Windows Genuine Advantage Spyware!

Well, what else can you call it? As you all know, if you install the latest security updates from Microsoft, annoying popup notifications appear for all pirated versions of Windows out there. On top of it, if you try to kill "WGAtray.exe" (one of the responsible culprits), it starts again immediately. So you have a process that can't be killed, and popups appearing everywhere, if it's not spyware, what else is it?

There are a lot of remedies to get rid of this spyware, but I believe in the old saying "Prevention is better than cure". So the simplest possible solution would be to change Automatic Updates setting to "Notify me but don't automatically download or install them". I would suggest one to do this immediately after installing windows. Now windows will notify you when there are updates to be downloaded. In this case, you will find "Windows Genuine Advantage" update. Uncheck the checkbox, tell it I don't want to be notified of it again, and you are done! For those of you who have already installed this update, nothing to fear, there are lots of sites out there that'll help you get rid of this spyware. Just do a search for it!

Switching to Mac

The world has been turned upside down with the the release of Boot Camp from Apple. There is a good possibility that this will make many to switch over to a Mac, including myself. Windows users for a change can say they have sexy looking computers! Contrary to what many say, I believe this will in fact be beneficial for OS X. Windows users can for the first time feel the so called Mac experience. For novice users, I recommend this ExtremeTech article titled "A Switcher's Guide to Windows / OS X". But for a seasoned Windows user, who has never worked with a Mac, I would highly recommend this excellent piece from Anandtech. Though the article is old, it's a must read for anyone considering a switch to a Mac.

IE7 Standalone

There's been enough rant about this already. Many have run into strange behavior with IE6, Explorer etc. causing many a headache to resolve the issue. For those of you who want to try out IE7 Beta2 without actually installing it or facing post-installation traumas, I would recommend Jon Galloway's IE7 Launch script. This should enable you to run IE6 and IE7 side-by-side, very useful for site developers to test out their pages against this new browser. This method is not recommended by Microsoft, so you are on your own if you run into problems!

Useful extensions for Firefox

For all those Firefox fanatics out there, extensions are nothing new. They all have their favorites. For newcomers, there are tons of sites out there that tell you the must-have extensions to make Fireferret useful. Here's one more from Extremetech which I think will be very useful for a newcomer.