The Bits 2.0

One of the most frequent complains about Windows Vista is the Multimedia Class Scheduler. The is an enabled-by-default component that prioritises multimedia applications and tasks such as video and music playback.

However, when multimedia tasks are active, MCS will throttle down the global network bandwidth to around 10,000 packets per second. On high speed links like 100Mbps full duplex and 1000Mbps LAN connections that doesn’t use Jumbo Packets, the throttling may be significant drop network throughput.

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Unlike most other boring Patch Tuesdays, Microsoft released a rather interesting eye-catching “patch” yesterday called “Security Update of ActiveX Kill Bits (KB948881)“. The security update is actually a registry hack that disables the critically flawed Yahoo! Music Jukebox ActiveX control that if exploited, the remote attacker could gain control over your computer.

Despite Yahoo! prompt action in fixing the flaw and releasing an updated version of the ActiveX control, probably Yahoo! knew it very well that 90% of users out there are just ignorant and never bothered to patch.

In December 2005, Microsoft slaughtered Sony BMG’s controversial root kit using a kill bit.

Source: http://www.computerworld.com/……&articleId=9075918

This brief tutorial teaches you how to disable Autorun to better protect yourself from malwares spreaded via USB flash drives and other removable media on Windows PCs.

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Problem: Adobe Illustrator CS3 crashes whenever you try to save a document in its default format.
Cause: The print spooler service is not started.
Solution: Start the print spooler via services.msc or this command:

net start spooler

Spare your sanity. If you don want this to happen, never ever install Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional on a Windows Vista system with UAC enabled and Microsoft Office 2007 installed:

No amount of reinstalling solved the problem. You could either disable UAC, which leaves a big security hole in your system because almost everything will be running with administrator level permission, or you could reinstall Windows. I ended up reinstalling Windows because this Adobe piece of wondrous shit is making me go crazy.

IMHO, Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional just suck! It’s a freaking bloatware that takes up several gigabytes of your hard disk space installing nonsense and bloated libraries. The best thing to do is to get rid of that bloated crap. Here are your options:

1. Use Microsoft XPS - Comes installed with Windows Vista and .Net Framework 3.5
2. Can’t live without PDF? Use the open source PDF Creator. It creates PDFs and its free!
3. Use Foxit PDF reader - It reads PDF, its free and its only 2.2MB