Thieves are not necessarily the smartest people around. Let’s face it, someone who steals for a living most likely does not have a Doctorate (or maybe even a high school diploma. They take advantage of hard working people who may be to trusting or just have a short lapse in judgment. Most of us now use our PCs for some kind of personal business, work or other things that are important to us. It could be a simple as pictures of loved ones to important legal documents on our PCs, in either case when someone steals our PC we feel violated and could be at financial or personal risk due to the data on our computers.

Now PC owners can fight back. A new program called Prey will help you recover your PC. Prey is a cross-platform application available on for Windows, OS X and Linux. If your computer is stolen it will contact you, tell you where it is, send a screenshot of what the user is doing, show you what programs are running and even take a picture of the thief! You can also have it sound an alarm which may cause the thief to throw the PC in the trash, which may actually be the best outcome you could reasonable hope for.

Prey is a lightweight application that you configure how you like. It runs in the background and could save you a significant amount of heartache if the worst should happen. Take advantage of the stupidity of thief’s by being smart.

If you have ever had a system crash you know the pain of loosing data, system configuration, pictures, data etc. Loosing a hard drive can be a traumatic experience .... unless you have a backup plan. Most of us know you can re-install the operating system, all the apps etc but there is an easier and faster way. There are commercial programs like Ghost, Altaris etc that will backup bit for bit all the data on your hard drives. We have found a free GPL package that can be used to clone/backup almost any Operating system Linux, Unix, Mac etc. When you restore your system the data is put back bit for bit so it is as if you never lost your system at all. The beauty of this is that you can do this over a network. So one computer can be used to backup all the systems you own. Other advantages include:

1. No need to have OS disks. All of the OS info is on the backup. When you restore the system it is configured exactly like you left it.
2. No need to have any OS loaded at all on the system being restored. The software is used to boot and reload the hard drive.
3. Free software you can use on any OS
4. Many operating systems can be supported with the same system

The Cloning package is called CLONEZILLA.

Admittedly, "BURG" may sound like something from the depths of Star Trek mythology but the letters actually stand for "Brand-new Universal loadeR from GRUB" and is based on the GRUB bootloader. A bevvy of cool features and enhancements make it an option well worth considering if you like to beautify your system. Here's a video of BURG in action: -

Firefox 3.6.6 with is now available, this version has crash protection. According to Mozilla it "provides uninterrupted browsing for Windows and Linux users when there is a crash in the Adobe Flash, Quicktime or Silverlight plugins. If a plugin crashes or freezes, it will not affect the rest of Firefox. You will be able to reload the page to restart the plugin and try again."

Microsoft Looks to Apple

Included in these presentations is a rather telling (but obvious) slide which shows that Microsoft is clearly paying attention to Apple while planning Windows 8. Titled, “How Apple does it: A virtuous cycle,” Microsoft has broken down Apple’s UX/Brand Loyalty cycle and cited its value. Though it’s fairly obvious, the takeaway here is that Microsoft is aiming to give Windows the very same “it just works” status that Apple’s products are known for:

New in Version 257.21

• Adds support for Blu-ray 3D with NVIDIA 3D Vision technology. Learn more about the hardware and software requirements here .
• Increases performance for GeForce GTX 400 Series GPUs in several PC games. The following are examples of some of the most significant improvements measured with GeForce GTX 480. Results will vary depending on your GPU and system configuration:
  • Up to 14% in Aliens vs. Predator (1920x1200 noAA/AF – Tessellation on)
  • Up to 4% in Batman: Arkham Asylum (1920x1200 4xAA/16xAF PhysX=High)
  • Up to 5% in BattleForge (1920x1200 4xAA/16xAF – Very High settings)
  • Up to 5% in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (1920x1200 4xAA/16xAF)
  • Up to 4% in Crysis: Warhead (1920x1200 4xAA/16xAF – Enthusiast setting)
  • Up to 24% in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (1920x1200 no AA/AF)
  • Up to 9% in Far Cry 2 (2560x1600 8xAA/16xAF)
  • Up to 25% in Just Cause 2 (2560x1600 no AA/AF - Concrete Jungle)
  • Up to 7% in Metro 2033 (1920x1200 no AA/16xAF – Tessellation on)
  • Up to 40% in Metro 2033 with SLI ((1920x1200 4xAA/16xAF – Tessellation on)
  • Up to 8% in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (1920x1200 no AA/AF – Day)
  • Up to 110% in Stone Giant with SLI (2650x1600 – Tessellation on, DoF on)
  • Up to 6% in The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Athena (2560x1600 no AA/AF)
  • Up to 9% in Unigine: Tropics (2560x1600 no AA/AF – OpenGL)
  • Up to 5% in 3DMark Vantage (Performance and Extreme Presets)
  • Up to 19% with Transparency AA (1920x1200 4xTrSS – measured in Crysis)