Privacy & Security Articles

Hide Drives from Your Computer in Windows 7 or Vista

If you’ve got drives in My Computer that you never access, such as a USB Flash drive that you are using solely for ReadyBoost, a floppy drive, or a network drive only used for a particular piece of software, then you mi...

Lowell Heddings Aug 22nd, 2007

Dealing With Windows Vista Time Sync Problems

Many people have reported problems with synchronizing their clocks with the internet time servers, especially time.windows.com, which seems to have a ton of problems with uptime. We’ll go through a few workarounds to fi...

Lowell Heddings Aug 20th, 2007

Disable AutoPlay in Windows Vista

Windows Vista’s AutoPlay options are a great improvement over Windows XP in terms of flexibility, but unfortunately there are so many options that it can be confusing, especially since there’s no specific mention ...

Lowell Heddings Aug 18th, 2007

Using Word 2007 as a Blogging Tool

Microsoft Word is a wonderful tool for writing documents, but did you know that you can now use it to post to your blog as well? This is tremendously useful if you tend to write very long, wordy posts, or if you just can&#821...

Lowell Heddings Aug 9th, 2007

Windows System Center Essentials 2007

This week I had the opportunity to check out Microsoft’s System Center Essentials (SEC) 2007. I thought I would share this with all of our IT geek’s out there.

Brian Burgess Aug 3rd, 2007

The First Thing to Disable in Access 2007

I have just started to play around with Access 2007 and so far my thoughts are indifferent. I am not sure how well the “Ribbon” is going to play out. I work in Access Databases a lot with my job and I am pretty ...

Brian Burgess Jul 27th, 2007

Using Secure Login in Firefox

If you allow Firefox to store your passwords you might be worried about the recent security holes found in the password manager. The solution to these problems is to use the Secure Login extension to prevent Firefox from auto...

Lowell Heddings Jul 26th, 2007

Use Parental Controls to Filter Websites in Windows Vista

The new Parental Controls in Windows Vista will allow you to filter the content your children can view on the web. You could, for instance, block your kids from using MySpace or other similar sites. Before you set this u...

Brian Burgess Jul 15th, 2007

Access Your MySQL Server Remotely Over SSH

So you’ve got MySQL on your web server, but it’s only opened to local ports by default for security reasons. If you want to access your database from a client tool like the MySQL Query Browser, normally ...

Lowell Heddings Jun 29th, 2007

Clear History from Totem Movie Player in Ubuntu

If you’ve been using the default movie player in Ubuntu to play videos, you might have noticed that there’s no way in the application to clear the recent history of watched movies. This could cause issues if ...

Lowell Heddings Jun 27th, 2007

Backup or Restore Saved Network User Credentials in Windows Vista

Whenever you enter user credentials into Internet Explorer, map a drive to a remote server, or connect to a Windows domain, you are given the opportunity to save your password. What you may not realize is that you can backup ...

Lowell Heddings Jun 27th, 2007

Clear All Browsing History in Safari

If you share a computer you know how important it is to keep your personal data and surfing habits private. You could always use the Private Browsing feature, but what if you forget? You can clear your session data by us...

Brian Burgess Jun 16th, 2007

Always Start an Application in Administrator Mode on Windows 7 or Vista

Many utilities need to be run as administrator in order to function properly, especially older utilities that haven’t been updated to support Windows 7 or Vista yet.

Lowell Heddings May 2nd, 2007

Share Your Calendar in Outlook 2003 / Exchange Environment

If you would like better communication with your co-workers here is a quick tip on sharing your calendar in Outlook. This will only work if you are using an Exchange Server e-mail account, typically something you’d be u...

Brian Burgess Apr 24th, 2007

Back Up Your File Encryption Key in Windows Vista

Windows Vista includes a file encryption technology very similar from a user perspective to the one that existed in Windows XP, but Vista makes it very easy to make a backup of the file encryption key. In XP, your encryp...

Lowell Heddings Apr 9th, 2007

Disable User Account Control(UAC) For Administrators Only

If you can’t stand the User Account Control prompts, but you’d still like to retain a little bit of security, you can disable it for Administrator accounts only. What we’ll be doing is actually changing Wind...

Lowell Heddings Feb 19th, 2007

Disable Security Center Popup Notifications in Windows Vista

If you decide to turn off automatic updates, you’ll be annoyed to death with popup messages from the Security Center that tell you to “Check your computer security” or “Check your Firewall status&#8221...

Lowell Heddings Feb 8th, 2007

Using Password Phrases For Better Security

Did you know that Windows supports using passwords of up to 127 characters? I don’t use passwords anymore, and I haven’t for years. I’ve switched to using password phrases instead.

Lowell Heddings Feb 4th, 2007

Enable or Disable Auto Login in Suse Linux

If you hate logging in every time you reboot your computer, you can easily configure Suse to automatically log you in when you start your computer. Or you can disable it if you are worried about security....

Lowell Heddings Jan 28th, 2007

Enable Ctrl+Alt+Delete for Vista Logon Screen

In older versions of Windows, you had to use the Ctrl+Alt+Delete combination to login to the system. This was supposed to provide a higher security login, although I don’t know how. You also might be used to using ...

Lowell Heddings Jan 25th, 2007

Make Windows 7, 8.x or Vista Log On Automatically

If you are just running a home computer for gaming or something unimportant, you might not want to have to log in every single time you reboot your computer. There’s an easy tweak that will let you autologin....

Lowell Heddings Jan 25th, 2007

Make User Account Control (UAC) Stop Blacking Out the Screen in Windows 7 or Vista

In Windows 7 or Vista, the screen goes dark when the User Account Control window comes up, which is extremely annoying. They call it the “Secure Desktop”, but I think it’s obnoxious.

Lowell Heddings Jan 12th, 2007

Install Subversion with Web Access on Ubuntu

This article covers installing subversion with the apache module so that it can be easily accessed from other systems on a public network. If you want a more secure svn server, you could use svnserve+ssh, which isn’t co...

Lowell Heddings Dec 28th, 2006

Enable Remote Desktop (VNC) on Kubuntu

Kubuntu includes the built-in ability to allow other users to control the desktop. Like Ubuntu, you can allow users to access and control the desktop via the VNC client. Unlike Ubuntu, there are a lot more options....

Lowell Heddings Dec 26th, 2006

Install TrueCrypt on Ubuntu Edgy

TrueCrypt is a phenomenal open-source disk encryption software that runs on Windows or Linux. Unfortunately, the installer doesn’t work so well on Ubuntu Edgy, so I’ve created this article to help walk you th...

Lowell Heddings Dec 22nd, 2006