mais esperados diantas todas as novidades apresentadas, já está na lista entre um dos melhores Games do ano 2008.

Colabore com o nosso Blog deixe seus comentários e assine nosso Feed e mantenha-se atualizado sempre com as melhores dicas de segurança para proteção do seu computador.

El comentadísimo y esperadísimo SP1 de Windows Vista ha sido por fin publicado. Básicamente, como todos los SP, soluciona bugs de funcionamiento, fallos de seguirdad y trae mejoras de rendimiento (que falta hacen). Este SP debería hacer al SO de Microsoft mucho más resistente a cuelgues del sistema, malfuncionamientos, ataques de virus, malware... y un largo etc.

El SP1 completo pesa 1.13GB, lo que lo convierte en el SP más pesado lanzado por Microsoft. Y es que el tamaño de este SP supondrá un dolor de cabeza para muchos usuarios que no cuentan con líneas de Internet de alta velocidad, ya que se tardará:

Aunque si tenéis el sistema operativo actualizado, hay usuarios que dicen que han tenido que descargarse algo menos de 500MB, lo que reduciría al 40% (aproximadamente) los tiempos calculados arriba, reduciendo el tiempo con un módem de 56Kb/s a unas 17 horas.