This week Forrester Research analyst Thomas Mendel published a report that claims that Windows Vista has been "rejected" in the enterprise and suggests to his customers that they should re-evaluate their Windows Vista deployments and consider waiting for Windows 7.  Not surprisingly, this is something that we, our millions of enterprise customers, and a bunch of pesky statistics don't agree with.  Heck, even Forrester doesn't agree with Forrester!  Let me explain:

First, this report doesn't reflect the normal enterprise OS adoption cycle. Enterprise adoption of OSes has always been much slower than consumer adoption.   After all, upgrading the PC in your living room is easy, but upgrading an entire front and back end infrastructure to thousands of users without downtime is much more complex, and that takes time.  Computerworld contributing author (and Microsoft partner) David Feng just wrote an article about this, too.  Mendel's report, however, simply skims over this common knowledge.

What is even more puzzling is that Mr. Mendel's report directly contradicts another Forrester report titled, "Building the Business Case for Windows Vista," which was written by fellow analyst Ben Gray.  This report outlines the five main reasons why enterprises should start their company's migration

In case you have been living under a rock for the past month you have most likely heard about the DNS cache exploit recently discovered by Dan Kaminsky.  This might be one of the most severe flaws discovered as it was cross platform affecting everything from Windows to Linux, UNIX, Cisco IOS etc....  It was so big in fact that all the major vendors worked together to get the patch issued on the same day.  The flaw would allow an attacker to insert a malicious DNS record into the cache.  As an end user you type in www.technet.com and rather than get the proper IP address the cache delivers the malicious IP address sending you to ????  You can find out more on the details of the flaw at Dan's blog.

You should also make sure that you are patched.  Make sure that your upstream ISP DNS servers are patched by calling them or using Dan's DNS Checker at the top of his website.

So why all of a sudden a rush to ensure you are patched?  Well the patches issued by the vendors have been reverse engineered and exploit code has been published!  Dan has

Do you know what XLG Security Center is?

DESCRIPTION

XLG Security Center was discovered to be a clone of XLGuarder which is a rogue anti-spyware program causing issues for computer users all over the world. XLG Security Center pretends to be a full security software suit that helps you remove or prevent spyware and other infections. XLG Security Center is far from doing any of this.

XLG Security Center tries it’s best to get you to purchase the full version of the XLG Security Center program through popus, system alerts and fake scan reports. XLG Security Center may also spread the XLGuarder program onto your system which is no better than having XLG Security Center installed. XLG Security Center has a silhouette of a woman which we think is part of the voice that you hear when XLG Security Center is run. This most deceptive thing about XLG Security Center is that you cannot close the program unless you end process or completely remove it.

Aliases: XLG Security Center, XLG SecurityCenter, XLGSecurityCenter.

In non-techie terms: XLG Security Center is not much different from many other rogue anti-spyware programs that are infecting computer users today. The web site xlguarder.com is

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Well as a System Administrator you browse through literal 100.000 event logs every week.
Below you will find a list posted by Microsoft. This list tells you which events you can safely ignore.

This will make your life a bit easier.... (I hope)

You can find the original document here

These days, we see in the computer shops wireless keyboards and mice being offered. Personally, I find them as totally useless. Why would a person want a wireless gadget for their computer? It is not like you cannot move your current keyboard and mouse far from the screen. Actually when you think of it, who would want farther from the keyboard?

The reason behind why I find this entirely outrageous is the fact that they pose more problems than good. I can understand why wireless is being done these days but if you are the technically inclined person, would you really need one? Outside that of bragging rights, the feasibility of having a keyboard farther away from your LCD monitor seems to be illogical. The only thing I can see as a benefit from it is to avoid the usual wirings that get entangled behind your CPU and nothing more. Besides I heard they run out of batteries fast!

Add to this the fact that they cost double than the usual wired keyboards or mouse we normally need. Paying for more for a standard device seems crazy and if you are wise, it would be best to stick to the default way

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