Hints and Tips from the Personal Computer Show on WBAI

Michael wrote a few articles about Wi-Fi security:

The Best Security for Wireless Networks which discusses suing WEP, WPA and WPA2 on your personal Wi-Fi network
Being Secure on Public Wi-Fi: VPN, Firewalls, File Sharing which, as the title implies, discusses being secure on public wireless networks
What your mother never told you about VPNs which discusses consumer Virtual Private Networks

Michael wrote a series of articles about removing malicious software. Malware can be very good at defending itself, thus, the best way to remove it, is not to let it run in the first place. You can do this by booting an infected machine from a CD and running an operating system on the CD that treats the C disk as a data disk.

The Best Way to Remove Viruses, Spyware and other Malware (Part 1) May 19, 2009
How to Remove Malware: Booting from a CD (Part 2) June 16,2009
The Best Way to Remove Viruses and Malware: The Clean-Up (Part 3) July 20,2009

From an article Strip Personal Information from Word Documents by Neil J. Rubenking in PC Magazine in 2003:

Have you ever written a venomous letter and then edited it down to something less offensive? If you've enabled the fast save feature, earlier versions of your document may still be present. If the document was edited with Track Changes enabled, a name is associated with each change. Fortunately, you can get rid of all the personal information with a few simple settings.

Choose Options from the Tools menu, click on the Save tab, and uncheck the box labeled Allow fast saves. Now click on the Security tab and check the box titled Remove personal information from this file on save. In Word 2003, as shown in the screenshot above, the check box's title is slightly different: Remove personal information from file properties on save. When you save the file, the Author, Manager, Company, and Last saved by fields are cleared. Names in comments or edits are changed to simply Author. Any routing slip or e-mail header information is also removed. If the document contains tracked changes, you may want to accept them all before saving.

The Allow fast saves option is global and is present in Word 2000 also. The Remove personal information option is specific to the current file and is present only in Word 2002 and later. If you want that option to be the default, click on the File Locations tab in the Tools | Options dialog and note the folder containing user templates. In that folder, open the file Normal.dot. Check the Remove personal information box as noted above, then save and close the file. All new files created from this point on will have that feature enabled by default.

Whenever a program crashes in Windows XP, the operating system offers to notify Microsoft of the problem...To eliminate this annoying behavior: right-click on My Computer and select Properties or open the System icon in the Control Panel - you'll see the System Properties dialog. Select the Advanced tab and click on Error Reporting. This brings up a dialog that lets you disable error reporting altogether. If you want to report errors for any program except one problematical one that you've already reported multiple times, click on Choose Programs and disable error reporting for specific programs.

Error reporting might send Microsoft some personal information. This is not done on purpose by Microsoft, but dumps of memory can include data from other programs that were running at the time. You can disable Error Reporting in a permanent way, by disabling the underlying service. In the Control Panel, click on Administrative Tools, then on Services. Find the error reporting service. Right click on it and bring up its properties. Change the startup type to "disabled". It will take effect the next time Windows is started.

When you do a Search in Windows XP, the search not only looks at file and folder names, but goes through any Zipped files it finds... if you have a great many Zip files it can extend the time the search takes by a considerable amount. The only way to change this behavior is:
From the Start menu's Run dialog, enter this command: regsvr32 /u zipfldr.dll
Repeat and enter: regsvr32 /u cabview.dll
Each time, you should get a notice that DllUnregister succeeded. You do need to restart the computer for the change to take effect. Now, when you search, the operating system will ignore ZIP files instead of treating them as folders. If you ever need that feature, you can turn it back on is by simply as repeating the two regsvr32 commands without the /u.

In Eudora 6, when you click the Print icon or select File/Print or press CTRL-P, it brings up the print dialog box which allows you to choose a printer and choose various options. If you simply want to print to the default printer with all defaults set, bypassing any options, choose File/Print One (you can also use the Toolbar Optimize function to include a Print One icon on the Toolbar).

Task Manager is a very useful program in Windows XP. Among the important information it displays is a graph of cpu usage and the amount of RAM currently in use. It can also break out cpu usage by process. However, unless you know the secret password you wouldn't even know that Task Manager exists. You can search the All Programs list all day and not find an entry for Task Manager. You just have to know that it can be started by right clicking on an empty spot in the task bar or with Control-Shift-Escape. To add an entry for Task Manager to the System Tools group in Windows XP:

Double click on My Computer
Double click on the C disk
Navigate to C:\Windows\system32
Find program TASKMGR.EXE
Right click on it and select "Create Shortcut"
Navigate to the shortcut, right click on it an select "Cut"
Right click on the Start button and select "Open All Users"
Drill down from the Programs folder to the Accessories folder to the System Tools folder
Paste the shortcut into the System Tools Folder
Close all open windows

A listener named Rick wrote: This is the first time that I am writing to you, hoping for clarification on something - color profiles. I have been into digital photography for quite a few years and have recently purchased a great photo printer - the Canon S900. The printed images are very vivid and crisp and, depending upon the paper I use, professional-looking. I used the Canon papers for a while and tried a few others such as Kodak and HP (with mixed results). Recently, someone in my camera club told me about Pictorico papers and that they have color profiles specific for each paper they produce free for downloading on their website.

So, after purchasing a few of their papers, I downloaded the appropriate color profiles and made a few prints. Two of the suggested color profiles seemed to give me a nice output on two different papers, but one of the suggested color profiles was horrible and my photograph actually looked much better using the default Photoshop profile than the recommended one from Pictorico. So, the question is this - what do color profiles really do for a specific paper? I was under the impression that color profiles were for color correction on images on screen only and that your image would be adjusted accordingly regardless of the paper used. Color profiles and the selections offered in programs such as Photoshop and other digital darkroom programs are somewhat of a mystery to me and I am not sure when and why I should change profiles.

Answering the question for us is Fred Kahn.

Dear Rick,

When you use a generic profile, (which is what you have done) you are using a profile that represents the average of all the printers (of your make and
model) that were made to the date of the generic profile AND the average profile of the paper you are using AND the average of the ink you are using. If you want your profiles to always work, you have to stop using generic profiles and make your own profiles (or use a profiling company such as www.drycreekphoto.com). The manufacturers of color profiling software and hardware (colorimeters), have made color management easy to do without having to understand exactly what is going on. However, due to this, when things DO go wrong people don't know what to do.

A quick little explanation of what happens when you profile your printer, paper and ink combination, (after, we assume, you have both calibrated AND profiled your monitor). You are now setting your hardware to a color standard. This can be one of several standards such as ICC, CIE, sRGB, Adobe RGB, etc. Since your printer cannot reproduce all the colors that your monitor can show (this is known as a devices color gamut) when you tie all your devices to one color standard (this is known as color management) it should cause your monitor to show only those colors that your printer can reproduce and your printer to reproduce the colors you see on your monitor (not always exactly, but close).

It doesn't always work and the saying in the color management business is that a color profile is only as good as the person making the profile. Making good profiles is sometimes easy, sometimes not. If you do want to do your own profiling, the best hardware on the market under $3000 is the Gretag/Macbeth Eye One. A more affordable one is made by Monaco.

I am just curious though, have you had a problem with the canon inks drying on the Kodak paper? I had that problem a few years ago. Also, remember to give your profile targets at least 2 hours to fully dry before using them to create profiles with.