sp3

McAfee bug forces Aussie store closures

Australian supermarket behemoth Coles was hit Thursday by a McAfee bug that affected 10 percent of its point-of-sales terminals and forced it to shut down stores in both western and southern parts of the country.

An update from security company McAfee released Wednesday caused computers using Microsoft's Windows XP Service Pack 3 to incorrectly identify a legitimate operating system component as containing a virus. Affected computers experienced networking problems or repeated rebooting. McAfee has since removed the buggy update code from the company's servers.

Coles spokesman Jim Cooper told ZDNet Australia that 1,100 of the supermarket's … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 799: Pop a cap in your usage

Comcast comes clean with its bandwidth cap: it's coming, it's coming in October, it's 250GB, and they won't give you any tools for monitoring their use, and if you exceed your cap twice, you get the boot for a year. So, we have a little fun with that. Also, a little fun with IE 8 Beta 2 bugs, the lack of Kindle this year, and the pseudo-alphabetical distribution of spam. Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 799

Comcast puts a cap on Net usage http://www.bizjournals.com/portland/stories/2008/08/25/daily35.html … Read more

Fixing Windows Update on XP SP3

Bad news: Service Pack 3 for Windows XP, or one of the subsequent patches, breaks Windows Update. Not all the time, but often enough that I got burned twice.

Good news: Microsoft offers free technical support for Windows Update and that support provided a solution to my problem.

While consumers are conditioned to call their hardware manufacturer for technical support, Microsoft offers free support for Service Pack 3 for Windows XP, IE7 and Windows Update. Support for SP3 and IE7 is offered on the phone (866-234-6020), although, I had a hard time qualifying. Support for Windows Update is offered by … Read more

Post-SP3 patch breaks Windows Update

On two Windows XP machines of mine, the installation of post-SP3 patches has broken Windows Update.

I first wrote about this yesterday, when it happened on one machine. Today, on a computer with very different hardware, the problem repeated itself.

In both cases the computers had no application software installed. Each had only Windows XP SP2 and a handful of vendor installed utilities. Neither machine had any anti-malware software of any kind, not even a firewall (other than XP's firewall). Both were running Internet Explorer 6.

Each time I started by installing SP3 and rebooting. Next, I ran Windows … Read more

Microsoft: No tech support for you

The day Windows XP SP3 was released I advised waiting a long time before installing it. In the three months since, I haven't installed it on a computer that mattered to me. Today, I installed it on a computer that didn't matter much, and it caused a problem. So, I tried to take advantage of the free tech support Microsoft offers for SP3 - and got a lesson in fine print.

The computer shipped with Windows XP SP2 and some vendor utilities installed. It was a good guinea pig for SP3 because there were no user-installed applications and … Read more

Power Downloader restores Mozilla applications

Last week when Microsoft released Windows XP Service Pack 3 unto the world, a few "lucky" XP users had their computers come to a screeching, brain-jarring halt. Kitty Kilobyte's best friend Penny Penryn was hit badly by this bug, and she had to do a full reinstall of her operating system.

As frustrating as a crash of this magnitude can be, Penny Penryn was surprisingly as cool as a fan for a quad-core CPU. She didn't lose any of her important documents because followed Power Downloader's advice and backed them up using SyncBack. She didn'… Read more

Buzz Out Loud 725: CBS' podcast of indeterminate length

In today's episode, Leo Laporte drops in (and out) to discuss the future of CNET, the future of Yahoo, and lack of future we'll all have if the Air Force doesn't stop trying to build a real-life Skynet. Also, Leo points out why we should probably all delete our Plaxo accounts, Nintendo gets patent trolled, and can we leave Twitter? At least for one day? Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 725

**NOTE: We are making a change to our podcast feed system on Monday, May 19. You do not need to subscribe to a new … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 723: Best bad idea ever

The military has proposed creating their own botnet to help combat cyberfoes. Kevin Poulsen at Wired thinks this is idiotic. We think there's a certain amount of mad genius to it, and debate the points. Meanwhile 6 million Chileans had their personal data leaked to the Internet. Don't worry it's not all shock and awe. Harvard says violent video games are A-OK! Shoot 'em up, kids! Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 723

Note: We are making a change to our podcast feed system on Friday, May 16. However, you do not need to subscribe to … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 722: Print your own drugs

In today's show, we learn that the future lets us print our own drugs, and robots will drive our sailboats for us. Sailboats? Sailboats. Also, Gmail has a new spam problem, the BlackBerry Bold could be the new iPhone of Summer 2008, and the Rolling Stones have rolled their way right off of eMusic. Bummer. Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 722

Note: We are making a change to our podcast feed system on Friday, May 16. However, you do not need to subscribe to a new feed. One important thing to know: If you have your podcast … Read more

XP update throws some for a loop

This blog was updated at 9:30 a.m. PDT with information from Microsoft about the cause of the glitch.

Owners of some AMD-based computers are finding that the move to Windows XP Service Pack 3 has sent their systems into an endless reboot cycle.

"While the root cause of this issue is complex, it results from OEMs improperly placing a Windows XP image created for an for Intel-based computer onto machines with non-Intel chipsets," Microsoft said in a statement. "Microsoft issued guidance to OEMs advising them to only load Windows XP images onto like hardware in … Read more