Holy RegWorm Batman! Windows Product Activation Attacks Gotham City You bought and paid for your version of Windows XP Home or Professional. You have the proof - your wallet feels much lighter! Like many people, you put things off and ignore what appear to be the plaintive pleas of the RegWorm emanating from your system tray. But then the day of reckoning arrives and the dreaded worm says your "grace period" has expired. You click "Yes" and POW! You're logged off. To give that ole RegWorm a shot of vitamin B12 and get back in action check out: http://www.winxpnews.com/rd/rd.cfm?id=030107CO-RegWorm    Web Site Reports That You Must Enable Cookies You've probably run into cookie problems if you use Internet Explorer to get your Hotmail messages. There's a link in the message and you click on it. You then get an error that says you must have cookies enabled. The problem is that you do have cookies enabled. This article describes the problem and gives you a fix: http://www.winxpnews.com/rd/rd.cfm?id=030114CO-Cookies    Hard Disk May Become Corrupted When Entering Standby or Hibernation Those giant hard disks that are larger than 137 GB are a lot of fun. You feel as if you can "save" the world - on a single disk. But here's some scary news: Your hard disk might become corrupt when it enters Standby or Hibernation in Windows XP. What's up with that? A small problem with atapi.sys causes the problem. Better head on over and get the fix before you lose your masterpieces! http://www.winxpnews.com/rd/rd.cfm?id=030114CO-Atapi_Fix    Connecting to Multiple Remote Desktops on Your Private Network Many of you have multiple Windows XP computers running Remote Desktop on your home or SOHO networks. It would be great to be able to connect to all of these computers over the Internet, but that usually requires multiple IP addresses bound to the Internet interface of your cable or DSL router. John Canning wrote to us with a great trick that allows you to make all of your Remote Desktops available from the Internet using just a single Internet IP address: Click Start, click the Run command and type in "regedit" (without the quotes) to open the Registry Editor. Browse to the following location in the left pane HKEY LOCAL MACHINESystemCurrentControlSetControlTerminalServerWinStationsRDP-Tcp In the right pane, right click on PortNumber and click the Modify command. In the Edit DWORD dialog box, click the decimal option and change the port number to whatever you want. Click OK and restart your computer. Log into your router and use port forwarding to forward the port you chose to your IP address on the network. Now when connecting to your computer from another computer, you have to type the following in the connection box for remote desktop YourIPaddress:YourNewPort (that is a colon in the middle). For example: 66.245.178.25:3388 Great tip! Thanks, John. WinXPnews™ E-Zine Tue, Jan 14, 2003 (Vol. 3, 2 - Issue 58)    Free Wireless Lockdown Tool! SecureWave just released a free security solution that, I dare to say, is of interest to many of you. In two words, they have released a Windows 2000/XP solution that allows you to prevent the use of Wireless cards --unless you actually want your users to use them of course. Many companies spent lots of money on their firewalls and, those that make use of it, even WLANs. However, today the focus has been on securing the communication between the WLAN endpoints and the base stations -- but what about if you do not want them in the first place? Under Windows 2000/XP you (as an end-user) just need to plug one of these wireless cards in that machine and bingo -- security polices are out of the window. If you want to make sure that WLAN cards cannot be used your will love WaveLock. I know the developers myself, these are reliable people. Wavelock is free, not supported but definitely interesting. check it out at: http://www.w2knews.com/rd/rd.cfm?id=030120TP-Wavelock Sunbelt W2Knews™ Mon, Jan 20, 2003 (Vol. 8, #3 - Issue #409)    Certain Programs Do Not Work Correctly If You Log On Using a Limited User Account Have your limited users experienced the following kinds of problems when running certain programs on their Windows XP computers? Program does not run. Program stops responding (hangs). Receive notification of run-time error 7 or run-time error 3446. Program does not recognize that a CD-ROM is in the CD-ROM drive. Program does not allow you to save files. Program does not allow you to open files. Program does not allow you to edit files. Program displays a blank error message. You cannot remove the program. You cannot open the Help file The problem is that some programs just don't work correctly when using a limited user account. For a BIG list of programs that don't work, and workarounds for the problem check out: http://www.winxpnews.com/rd/rd.cfm?id=030121UP-Limited_Accounts WinXPnews™ E-Zine Tue, Jan 21, 2003 (Vol. 3, 3 - Issue 59)    Anatomy of a RegWorm (Windows Product Activation/WPA) Do you live in fear of the day when Windows XP's built-in timebomb will explode on you? That timebomb (WPA or RegWorm) can render