It probably comes as no surprise, but it seems most people ignore routine computer maintenance and only think about it when disaster strikes. A survey done of Staples “EasyTechs,” indicated that more than 80 percent of the chain’s customers don’t bother with routine maintenance and most of the problems they call in the techs for could have been prevented. Do you perform any maintenance on you PC?
The problems the techs found included the personal record number of viruses cited above as well as some much, much ickier ones:

Enough …

I recently read an article by Steven Warren entitled Vista is not ready for the corporate world.  I could not disagree with the article title more, well sort of.  In the article he make several assumptions that are plain false.  I did get a kick out of his statement “Prior to Vista, the default in Windows was to run as administrator”.  Since Steven is talking about the corporate world this statement is amusing.  A good system engineer will not setup any user as a local administrator by default.
In the rest …

Wordpress (the software that runs this site) has been upgraded to the latest version. Let me know if you see any issues.

wordpress

If you are looking to fight spam coming through your emails system, I recommend Barracuda Networks.  We have been using the Barracuda 600 for about a year and recently went with a Barracuda 400 for some additional domains.  Both of these units have worked well for us and we have been happy with their performance.  The Barracuda 600 has been out performing our previous set up which was a farm of Spamassassin servers.  Go with Barracuda, they are a little pricy, but you get what you pay for.

Takeaway: Methods for preventing internal security breaches that work in a small company environment generally don’t scale well as the organization gets larger. Here’s how you develop a scalable strategy for preventing breaches as your company grows.

Many companies focus their security strategies on keeping outsiders from getting into the network. Yet a large percentage of serious security breaches come from within. Some of these are deliberate and others are unintentional, but either way they can put your network and the data on it at risk and result in lost …

I found a new tool called Hitman Pro 2.  Basically you download the application and install it.  The application then downloads 6 top rates spyware prevention/cleaning apps and installs them.  Himat then updates them and executes them all without user intervention.  You can spend 5 minutes downing and installing the Hitman and let it work for the next 2 hours cleaning up your PC.  Pretty cool!
spyware

The SpectraLogic T50 that I mentioned a while ago will ship tomorrow.  We will probably spend the next month configuring and testing our backup solution before I will say we are in production.  Many times companies put backups on the back burner, Don’t!!  Even big companies lose data by accident, check out Google latest blunder.
google, spectralogic, backup

An exploit for a new zero-day bug in Internet Explorer appeared Thursday, causing security companies to ring alarms and Microsoft to issue a security advisory that promised it would patch the problem.
Just a day after anti-virus vendors warned of a new zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer – the second such alert since Friday — companies including Symantec and Secunia boosted security levels as news of a public exploit spread.
Source
microsoft, ie, internet explorer, security, javascript, exploits

Are you looking for a fairly simple way to inventory your LAN machines.  I have been testing an open source package for about 2 months now and it works wonderful for my needs.  Check out OCS Inventory.  Leave comments if you need help but the setup and use is pretty straight forward.

For over five hours, McAfee’s anti-virus software erroneously flagged hundreds of legitimate executables as a malicious virus, leading some customers to quarantine or delete the offending files and render applications such as Microsoft Excel inoperative.
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virus, mcafee