An awesome tool for customizing the Windows 7 Logon screen wallpaper

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A great Windows 7 article about changing your Windows 7 logon wallpaper, from Techrepublic:

 

Back in February 2010, I wrote a blog titled “Change and Customize Windows 7’s Logon Screen Wallpaper”that to this day continues to be a popular article. In that blog I told you that in order to make it easy for OEMs to customize Windows 7, Microsoft built the ability to change the Logon screen wallpaper right in to the operating system. Even though the technique that I explained in that article is very straightforward, it is still a manual procedure in which you must edit the registry, create folders, and copy files.

Well, I recently discovered that Julien Manici, an ingenious developer from Toulon, France, just released the final version of his free Windows 7 Logon Background Changer program that beautifully automates the entire procedure, even providing access to a nice collection of images that are hidden in Windows 7. Furthermore, the program has an awesome user interface that takes advantage of the Windows Presentation Foundation capabilities to create a very fluid selection operation — reminiscent of the effect presented by Windows 7’s Flip 3D feature.

In this edition of the Windows Desktop Report, I’ll show you how to use Windows 7 Logon Background Changer. As I do, I’ll tell you why I think this program is awesome.

Getting the program

Once you download the Windows 7 Logon Background Changer from the developer’s site, you need to open the Zip file and either install the program or just use the executable file. If you choose to install the Windows 7 Logon Background Changer, you’ll find that the program gets integrated into the Control Panel’s Appearance and Personalization tool, as shown in Figure A. (This is just the beginning of this developer’s resourcefulness.)

Figure A

Installing the program into the Appearance and Personalization tool is a unique approach.

If you don’t want to install it, just copy the executable file, Win7LogonBackgroundChanger.exe, to the folder of your choice. When you run the stand-alone executable file, you may see a Security Warning, but you can safely bypass it by clicking the Run button.

Using the program

Once you have Windows 7 Logon Background Changer up and running, as shown in Figure B, you’ll be amazed at the fluidity of the selection process. (I recommend clicking the Full Screen button to get the full effect.) The first thing you’ll notice is a pulsing circle emanating from the center of the screen; this is a nice effect.

Across the bottom of the screen, you’ll find an amazing set of pictures that you can choose from for the logon screen wallpaper. The Windows 7 Logon Background Changer pulls these images right from within the bowels of the operating system. Yes, that’s right — they come with Windows 7. As you may know, Windows 7 ships with a host of region specific themes. When you install Windows 7, it sets up those themes specific to your region in the My Themes section of the Personalization tool. The rest of the themes are on your hard disk but are not made available.

Figure B

The Windows 7 Logon Background Changer takes advantage of Windows Presentation Foundation to create the 3D animation.

But Windows 7 Logon Background Changer reaches into the C:\Windows\winsxs folder and makes all these awesome images readily available for use as Logon screen wallpaper. (This is the second example of the developer’s resourcefulness.)

The best way to cycle through the available wallpaper is to select the first image with your mouse and then use the right and left arrow keys to scroll through the images. As you do, you’ll hear a pleasant sound effect and see the images rotate in a nice 3D animated circular motion to reveal the next one in the series on the flip side of the rotating image. This 3D animated effect was created by taking advantage of the Windows Presentation Foundation capabilities. (This is the third example of the developer’s resourcefulness.)

Once you choose an image, just click the Apply button and the image will be configured as the Logon wallpaper, as shown in Figure C. It will take a few moments to set up the new logon wallpaper, but the orange progress bar keeps you apprised of the length of the operation.

Figure C

It will take a few moments to set up the new logon wallpaper.

Of course, you aren’t limited to using the images from Windows regional themes. Just click the Choose a folder button and you can choose a folder of your own images.

If you read my 2010 article, you know that the button and the text used to identify your user account on the Logon screen have shadows behind them to give them a 3D-like look, and that the default shadows configuration works well with the default Logon screen wallpaper. Depending on what image you use for your new Logon screen wallpaper, those shadows might not work so well. If you click the Settings button, you’ll see that you can adjust the shadow effect, as shown in Figure D.

Figure D

On the Settings page you can adjust the shadows used on the Logon screen’s button and text.

Get real

Before you head to the discussion area to ask me why I am so excited about a program that performs such a simple task, let me explain.

When I first saw Window Flip3D and other cool animated effects such as the Live Taskbar in early versions of Windows 7, I was excited at the prospect that the Windows 7 developers would build more such 3D animated features into the operating system in order to really show off the capabilities of the Windows Presentation Foundation. But they never did. And then to see something as nicely designed as Windows 7 Logon Background Changer, well, it makes you wonder what could have been.

Just imagine other features in the operating system that could have been more exciting if they were programmed with a Windows Presentation Foundation-based user interface like the one in Windows 7 Logon Background Changer? For instance, take a look at the Personalization tool in the Control Panel. Imagine how different it could have been to select Desktop Background, Windows Color, or screen saver from a Windows Presentation Foundation-based user interface. How about looking at photos in the Pictures Library?

Take control of the Windows 7 New menu with ShellMenuNew

From TechRepublic:

 

In recent articles, I’ve shown you how to take back control of Windows 7’s Context and Open With menus using the free utilities from NirSoft. Well, there is one more right-click menu that you might want to clean up — the New menu.

As you know, after installing and uninstalling applications, the New menu can become crammed full of application shortcuts that you no longer want or need. In fact, it can get so crowded that it is really difficult to find what you do want. Since Microsoft made it so easy for the New menu to be populated with application shortcuts, you would have thought that they would have created a tool that would allow you to clean it up. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. If you want to clean up the New menu you can do so by manually editing the registry. Unfortunately, the items that appear on the New menu are in numerous locations in the registry, thus making the operation extremely time consuming.

Fortunately, the folks at NirSoft have created ShellMenuNew, a small utility that shows you all the items that appear on the New submenu and allows you to easily disable unwanted menu items.

