Earlier in the week I got an e-mail alerting me that the latest Windows Upgrade patch, Security Update #811493, does more harm than good. According to Microsoft-Watch.com’s article, “The patch which was designed to stave off a buffer overrun that could allow attackers to elevate privilege permissions on users’ machines ended up slowing some users’ systems to a crawl.” Fortunately, the patch can be easily uninstalled through Add/Remove Programs (it’s near the bottom of the list); and Microsoft is at present working on a patch for their patch.My computer has been running awkwardly of late, and since I’m pretty ardent about downloading the latest updates I thought this 811493 patch might be the culprit. As it turned out, I had not downloaded it yet, so the cause of my problems lay elsewhere. In fact, it looked like it might be as simple as creating more room on my C:\ drive for Windows’ swap file. Which brings me to my next tech alert. After uninstalling several seldom used programs and defragging my drive, I began noticing problems with Internet Explorer. I inexplicably lost the ablity to Open Links in a New Window. The new browser window would pop up, but no new page would load and the browser would crash.
I tried reinstalling (which is how I think I solved the problem at work, some time ago, when I first discovered this behavior), but since my browser was up-to-date here at home the IE installer refused to run. I found out though there is another solution to fix this strangely recurring problem. It worked for me, so perhaps it might be of use to you as well.
And speaking of tech problems, my homepage counter dropped three thousand hits last night!
P.S. After publishing the above, I also discovered my computer’s clock was an hour ahead.
