Author: Ed Bott

Tech journalist. Author of 25+ books. ZDNET Contributing Editor since 2006. Contact info: https://edbott.com/contact-me/

Doing the right thing

This is excellent news. Congratulations to Microsoft for making the right decision, even if it took a while. And congrats to all the Microsoft employees who spoke up against discrimination and prejudice.

Microsoft kicks off new security service

Ryan Naraine at eWeek has word of a new Microsoft security service:

Microsoft plans to unveil a new security advisories service next Tuesday as part of an aggressive long-term effort to revamp the way it reacts to publicly reported software vulnerabilities.

The pilot project, which is independent of the scheduled monthly security bulletins, represents a major shift in the way the Redmond, Wash.-based software maker communicates with customers when information on security flaws is published by gray hat hackers and private research outfits.

The new offering, dubbed Microsoft Security Advisories, gives engineers at the MSRC (Microsoft Security Research Center) an outlet for providing instant feedback, guidance and mitigations when researchers jump the gun and release vulnerability details before a patch is available.

This is very good news, good enough to warrant interrupting a vacation! In this new program, security experts at Microsoft will be able to issue advisories with detailed advice without having to wait for a formal update to work its way through the Microsoft bureaucracy.

According to Ryan Naraine’s story, the impetus for this new program was a pair of embarrassing episodes – one in which a patch was issued but not properly documented, and the other involving the issue of “poisoned” Windows Media files, for which a patch was issued only after three months.

When it comes to security, transparency is a very good thing.

Tip of the day: A few Task Manager tricks

I’ve been posting Task Manager tips all week (here, here, here, and here), so I’ll finish up with a few of my favorite tweaks and techniques for this valuable utility.

First, I keep Task Manager running all the time. From the Options menu, I choose the Hide when minimized option, which keeps it from displaying a button on the taskbar. Instead, it minimizes to an icon in the system tray which glows green to indicate the percentage of CPU resources in use at any given time. If you see a bright green icon here, you know that something is sucking up the CPU.

I also set Task Manager to stay on top (Options, Always on Top) when it’s in use.

Next, I customize the display of columns on the Process tab. With the Processes tab selected, click View, Select Columns. Most of the choices here are fairly geeky, but the Peak Memory Usage and CPU Time columns can be useful.

Most people don’t realize the Task Manager window is resizable. Drag the right border to the right to make room for more information in each listing; drag the bottom border down to make room for more entries in the list.

Finally, if Task Manager’s menus and status bar disappear from view, don’t be alarmed. You double-clicked on a chart on the Performance or on a border of another tab. To return to normal view, double-click any empty space around the border.

Tip of the day: Identify processes in the task list

Using Task Manager to identify a process that’s taking more than its fair share of CPU or memory resources is a start, but what happens when you can’t identify the specific process causing the problem? That’s likely to occur if a system service starts to spin out of control. In that case, you’ll see the excess resources attributed to a generic process (usually Svchost.exe), with no indication of which service is actually responsible.

Service Host (Svchost.exe) is a core piece of Windows XP code that collects a number of lower-level system-critical services and runs them in a common environment. By gathering multiple functions together, this arrangement reduces boot time and system overhead and eliminates the need to run dozens of separate low-level services.

Because different groups of services have different requirements in terms of system access and security, Windows XP creates a number of different groups. To see a list of which services are associated with each Svchost instance, click Start, click Run, type cmd in the Open box, and press Enter. In the Command Prompt window, type tasklist /svc /fi “imagename eq svchost.exe” (including the quotation marks).

(Note that the Tasklist command is only available with Windows XP Professional. If you have XP Home Edition, you can download the file from here.)

After you gather the names of services running in the context of a Svchost instance, you can do further research to see which one is causing your performance problem.

For more details on how to use the Tasklist command, type tasklist /? at a command prompt.

New Xbox = Media Center hub or extender?

Bill Gates spilled the beans on some upcoming Xbox features in a meeting of business journalists on Monday. The AP has the story:

The console, code-named Xenon, is due to be previewed in an MTV half-hour special later this month.

Gates, Microsoft’s chairman and co-founder, was vague on specific features of Xenon but said the company’s consoles would be evolving to include improved communications tools for making multiplayer online gaming more convivial.

He told the annual meeting of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers that Xenon’s software menu would be similar to that of the company’s Media Center edition of Windows, which is designed for computers meant to be located in the living room.

“If you’re used to that menu, when you use this Xenon you’ll see a menu a lot like that that lets you get photos, TV, music and all those different things.”

Interesting…

Language lessons

Do you know the difference between flaunt and flout? How about imply versus infer?

The answers to these and other knotty language traps are on display at the Columbia Journalism Review’s Language Corner.

Less practical and more fun is Paul McFedries’ The Word Spy, which is always worth a visit for anyone interested in lexpionage, which is defined as “the sleuthing of new words and phrases … that have appeared multiple times in newspapers, magazines, books, Web sites, and other recorded sources.”

Tip of the day: Get to know Task Manager

If you use Windows, you should know about Task Manager. This essential system utility allows you to keep track of which programs are running, kill a program or process that has stopped responding, monitor your system’s performance, and keep track of how your system is using memory. The Task Manager utility has been a part of various Windows versions for years, but the version included in Windows XP does more tricks than any of its predecessors. In fact, this week’s tips will focus exclusively on Task Manager functions.

To start Task Manager, press Ctrl+Shift+Escape. (If you use the default settings for Windows XP with Fast User Switching enabled and your computer is not logged on to a domain, you can start Task Manager with the simpler Ctrl+Alt+Delete sequence.)

The Task Manager interface consists of four tabs (a fifth tab, Users, is visible if Fast User Switching is enabled). The Applications tab, shown here, lists every running program that appears as a Taskbar button. It also includes items that run as programs but hide their taskbar buttons and appear only as tray icons when minimized.

Taskman_apps

I don’t know anyone who uses Task Manager to actually manage programs, even though the various buttons and menu items available here offer a full range of options for doing just that: The Switch To button makes the selected program active, for instance, minimizing the Task Manager window. Click Windows, Bring To Front if you want to surface a program or Explorer window that’s currently hiding behind other windows while still leaving Task Manager in the foreground.

The most important use for the Applications tab is to kill a program that isn’t responding. The Status column normally displays “Running” for every program in the list. If you see “Not Responding,” that’s a clue that the program might have hung. (Some programs fail to respond to requests about their status when they’re busy with a CPU-intensive task, so be sure to wait before concluding that the program is hung.) With very rare exceptions, you should be able to kill any program by selecting its entry in the list on the Applications tab and clicking End Task.

Tomorrow: Using Task Manager to monitor performance.