In this edition of the Windows Desktop Report, I’ll examine ShellMenuNew and show you how to use it to take back control of Windows 7’s New menu.

Editing the registry

It is important to keep in mind that the techniques I’m about to show you involve making changes to the registry, which is vital to the operating system. Changing it can be dangerous if you inadvertently make a mistake. Therefore, you should take a few moments to back up your system by creating a Restore Point as well as by creating a system image in the Backup and Restore tool. That way if anything goes awry, you can restore your system and get right back to work.

The New menu

As I mentioned, depending on the number of applications that you have installed on your system, the New menu can easily become overcrowded. Even if you have not installed a lot of applications, the New menu can contain application shortcuts that you will never need. In both cases, it can be difficult to quickly access what you want on the New menu.

For example, Figure A shows a New menu on one of my test systems. As you can see, there are a dozen items on the New menu. Of those, I really use only five. So that means for me, there are seven items that do nothing but hinder me from quickly getting to the items that I do use.

Figure A

A typical New menu can contain items you’ll never need.

Using ShellMenuNew

Just like other NirSoft utilities I showed you, ShellMenuView, ShellExView, and OpenWithView, you can run ShellMenuNew right away as there is no installation procedure. As soon as you launch it, the program scans the registry and populates its window with all the applications that appear on the New menus on your system.

On my example system, running ShellMenuNew presented the display shown in Figure B. You’ll notice that the New Folder item doesn’t appear in the ShellMenuNew display and that the Library Folder item does. The New Folder item works differently than an application and so is outside of ShellMenuNew’s scope — so you can’t disable the New Folder item. The Library Folder item, which appears on the New menu only when you right-click in the Libraries folder, is also a different type of animal, but it does show up in ShellMenuNew display. Even so, since it appears only in the Libraries folder, I would highly recommend that you leave the Library Folder item alone — don’t disable it.

Figure B

Using ShellMenuNew, you can easily remove applications from the New menu.

Now, to get rid of the items that I don’t use, I simply hold down [Ctrl] and click each item I want to disable. I then click the red Disable Selected Items button. As you can see in Figure C, each of the items that I selected now has a Yes in the Disabled column. Now, when I access the New menu, as shown in Figure D, finding the items that I regularly use from the New menu is very easy with all the clutter out of the way. (Keep in mind that in some cases, the operating system may take a few moments to register and display the updated New menu.)

Figure C

After I click the red Disable Selected Items button, a Yes appears in the Disabled column.

Figure D

Now, my New menu shows only those items that I use regularly.

Other handy features

As you can see in Figures B and C, the last column in ShellMenuNew’s display is titled Registry Key and indicates where in the registry the setting is stored. If you double-click any row, you’ll see a Properties dialog box that provides you with a summary of the information stored in the registry key.

For example, when I double-clicked on the Microsoft Office PowerPoint Presentation row, ShellMenuNew displayed the dialog box shown in Figure E.

Figure E

The Properties dialog box provides you with a summary of the information stored in the registry key.

If you want to delve into the registry and see for yourself how the New menu is configured, just select a row and click the Open In RegEdit button. When you do, the Registry Editor will appear and be open to the appropriate key, as shown in Figure F.

Figure F

When you select a row and click the Open In RegEdit button, the Registry Editor will open that key.

You can also create a very detailed HTML report of all the items displayed by ShellMenuNew by pulling down the View menu and choosing either the HTML Report – All Items or the HTML Report – Selected Items. ShellMenuNew also has several command-line options for creating reports in other formats. You can find a list of these command-line options in the ReadMe.txt file as well as on the ShellMenuNew page on the NirSoft web site.

Five apps that make your smartphone a smarter phone

A great smartphone article from TechRepublic:

 

Remember when cell phones were just for making telephone calls? We use today’s smartphones for much, much more. They function as tiny held-hand computers that browse the web, send and receive e-mail, create and view documents of all kinds, and run a myriad of apps that can do everything from lighting up the night to reading and interpreting the barcodes on products.

Some of us could probably get along just fine with a data plan and no voice minutes at all, if our carriers would let us. It’s easy to forget that the primary purpose of a phone is to make, receive, and manage actual phone calls. But the nice thing is that the software on today’s phones — both the built-in features and the apps we install — can make them much more functional as phones in addition to all those other functions. In this article, we’ll look at how you can make the “phone” part of your smartphone work better for you.

Block unwanted calls

Whether it’s a “zombie” bill collector who thinks your number belongs to someone on his debtor list and you’re just covering for the deadbeat, a not-so-secret admirer whose affections you don’t return, a recurrent wrong number, or someone else whose calls you prefer not to take, the ability to block unwanted calls is a big benefit of today’s technology. Carriers often offer this service, but you might have to pay an extra monthly fee for it. Instead, you can install an app to give you the same capability, for only a small one-time price.

One such app is Call Guard ($2.99 USD), for Android 2.0 and above, which will block both voice calls and SMS text messages from specified numbers. You can create black lists, or you can create white lists and block all other calls, as shown in the figure below.

With Call Guard, you can choose to have the calls sent to voicemail or use pickup/hangup mode where the caller doesn’t even get to leave a voicemail message. Another option is to simply set the phone to mute the ringer for specified calls. There’s a lot of flexibility; you can block hidden numbers or all numbers not in your contact list. You can even block SMS messages that contain specified keywords, and you can use filters to block by time of day or day of the week.

You can also block outgoing calls, which is useful if you share the phone with someone else, and you can password protect the app so the other user can’t change its settings. At $2.99, the price is more than reasonable and pays for itself quickly when compared with purchasing an additional carrier service to do the same thing.

Manage your call log

Your smartphone probably provides a call log where you can see the history of calls you’ve made and received, but some leave a lot to be desired. Call Log Manager Pro ($1.99 USD) can log calls to your calendar, and it lets you group calls not just by the usual types — incoming, outgoing, missed — but also by date, by contact, or according to custom filters that you create yourself. You can also write your call history to a .CVS or XML file, and you can delete call records by type or for specific contacts. You can search the log or get graphical analysis information about your calls. Best of all, it gives you detailed information about the calls.

