The Momentus XT solid state hybrid drive fuses the blazing speed of solid state with the high capacity of a disk drive to unleash your system performance by removing the data bottleneck. The FAST Factor™ advantage takes the Momentus XT drive to a new level by enhancing data integrity and increasing storage longevity.

Read more here.

Process Explorer is at v15. The unique capabilities of Process Explorer make it useful for tracking down DLL-version problems or handle leaks, and provide insight into the way Windows and applications work.

ProcDump is at v4 now. ProcDump is a command-line utility whose primary purpose is monitoring an application for CPU spikes and generating crash dumps during a spike that an administrator or developer can use to determine the cause of the spike.

Mark, one of the sysinternal developers, added a blog where he was trying to play Portal 2, he used his own utilities to find what was causing the issue.

Check the site out here.

Introduction

Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. It combines the features of two legacy Sysinternals utilities, Filemon and Regmon, and adds an extensive list of enhancements including rich and non-destructive filtering, comprehensive event properties such session IDs and user names, reliable process information, full thread stacks with integrated symbol support for each operation, simultaneous logging to a file, and much more. Its uniquely powerful features will make Process Monitor a core utility in your system troubleshooting and malware hunting toolkit.

Overview of Process Monitor Capabilities

• Process Monitor includes powerful monitoring and filtering capabilities, including:
• More data captured for operation input and output parameters
• Non-destructive filters allow you to set filters without losing data
• Capture of thread stacks for each operation make it possible in many cases to identify the root cause of an operation
• Reliable capture of process details, including image path, command line, user and session ID
  Configurable and moveable columns for any event property
• Filters can be set for any data field, including fields not configured as columns
• Advanced logging architecture scales to tens of millions of captured events and gigabytes of log data
• Process tree tool shows relationship of all processes referenced in a trace
• Native log format preserves all data for loading in a different Process Monitor instance
• Process tooltip for easy viewing of process image information
• Detail tooltip allows convenient access to formatted data that doesn’t fit in the column
• Cancellable search
• Boot time logging of all operations

Here is the download link… also if you want to see some screenshots, and read more about this wonderful app go here.

Windows 7, in contrast, is flourishing both at home and at work. Microsoft cites an IDC estimate that 90 percent of corporations are currently in the process of migrating to Windows 7, and Redmond claims that deploying Windows 7 will allow businesses to save around $140 per PC per year. This corporate take-up should have some nice side-effects—notably, it’ll be another nail in the coffin of Internet Explorer 6.

Windows 7 will catch up to Windows XP, but by that time Windows 8 will be almost ready.

Please tell me you are reading my blog from Windows 7, or anywhere by Windows XP… time to move on my friends.

Click the Start menu and type “gpedit.msc” (without quotes) in the search line and press the enter key. This will launch the Local Group Policy Editor. On the left side of Local Group Policy Editor, expand to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components. Then scroll down and select Windows Update. Double click “No auto-restart with logged on users for scheduled automatic updates installations” option. In the properties window that appears, change the option from “Not Configured” to “Enabled”. Click “OK” and close Local Group Policy Editor.

Here is the Microsoft Explanation of the Group Policy Object

Specifies that to complete a scheduled installation, Automatic Updates will wait for the computer to be restarted by any user who is logged on, instead of causing the computer to restart automatically.

If the status is set to Enabled, Automatic Updates will not restart a computer automatically during a scheduled installation if a user is logged in to the computer. Instead, Automatic Updates will notify the user to restart the computer.

Be aware that the computer needs to be restarted for the updates to take effect.

There is also a switch that lets you modify how often Windows reminds you with a pop up that a restart needs to be performed. The setting is called, ” Re-Prompt for restart with scheduled installations” Set this to enabled and specify say 60 minutes.

Now open command prompt and type “gpupdate /force” like below.

C:\Users\n8dog89>gpupdate /force
Updating Policy…

User Policy update has completed successfully.
Computer Policy update has completed successfully.

Your PC will now NOT restart automatically, but will remind you every 60 minutes to restart. Much better than coming to your PC and its restarting, or you see that it has restarted, so annoying sometimes!

Have a great weekend!

-NS

Anyways, back to business, I included a small insert for you to quickly read, then you can decide if you want to check out the whole article.

The Cr-48 may look like just any other laptop, but we can tell you right off the bat that it feels considerably better than most of those plastic netbooks sitting on store shelves right now. The entire body (that means the lid, edges, and the underside) is made of a soft, rubber-like matte black plastic — in fact, it feels a lot like the back of the Droid, though it feels a bit less rubbery. Overall, it looks a lot like the old black MacBook, including a magnetic latch with a split spot for getting your finger in and lifting the lid and a sunken screen hinge. We’re obviously pretty taken with the hardware design look and feel, but the laptop itself isn’t going to turn heads or win any beauty contests, and that was clearly intentional on Google’s part — remember this one isn’t for consumers, but more for those less stylish developers and early adopters.

As promised here is the article from Engadget.

Enjoy!

-NS

A few of the updates to be noted are that they improved Windows Firewall integration, you can now inspect traffic as you surf, and they added a better heuristic scanning engine.

Even though going here doesn’t show any sign of updates, if you “Download Now” you will get Microsoft Security Essentials 2.0.

-NS

Check it out Part 1 and Part 2.

Also if you have never checked out Process Explorer, it is considered a replacement for Task Manager the world over. Go here to see what it is all about.

Release Notes

This is a clone of the Image Resizer Powertoy for Windows XP — a PowerToy that allows you to right-click on one or more image files in Windows Explorer to resize them. It was created (by me) to extend support to non-XP and 64-bit versions of Windows (including 2000, Vista & 7).

Version 2.1.1 of the Image Resizer adds some community-contributed features to the tool. This will be the last release of version 2.x. I am currently performing a major overhaul of the tool (see Image Resizer 3).

Download it here.

TCPView is a Windows program that will show you detailed listings of all TCP and UDP endpoints on your system, including the local and remote addresses and state of TCP connections. On Windows Server 2008, Vista, and XP, TCPView also reports the name of the process that owns the endpoint. TCPView provides a more informative and conveniently presented subset of the Netstat program that ships with Windows. The TCPView download includes Tcpvcon, a command-line version with the same functionality.

Download the application here also read about it in greater detail. If you want to check out the whole suite, go here, downloads and details are all  there.

-NS