Computers & Technology

In Windows Vista, when User Access Control (UAC) is enabled all programs run with regular privileges.  When a task needs to be done that requires administrator privileges, the entire screen darkens and all windows are disabled except a dialog window that asks you to accept or reject that administrative task.

One way to circumvent that is to simply disable UAC.  This is not a good idea and is not recommended, as all programs and tasks will run as administrator.  This can have devastating effects should your computer become compromised.

Yet it is annoying to have so many barriers to your own computer, if you know what you are doing and what consequences your actions will have.

Windows Vista also includes an elevated mode of running programs which does not prompt you for UAC permission, but also does not disable the UAC.

To run a program with elevated privileges, follow these steps:

• Click Start (or press the Windows key).
• Type the name of the program.
• Press CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER

If a company releases the latest version of their software as beta, does that mean that the previous version is out of beta?

Google released recently version 3 (beta) of Picasa.  But the previous version was Picasa 2 (beta).  If all your products/services are (beta) even after you come out with new versions, then what is the meaning of beta?  Does it mean that you don't stand behind your products/services?  What does that say about your confidence in those products/services?

That said, Picasa 2 was a fine program, meaning that what it does, it does well.  Let's see what the new (beta) version is like.

I have tried downloading and installing Google's Chrome web browser on three different computers that have Symantec Endpoint Protection 11 installed, and the browser crashes (never successfully loads any web pages) every time it is run.

One computer has Windows XP, another has Windows Vista Business and the third has Windows Vista Ultimate.  Doing a search in the Internets reveals that this problem happens because when SEP 11 is installed Google Chrome's sandbox feature cannot run properly and therefore crashes the browser.  I don't have a more detailed description than that, but I found a solution, of sorts, that involves disabling the sandboxing feature.

It is interesting to note that the sandbox feature is what allows Google Chrome to isolate a crashing web site, thereby saving other tabs and browser windows from having to also crash because of one bad web site.  In other words, in order to prevent Google Chrome from crashing one has to disable the feature that prevents crashes from spreading.

So the solution is to run Google Chrome with the argument "--no-sandbox".  The idea is to modify the Google Chrome shortcut on the desktop such that the command that gets run has --no-sandbox appended to the chrome.exe.

How to create a new blog entry using Windows Live Writer.

Check out this video!

When I tried to open a Microsoft Word document recently, the following dialog boxes were displayed:

wtf

"close open dialog boxes".

Is the second dialog box referring to the first or vice versa?  Why did the first dialog box come up in the first place?  Which came first (the chicken or the egg?)

In the end, clicking OK simply dismissed the error and successfully displayed the document that I attempted to open originally.

Microsoft Word wants to waste my time.