Microsoft announced today the release of Windows XP SP3 RC1 (Is that enough acronyms for you?)

If you are a Technet, or MSDN subscriber you can download it now

I have started testing it with a fresh XP install. No big changes over SP2. No speed increase or decrease either. It includes all of the latest hotfixes and patches so once this thing is released it will reduce your setup time for new XP machines considerably.

I will continue to test, and let you know if I find anything noteworthy about this release.

Another update to the IE6 and IE7 Virtual PC images that the IE Team at Microsoft makes available is available for download in the Microsoft Download Center. The previous ones expired on 2007-12-07; these expire on 2008-04-01.

My business requires me to safeguard the security of certain files. For years I have used Encrypted Magic Folders (EMF) from PC-Magic to encrypt those files, and to hide them from the view of an interloper. I loved it, because files were always encrypted on disk and yet were fully accessible to applications. However, when I upgraded to Vista 64, the new EMF crashed my system so completely that it was unbootable even in safe mode. I tried it twice, recovered twice with some difficulty, and gave up on EMF.

In the meantime I had heard about TrueCrypt, an open-source disk encryption package for Windows and Linux. It’s free! I must admit that after I downloaded it, I needed some time to get my mind around it.

Here are the basics:

• Using the TrueCrypt application you create a large “container” file on your system, larger than you will need to hold your encrypted files. It can be on any read/write disk, even a memory stick, and is initially filled with random data.
• The container file can be copied, moved, deleted, or renamed just like any other file. It’s not fragile.

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Surely it’s no news to you that we use Windows Update to continually deliver ongoing improvements to our customers so that Windows is always up-to-date.  Plus, doing so eliminates the need to wait for larger releases like service packs.  Some updates are released to the community for general feedback prior to delivery via Windows Update, as is the case today.  The Windows Serviceability Team today is rolling out another update on the Microsoft Download Center.  The update is categorized as a “preview release” and may be subject to change before it is released via Windows Update (we expect that to occur in January).
 
Today’s update preview release is geared toward improving reliability and performance in Windows Vista and we highly encourage you to install it.  It includes:

• Improvement of previous issues affecting going into or resuming from sleep/hibernate under some scenarios
• Update to address a previous issue with the disk spindown feature to improve battery life for portable systems
• Up to 15% improved performance of disk I/O (i.e., copying/moving/deleting large files)

I’m running this update on one of my systems — the one I’m using to draft this post, in fact. 

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Over the last few days I’ve noticed Digg.com has slowed to a crawl where it would take up to a half a minute to load each page. At first I thought it was Digg, but then I noticed “connecting to ads1.msn.com” in my status bar when apparently nothing would happen. Is there something wrong with Microsoft’s advertising network?

One of the many neat features in Firebug - a web-developer extension for Firefox - allows the monitoring of network traffic when loading a web page. This is extremely useful to track down causes for slow loading websites.

In this case, Microsoft’s ad servers (in particular, ads1.msn.com) is taking around 27 seconds to respond to the request for a simple 5KB Javascript file used to propagate websites with banner advertisements. In contrast, Digg’s server responds on average in less than 100ms.

On another site, Microsoft’s own Live Hotmail, the advertising banners served by ads1.msn.com and takes around 27 seconds as well to load. However unlike Digg, Hotmail’s ads are not placed at the top of the HTML so it does not hinder displaying the rest of the page’s

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