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Yesterday, the 1st of 4 webinars on the HP MediaSmart Connect took place with special guest Ed Bott from ZDNet. You can register to watch the session on-demand here. The HP MediaSmart Connect is a brand new Extender for Windows Media Center device that enables you to "extend" your Windows Media Center experience to any HDTV in your house. I took a look at the device myself and posted about it last week.

There are 3 more webinars for you to attend - with the next one being tomorrow June 26th, 2008 at 1:00pm PST with Ian Dixon from The Digital Lifestyle.  Click here to register for the webinar.

I'll also be posting reminders for the webinars coming on July 8th and 10th.

Now let's examine the two different types of GP, starting with local GP and moving to domain-based GP. Although local policies don't have the flexibility of domain-based GPs, as you will see, they are still a valuable tool for creating a deployable set of standards for computers in your organization. Local policies are most useful for creating a security configuration for either clients or servers that is appropriate for your company. With the Security Templates snap-in, you can create role-based templates that configure most security-related settings on your machines. And with the Security Configuration and Analysis Tool snap-in, you can create a database of roles and policies for your organization's machines.

Security Templates

Microsoft wisely decided to ship Windows with a few predefined security settings files, hereafter referred to as "security templates." These files contain what are essentially recipes for configuring a machine's security policy based on its daily role. These templates, designed to be applied to new Windows installations that already have had a basic template applied, must be used on systems formatted with NTFS, at

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After the last Adobe vulnerability found in Windows XP SP3 in Adobe Flash Player, recently, more serious vulnerabilities were found in Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat. In result, Adobe released a new security update on Monday to patch up that security hole. The vulnerability is defined as CVE-2008-2641, and is now out wild on the Internet.

According to Adobe, if this vulnerability gets exploited, your system may crash and allow the hacker to gain control on it. This is what Adobe’s site says:

A critical vulnerability has been identified in Adobe Reader and Acrobat 8.1.2. This vulnerability would cause the application to crash and could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system.

Following Adobe products are affected with this vulnerability:

• Adobe Reader 8.0 through 8.1.2
• Adobe Reader 7.0.9 and earlier
• Adobe Acrobat Professional, 3D and Standard 8.0 through 8.1.2
• Adobe Acrobat Professional, 3D and Standard 7.0.9 and earlier

This vulnerability does not affect Adobe Reader 7.1.0 and Acrobat 7.1.0.

Download Latest Adobe Patches

RegDefrag is a free utility by Quicksys, that defrags your Windows Registry by removing gaps, fragments and wasted space. It even optimizes your registry to help improve performance and boost access to it. This is a very small (approx. 1 MB), light and easy-to-use application. It is also safe to use because it does not modify any registry entries.

Quicksys RegDefrag is compatible with Windows 2000, XP and Vista.

Download

Download Quicksys RegDefrag 1.3

" > Windows Vista Security (User Account Control, UAC) was designed to block  programs that needs elevation or Administrator's approval which makes it very difficult for malicious programs to run during the startup. Anyway, There are several ways to configure, enable and Add programs to launch after the logon or startup process.

How?

A. Force the program to start and Bypass UAC using the Task Scheduler in Windows Vista

1. Open the Task Scheduler using that Start Search > Type "task"...

2. Click Create Task located at the right side.

3. Type the name of the program and Click "Run with highest privileges" option

4. Go to Actions Tab and click the New Button

5. Click the Browse button and locate the program to be launch during startup. To add another program, just click the New Button and repeat #5

6. Finally, Click the OK Button and Reboot your Computer. That's it!

Note: After Reboot, Windows Vista will display a warning message 2008/03/unlockme-has-blocked-some-startup.html" >"Windows has blocked some startup programs". To solve this

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