New look for Microsoft homepage being tested
Microsoft is testing out a new look for their web presence, and it’s definitely more elegant than the old one. In fact, it has a definite “Vista” flavor. The real question is whether it will be easier to navigate and find what you’re looking for. Meanwhile, tell us how you like the new look. It’s online here.
Read more about it here.
Updates kill Outlook 2007 beta
If you’ve installed the Office 2007 beta 2, you may have awakened a few days ago to find that Outlook wasn’t working properly. In my case, I could read mail with no problem, but suddenly I couldn’t send – neither by replying/forwarding nor by creating a new message. Trying to do so displayed a non-helpful error message.
Uninstalling the beta and replacing it with the Office 2007 RTM version fixed the problem, but what if you don’t have access to the RTM code? As an MSDN member, I do, but most consumers won’t be able to get the final version until January. You may need to uninstall Office 2007 and reinstall Office 2003 to regain Outlook functionality. That’s rotten, considering it was implied that the Office 2007 beta would be good until February.
Vista: Make laptops more secure with Bitlocker
Vista’s Enterprise and Ultimate editions include a new security feature that’s especially useful for portable computers: BitLocker Drive Encryption. It’s designed to protect your data when an unauthorized person gains physical access to the system (for example, a stolen or lost laptop). You can configure the computer to require a startup key (such as a USB flash memory drive) or a PIN to boot the computer. This makes data stored on portable computers much more secure, so that a thief can’t merely boot into a different operating system or use a boot disk to get to the data. You can read more about BitLocker here.
How to add the Encrypt/Decrypt command to the right context menu
Want to be able to right click a file or folder and select to encrypt or decrypt it, without having to click through the Properties | Advanced dialog boxes? You can do it by editing the registry. Here’s how:
- Open your favorite registry editor.
- Navigate to this entry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE Software Microsoft Windows CurrentVersion Explorer Advanced
- In the right details pane, right click an empty spot and select New, then DWORD Value.
- Name the new value EncryptionContextMenu.
- Double click the new value, and in the data value box, enter 1.
- Click OK and close the registry editor.
- Restart the computer for the new setting to take effect.
Get patched now! The exploits are out there
If you don’t have your computer set to automatically install critical updates and you haven’t yet installed the patches released on this month’s Patch Tuesday, it’s probably a good idea, since there are already instructions circulating on the Internet for how to exploit some of the vulnerabilities that are fixed by those patches. Read more here.
Files from FTP site download into the wrong folders
If you download files from an FTP site and they don’t go into the folder that you selected, it may be caused by certain characters in the file name that match those of a folder you already have on your hard disk. This can be fixed by the latest service pack or, if you don’t want to install the service pack for some reason (such as incompatibility with legacy applications), there is a hot fix specifically for this problem. To find out how to get it, see KB article 810790.
Help window doesn’t appear when you click Help on the Office Online web site
If you visit the Microsoft Office Online web site and click the Help link in the upper right corner of the page, you might receive a warning message instead of the Help page you were expecting. This can be caused by having your popup blocker set to High. You’ll need to either override the popup blocker or temporarily enable popup windows. For information on how to do so, see KB article 884183.
Deb Shinder, MVP