Peanuts to Profits With Thor Schrock
Peanuts to Profits With Thor Schrock

I found this story on an Australian news website. I have no idea if it is true, but either way it is funny.

Microsoft executives love telling stories against each other. Here’s one that platforms vice-president Jim Allchin told at a recent Windows Vista reviewers conference about chief executive Steve Ballmer.

It seems Steve was at a friend’s wedding reception when the bride’s father complained that his PC had slowed to a crawl and would Steve mind taking a look.

Maybe it is the fact that I am exposed to my programming staff many hours a day, or maybe it is because the FireFox browser is better than Internet Explorer… I am almost using Firefox as much as IE now.

If you have not downloaded Firefox, I recommend you do so and see what I am talking about. You can get Firefox free at http://www.getfirefox.com. While it takes a little longer initially to open FireFox, it does seem to surf a little more quickly.

As of today, over 15,000 unique individuals have visited the www.schrockinnovations.com website looking for help removing the SpyFalcon, SpywareQuake, and SpySheriff spyware infections. SpyFalcon and SpywareQuake are the latest spyware threats in a string of similar programs that started with the SpySheriff infection in 2005. For complete background information you can read our SpyFalcon, SpySheriff, […]

A new security loophole has surfaced in Microsoft Word 2002 and greater that could leave your computer open to any number of attacks. Microsoft acknowledged the threat today and explained a work around that does not immediately fix the problem, but would limit some of the effects if you were hit by a bug that exploited this vulnerability – run Microsoft Word in Safe Mode.

Running Word in safe mode is a little like running Windows in Safe Mode. It will restrict some of its higher-level functions such as integrating with Outlook as your email client.

Today Microsoft released the official minimum system requirements for Windows Vista. To run Vista in its most basic form you will need at least a 20 GB hard drive (not a problem for most people) and 800 MHz processor, and 512 MB of memory. Microsoft calls this the requirements for Vista’s “core” features. As usual, I would not recommend trying to run a Microsoft operating system with the minimum requirements. Vista has other features ranging from improved functionality to some pretty cool eye candy, but you will need some more horsepower to enjoy everything there is to offer.

I am proud to report that for the first time ever the Schrock Innovations website at www.schrockinnovations.com has had more than 10,000 visitors in one month. That means that between May 1 and May 16 more than 10,000 unique individuals (not just hits, but unique hits) took advantage of the free services on the Schrock website.

Today Microsoft released some concept photographs of what the office of the future may look like. Their presentation was complete with photos, and I have selected two of the best and added them to my blog album (Credit: Daniel Sheehan Photography). The interesting thing is that with the new technologies and operating systems that are just on the horizon, one can almost feel a paradigm shift taking place.

As you might imagine, Microsoft envisions that the office of the future will be devoid of CRT monitors and even single LCD displays. Both will be replaced with much larger dual screen displays. Perhaps it is just my keen insight into the world of computers, but this doesn’t really impress me much. Who wouldn’t want a huge 26″ high definition plasma computer monitor? And if one is good, two would most certainly be better, right? While the pictures are fun to look at, and touch screen keyboards with no sign of a mouse is a sexy idea, you would expect the office of the future to have something more.

You guessed it… Another wonderful spyware infection is causing problems for our customers. This infection is a variant of the SpyFalcon infection. We detailed its removal
with our Remove SpyFalcon Tutorial.

This new variant will not respond to those removal instructions, so we have created a new tutorial to deal with it. If you think you have the SpywareQuake spyware infection, or are not sure if you do, you can take a look at our Remove Spyware Quake tutorial on our DIY website. The tutorial has pictures of what the screenshots look like and everything.

Last month we posted a free removal tutorial on our website at http://www.schrockinnovations.com/removemoviepass.php that showed our customers how to remove this software from their computers. It seems that while people have been surfing the internet, an advertisement has been appearing that offers free video content if you click on it and install some software. The next thing you know, BOOM you have Movie Pass’ Media Pipe software installed on your computer.

We have seen over 30 customers in our Service Centers over the past three days or so who have been suffering from an error message that states their “windows/system32/config/system file is missing.” Typically, we would simply restore a backup copy of the system file and send them on their way. But the problem has taken a new twist recently.

It seems that the entire windows/system32/config/ folder is missing entirely. This folder stores information about your stored passwords, your registry, and your Windows profile. Without it you will not be able to reboot your computer, and there is no way to completely recover from this problem.