Be careful what you have on your laptop when entering the USA, the security checks are no longer limited to your physical goods, according to the Danish online magazine ComOn.DK quite a lot of people have had to hand over their passwords to their laptops, in order for the Security personnel at the US airports to search their computers.
Disturbing is the only word I can think of.Some stupid ¤#?# at Microsoft has seen fit to change the parameter to Mstsc (Remote Desktop) in SP1 (Vista/Win 2008) and SP3 (XP). Before you typed “Mstsc /Console” to connect to the console session at a server (basically some not so well written applications only worked here), but that was then – now say hello to “Mstsc /Admin”…
Even more genius, the /Console is SILENTLY IGNORED… just so it will take you longer to figure out what is wrong, AND of cause all third party Terminal Services applications will no longer be able to connect to console. Yes I know, of cause new versions will be released… but what #¤”% would have been wrong with leaving the /Console for backwards compatibility.
And why, well because Windows 2008 no longer needs this (yeah we heard this one before ;-)), ok cool – but hey Windows 2003 still does and will be around for QUITE some time still (we still have one or two NT4 servers running)..
Sorry no price for that one guys.
You may have heard about the excellent utility TrueCrypt which create encrypted virtual drives or partitions!? But now it has been released in a version 5.0a which should support the underlying OS (that is transparent bootup encryption of the system drive). Excellent.. I have not had time to check it, but if it works its utterly excellent (and best of all FREEEEEEEEEE!).
Recovery is as I read it achieved via an ISO boot image created upon installation, but again I have not checked this.