A few years ago Microsoft embarked on an anti-Java campaign called .NET, spinning .NET as a revolutionary technology (while failing to explain that it’s really Microsoft’s own implementation of the JVM concept with new languages layered on top of it)...

If you’ve replaced Task Manager and run Process Explorer at all times in your tray (like you should) and you’ve run Regmon you probably have noticed Services.exe repeatedly querying the entire HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services branch of the Registry...

A couple of posts ago I talked about the negative effects of polling the Registry and file system from an application . A developer on the MSN Desktop Search responded to the MSN Desktop Search polling example I presented by saying that they are fixing...

I’ve been a DVR user since around the year 2000 when I purchased a ReplayTV (then sold by SonicBlue). A couple of years later its disk was too small for the programs all I was recording and it lacked some of the features available newer DVRs, like broadband...

One thing I do regularly is run Filemon and Regmon to identify poorly written software. In the context of these tools a poorly written application is one that polls (repeatedly queries) the file system or Registry for changes. Polling is undesirable because...

Yesterday I discovered a bug in MSN Desktop Search (MDS) and its Outlook integration. I would enter a search term in the MDS toolbar in Outlook and the resulting Explorer window (someone pointed out that MDS uses an Explorer shell extension to display...

Yesterday we released RootkitRevealer v1.30. This release is in direct response to Microsoft Product Support Services (PSS) discovering actual installations of the Hacker Defender rootkit on customer systems that target RootkitRevealer. RootkitRevealer...

I've been using MSN Desktop Search (MDS) for several days now and overall am happy with it. Since I'm using Outlook and Office I don't have a problem with its lack of support for some non-MS technologies. Its search is fast, though the results aren't...

I haven't blogged the last couple of days because I both wanted my desktop search testing to progress before reporting back, and because I've just finished an article on rootkits for Windows IT Pro Magazine's June issue. If you’re not familiar with rootkits...

Someone wrote in to tell me that Google has a FAQ that addresses my incomplete search issue: http://desktop.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=12764&query=5000&topic=0&type=f What good is a partial search of my documents, especially when...

Welcome to my first blog posting! I installed Google desktop a few days ago and have had a pretty lackluster experience with it so far. After it finished indexing my system (which has over 250,000 files), I decided to try sample searches. I was encouraged...