Talking Caller ID

When you’re using your phone in the car or another hands-free environment, it’s really handy to be able to hear who’s calling before you answer. Sure, you could just set a custom ringtone for every person in your address book — and if you only know ten people, that might work fine. Otherwise, something like the Talking Caller ID app can be very useful. It will speak the name or number of the incoming call so you don’t have to look at the phone to find out who’s calling. There’s a free and a paid version ($1.49 USD). The full version is very customizable; you can have it speak over your ringtone or silence the ringtone, choose to use it with only calls from your contacts, only calls from non-contacts, or only calls from specific contacts.

Record calls

It’s often handy to have a full recording of business phone calls, so you can go back and verify what was said — either for your own use (e.g., someone provided detailed instructions on how to do something and you didn’t get it all down in your notes) or to “prove” what you or someone else said if there’s a disagreement about it later. One app that you can use to do this is Total Recall Call Recorder ($7.96 USD). It allows you to record phone calls manually or automatically, and you can have it automatically send you or someone else the audio file via email.

Unfortunately, on some phones, it won’t record both sides of the conversation (check the list of phones), and you should always be aware of the laws regarding the recording of phone calls in your jurisdiction, as they vary according to your location. You can test the free trial before you buy.

Google Voice

One of the most useful apps you can get for making the phone calling experience better on your smartphone is Google Voice for mobile. You can make calls (and send text messages) from your Google Voice number (which can be configured to ring any or all of your phones — mobile, home, work), and it integrates with your Google contacts and your phone’s address book.

One of my favorite-by-far features of Google Voice is the ability to get my voicemail messages as e-mail transcriptions. That way, instead of having to play and listen to the message, I can just read the text of it as an e-mail. That’s much less disruptive if, for example, I’m in a meeting and don’t want to hold the phone up to my ear to hear an audio message. I have to note, though, that the transcription works better with some voices than others. Some of the transcripts are almost perfect, whereas certain accents or dialects can throw it off completely, resulting in gibberish or unintentionally funny results, such as when I got a message from a very businesslike man I know that was transcribed as “Hi, babe” instead of the “Hi, Deb” that he really said. Here’s another transcription that didn’t turn out so well:

The good news is that the e-mail with the text transcription also includes an attachment that’s a .wav file with the audio version of the message, so if you can’t figure it out, you can always listen.

With Google Voice on your phone, you can set up custom greetings for different callers. Best of all, it saves you money. You can make lower cost calls to international destinations than what your carrier charges, and you can send text messages through the Google Voice app at no cost, whereas most carriers charge you a monthly fee or 10-20 cents per message.

When you have Google Voice installed on your phone, each time you dial a phone number, you’ll get a dialog box asking whether you want to call with Google Voice or without it. If you go through Google Voice, your phone will first dial a local number for GV, and then the GV service will dial the person you’re calling. The recipient will see your Google Voice number on caller ID, rather than the number of your cell phone. This is useful if you prefer to keep your cell phone number private.

Google Voice apps are available for Android, BlackBerry, the iPhone, and with other phone operating systems, you can use the web-based version of the service.

Those barcode-looking things? They’re called QR codes. Here’s what they do.

Many of you reading this have undoubtedly seen a QR (Quick Response) code by now… …but there’s just as much — if not more — confusion surrounding them today as there was a number of years ago. Well, prepare to no longer be confused by these highly-useful things that are seemingly popping up everywhere these days (and for good reason, too)!

Put simply, QR codes serve as an ultra-fast reference for something that someone can look up immediately on the spot, or at a later time. By using your cell phone and a QR code reader app, scanning a QR code might yield a Web address, name and address, phone number, email address, pre-filled text message, or some other similar data type. To give you a better visualization of how it works, consider the following 3 short scenarios:

Scenario 1: You’re walking around in a town you’ve never been to before, collecting menus from restaurants that you’re hoping to find some decent local food from. But instead of simply handing out takeaway menus, you notice many of the restaurants are providing an eco-friendly QR code for you to scan to see their menu and effectively have it with you at all times on your phone.

Scenario 2: You’re out at a concert, listening to one of your favorite bands, when all of a sudden, you notice the guitarist is wearing a shirt with a giant QR code on the back of it. Being in the 7th row and knowing what a QR code is, you take out your phone so you can get a picture of it to see what he wants you to see. Lo and behold, you’ve just earned a secret backstage pass right there on the spot that no one else can win now because you were the first to access it!

Scenario 3: You’re flying over a city about 15 minutes out from landing at your destination, when all of a sudden, you notice an incredibly massive QR code that has been painted on the top of an entire building. Once again, you take out your phone and quickly take a picture so you can see what it’s all about (be it a URL, phone number, text message, or otherwise) once you’ve got cell service again.

Those are just a few scenarios, but there are TONS of scenarios that companies and individuals are currently utilizing QR codes for. Just the other night, I was practically inundated by QR codes while out eating dinner at a restaurant: their menu had a QR code on it so you could have a copy to go right there on the spot, the ketchup bottle on the table had a QR code on it so you could visit the manufacturer’s Web site, and someone had printed out a QR code on a sheet of paper and stuck it on the mirror in the men’s restroom.

Now, what do you do when you see a QR code? Well, you either need a camera or a phone with an in-built camera. If you have a phone with an in-built camera, there are plenty of QR code apps you can download from your respective app store/market that will allow you to scan a QR code and it’ll show you the information contained within it. If you only have a camera, then you can simply take a picture of a QR code with which to upload later to a site like ZXing Decoder Online. Lastly, if you’re interested in creating your own QR code, well, that’s just about as easy as decoding one, what with online QR code generators like this one.

