Tag: FIX

A 20-line patch looks set to cut Firefox's start-up time in half. The fix, which works by preloading Firefox's XUL library, could land in nightly builds as early as tonight. Unfortunately, the speed-up will only affect Windows users. To be honest, it's a little odd that preloading DLLs hadn't been tried before. Prior to this fix, the XUL DLL was slowly loaded in 32KB bits, which really ground ...

Google has been offering bounties to encourage the developer community to find weaknesses in Chrome for some time. In July of 2010, Google bumped the maximum payment amount for a single bug to $3,133.7 (see what they did there?) to sweeten the deal. Six months later, and they've finally had to pony up. Sergey Glazunov has become the first person to report an "elite" bug in Google Chrome -- which ...

After moving quickly to plug a critical vulnerability last month, Adobe has followed up by patching another 23 holes in both Reader and Acrobat. These vulnerabilities affect all versions of Adobe Reader and Acrobat for Windows and Mac, so you need to update your software immediately. Users of Acrobat and Reader 9 will have to update to version 9.4, while users of Acrobat 8 should update to ...

It certainly didn't take long for Mozilla to jump to the pump and address a very-recently-announced bug affecting automatic updates to Firefox 3.6.9 and 3.5.11. A patch has been pushed, and users can now allow auto-update to do its thing without fear of winding up with a browser that won't start properly. Mozilla's Christian Legnitto voiced his surprise about the bug in comments on Bugzilla, ...

Google Chrome's sync features can be incredibly handy for those of use who run the browser on multiple computers. Every now and then, however, you may run into a problem. In my case, I had certain bookmarks which kept popping back up even though I'd previously deleted them. Today I got an email from a reader, John, who was having a similar issue with his extensions. "Recently LastPass has ...

Among the must-have utilities on my USB flash drive is CCleaner -- it's been cleaning my system of useless, space-wasting cruft for years. Every now and then, however, I find myself wishing there was an easy way to make it tidy up after a few additional apps without having to manually set up a handful of custom rules. Thanks to a post on Raymond.CC, I've now got a nice, simple way to do just ...

I spend a lot of time during the work week removing malware from customers' computers. So whenever I happen upon a new malware cleanup app, I make it a point to put it through the paces. Better tools make my job easier, after all. Today I'm checking out Norton Power Eraser -- a free, portable malware cleanup tool from the folks at Symantec. I had tried to test earlier beta versions of NPE, but ...

I don't often run into corrupt or unloadable user profiles on my workbench, but when I do they can be very tedious to repair. There's a lot of registry tweaking and permission setting that I'd love to be able to leave up to an application -- like ReProfiler, a free, portable tool designed to fix exactly this problem. Highlight a user account, then click the properties button to see what ...

Ask most computer techs or power users which virus programs you should avoid, and the big two retail boxed options -- Norton and McAfee -- will usually be the first two words out of their mouths. In the enterprise, however, the situation is very different. Symantec and McAfee still have pretty strong reputations and a loyal customer base. In McAfee's case, however, that reputation took a ...

Just yesterday I wrote about FixWin, a free program which helps fix a number of Windows Vista and Windows 7 errors. It's a lot like Microsoft's web-based FixIt solutions. Today, there's another option and it comes straight from Microsoft. Their new Fix It Center is a program you can download for free which provides automatic fixes for a wide range of bugs and annoyances. Choose the issue you ...

Microsoft's FixIt solutions generally work well, but sometimes they just take way too long to run -- especially on Vista and Windows 7. Some of them also require a little more interaction than I'd prefer: I know where the registry key is to fix that stupid bug where DVD drives disappear from My Computer, I just want a point-and-click way to do it! Fortunately, The Windows Club has a nice ...

With 2010 just begun, Adobe seems primed to take yet another step in making sure Acrobat and Adobe Reader users are protected from the security exploits which plagued the apps in 2009. Currently in beta testing is the Adobe Refresh Manager which will handle automatic update duties for both products. According to Brad Arkin, Adobe's chief of security and privacy, the current system just isn't ...

Even though it's getting a little long in the tooth, plenty of PC users are still perfectly happy with Windows XP. Of course, that doesn't mean running Windows XP is always a trouble-free experience. It's got its fair share of issues. Thankfully, though, there are loads of great programs out there which make fixing little annoyances as simple as point-and-click. Programs like XP Quick Fix ...

Even if you don't have a Gmail account, you may have seen an email message from a Gmail user with "on behalf of" in the "From:" field. This occurs when someone uses Gmail to send a message from a consolidated address that they've added to their account, but the message is delivered by Gmail's SMTP servers. Google has introduced a fix for the superfluous, confusing "on behalf of" language, ...

Yes, the JIT security flaw that was being buzzed about two days ago has already been corrected. The bug was originally identified on July 9th. As I mentioned in the last post, the patch was going to be released at the end of the month - but Mozilla wasn't foolish enough to let the bug go unaddressed for that long. Sometimes a flood of criticism will alter timetables ever so slightly. Apart from ...