Sean, Miles and John join Lyle for a spot of Geeky News and a lot of phone calls.
A service that exists in multiple versions of Windows the Windows Messanger Service was desinged for administrators to be able to send messages to users on a network.
The “feature” is enabled by default and companies are taking advantage of it by using it as a marketing mechanisum. The good news is that you can turn it off.
In Windows 2000 and Windows XP go to “Start→Run” and type “services.msc”. In the services find “Messenger” and turn it off.
SBC/PacBell turned off Miles DSL for lack of payment and said it wouldn’t offer the same deal as he had before. So Miles decided to go to Cruzio for DSL. But SBC is dragging their feet. Even saying that there is a “short” in his line. We think it’s odd that the short showed up after they decided to switch carriers.
The Uber VCR – TiVo, a DVR , reached it’s one millionth customer. So TiVo is not going away, and is actually becomeing the Kleenex of DVR s. John and Sean both love their TiVos.
The FCC on Tuesday approved the inclusion of the “Broadcast Flag” for digital rights managment into the digital television specification. This new ruling forces producers of Digital TV recivers to limit rights to the user when this flag is present. Read more about the FCC Broadcast Flag Approval
It looks like IT salaries are going down by an average of 1.7% in the next year. LAN administrators down 4.5%. Desktop Support Analist down 5.3%. Application Archetects up by 1.9%. Senior Internet/intranet Developers up by 1.9%. System Auditors up 1.8%. The fastest growing IT job is Security Admins +2.1%.
Dick
Salanis
Windows 2000 does not have msconfig (the way that Sean sugested disabling Windows Messanger. Dick sugested that users can use “services.msc” instead. This works on Windows 2000 and XP. [News item above corrected – thanks Dick.]
Savana
Seaside
Can you recomend a book for me to help me learn about troubleshooting computers?
John said that the web is a great resources.
Books to look at Upgrading and Fixing PCs for Dummies or PC Help Desk in a Book: The Do-it-Yourself Guide to PC Troubleshooting and Repair
Donald from Monterey called in to say that community colleges are very useful. They have very reasonable classes designed for the beginer.
Any software for the novice to recover erased data.
If you erased it very recently then there are software solutions to recover your data. The longer you wait the more likely your software will be overwritten by new data. Sean uses Ontrack Data Recovery, which alows you to find erased data.
Tom
Bonny Doon
There curently are no Cable companies that offer cable modem service. Cable Modems are faster then DSL, but you might not notice a difference between Cable Modem and DSL. If you can get Cable Modem Internet – go for it. One thing of note, cable companies almost never allow static IP addresses.
David
Boulder Creek
Last week you were touting Mozilla Mail and Web Browsers, but I have a Mac running OS 9.something. What email client should I upgrade to and what browser?
Yikes – tough one. Definetly get a newer version of browser… Netscape 4.x is a horrable little beast. The problem is, no one is making new browsers for OS 9. You can try the iCab Browser or a not-so-stable version of Mozilla or the Opera Browser. But I’m not sure how much of an improvement any of those will be. Good luck.
[We had more calls – but that is all that I wrote about… there is always a show next week. – Lyle]