For as quick and convenient as QR codes are, they aren’t 100% risk-free, since all kinds of data can be contained within them. Wikipedia spells it out best in their QR code risks section:

Malicious QR codes combined with a permissive reader can put a computer’s contents and user’s privacy at risk. They are easily created and may be affixed over legitimate QR codes. On a smartphone, the reader’s many permissions may allow use of the camera, full internet access, read/write contact data, GPS, read browser history, read/write local storage, and global system changes.

Risks include linking to dangerous websites with browser exploits, enabling the microphone/camera/GPS and then streaming those feeds to a remote server, analysis of sensitive data (passwords, files, contacts, transactions), and sending email/SMS/IM messages or DDOS packets as part of a botnet, corrupting privacy settings, stealing identity, and even containing malicious logic themselves such as JavaScript or a virus. These actions may occur in the background while the user only sees the reader opening a seemingly harmless webpage.

In other words, the information waiting on the other side of a QR code might not be all roses and sunshine — even if it’s something as simple as a derogatory plain text message.

So, with all that said and now that you know everything you need to know to make use of QR codes, what are you waiting for? Start by scanning the QR code you see in the upper right-hand corner of my post (I promise it’s not malicious) and see where it leads to. From there, be on the lookout for QR codes all around you as you’re shopping, eating, vacationing, working, browsing, etc. Before long, they may just start making life a little more convenient for you!

10 ways to improve Excel performance

Most Excel files are small enough not to affect performance, but size isn’t the only thing that can slow things down. Fortunately, you don’t have to know all about multithreads and dual processors to eliminate bad performance. The following tips are easy to implement, so even the most casual users can improve performance when a workbook slows down. Better yet, apply this advice when designing sheets to help avoid sluggish performance altogether. 1: Work from left to right This tip is easy to implement because data tends to flow from left to right naturally, but it doesn’t hurt to know that there’s a little more going on under the hood. By default, Excel will calculate expressions at the top-left corner of the sheet first and then continue to the right and down. For this reason, you’ll want to store independent values in the top-left portion of your sheet and enter expressions (dependent cells) to the right or below those values. In a small sheet, you won’t notice much difference, but a sheet with thousands of rows and calculations will definitely perform better when you position dependent cells to the right and below the independent values. In technical terms, this behavior is called forward referencing. Formulas should be to the right or below the referenced values. Avoid backward referencing, where formulas are to the left and above the referenced values. 2: Keep it all in one sheet When possible, store everything on the same sheet. It takes longer for Excel to calculate expressions that evaluate values on another sheet. If you’ve already spread your work across several sheets, rearranging everything probably isn’t worth the effort. But keep this one in mind when planning sheets. Keep expressions and references in the same sheet, if possible. 3: Keep it all in the same workbook Linking to or referencing other workbooks will usually slow things down, even in an uncomplicated workbook. If you can, store everything in the same workbook. Using fewer larger workbooks will be more efficient than using several smaller linked workbooks. When you must use linked workbooks, open them all — and open the linked workbooks before opening the linking workbooks — to improve performance. 4: Clean things up What you’re not using, delete. Create a backup so you can reclaim functionality at a later date and then delete everything you no longer use. In doing so, you’ll minimize the used range. To determine the used range, press [Ctrl]+[End]. Then, delete all rows and columns below and to the right of your real last used cell. Then, save the workbook. 5: Convert unused formulas If you’re still referring to derived values (the results of formulas), #4 isn’t feasible. You can, however, convert the formulas to static values. But only do this if you’re sure you will never need to recalculate the formulas that generated the values in the first place. To convert formulas to their static values, use Paste Special and select Values to paste. Doing so will overwrite the formulas with the results of those formulas. Be careful, though. The formulas really will be gone. Create a backup first, just in case. 6: Avoid multiple volatile functions A volatile function recalculates every time there’s a change in the worksheet, and that slows things down. An efficient alternative is to enter the volatile function by itself and then reference that cell in your formulas. The function will still calculate as expected, but only once instead of hundreds of times. Examples of volatile functions are RAND(), RANDBETWEEN(), NOW(), TODAY(), OFFSET(), CELL(), and INDIRECT(). 7: Avoid array formulas Gurus and power users alike love arrays, and they are a powerful tool. Unfortunately, they’re memory hogs. It might be hard to believe, but a couple of regular formulas will calculate faster than their equivalent array. If helper formulas aren’t adequate, consider a user-defined function. In addition, you might be able to replace arrays with new functions, such as SUMIF(), COUNTIF(), and AVERAGEIF. (Array formulas perform somewhat better in the Ribbon versions of Excel.) 8: Avoid monster formulas The performance killer in most workbooks is the number of cell reference and operations, not the number of formulas. Throw in some inefficient functions and you can slow things down enough that users will complain. Two or three helper formulas are almost always more efficient than one super colossal formula. 9: Use ISERROR() to update old error-masking formulas If you’ve upgraded to a Ribbon version of Excel, you can replace most of your convoluted IF() masks with the IFERROR() function: =IFERROR(expression,actioniferror) This function is more efficient than the pre-Ribbon solution of using IF() in the following form: =IF(ISERROR(expression,trueaction,falseaction)) If you’re still working with a pre-Ribbon version, consider a helper formula (#8). Two columns of simple formulas will be more efficient than a single column of IF() functions. 10: Limit conditional formats Many techniques rely heavily on conditional formatting, but sometimes at a cost. Every conditional format is evaluated every time the workbook performs calculations. Use conditional formatting wisely, and sparingly. Too many conditional formats will slow things down.

Phone scammers target PC users with phony virus reports

Here’s an informative article from ZDNet about a new scam:

An old social-engineering scam appears to have taken on new life lately, targeting PC users worldwide.

Ironically, the scam doesn’t use a computer at all—at least, not initially. Instead, it starts with a phone call from someone who claims to be affiliated with Microsoft or another legitimate company or government agency.

The caller then asks for the primary computer user in the house, who is told: “Your computer has downloaded a virus.” And, of course, the caller is ready and willing to fix the problem. All you have to do is navigate to a web site, click a link to install some remote-control software, and allow the “technician” to get to work.

