Laptop Rentals
I recently endured a laptop failure that threatened my contract. I contacted repair services and determined that I would have a week's wait regardless of the repair option I picked. One of the repair services offerend notebook rentals at $75/wk. I did a little digging and found a variety of notebook rentals from different businesses.
If you need a laptop rental, look under "computer repairs" and read the adds. A few offer rentals. Check general rental places, too. The best deal I found was from a general rental place, Tri-City Appliance Rentals. Yes, the place caters primarily to students and rents anything that can fit into an appartment, including notebook computers.
I rented an Acer notebook with Intel(R) Celeron(R) M processor 1.50GHz. It came with a clean install of Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition, Service Pack 2, Microsoft Office, and Norton Antivirus. For $50/wk I could completely re-install the system with my own software. I could keep it as long as I needed, with week by week extensions. I wiped my client files from the drive, but they also overwrite the laptop with a clean install ghost image after each rental.
Cheers.
Hamster-go-round
Kid Links
Now if someone would just combine these two.
Hamster linkIncredible Machines
April Fools
25 rolls, 4 people, and several hours...
Would you trust faces like these?
Look at what they've done!
Presentations
Some time ago I put together a high-level procedure for pulling together a slide presentation. The second link lists pointers specifically for presentations that are geared to getting financing.
Presentation BasicsFinancing PresenationsCheers!
Security Trouble - Rootkits
I found out about rootkits a couple of weeks ago when my husband started
reading aloud about Sony's latest anti-piracy tactic. Apparently Sony had
included a rootkit on a number of their new releases in an effort to keep
people from sharing ripped CDs. The problem is that no uninstaller exists.
Once a rootkit is installed on your system, anyone can use it to hide their
files. There has already been at least one virus in Brittain that uses the
Sony rootkit as its host.
Apparently customers didn't like having their computers compromised in this way and
Sony released a patch that would reveal their rootkit. Note that the patch
didn't remove the rootkit, it actually expanded it. Sigh.
The bad news:
- Rootkits can hide and be virtually undetectible.
- Rootkits operate between you and the operating system, they intercept explorer commands and hide files.
- Rootkits are very difficult to remove and anecdotally most admins save the data and format the drive.
The
Wikipedia entry for "rootkit" has information about what rootkits are and what they can do.
For information about the Sony mechanism, try
Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far SystemInternals.com provides a Rootkit Revealer if you want to check your sytem.
If you're still curious and you're a patient reader check out
metafilter.com and run their search on "rootkit".
7 Dec 05
