Windows Goodies

Just some neat (for sysadmins) posts on Windows related items

• The Case of the Phantom Desktop Files – Mark’s Blog.  Yep. Microsoft Sysinternals guru Mark Russinovich breaks down a new mystery revealed on his wife’s system.  It’s good information and might be valuable from a forensics or malware fighting perspective.  Turns out it is a PMIE(Private [browsing] Mode Internet Explorer) Integrity Level thing and as always, very fascinating.
• Help! My Application only runs on a Single Processor system! – Ask the Performance Team blog – The Windows pros provide some nice advise on how to get a balky application to play nicely on a multi-core system.  They provide a number of (relatively) easy methods for forcing the app (affinity) to run on a particular core or cores to help tune its performance.  These GSD blog posts might be related and worth looking into as well: Enabling Dual-Core Support and Windows CPU throttling techniques.
• Birth of a Security Feature: ClickJacking Defense – IEBlog continues it drumbeating celebration of IE8’s “ClickJacking” defenses. They’ve done the coding in their browser and now are out to convert the web developers to change their code to “activate” that protection.  I’m not sure I fully understand it but something just seems a bit off.  Maybe I’ve been reading NoScript (and clickjacking defender) Giorgio Maone’s hackademix.net blog responses to the whole thing too much and have become biased.  To the IE team’s credit, at least they are trying.
• TaoSecurity: Benefits of Removing Administrator Access in Windows – Links to a study that shows that (big surprise) running Windows from a non-Administrator level account provides better system integrity protection than doing so under an Admin level account. 
• Windows XP Your Way- Configuring Windows Explorer – Somehow at work the other day I was fast-finger clicking though a ton of windows on my desktop. One of which was Windows Explorer. Anyway, I ended up accidently setting the display sorting view of the items to show them all grouped alphabetically.  It was big-time annoying and I had to Google this stupid solution to find the menu path needed to correct it back to my “detail” view preference.

Enjoy.

--Claus Valca