The perps are using legitimate remote-assistance software, like the Ammyy Admin program from Ammyy Software Development, which posted a warning that included some reports the company has received from scam victims:

“I got call from an India based consultant who said to me that he is calling from a govt. organisation in Melbourne, Australia. He made me to log into my computer to track some files and without advising me he wanted me to download a software application from ammyy.com and get remotely connected to a technician to delete some files…”

“I was recently called by what I thought was my internet service provider technician who used Ammyy to gain remote access to my computer – after I stupidly granted him that permission. It turns out that he was nothing to do with my internet service provider. When I became suspicious and began questioning him he said he would show me who he was and opened a website of a company – the web site triggered my virus software and I then demanded that the remote access be terminated…”

The scam has been around for a few years. Charles Arthur at the Guardian UK wrote about a similar scam last year, noting that it had been “going on quietly since 2008 but has abruptly grown in scale this year.” He wrote about it again in March 2011.

In June of this year, Microsoft published a warning about the scams, including results from a survey it conducted in the U.K., Ireland, U.S. and Canada. The survey showed that across all four countries, 15 percent of those surveyed reported having received one of these phony support calls.

Of those who received a call, 22 percent, or 3 percent of the total survey sample, were deceived into following the scammers’ instructions, which ranged from permitting remote access to their computer and downloading software code provided by the criminals to providing credit card information and making a purchase.

The vast majority (79 percent) of people deceived in this way suffered some sort of financial loss. Seventeen percent said they had money taken from their accounts, 19 percent reported compromised passwords and 17 percent were victims of identity fraud. More than half (53 percent) said they suffered subsequent computer problems.

The latest outbreak appears to be another wave, judging from the sudden increase in complaints I’ve seen recently.

I’ve heard from Windows users and legitimate support specialists who’ve seen this scam in action in Australia, Canada, and the UK. Recent reports from Microsoft indicate that the scammers have widened their net and are now working in languages other than English, targeting Windows users in Poland and the Czech Republic.

I also got one reliable report from an extremely trustworthy source: my mother.

A caller with a thick accent tried to run this scam on my mom, who peppered the caller with questions. What’s your name? What’s your company’s name again? What’s your phone number? (She raised six kids. She’s used to social engineering attempts.)

My mom’s Caller ID said the call originated from 999-910-0132; the caller claimed to be from a company that sounded something like Alert Center, and she gave a callback number of 609-531-0750.

If you plug those numbers into a search engine, you’ll find that they lead to a group of companies using identical website templates under different names, including TechResolve, Itek Assist, and—bingo—AlertSoft. A company with the unimaginative name Custom Design Firm, at the same address in Kolkata, India, also offers custom web-design and search-optimization services at exorbitant prices.

My mom eventually hung up on the scammers, but others haven’t been so lucky. If a victim falls for the scam, the next step involves a credit card, naturally, as this victim reported:

Posed as troubleshooter, got into my system, used a “safe code” to get into my computer. Claimed my machine has been hacked into and infected with a virus. Tom and John, heavy Asian accents. Wanted to install “lifelong protection” for $130. I balked. They have my name and number and have been calling incessantly. I’m concerned that they might have planted something in my computer that allows them access.

Indeed, that’s a legitimate concern. Once a victim has granted an intruder remote access, it’s impossible to tell exactly what sort of damage they’ve done. If you know someone who has fallen for this scam, you should assume their computer has been compromised and respond appropriately.

Most readers of this blog are sophisticated computer users who would laugh out loud at an attempt like this. But you probably have friends, family members, or clients who could use a heads-up on this one. If you get a call from someone claiming to have detected a virus on your PC, just hang up.

Enable natural language search in Windows 7 to produce better results

Here’s a great article to help you Windows 7 users get the best out of your searches:

By Greg Shultz

October 5, 2011, 11:57 AM PDT

Takeaway: Greg Shultz shows you how to take advantage of the natural language search feature in Windows 7 to get more accurate results.

Back in March of this year in a blog post titled “Taking Advantage of Search Filters in Windows Explorer,” I showed you how to take advantage of the Search filters built in to Windows Explorer’s Search Box in Windows 7. As you may remember, to access the Search filters you just click in the Search box and you’ll see a drop down that shows the Search filters in blue, as shown in Figure A. I then explained that by using Search filters you can quickly and easily narrow down the results and find what you are looking for.

Figure A

The Search filters will appear at the bottom of the Search box.

While I find that Search filters are a great tool, I was recently reminded that Windows 7’s Windows Search supports a natural language search feature that really makes it easy to find what you are looking for because it enables you to search for things using a more natural sentence structure.

In this edition of the Windows Desktop Report, I’ll show you how to enable the natural language search feature in Windows 7. I’ll then show you how to use it to your advantage.

How it works

The natural language search feature works similarly to Search filters, in that it can use filter-like words, but it doesn’t require the adherence to the rigid syntax. For example, rather than typing kind:music INXS you can just type music by INXS.

The natural language search feature is designed to recognize the keywords that you type in your phrase, strip out the unnecessary words, and then conduct the search operation. For instance in the above, the natural language search feature will strip out the word by and search for the keywords music and INXS.

Enabling natural language search

Before you can use the natural language search feature, you must enable it. Click the Start button and type Folder Options in the Start Search text box. When it appears in the result, just click it. Once the Folder Options dialog box appears, select the Search tab. Now, locate and select the Use Natural Language Search check box, as shown in Figure B. Then click OK.

Figure B

The Natural Language Search check box is found on the Search tab of the Folder Options dialog box.

