Why every Windows user needs a Linux CD...

Even if you're a died-in-the-wool Windows supporter, you NEED to keep a copy of Linux around on a bootable CD. Here's why.

The other day, we experienced a power outage... brief, but it took down a couple of machines that I had yet to protect with a UPS (I know, I know... my bad, but I've only protected the machines with RAID drives in the past as they spend a lot of time checking the drives after a power failure).

In any event, a new Windows 7 desktop refused to boot after the power failure: the first Microsoft Windows splash screen displayed and then nothing except an ominous tock, tock, tock as it sat there doing nothing. I've heard that sound before on a machine that couldn't read the Master Boot Record (MBR - the very first part of the disk that the BIOS uses to start loading the operating system into memory). Fortunately, I had a recent backup of the system, but there was some work on the system that I had just completed, so I figured I'd use my Ubuntu Live CD to check out and save the few updated files (the idea of using Linux to save data on damaged Windows machines is not new: see here, and here for examples. Some of these articles are a little old and there's now even better support for Windows NTFS file systems)

Starting up Linux on your Windows machine is easy: insert your favorite Linux CD (I used Kubuntu 9.04) into the machine and restart the computer. You'll get an option to run Linux without installing it. The fun part is getting Linux to recognize your hard drive. Usually, it will be something like "mount -t NTFS /dev/sdb /media/windrive", but check out the references above for more details... that's not the point of this posting.

The amazing part is that -- once I loaded Linux and issued the mount command, there was a bit of a pause, Kubuntu recognized that the Master Boot Record was corrupted and then...

it automatically fixed the error!

Totally unexpected -- you could have knocked me over with a feather.  I shut down Linux, rebooted the machine and Windows promptly started up just fine and a week later continues to operate with no errors. Saved me my latest updates and a bunch of time not having to do a clean re-install of everything on that machine. Terrific!

Now why can't Microsoft do that?

Nice solution to a Microsoft Outlook problem...

Nothing frustrates me more (well... only a few things :) than a software developer taking away an option and not providing a way to undo that change, particularly when it is or should be a user choice.

Case in point: Microsoft came late to the security party and when they finally realized that their software was riddled with security holes, they took a rather heavy-handed approach to "solving" the problem. As everyone knows, email allows attachments, which are a great thing for sending files of various kinds to your friends, co-workers, and clients. That's great, but the bad guys figured out ways to package malware into various file types, including such things as Microsoft Access databases (.mdb), web address files (.url), and even compressed files (.zip).

What did Microsoft do? They dropped in a security "fix" that completely disallowed these and many other potentially harmful file types. And the didn't provide a way to undo (either temporarily or permanently) these changes. Once you've installed the security "fix", those attachments are completely inaccessible to you through Outlook. To gain access to them, you have to have another email client handy and that's a real PITA.

Unfortunately, I occasionally get such files from clients or associates whom I trust and I need to be able to open them... Uh-uh. Microsoft knows better than me and won't let that happen.

Today that problem bit me again and I found a terrific resource on the web that allowed to me take care of that in a very intelligent manner.  A quick Google search turned up this page, which explained the situation nicely and then offered up a veritable smorgasbord of solutions. As always, there's a way to edit the Windows Registry , but that's not something you want to do regularly. If that is your cup of tea, see the section on the page titled ""Recent Outlook Versions". I started to do that and then happened to glance further down the page and found an even better solution. 

In the "Tools" section, you'll find an Attachment Options link which offers an Outlook plug-in (or COM add-in) by Outlook MVP Ken Slovak. This does everything that Microsoft should have done. It installs quickly and easily, and adds a tab to your Outlook "Tools | Options" window.

There you can see all the file types that are disallowed, and allow them, individually (or all at once if you like to take risks). Even better, once you've downloaded a particular file that you were expecting, you can easily go back to this tab and disallow them again, so you don't accidentally allow the bad guys to get you.

Now that's intelligent design!

What just happened...?

Computers do the strangest things... I was working this morning and scanning some documents when I decided to make some adjustments to the scan settings: I just upped the resolution from 200 DPI to 240 DPI to get a little more clarity. Shouldn't be a problem, right? Wrong.  After that, my scanning application (PaperPort V10) stopped working and just complained with an "Unable to communicate with the device" error message.

I ran thru the tests and it worked just fine, but whenever I tried to make a scan for real, it failed.  There were a couple of settings that I was able to get working, but the original setting failed and most every other option just stopped working.

A reboot didn't help (the Windows sometimes miracle cure); stopping/restarting the scanner didn't help.  I was about ready to uninstall/reinstall the FAX/Printer driver when I looked at the scan driver options: there were two. One was for a TWAIN driver and one was for a WIA (Windows Image Acquisition) driver. When I switched to the WIA driver, everything was back to normal.

Total loss of productivity: roughly 30 minutes trouble-shooting... and it really isn't "fixed". I just lucked into a work-around.

We'll see what happens next, as I don't trust lucky fixes. At least Windows provided the solution in this case.