Makeuseof.com has made some wonderful informative publications for free over the years and they just did it again.

Here is a link to an e-Book you can download or read online at Scribd. (We should have a post about Scribd soon.)

MakeUseOf.com Windows on Speed

This is a full search-able book for Windows 7 and XP that list the causes of system slowing and what you can do (FREE) to fix it. I think any of us can benefit from it and wanted to be sure to share it.

Of course I’m using Linux as I write this… 

We’ve had discussions at our meetings about Facebook Security in the cafe and how anyone with the Firefox extension Firesheep could access our accounts while using Facebook in the cafe. Now there is news on the Facebook Blog about this:
A Continued Commitment to Security (1)

Apparently Mark Zuckerborg, Facebook’s founder was hacked recently so now the https:// version of Facebook is going to be rolled out. It still requires you turn it on and it will mean slower loading pages. My account is not updated yet but when it is going to Account settings will have the new option to turn on:

I suggest you look for it and when it appears, turn it on.
-=Lare=-

I’ve been trying to get the Ducks to change the time of their little game but so far I have not heard back from them and it looks like they will be performing right when we should all be meeting.

So I guess we’ll just have to defer to football arrogance. We’ll try again next week after the win.

Go Ducks! 

Some of us in this group have been using PCs for decades now and from back in those early years were some writers/geeks who became well known for having great information. Among these was Fred Langa who kept the Langalist for years before he joined the Windows Secrets gang. Personally I have been using them less as I drift deeper into the Linux world instead. But now that I installed Windows 7 Family pack on our family’s computers I find myself looking more carefully at this mailing again.

If you want to be informed of useful Windows information I recommend you subscribe to this list. They offer a premium version for a “what you will afford them” payment plan.

Have a look at this week’s offering from them:

Four free programs to help control Windows 7

If you have as hard a time giving money away to the biggest money holders on the planet for the latest Windows, there is a sale going on right now worth looking at. M$ is offering Windows Home Premium on three computers for $150 right now and they give a Cisco router with the deal. I gave up the router in favor of a local store purchase when I found both Costco and Bestbuy are selling this pack for $125.

Upgrading from Win XP means wiping out all you have and starting over so backup everything you need first. (Maybe a purchase of an external drive or a large capacity memory stick is in order)

Something to talk about at future meetings.

BTW – I, (Larry) will probably miss tomorrows meeting. Merry Christmas All!

Windows 7: Shop, Buy, Download, Upgrade, Search for Current or New PC

I urge everyone to read this website as there are a number of news stories about it right now:

Eric Butler – Software Developer in Seattle WA

The bottom line. It is now possible to download a simple Firefox extension and go to an open network (such as Aquilla and Pricilla’s) and log into other users Facebook or other accounts. You can do it. And others can do it to you.

It’s as simple as installing Firesheep and sit at the cafe waiting for someone to log into Facebook, or Twitter:

Firesheep opens a sidebar in Firefox and when you hit the start capturing button it watches for logins happening on that network. Could this affect us?

Yes.

Are there solutions? For Firefox, yes, but if you are still using Explorer you are still susceptible.

The problem is actually caused by the sites we visit as they are not encrypting the cookie sent back to us when we log in even though they are encrypting it when we send our password. Firesheep was actually created to demonstrate this vulnerability.

I definitely think we should discuss this at our meetings in the future.

Image via Wikipedia

While I am a user of Thunderbird most of the time for my mail I have several computers so I wind up checking my Gmail addresses in its website form quite often, that is at Gmail.com.

I find all webmail sites to be very ‘clunky’ and slow but Gmail does offer hotkeys so moving through the mail and handling it can be fairly quick. Just use the symbol ? (shift-/) when at the Gmail page to see what is available. There is a link on that display to this page which lists the key commands. Here are the ones I use most:

If you want to delete an email you are reading just hit # (shift-3) and it goes to trash and you are back at the Inbox.

Three of us made it to the cafe this evening:

Join us!

We all won a good cup of coffee tonight. Come next month and see what happens then.

Tonight I have the holiday season on my mind and the current state of the world requires thoughts of less expensive ways to celebrate. Shouldn’t computing make this possible?

That will be on my mind at least and if you have other ideas to bring to the meeting tonight, please do. I wish we could say we’ll have representatives from HP and Dell and we’ll be raffling off notebooks to members….   Maybe next year. 

Imagine winning this for free just for attending an EPCUG meeting!

Just imagine!

Our old website was too difficult for us to keep updated so we have now changed to this WordPress Blog format. With luck we will all now see new information every week as to what we have been able to do and share as a User Group.

If you would like to share something here on this page/site just login and write. New posts and comments will be moderated to keep out spam so be patient if you writing is not immediately displayed.