Other examples

Once you enable the natural language search feature, you’ll need to experiment, but you’ll quickly get the hang of it. For example, I can now use the following searches:

• Email from Greg –> Any saved email messages from Greg
• Pictures of Greg –> any picture files named or tagged with Greg
• Documents created last week –> Any documents created last week
• Documents by Greg –> Documents where Greg is the author
• 4MB MP3 –> MP3 files that are under 4MB in size
• “Adobe Acrobat Document” created last month –> Any PDF documents created last month

Gmail in your mobile browser is probably better than your email app

By Kevin Purdy

September 27, 2011, 11:37 AM PDT

Takeaway: Sure everything is supposed to be an app these days, but Kevin Purdy thinks Gmail on a mobile Web browser may be your best bet.

If you want to be notified immediately and repeatedly when you have new mail messages, then by all means – access your email through your Android Gmail app, your iPhone’s Mail system, or even the BlackBerry add-on. They’re generally good apps, they get the job done, and you always know just how far behind you are on your Gmail or Google Apps inbox.

But with the recent roll-out of some core new features, the version of Gmail you see in your smartphone or tablet browser is often the version that’s more convenient and powerful than the dedicated app. This is definitely the case on iPhones, iPads, WebOS devices, and other portable devices not made by Google that have a solid, modern browser (usually based on WebKit). On most BlackBerry devices, the browser is pretty rough, so the official Google app might be worth sticking to. On Android, the Gmail app is as good as it gets – but, actually, you might still favor the mobile version, or at least want to keep it handy.

Web-based Gmail

Google is a strident proponent of developing for the Web using cross-platform standards, and it shows in their mobile Gmail Web-based app. Here’s how it holds its own, and often excels, compared to Gmail apps:

Multiple accounts? Check

Added just last week, Gmail’s mobile site allows for easy switching between accounts by clicking a button at the bottom of your inbox and flipping over. It’s nearly a tie with Gmail’s Android app, which requires a tap on the account name in the upper-right corner for the switch.

Offline access and storage? Check and check

The problem with the Gmail Webapp, or any Webapp really, is that it can fall flat on its face when your Web connection goes away, or even just gets dodgy. Google’s Web-based mobile Gmail lets you read recent messages while offline, as well as process your mail and compose messages for sending when you’re back in Web-friendly territory.

Better search nearly everywhere

Until very recently, iPhone and iPad users who wanted to dig through their Gmail to find an address, phone number, or the like were plain out of luck. Even still, search on the Gmail mobile Web site can often be faster than asking your phone to search its own database, then reach out and look further on a remote server. Plus, you can use all the advanced search syntax you can remember to find exactly the message you’re looking for.

Auto-responders and custom signatures

If you’re headed out on the road or into a longer vacation, you can turn on an automatic “vacation responder” from mobile Gmail on the Web. Head back to the Menu (the arrow in the upper-left corner of the inbox), then look for the gear-like icon to set preferences. From here, you can write and activate an automatic response, as well as set a custom signature that lets people know you’re writing from a small screen, if you dig that sort of thing.

Lots of little mobile things: Separate account shortcuts, storage space, better text selection, nicer looks

From Gmail’s mobile Web interface, you can create a separate home screen shortcut for each of your accounts, whereas Android, iPhone, and most smartphone email apps don’t allow that. And, depending on what version of Android you’re running, you may find that the smaller and separate storage used by Web-based Gmail frees up some of your limited app space, and that Gmail in the browser is much easier to select and copy text from than the dedicated app.

And on every platform, you might just get addicted to the clever interface touches Google puts into their mobile Webapp: a floating action bar that prevents unnecessary scrolling, easy access to other Google apps from the shortcuts hidden above the top menu, and, on most tablets, a two- or three-pane interface that makes email triage sessions a bit easier.

Still needs work: attachments, more offline storage

It feels like a spoiled kind of nit-picking, but it would be nice if Gmail on the mobile Web allowed for adding attachments to new messages, even if it was limited to just pictures for now. And while Gmail does make use of some modern HTML5 storage powers, it would be better if, like its offline Chrome counterpart, the mobile Web Gmail gave users some idea of how far back their offline mail would go, and grabbed a bit more space if users wanted.

You also miss out on the inter-app communication that a dedicated app provides (”Email this” and “Share” links, in other words). But there’s no law saying you have to swear loyalty to one form of Gmail or Google Apps Mail over another. Keep your app handy, but check out how nice, fast, and robust Gmail is rolling on the Web lately.

The 20 best iPhone apps of 2011 for productive geeks

A great list from techrepublic:

 

Mobile apps have become an embarrassment of riches for iPhone and Android. In a world with over 500,000 iPhone apps and over 250,000 Android apps, the toughest part is finding the most useful stuff.

For iPhone users, I’m going to throw you an assist by sharing my top 20 (this is an update of my 2010 iPhone list, and I will update my top Android picks next week). My iPhone picks are all third-party apps that can help you be more productive, streamline regular activities, reduce the number of gadgets in your life, and take advantage of the top benefits that mobile computing has to offer.

1. Dropbox

Dropbox is a great cloud service that automatically syncs a folder of files between multiple computers (Windows, Mac, or Linux). This app extends Dropbox to the iPhone and includes a built-in reader within the app for PDFs, image files, and Microsoft Office files.

2. Evernote

Once you get used to typing on a virtual keyboard (and it honestly took me over a year to do it), then these devices are great for note taking, and Evernote is a great note taking app. It is similar to Dropbox in that it saves data locally but syncs it across all your machines and devices.

3. Due

There are a ton of to-do apps on iPhone but I prefer Due for its simplicity and its audio alerts. However, this is an iPhone-only task list. If you want something that can sync with your PC, Mac, or the Web, then try 2Do or Things.

4. Tripit

I love Tripit. It is by far the best app I’ve found for keeping track of all my travel itineraries. It is powered by some excellent backend systems. You simply forward your confirmation emails (or use the Gmail plugin to do it automatically) for your flights, hotels, rental cars, and more to Tripit and it automatically organizes them into trips with all your details and confirmation numbers.

5. Analytics App

For some reason Google doesn’t have an official app (for either iPhone or Android) for Google Analytics. The best one I’ve found to go deep into all of the data is Analytics App.

