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Yahoo Group Users - Attention, I received this information on a discussion list for a master mind group I'm a member of. If you, like millions of others, use Yahoo Groups to connect with clients, classes or other discussion groups, you may want to read this:

Yahoo is now using something called "Web Beacons" to track Yahoo Group users around the net and see what you're doing and where you are going (similar to cookies.) Yahoo is recording every website and every group you visit. Take a look at their updated privacy

statement:

1. http://privacy.yahoo.com/privacy

2. About half-way down the page, in the section on Cookies, you will see a link that says Web Beacons. Click on the phrase "Web Beacons".

3. That will bring you to a paragraph entitled "Outside the Yahoo Network". In this section you'll see a little "click here to opt out" link which will let you "opt-out" of their new method of snooping.

4. Once you have clicked that link, you are exempted.[Notice the "Success" message on the top of the next page. Be careful because on that page there is also a "Cancel Opt-out" button which, if clicked, will *undo* the opt-out. It appears after you have hit the opt-out button so is very confusing.

One of the most popular source of annoyance in Windows is hanging of the explorer. We will not get into the causes of this problem because there are many possible issues.
Here is a simple solution (at least temporary) for that problem but this will only work if Windows is still responsive.

Shut down the Windows Explorer by hitting Start => Shutdown (Turn off Computer on Windows XP) and click cancel on the shutdown dialog while holding the CTRL, Shift and ALT keys.

This kills the explorer.exe process and all that we have to do now is create a new explorer.exe process to access all windows and functions again in Windows.
Then fire up task manager, click on File => New Task and enter explorer.exe in the window. This will restart the Windows Explorer and hopefully brought the desired result.

You can open the Task manager with CTRL + ALT + DEL . (or Ctrl + Shift + Esc).
msdn
Related:

People like complaining, and one of the most popular complaint in tech world is about Vista. Like all other OSs and softwares Vista has its share of faults. But before complaining you should know some vital facts about Vista:

• Majority of Windows Vista-based PCs boot in less than a minute.
• Majority of all Windows Vista-based PCs resume from sleep in less than 6 seconds.
• Windows ReadyBoost is a terrific new innovation in Windows Vista that lets you speed up your system in seconds, and PCs running Windows Vista that are equipped with 512 MB memory experience a performance boost of up to 40 percent.
• Windows Vista users generally experience 20 percent fewer application "hangs" than those running Windows XP.
• Based on their first 180 days of availability, Windows Vista has been shown to have fewer vulnerabilities than Windows XP or Mac OS X 10.4.
• Windows Vista security has improved so much that PCs running it are 60 percent less likely to be infected with viruses, worms, and rootkits than PCs running Windows XP SP2.
• And Windows Vista-based PCs are over 90 percent less likely to be infected than systems running Windows XP without a Service Pack.
• Windows Vista-based PCs are almost three times less likely to be infected with potentially unwanted software than Windows XP-based PCs because of Vista shipping with Windows Defender.
• Internet Explorer 7 is now blocking nearly 1 million attempts to access these fake sites per week. New phishing attacks are more than 25 times as common as new viruses. That's right, over 20,000 of these fake websites are created every month.

We may have hundreds of programs installed on our system but we only use couple of them on occasional basis (that is why I prefer portable programs) and some of these installed programs come preconfigured to load on windows startup. I suggest you clean these programs from windows startup (only leaving the programs that you are sure you will need every time you log on windows) by either using MSConfig or using a specialized program like Autoruns from SysInternals.
After cleaning the start up programs you can create a batch file to start all your favorites ones with just one click. And here is how to do that:

Open Notepad (Start Menu -> Accessories -> Notepad):

Get the paths for the programs you want to start. The easiest way to do this is to right-click on each of the existing shortcuts, choose the Properties option, and then copy the Target path.

Enter the paths for each of the programs into Notepad, one per line. Be sure to write

start ""

at the beginning of each line, and put a space after it to separate it from the application path. If the path of your application has a space in it, you'll need to surround the entire path with quotes.

Save it as a .bat file by manually entering in the extension at the end of the file name.

In the end you should have something like this:

start "" "C:\Program Files\Opera\Opera.exe"

start "" "C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Messenger\msnmsgr.exe"

start "" "C:\Program Files\FeedDemon\FeedDemon.exe"

With this method your Windows will load a little much faster depending on your hardware.

What if your files do not have any extension at all (there are programs that come in archives with text files that do not have extensons). For example if you want to add txt extension to all files in a folder open command prompt (win + R / cmd), navigate to your folder than enter the below command.

ren * *.jpg

One of the most appealing feature of blogging is that most of the blogging platforms offer easy customization. You don't have to stuck with default themes and other visual elements. You can either design your own custom theme, favicon and even cursor or you can choose and apply from among the thousands of free ones available on the Internet.
In this post I will try to show you how you can change your cursor for your blog.

Here is how to do that:

1. Find a cursor you like on the Internet or design yourself.

• Cursors have their own file formats, which you'll be able to identify by the file extensions .cur and .ani. The .cur extension is for static cursors, whereas the .ani extension is for animated cursors.
• The easiest and best way to design your own cursor is to use a specialized cursor editor,such as IconArt or use Imagine to convert images to ani/cur files. You can also try designing one online within your browser.
• If you find the idea of designing your own cursor too challenging, plenty of cursors are available on the Internet free of charge-just type "free cursor" into Google. Look for cursors with .cur and .ani extensions. You will find tons of them.

<style type="text/css">
<!--
body {cursor: url('http://svr1.cursorhost.com/081008/1223460287x4gwg3.cur');} -->
</style>