windows

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Windows 10 spies on you by default

Windows 10 has a ton of tracking built-in. Here’s how to opt-out. Five things to do as soon as you install Windows 10: http://bgr.com/2015/07/30/windows-10-upgrade-installation-settings/ Open your Settings panel and click on Privacy where you’ll find 13 different screens to go through. Disable anything that you feel you won’t want tracked. Most of the important settings can be found on the General tab, but be sure to go though other tabs as well.

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HOWTO: Start a named PuTTY session from a Windows Shortcut

I have Windows 7 on my laptop, but since I’m a die-hard Linux geek and haven’t got the patience to wait for anyone else to figure out all of the drivers needed for a clean, working Linux build on my M17x, I installed Cygwin. However, the limitation of running Cygwin in a DOS-like command line window that couldn’t be expanded beyond an 80-character width was a nuisance. Enter “puttytel” (downloadable on this page) which can connect to your local Cygwin installation in a PuTTY-like SSH terminal.

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HOWTO: enable a 'god mode' control panel in Windows 7

CNET posted a HOWTO video on how to enable a much broader Control Panel setup by creating a folder with a specific filename. If you want to skip the video, here are the instructions: create a folder in the root level of any drive (C:, D:) call the new folder “GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}” open that folder enjoy

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If you ever needed a reason to switch from Windows, This should convince you

It’s amazing to me, the stranglehold that Microsoft seems to have on the PC market. So much so that for years they’ve been the target of so many attacks, exploits, trojans and viruses. Between the OS itself just not being secure, to their flagship browser many dub “Internet Exploder”, it’s surprising that Windows would continue for so long to be such a popular product. But why change from what you know, right?

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Funny Reminder

I was just surfing around, looking to see any updates on GnuCash or such personal financial software to find a Linux replacement for Microsoft Money – the last nail in the coffin so I can stop using Microsoft products (other than gaming) – and came across a comparison of books that Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds had written. I looked at an “equivalents” page found at http://www.linuxrsp.ru/win-lin-soft/table-eng.html and noticed under the ‘other’ listing that Bill Gates had written a book called “Road Ahead” and Linus Torvalds wrote a book called “Just for Fun”.

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Here comes da spam!

ZDnet is carrying an article about how the nice folks over at Spamhaus are warning of a potentially large increase in the amount of spam to come through in the next two months. Apparently the spammers have made a zombie trojan that can figure out your ISP’s Email proxy information, and send spam through your PC as if you were actually sending it from your PC using your ISP’s Email service.

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triple worm threat

Hey folks. PLEASE, for the sanity of everyone close to you: if you get an Email about Saddam Hussein being dead DO NOT open any attachments on the message. There’s a triple worm threat going down that’ll really screw up your machine. Check out this article at ZDnet for more information.

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Review: GoToMyPC

I used GoToMyPC for quite a while - almost since they started. I was a member for quite a while, too. So long, in fact, that when I wanted to quit their service, they cut my monthly cost in half to keep me as a customer, which I did for a few more months. I loved that I could connect to my PC at home while it was behind a firewall, and get files or access some archived Email or whatever.

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