6. Ego

Even better than Analytics App for a quick-glance dashboard is Ego. It shows basic data from Google Analytics as well as a bunch of other sources, including Squarespace, Twitter, and Feedburner.

7. Twitter

The official Twitter app (formerly known as Tweetie) is still the best Twitter client on iPhone (although Osfoora is catching up). Twitter itself is an amazing instant-intelligence engine. Two other great social media apps for iPhone are Google+ and Foursquare.

8. Reeder

Twitter has largely replaced RSS for me for finding and filtering the latest news. However, I still track some RSS feeds and the best tool I’ve found to do it with is Reeder. It syncs with Google Reader so it’s easy to flip between the mobile app and the desktop, plus the app lets you share to Twitter (and Facebook) and save to Instapaper and ReadItLater.

9. Amazon Kindle

I’ve never fully warmed up to the Amazon Kindle e-reader, but I’m a big fan of the Kindle iPhone app. Since it was released I’ve read a lot more books simply because my phone is always with me and I can pull it out and read a few pages anytime I’ve got a couple minutes free. Alternatives: Nook, iBooks, and Kobo.

10. Audible

As much as I like the Kindle ebooks, I actually consume more books as audiobooks via Audible. In the past you could download these and sync them via iTunes. But Audible now has its own app, which lets you connect to your Audible library and download over the air, and even gives you a self-contained player optimized for audiobooks.

11. Podcaster

Sure, you can use iTunes and the built-in iPod app to listen to podcasts, but if you’re an avid podcast listener (I regularly follow This Week in Tech, Buzz Out Loud, and Tech News Today) then the app Podcaster offers a better experience. You can download over the air (so that you don’t have to constantly sync to a computer to get the latest episodes), you can skip forward and backward 30 seconds, you can increase playback speed to 1.5 times normal speed, and the app is even compatible with AirPlay.

12. Photoshop Mobile

Photoshop is, of course, the best known photo editor in the world and its mobile app doesn’t do anything to hurt that reputation. But while the desktop version is known for having a zillion features, the mobile app is distinguished by its simplicity. It’s the best iPhone photo editing app for simple crops, brightness adjustments, and sharpens, for example. However, once editing is built into the native Camera app in iOS5, editors such as Photoshop Mobile may quickly become unnecessary.

13. Pano

Pano makes it easy to take excellent panoramas with the iPhone. It helps you line up your shots and it automatically corrects many of the imperfections. My wife is a photographer with a big, expensive Nikon camera and she’s regularly jealous of some of the shots I can get with the iPhone and Pano.

14. Instagram

The camera and camera app on the iPhone are now good enough to replace a point-and-shoot. You can even take pictures that are worthy of saving in your family albums. For those, I upload them to Flickr using the iPhone app. For the everyday photos that I just want to quickly post on social media, I use Instagram. It is very quick, dead simple to use, and very social media friendly. But, do me a favor and go easy on the filters. They are badly overused by most Instagram users, while 90% of photos are better with no filter at all.

15. Navigon Mobile Navigator

I used to carry a separate Garmin GPS unit for turn-by-turn directions but I eventually got rid of it and decided to just use the iPhone instead. In researching the various apps, I eventually decided on NAVIGON, which is a company that makes a lot of the built-in navigation systems for many cars. Tip: Make sure your iPhone is plugged in to power when you run a GPS navigation program like this because otherwise it will quickly drain your battery.

16. Where To?

A great companion to a GPS system is the app “Where To?” which lets you quickly look up various types of shops and services, from Cuban restaurants to medical specialists to animal hospitals to local museums and much more.

17. RunKeeper

This is a great little app that can save you from buying a pedometer. It uses the iPhone’s GPS to track the miles you’ve run or walked, and it compiles the data into some nice dashboards that you can view on your phone or on RunKeeper’s website.

18. Nutrition Menu

Another app for all of you health-conscious geeks out there is Nutrition Menu. This thing is a mobile compendium of nutritional data. It has calorie information on common foods and most major restaurants, and it has calorie-burning information for many types of exercises. It also allows you to track your daily weigh-ins and makes notes on your progress.

19. GroceryGadget

This is an app plus a website and you can quickly sync between the two. The way it usually works for me is that my wife makes a grocery list, enters it into grocerygadgets.com, and then it syncs to my iPhone so that I can swing by the grocery store and pick up the stuff.

20. RedLaser

This is a great app for shoppers. It turns the iPhone camera into a barcode scanner and it’s quite accurate. You simply scan a product’s UPC code and let the app go to work to find it in Google Product Search and TheFind. For food it will even look up allergen information and for books it will scan to see if you can get it in a local library. You’ll be amazed at how fast it works. A similar product is SnapTell, which not only scans barcordes but you can also take a picture of the cover of a book or DVD and it can look them up that way. These apps are great when you’re shopping at a retail store and want to check the prices of products online before buying. It also reads QR codes.

Don’t be fooled by these 10 PC performance myths

A great article from TechRepublic:

 

By Justin James

September 2, 2011, 10:16 AM PDT

Takeaway: Much of what you hear about boosting PC performance is outdated — and some of it was never true to begin with. Here’s the real story.

Computer lovers are always looking to get more speed out of their computers. Unfortunately, a number of incorrect or outdated performance tips have been around long enough to become myths. Here are 10 of these myths — and the truth about them. As always, I am sure you’ll be able to think of plenty more. So be sure to post your own myth-busting in the forums!

1: Vista and Windows 7 require many times more RAM than XP

When people first move from Windows XP to Windows Vista or Windows 7 and bring up a RAM usage meter, they often panic. What they see is something like Figure A.

Figure A

Does Windows 7 really use more than 8 GB of RAM?!

Wow, that looks scary, doesn’t it? The system is doing just about nothing (1% CPU usage) but needs 8.84 GB of physical RAM to run. Here’s what is really happening.

