It appears that antivirus companies have begun to sell their products on USB thumb drives. This is a great idea now that Netbooks are more common since many of them don’t have an optical drive. In fact, some antivirus companies such as Panda Security are making a Netbook specific versions of their antivirus products which are lighter on resources and come on a USB drive.

Another great thing about antivirus products coming on a USB drive is that the installation of the antivirus product (which usually takes ages) would happen much faster, since it is usually much faster than installing something from a CD.

Lastly, at the end of the day the customer is left with a USB drive which they could use for other purposes.

The default power settings for Windows is to have the computer go to sleep after about 15-30 minutes of inactivity (such as no keyboard input or mouse movement). This is great for the client because it saves power but not so great for a technician who is working on the computer.

Insomnia is a small, freeware and portable application designed to prevent the computer from going to sleep. As long as the Insomnia window is open, the computer wont go to sleep. This is great for a technician who is running malware or diagnosis scans on a computer which can potentially take hours.

If you are a technician who makes use of .BAT file or AutoIT scripting, this would be a nice addition to your script to keep the computers awake while your script does its task.

One of the biggest frustrations when installing Windows XP was making sure you had the correct CD for your license key. Windows Vista fixed this problem by having a universal CD that contained all versions (all 32bit versions or all 64bit versions, not both) and simply installed the version that the key matched.

Now that Windows 7 is out, Microsoft have reverted back to needing a separate disk for each version which is annoying for us computer technicians. However, the only difference between each DVD is a small 51 byte configuration file called ei.cfg which tells the installer what version disc it is. If you were to turn your DVD into an ISO, remove this ei.cfg file and write it back to a DVD, that DVD would become a Universal DVD.

ei.cfg Removal Utility will make this easy for you. Just create an ISO with your legitimate Windows 7 DVD, run this tool, choose the ISO and let it run. Once it has finished, just write the ISO back to a DVD again and you would only need to carry one 32bit version and one 64bit version to support any Windows 7 install onsite.

Of course, your client would still need to provide you with a working key for the Windows 7 install to work.

The critical security bug in vPro processors has been patched by Intel. The affected chipsets are Q35, GM45, PM45 Express, Q45, and Q43 Express.

The bug is about implementation errors in the company’s trusted execution technology (TXT).

“We again showed that an attacker can compromise the integrity of a software loaded via an Intel TXT-based loader in a generic way, fully circumventing any protection TXT is supposed to provide,” said Invisible Things Lab researchers.

The overhaul of Firefox’s interface has been delayed. Instead of debuting in version 3.7, it is now scheduled to debut in version 4.0 which is a major release slated for a 2010 release.

Mozilla, the developer of Firefox, would “ribbonize” the browser and borrow graphics graphics concepts from Microsoft. This means eliminating the top-of-the-frame menus.

Stephen Horlander of Mozilla said that there will be an “App Button” that will take place of the menus.