Make your cyberlife at GCC a bit easier...
>Sophos Freedom!
GCC has decided to use Sophos Antivirus on their computers. That's all well and good until you're out of range of wireless and Sophos decides to make one of its every-15-minute updates, and ALUpdate.exe starts eating 100% of your CPU time trying to find a server that isn't there. You have a couple of options.-
Enable the Sophos options dialog and change the update frequency:
- Open "C:\Program Files\Sophos\AutoUpdate\Config\" in My Computer.
- Copy each of the files ending ".cfg" to another folder for a backup.
- Open each original .cfg file, and change "AllowLocalConfig = 0" to "AllowLocalConfig = 1"
-
Disable Sophos and switch to a different antivirus:
- Download a different antivirus program and install it. Personally, I like Avast Antivirus, which is free for personal use (requires free registration)
- Open the Control Panel
- Double click 'Administrative Tools'
- Double click 'Services'
- Find 'Sophos Agent', 'Sophos Anti-Virus', 'Sophos Anti-Virus status reporter', 'Sophos AutoUpdate Service', and 'Sophos Message Router' and:
- Right click the entry and click 'Properties'.
- In the 'Startup type' dropdown, select 'Manual'
- Click 'Ok'
- Open "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup" in My Computer.
- Delete 'AutoUpdate Monitor.lnk'
- Reboot your computer.
>Fix Thunderbird!
My math professor complained that my Mathemetica assignments were being sent inline with the rest of the email, and he had to copy-paste the contents out by hand. A quick email to myself confirmed this. Turns out Thunderbird embeds "text" (non-binary) attachments inline by default. The fix is relaticely simple.
In Thunderbird:
- [Menu] Tools > Options
- [Section] Advanced
- [Tab] General
- [Button] Config Editor
- for "Filter", type "content"
- double click on "mail.content_disposition_type" so that its value becomes "1"
- [Close]
- [Ok]
>Virtual CDs!
I was deeply saddened to find that my tc4200 Tablet (though a nice techno-bauble) has no internal optical drive. A great tragedy, to be sure. A few small utilities later, life can continue.
- ISO Recorder
- Adds a right-click menu to record CDs and DVDs to an ISO file.
- Virtual CD Control Panel
- Allows you to add virtual drives and mount ISO files as CDs & DVDs.