Starting in Vista, Windows got aggressive about RAM use. The engineers at Microsoft made it pre-allocate RAM and pre-cache commonly used items, even if they were not actually in use. For example, if you use Word a lot, it will keep Word in memory ready to be used. Obviously, this lets it chew up a ton of RAM, and why not? It isn’t like you were using the RAM anyway, and you will eventually be using it, most likely for the purposes Windows is preparing for. Applications start much faster as a result.

2: More RAM is always faster

More RAM is not a guarantee of a faster machine, although more RAM has never hurt. Actually, that isn’t quite true, either! Many times, the bigger RAM runs as a slower bus speed than the smaller RAM chips. So in theory, more RAM can be mildly harmful to performance. More important is the Dual Channel vs. Triple Channel RAM issue. If you have a choice between 12 GB of RAM using Triple Channel, and 16 GB of RAM on Dual Channel, the 12 GB of RAM will be faster, so long as you rarely need to go to the swap file. Also, since Windows does pre-allocate RAM and cache often-used items, having that extra RAM could conceivably make a difference, assuming that you are a huge RAM user.

3: Anti-malware apps kill performance

Yes, anti-malware apps have an effect on performance. And at one time, that effect was massive. Back in the day, many PC slowdown issues could be solved by removing applications like antivirus. In recent years, things have changed.

It used to be that anti-malware apps essentially had to hijack the OS to see what was going on with the file system and RAM, and this was where the slowdown occurred. That is no longer the case. Windows now provides hooks into the OS for anti-malware applications to receive files and sign off on them in a regular fashion. As a result, anti-malware apps still have a performance hit, but it’s very minimal.

4: If you clear the browser history, you’ll gain some speed

On a regular basis, I see advice like this bandied about:

• Delete your browser history to speed things up.
• Clear your cookies for more speed.
• Empty your browser cache to make the Web fly!

Guess what? It’s bunk. The only thing that clearing the history could make faster is the display of suggestions from your browser (which quietly pares the list as needed for performance anyway).

Dumping the cookies won’t do anything, since they don’t sit in memory; they are merely read and uploaded to the server when requested, and they’re so small that they won’t slow things down noticeably. And the browser cache? It makes things faster! Think about it: What’s going to be faster when your browser needs an image, CSS, or JavaScript file — re-downloading it from the site or pulling it off the local hard drive? Emptying your cache was a storage space tip in the 90s when drive space was at enough of a premium that the browser cache could be a big chunk of it. Somehow, the tip eventually morphed into a bogus performance trick.

5: Registry cleaning is a miracle worker

This is another one I see all the time, too. In theory, yes, a smaller registry will have an effect on performance. But that presumes that your applications are constantly hitting the registry and that your registry is in such poor shape that the junk is a significant part of it. And even then, guess what? You’ve optimized the data in a database that is already designed to be fast, that resides in RAM, and is a few megabytes in size anyway.

Unless you’re running on a PDP-11, working with a database the size of the registry is so blazing fast that you could slash it to 1% of its current size and still not have a real difference. That said, cleaning the registry could have some benefits (especially getting rid of entries for apps that were uninstalled but that you may reinstall), but performance is not going to be one of them. This is a tip that made a lot more sense a long time ago, but is no longer important.

6: Having more cores is always better

Having more CPU cores is not going to be slowing you down. But in many cases, you are simply wasting your money. Few applications are multi-threaded and follow a true parallel processing paradigm in which the application is grinding away on all your cores at once to solve hard problems. Writing parallel processing code is hard to do (I know from first-hand experience) — and it’s even harder to do right.

Many of the most demanding applications, like games and graphics processing, often push the hardest processing onto the GPU, not the CPU –even non-graphics work (like bulk cryptography), in many cases. So yes, while having extra cores is great, don’t expect that putting dual quad core CPUs in your box is going to give you anything extra on speed, unless you run those rare applications that are really optimized for it or you do a ton of work with virtual machines.

7: Drive RPMs are all that matter

When measuring drive performance, people love to look at the RPMs that the platters spin at. While faster RPM drives can theoretically read large chunks of data faster and perhaps seek a little faster, the better number to look at is actually the seek time. Little data transfer is done in long, drawn out reads or writes; most of it is small random access. Seek time is therefore very important to performance. Also look for larger caches on the disks and the total transfer speed number.

8: You should empty the Recycle Bin for more speed

This is another of those tips that made sense 10 years ago but is outdated now. Emptying the Recycle Bin will obviously free up disk space. But where is the performance boost going to come from? I suppose that if you have a huge amount of data in the Recycle Bin and dump it, and then perform a defrag, it is possible that you’ll suddenly get such a well-optimized disk that there will be a noticeable difference. This presumes, of course, that you regularly create large amounts of data in the middle of the physical disk and then remove it. Unless you are constantly installing and uninstalling large applications, and creating and then removing large amounts of data, emptying the Recycle Bin is not going to give you a noticeable speed improvement.

9: You need a fancy hard drive for ultimate performance

For a long time now, specialty drives like the Western Digital VelociRaptor have been used to get the best disk speed around. There’s no doubt that these drives are fast. But did you know that you can get just about the same speed from less expensive drives? The secret of the VelociRaptor’s performance is that it uses small platters, so the heads never have far to move. If you can find a drive with similar performance stats for cache and RPMs, you can “short stroke” the disk. Essentially, you partition the drive in half and then format and use only the partition closer to the inside of the disk. This gives you the benefits of the smaller platters without the cost of the specialty drive.

10: One big disk is fine

People think that just because it’s rare for multiple applications to be pounding on the hard drives at the same time that just having one large disk is okay for performance. Yes, it’s unlikely that you will have two applications simultaneously trying to grab a ton of disk access, unless you are running a server, running VMs, or doing some crazy multitasking. Splitting your data between two disks (like the common OS and apps on one disk and documents on another scheme) really does not give much performance gain. At the same time, multiple disks can be a huge performance boost… when put into a RAID. Check out the information on Wikipedia about what different RAID levels can do for the read and write times of your PC, and you’ll see why RAID is a hidden performance gem.