your computer useless and require you to get on the phone and beg Microsoft to let you use the computer and software for which you paid big money. What triggers the bomb to explode? Whenever you start your Windows XP computer, the bomb checks on the status of the following hardware devices: Video adapter SCSI disk adapter IDE disk adapter Network Interface Card (NIC) MAC Address Amount of RAM Processor Processor Serial Number Hard drives Hard Drive volume serial number CD-ROM/CD-RW/ DVD-ROM The worm calculates a number associated with the devices and compares it to previous values. You can change up to 6 components in this list during the first 120 days. The bomb is triggered when you change the 7th (at that point you may wish for Linux). The counter is reset every 120 days. At least, that's how it's suppose to work. But keep in mind that software makes errors all the time, so the timebomb might go off even if you haven't changed anything! For a detailed discussion of WPA, check out: http://www.winxpnews.com/rd/rd.cfm?id=030121SE-WPA WinXPnews™ E-Zine Tue, Jan 21, 2003 (Vol. 3, 3 - Issue 59)    How to Put an Entire Drive into a Folder Frank Lund wrote with a great tip on something you can do with Windows XP that you could never do with those old Windows 9x/ME operating systems. This feature, called "Volume Mount Points" (also supported in Windows 2000) allows you to associate an entire partition with a single folder on your hard disk. Frank recommends using the Volume Mount Points feature to free up disk space on a C: drive that's getting too full. If your C: drive is getting too full, you'll love this trick: Create an empty folder on your C: drive called "NewDrive". Install your new hard disk and open the Disk Management console. You can access Disk Management from the Run command. Type diskmgmt.msc in the Run command and click OK. In the Disk Management console, right click on the new disk and click New Volume. Click Next when the Welcome to the New Volume Wizard dialog box appears. On the Select Volume Type page, select the Simple option. Click Next. On the Select Disks page, make sure the correct disk (the new one) is selected and then type in the size of the partition you want to create. The default is to use the entire disk. Type in the size in the Select the amount of space in MB text box and click Next. On the Assign Drive Letter or Path page, select the Mount in the following empty NTFS folder option and then type in the path to the NewDrive folder. Click Next. On the Format Volume page, accept the default settings and click Next. Click Finish and the volume will be created and formatted. Find some folders that are taking up a lot of space. Right click on those folders and click the Cut command. Then click on the NewDrive folder and use the Paste command. Note that you shouldn't do this with Program Folders and System Folders, as there are many files in use in those folders so you won't be able to reliably copy them to the new location. The Cut and Paste operation moves the files from their old folders into the new one. Notice that all the files still appear to be on the C: drive. This makes it easy for you to save all your stuff to the C: drive, but actually use the space on the new disk. You can, of course, name the folder whatever you wish instead of NewDrive. WinXPnews™ E-Zine Tue, Jan 21, 2003 (Vol. 3, 3 - Issue 59)    Automatically Defrag Your Hard Disks with the Built-in Defragger The official Microsoft documentation says you can only defrag one disk at a time and that you can't schedule the defrag run (at least, using the Task Scheduler). http://www.winxpnews.com/rd/rd.cfm?id=030128TI-Defrag  But that's not completely true. If you're an adventurous type you might want to check out these scripts that allow you to schedule and defrag multiple disks at once. You can find the scripts and instructions at: http://www.winxpnews.com/rd/rd.cfm?id=030128TI-W2KDfrag Make sure you download and use the XP scripts when scheduling defrags for your XP systems. You can also schedule defrags using the new command line defrag included with XP. For instructions on using see: http://www.winxpnews.com/rd/rd.cfm?id=030128TI-XP_Defrag

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"Data! data! data!" he cried impatiently. "I can't make bricks without clay."
— Sherlock Holmes to Dr. Watson in "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches" by Arthur Conan Doyle. 

"I like deadlines," cartoonist Scott Adams once said. "I especially like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."

"There is nothing like that feeling of spending days and days banging your head against a wall trying to solve a programming problem then suddenly finding that one tiny obscure and seemingly unrelated piece of the puzzle that unlocks the solution. Oh yeah!"

- Chris Maunder, CodeProject Newsletter 28 Jan 2002

"Management at eSnipe, which is me, is also feeling the pain of the 2002 bear market. So rather than pout about it, I bought some stuff on eBay that I really didn’t need, but made me feel better."

- Tom Campbell, president of eSnipe