So you’ve got a brand new laptop at the office. Maybe you’re really lucky and got a Tablet PC. Whatever model or brand you got, it almost certainly includes wireless support. Now you can work from anywhere in the office or campus without having to find an available network plug. Your IT department will handle …

No matter how fast or shiny computers might be when they are new, they all seem to get slower over time. That state-of-the-art PC you bought last year might not feel like such a screamer after you install a dozen programs, load it with antispyware and antivirus tools, and download untold amounts of junk from the Internet. The slowdown might happen so gradually you hardly notice it, until one day you’re trying to open a program or file and wonder, “What happened to my poor PC?” Whatever the cause, there are a lot of ways to help speed up Windows and make your PC work better—even without upgrading your hardware. Here are some tips to help you optimize Windows Vista for faster performance. Delete programs you never use Many PC manufacturers pack their new computers with programs you didn’t order and might not want. These often include trial editions and …

Online auctions are more popular than ever, enabling users to find everything from collectibles to car parts. Most auction transactions go smoothly. Auction fraud, however, is also more prevalent. You can choose LifeLock.com (Promotion Code) to be pro-active in protecting your identity and personal information. Simply reacting to identity theft isn’t enough anymore. Too many thieves have found out this is a safe, easy, money-making crime to commit. They’re out to get you. You may never receive the item that you won, or the item that you receive may not be what the seller promised. You may even discover that a seller has stolen your personal information. Fortunately, if you do a little research and follow these tips, you can help avoid auction fraud.

1. ENABLE WIRELESS ENCRYPTION Enabling Wireless encryption is essential otherwise every one within your Radio Frequency (RF) range (and remember the Wireless network world record distance is 125 miles!), at best can capture your traffic compromising surfing habits, gathering usernames and passwords and at worst sharing illegal images or hacking over your Wireless network for which you are legally responsible. DO NOT USE WEP (WEP is trivially broken) DO NOT USE A DICTIONARY BASED WORD FOR YOUR WPA/WPA2 PSK DO USE WPA2 (BEST) or WPA (NEXT BEST) WITH A NON-DICTIONARY PSK Note: Use AES encryption where you can, it’s the strongest available. 2. DISABLE SSID BROADCAST Ensure you disable the SSID broadcast on you Access Point this will hide your Wireless access point from casual WARDRIVERS. While it is still trivial for a proficient WARDRIVER to determine the SSID it makes him/her work that little bit harder and there may …

In ISA Server 2006 or in ISA Server 2004, client Web requests are handled by the Web Proxy filter. This filter works at the application level on behalf of clients residing in networks that are behind an ISA Server-based server that requests HTTP and Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTPS) objects. Web proxy client requests from client computers that have ISA Server specified as a proxy server in the browser settings are passed to the Web proxy filter.

The Mozilla team is working really hard to make sure that Firefox 3 will be the best browser we will ever see on this planet. Part of the plan is to enhance the UI of Firefox to make sure it blends with the host OS. Firefox 3 will come out with inbuilt skins that will integrate completely with Windows Vista, OS X and Linux. The Mozilla team posted some screenshots on what we can expect, and here the screenshots of the theme for Vista and OS X in action :

If you would like to recover a single mailbox on your production Exchange Server 2003 you are able to do so. You just have to add and configure the fifth storage group on your server – known as Recovery Storage Group and you will not have to configure your separate recovery server in an isolated forest as you had to do with Exchange 2000 Server. You can create this storage group using your Exchange System Manager as seen in the following screen shot. Figure 1: Creating the Recovery Storage Group

If an administrator has deleted a user and with that its mailbox and within 30 days (by default) he discovers that this mailbox should not have been deleted, there is an easy way to reconnect the orphaned mailbox to a new user. The time line for not deleting an unconnected mailbox from the storage is 30 days by default and can be increased using a private storage system policy. The administrator can have a look into the private storage of the private storage where he will find all orphaned mailboxes with a red cross. The cleanup agent is the piece of software that regularly scans all mailboxes and checks, if there is a connection between a user object in Active Directory and a mailbox in the private information store. If there is not, it marks the mailbox for deletion. The retention time for the tombstoned mailbox now begins to run. …

Today Microsoft announced two new search servers: Microsoft Search Server 2008 and Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express. The interesting one is the Express version, since it’s free. A download is available warning: it’s beta software, although Microsoft says it’s close to final at www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch/ Furthermore, the only difference between it and Search Server is that Search Server can be run on multiple servers for load balancing. This announcement is a game-changer, in terms of Microsoft’s relation to its arch competitor, Google, as well as the market in general. In several calls I had with reporters, I was asked, “Is this Microsoft playing catch up to the Google Search Appliance?” Sort of, but with a twist — while Microsoft is not offering a search appliance itself, it certainly expects its partners to do so. Interestingly, the Microsoft offering is more nuanced than the Google Search Appliance. The Google appliance pretty much …