Day: September 22, 2006

Geek Software of the Week: NTREGOPT

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You defrag your hard drive (don’t you?!) Well, you should! You should also defrag your registry! What?!? You say that you don’t know how to defrag your registry? Well, then, you need this week’s GSoTW!

NTREGOPT: Defrag Your Windows Registry

From the NTREGOPT FAQ:
“Similar to Windows 9x/Me, the registry files in an NT-based system can become fragmented over time, occupying more space on your hard disk than necessary and decreasing overall performance. You should use the NTREGOPT utility regularly, but especially after installing or uninstalling a program, to minimize the size of the registry files and optimize registry access.”

Hint: Get Linux/UNIX Text Manipulation on Windows!

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So… there you are using Linux… you are using “cat,” and “sort,” and “tail” happily! Then you move over to your Windows box, and, “Ack!” You get frustrated not having the same power to control your text files there!

Or, in scenario two, you WANT to be able to sort a text file, and eliminate duplicate lines while doing so. Sigh! What to do?

Get the TextUtils for Windows!

GNU TextUtils for Windows

Download the file called, “textutils-2.1-1.exe”, and click on it to install the GNU TextUtil for Windows utilities. Then, go to “Start -> Control Panel -> System and click on the “Advanced” tab. Click on the “Environment Variables” button at the bottom of that screen, and then highlight the “System Variable” called “path” and click on the “Edit” button. Add this string to the very end of the line that is there:

;C:\Program Files\GnuWin32\bin

Note the “;” (semi-colon) at the beginning of the string! Click “OK,” then “OK,” and then “OK.” Now, you can use the command below, for instance, to solve the second scenario I used an example above:

sort file.txt | uniq > newfile.txt

This will take the contents of “file.txt” and sort each line, then eliminate duplicate lines, and then output the new data to a file called “newfile.txt” … how’s that for cool and geeky!?!

Two VERY Serious Windows Security Problems – ALERT!

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Steve Gibson, on a special edition of his “Security Now!” Podcast, is spreading the word about two VERY serious Windows security issues. Check out his website for full details:

Two Serious New Windows Problems

One is a vulnerability in Microsoft’s Vector Markup Language that can allow remote code execution on your system! The other is for folks running ANY flavor of Windows 2000. This is a “bad” patch that Microsoft pushed out that effects any compressed files that are larger than 4 kilobytes, which may then be corrupted when you create or update those files. This serious “regression” error was introduced into last month’s (August 2006) security patches for Windows 2000 systems. The error can cause corruption of NTFS-compressed files on systems that have had Microsoft Security Update 920958 (MS06-049) applied.

These are both VERY bad problems! Be sure to take the measures that Steve recommends!