Using Gmail? Better Turn on SSL

I know some of you are using Gmail for your mail accounts. Google's mail system is becoming well accepted in the community as an alternative to Yahoo and Hotmail.

The problem is that there is a way for hackers to grab your account - but only if you are NOT using the secure session (SSL) facility FULL TIME. Google has just introduced a new feature that allows you to turn this SSL (Secure Session Layer) feature on for the whole session instead of just while you are authenticating yourself at the beginning of a session and I STRONGLY suggest you do this - turn on SSL.

You can see details of this hacking process at Hungry-Hackers
----------------

Did you know that all the major vendors of PCs with Windows on them (Vista) offer an option to "downgrade" to XP? A recent Computer World article notes that 35% or more of new PCs recently purchased have been so downgraded - citing a testing facility (Devil Mountain Software Inc.) - showing that either the machines were downgraded by the vendor or by the purchaser after receiving the machine.

I'll note that many of my customers either proactively purchased extra XP machines before Vista came out, fearing that XP would become completely unavailable, or have asked for the downgrade option when getting new hardware.

I also note that several have had problems with either not being able to run some older software on their new Vista systems, or with the speed of Vista, even on what should be fairly powerful hardware. One of my associates notes that Vista seems to really run well on 64 bit hardware, especially with 4 Gigabytes of RAM. This in itself looks promising, but there are some packages (one person noted that Goldmine was one of them that was the reason they were sticking with 32 bit machines for now) that are not supported yet on 64 bit systems.

So even if you are going to get a machine with Vista on it - you need to make sure that what you will be running is supported on the hardware you purchase, even if it says "Vista ready" - it might not run on Intel 64 Pentium/Xeon or AMD's Opteron/Phenom or other 64 bit processors.