Jalaj P. Jha

If you are working in a office where security is taken seriously, this screenshot should not be new to you. If you are leaving your system, just press ‘ctrl+alt+delete’ and ‘enter’ and your system will get locked to open again only if you put in your password.

Once I was busy with my project nearly finished with the testing phase. Just when I was expecting a call mentioning testing is over, I got to hear something totally different. I was told that testing team is receiving error.

Everything had gone smoothly so far, how could it be possible that it is erring at the last stage. Puzzled I moved to the area where systems that were part of testing environment were located, and found that a guy unable to find hostname of one of the three machines in testing environment, due to machine being locked and showing above message, had forced the machine to shut down. Doing so enabled him to start the system again and get the hostname using his own login password.

I told him not to do such things without informing others in the team, as some time critical tasks may get delayed. Then I got him to log off and sat down to restart all the services that were required for testing to start again, only to find that something had broken down. Next 30-40 minutes I sat there trying to get system up again with anxiety building up as time passed. At last things settled down to normal.

Hope you are not someone bearing resemblance to that guy, who despite knowing the name of the person who locked the system (gets mentioned in the message “only <name> or an administrator can…”) and asking him to unlock, chose other way… Remember “Locked Systems are meant to be Locked” don’t force it to open unless you have the key.

Browsing around, I came across a video on Metacafe that was currently attracting a lot of views. The video was titled “Hidden Internet Explorer”, which gives a first impression that it might be a very good info or tip or a report of some very confidential Microsoft insider news. The video goes like this -

Desktop shows up. A notepad window is opened and a sentence hidden internet explorer in you’re “My Computer”… shows up. Next the “My Computer” icon gets clicked and in the address bar WWW.GOOGLE.COM gets typed (and ‘enter’ button pressed). A few seconds later Google homepage opens up in the same window. The motive behind the video to show you that there is a hidden Internet Explorer in “My Computer”.

Did you find this amazing and informative? Yes it is! except that this phenomenon in being for more than 10 years!! and yet a very small fraction of Internet Explorer users really know it. It is there since Internet Explorer 4.0

While Earlier version of Internet Explorer were similar to any other application that can be downloaded by users, installed and uninstalled, Internet Explorer 4 was different in the way that it not only served as a browser but got integrated with the operating system and changed the nature of OS itself. While users working on Windows 95 could install Internet Explorer 4, Windows 98 had it as a part of OS itself, in fact except for few modifications Win98 was Win95+IE4 with no way to uninstall Internet Explorer. This met with a lot of criticism and was point of contention in lawsuits as United States v. Microsoft.

And if you thought that it was just “My Computer” that behaves like this then update yourself… it works with any folder be it “My Documents”, “Recycle Bin” or any other normal folder. Just open it put in the address and press enter and the page gets loaded with a very little response time compared to other browsers plus no annoying splash screens.

Now with Internet Explorer 7 and above though you still can put the address in the address bar of any folder but instead of page getting loaded on the folder itself, the Internet Explorer 7 application gets started opening the intended page.

Do you use Internet Explorer? and if yes how do you open a web page, from the application itself or by way mentioned above? Eager to hear from you.

The post “Downloading Windows Update Agent 5.8.02469″ has come up as the most popular post here and many visitors even used Google Translate to read it. I was suprised by certain searches containing keywords as Telecharger ending up visiting my page. It now occured to me that the searches were being made in other languages. Though Google do allows specialized searches where you can specify the keywords and ask google to search in pages from other languages as English, not many people might be using the facility with most not even knowing about it. Since the information is of use to a very large group of people not necessarily knowing English, and they may not be getting to this page, here are translations of the page to different languages.

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Want to download Windows Update Agent 5.8.02469 or later? Click here

Most of you (and once me too) had to look for the Windows Update Agent when encountered failure installing an application from Windows Live Services, otherwise nobody even cared what Windows Update Agent was all about.

If you had tried executing Windows Live Installer on an operating system earlier than XP (with SP2), remember the error message that was thrown that meant that you cannot install an application from Windows Live if you didn’t have Windows XP with SP2. Was SP2 that essential? Yes because it was the first time with SP2 that Windows Update Agent came into existance, and since Installing Windows Live required Windows Update Agent makes SP2 essential.

Am I confusing you?… Windows Update Agent existed only after SP2 then how did Windows Update happened earlier??… It did use to happen!!!

Yes Updates happened using an application called “Automatic Windows Update” that used to be a standalone software that looked for the updates on the microsoft site. Now since SP2 the task of looking for updates and downloading no longer is handled by the application but a seperate COM Component name “Windows Update Agent” handles it, and it provides a set of COM Interfaces named “Windows Update Agent API” which any application can call and use Windows Update Agent’s capabilities to check for updates, download, and deploy them.

OK…OK! So Windows Live Installer is one such application that uses Windows Update Agent API to check for latest versions of softwares, to downlaod and to install them…. then why didn’t it function when I had XP with SP2 which had Windows Update Agent and still asked for Windows Update Agent 5.8.02469 or later…

Well the Windows Live Installer is making a API call that was added only after the above version and hence knowing it cannot continue it displays the message for you so that you can get and install it?

Understood, but why did I had to manually download the update and install it, when Automatic Update Service itself could have done it?

Good question! and answer may be that due to download breakups, other more priority downloads or for some other reason it failed to update itself automatically and thus required you to manually do it… and if that doesn’t satisfy you… probably because barbers don’t have hair-cuts themselves

So in essence, Windows Update Agent is here, you like it or not… and going to live, with Windows Live… and may be a lot of software in future would use the API to update themselves. So keep yourselves (I mean your PC) updated.