Norton Solves Windows Vista UAC Woes

Norton has created a great little utility that attempts to solve the Windows Vista User Account Control (UAC) woes.

Albeit annoying, Windows Vista’s UAC feature is a great security tool that alerts the user before any potentially damaging system actions are taken. The problem is the user is frequently prompted with UAC dialog boxes on various actions that may otherwise seem trivial and sometimes even confronted with multiple prompts for a single action.

Although Microsoft has reportedly addressed the concern in the upcoming Windows 7, users have resorted to either silencing UAC altogether with a registry hack or TweakUAC or disabling it altogether in the mean time. Both not very secure alternatives.

Norton has seen the need for a solution and has provided a great, free utility that provides the same security benefits of Windows Vista’s UAC prompts but with the added functionality of remembering previous confirmations and providing more detail on the action to be taken. In addition to this, Norton’s UAC Tool will also optionally report confirmations from users and create a white-list to be distributed when the app gets out of beta to minimize unnecessary prompts.

Check out Norton Labs’ UAC Tool.

Windows Live Writer

I just downloaded the latest version of Windows Live Writer. It has a really awesome interface that will allow you to post to various weblogs, not just Microsoft's Spaces.

For anyone that has a weblog, be sure to check out the latest version of Windows Live Writer that apparently fixes a few bugs with Blogger.com. Great stuff, really.

You can download it here.

I'm never gonna give this up! :)

Launch Apps

Today's post is focused on command-line-esque launch applications. Both are essentially replacements for the Windows run command (WinKey+R) and help you get to your applications quicker by using command-line names instead of having to browse and click through for shortcuts.

Launchy
Launch is an open-source Windows application launcher. It has built-in features to search Google and other websites. It can lookup weather forecasts and it indexes your Start Menu to provide quick access to everything registered there. Of course, it's completely free and has a great interface to boot.



Executor
Executor is very similar but expands on the features list a bit; such as drag and drop functionality. It has commands to manipulate the current window and can even override the Windows Run command.



Both are skinnable and both provide some great added functionality to your system. Definitely recommended.

Lifehacker 2007 Guide & iTunes Apps

Lifehacker's 2007 Guide to Free Software and Webapps

Some great free apps in there. Some pretty obvious, but the are others that you would never have thought were free. OSI FTW! :)

The 23 Best iTunes Add-ons

They have also listed the 23 best iTunes add-on. I love iTunes. Although it is a little bloated and painfully slow with a fairly large media library (50+ GB), it is the easiest and most advanced music manager out there in my opinion. Lifehacker has put together some great add-ons that will enhance iTunes even more.

Some of the highlights:

• moreTunes - Displays an album art pop-up while playing and repairs metadata for your songs
  
• iTunes Export - Export your iTunes music library to an external storage device or another computer
  
• iTunes Sync - Get iTunes to sync with non-iPod mp3 players
• iSproggler - Automatically upload your iTunes listening habits to last.fm
  

There are a bunch more quality apps in there so definitely check out the complete list. There are some especially good ones for Mac users as well.

Mozy Free 2GB Online Backups

Mozy.com

Gets you free unlimted 2GB backups. Everyone should have some sort of backup going on, even if it's just your 'My Documents' folder. I learned my lesson once when I lost 2 years worth of programming work when my hard drive failed on one of my older computers. Ever since then I have been using periodic CD or DVD backups and it's usually just a matter of dragging and dropping my Documents folder. Now with this, I don't have to worry about cataloging those disks anymore. One less thing to clutter the desktop.

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