September 19th, 2007
mike
You think keeping up to date is a good idea, however, the last version of RDC now has an annoying bug. It seems if you use the Windows-L combination to lock your machine (in person), the next time you connect via Remote Desktop the system acts like the Windows key is stuck. I don't know if this happens 100% of the time, but this has been happening to me now consistently for over a week and I finally remembered to see if it is truly an issue or not.
Sure enough, tons of other people have complained, but there doesn't seem to be a permanent fix. There are a couple options - a "soft hack" method where you use the On-screen Keyboard and just click the Windows key on/off, a registry hack that will disable the Windows keys altogether, and quite possibly downgrading to the slightly older RDC version.
Here's some relevant threads. The OSK idea works simple enough; however it shouldn't be an issue no matter what, especially since the Windows key is not passed through RDC anyway.
Hopefully there will be a proper fix soon. I'd rather not have to disable keys or manually have to click buttons every time I connect via RDC...
September 14th, 2007
mike
Wow, once again NTFS has ruined my day by invalidating an entire external USB drive's data. The filesystem looks fine, passes all checks, I can copy the data even using Linux but it acts like it is corrupt. So I try some NTFS recovery software and it's showing me all this "EFS" stuff - like this stuff has some Encrypted File System related issue. Sure enough, I picked up an EFS decryption tool (if you know the password) and it shows every file as being encrypted. Did I ever encrypt it? No. I don't even have EFS readily available in my right-click menu. Even if it was encrypted for some odd reason it would have been using one of only a couple passwords I've used on my desktops... and none of them work.
Meanwhile now I am stuck with a perfect directory listing of these thousands of files that are now digital rubbish. The least NTFS could have done was just corrupt itself like usual and let me try to recover pieces of them. Always something new out of Redmond. Sigh.
Updating the definitions keeps failing on my Active Virus Shield installation. Why? Quickly Googling it I find out that it's suspended and is being replaced with a special version of McAfee VirusScan. This comes only a couple months after I just removed Norton off all my computers and the people I support (family, friends) since it was becoming more of a resource hog as time went on.
Originally I discovered AVS through CPU Magazine, and in their tests Kaspersky Anti-Virus ranked #2 (IIRC) - which was a bonus - it was free, and it was basically the best. Now if I want a free "supported" copy from AOL, I have to change to McAfee, which is already scaring me with its 25 meg download and extra programs like "SecurityCenter" - at least I was able to unselect the firewall.
Instead of a single program with a smaller footprint, I now have SecurityCenter AND VirusScan running. I highly doubt this will run as clean as AVS did. Currently it is struggling to update the windows even. Feels like Norton all over again... sigh.