PC Publican

I'm often asked by parents for recommendations for Internet filters to protect their kids (and their computers) from inappropriate material on the Web.  My answer for some time now has been BlueCoat's K9 Web Protection.  This outstanding (free!) product, which I've written about before, is now available for the iPhone, iPod, and iPad.

With these Apple devices, BlueCoat replaces Safari (and other browsers) with its own Internet browser, which then blocks inappropriate content as would the computer-based version.  While the K9 browser is not yet as full-featured as Safari, this trade-off may be well worth it to protect your children.

The K9 Web Protection Browser is available as a free download from the Apple iTunes App Store.

Recent flooding in Thailand has resulted in significantly higher prices for hard drives.  How much higher?  Just a few weeks ago I purchased a 500GB Western Digital SATA hard drive (WD5000AAKX) for $42.98.  That same drive now retails for $99.00.  A 2GB Samsung SpinPoint which was $79.99 is now $148.99. What exactly happened to cause such a precipitous increase?

In turns out that around 30% of the world's hard drive manufacturing capability resides in Central Thailand, in the Bang Pa-In industrial estate.  This estate is essentially a gigantic floodplain, and after nearly two months of relentless rain, the series of dikes surrounding the estate failed.  By October 15th, Western Digital's production facilities were under 4 feet of dirty water.  Toshiba, which makes more than 10% of the world's hard drives, suffered a similar fate.  What about Seagate?  Well, even though Seagate was not directly impacted by the flooding their drives relied on numerous components produced by companies in the Bang Pa-In estate.

This supply disruption will have a profound effect on consumers for quite a while.  Seagate's CEO sees significantly higher drive prices through 2012, and, perhaps even more ominously, Western Digital has not made an official announcement since October 19th.  The largest consumers of hard drives (i.e. computer manufacturers) will weather this storm by locking in supply, which leaves retail consumers out-of-luck.

If you can delay purchasing a hard drive you will certainly benefit from a stabilizing market, but if you need a drive now (i.e. drive crash) be prepared to pay at least double what you would have a few months ago.  Maybe this will speed the transition to solid-state drives (SSD) and cloud computing.

Instances of data breaches are now far too commonplace.  We hear regularly of email services, social media sites, merchants and even financial institutions whose databases have been hacked.  Less reported are the thousands of personal computers whose data has been stolen, lost portable drives, or any other form of security compromise.  Much of this information resides openly on the Internet, available to anyone who knows where to find it.

While there's no fool-proof way to determine whether your accounts or data have been compromised, a website called "PwnedList" serves as a useful tool in online safety.  They have programatically harvested an immense amount of stolen data, storing nothing but encrypted e-mail addresses and usernames.  This limits their ability to a simple yes or no query -- yes indicates that the given username or e-mail address was found in at least one stolen database.

What should be done if your login information is found at "PwnedList"?  Since you don't know which account it relates to (or even if a username is uniquely yours), I recommend simply changing the password for all accounts that use that particular e-mail/username.  Better to be safe than sorry.

Even though Windows 7 is a definite improvement over Vista, Windows XP remains the operating system of choice for many systems both old and new.  Support from Microsoft for Windows XP will continue at least through April 8, 2014, so users should be aware of what they can do to extend the life of their XP systems:

• Check The Hardware: How much RAM do you have? 512MB is a minimum, 1GB is better.  Clean your laptop's CPU ports for a cooler running system.
• Check Your Hard Drive's Health:  Use a tool like HDTune to check for disk errors and self-test (SMART) scores.  Run a test of your drive's logical health using chkdsk (type chkdsk /f c: in a command window).
  
• Repair Hardware Driver Issues: Use the Device Manager (Control Panel -> System -> Device Manager) to discover any hardware that may be missing drivers (look for a yellow triangle).  Download the latest drivers from the manufacturer's website.
• Update Your System:  Use Windows Update to apply the latest XP patches/bugfixes to your system.  Use the Secunia Personal Software Inspector to determine whether your system (and other key applications) is up-to-date.  Note that Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) is no longer supported by Microsoft.  Download service pack 3 (SP3) from here if needed.
• Clean Up Your Hard Drive: Use CCleaner to remove unneeded system and browser (Internet) files.  Defragment your drive on a regular basis (waiting until it's nearly full makes the process much less effective).
  
• Back Up Your Hard Drive:  An aging hard drive, especially one older than 5 years, has a dramatically higher failure rate.  Use a program like Cobian Backup to backup important files to an external hard drive or flash drive.  To image (a full-disk backup which allows for a perfect recovery of system and data) the entire hard drive use a product like Acronis True Image.  Finally, a cloud-based (online) solution like DropBox allows for free (2GB in the case of DropBox) and easy backup of a limited amount of data.
  

There was a time, soon after its release, that I cautioned users not to update their computers to Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3).  Reports of corrupted installations and lost data were numerous (not to mention the infamous HP endless reboot bug).  Many months have passed, however, and SP3 is quite stable and should be applied to any Windows XP installation that does not yet have it.  It remedies countless bugfixes and security patches, but don't expect any noticeable performance improvements (unlike the file system speed-ups from the Windows Vista SP2 update).

As an additional motivation to update, Microsoft has declared July 13, 2010 as the last day of support for XP SP2.  This means no more patches or bugfixes.  Updating to Service Pack 3 will extended the Microsoft support life of your computer until April 2014.

You can find Windows XP SP3 at this Microsoft page.