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Archive Updates June 99 — December 99 Brought to you absolutely free by the award-winning authors Lee Hudspeth and T. J. Lee... December 29, 1999 -- Clayton Moore, 1914-1999, adios Kimosabe. December 28, 1999 -- No, we're still here... it's just been a real slow week for news. While we're all waiting to see what happens when Y2K hits you might want to check out A Brief History of Microsoft on the Web by Dave Kramer. Click here for this interesting article. (Thanks to Dan S. for this tip.) December 14, 1999 -- In last week's issue of The Naked PC newsletter the latest Office add-on utility from PRIME Consulting Group was announced. PRIME DocLauncher from the development team at PRIME and the macro master Mike Craven is bound to be a hit. Click here for more information. December 13, 1999 -- Lee and T.J.'s latest book, The Unofficial Guide to PCs has gone into a second printing to meet the demand! Yea us! Check out TUGPCs here! Read the top ten reasons not to read this book here. Microsoft is offering something it calls eServices, which include unified messaging from eFax.com; Web publishing services from Tripod Inc., Angelfire.com and Talk City; contact management from InfoSpace. com; file storage and sharing from Driveway.com; and language translation which it hasn't got nailed down yet. Of course you can help yourself to any of these services without MS's help but in keeping with the Redmond rewriting of history that Microsoft invented, or at least innovated, the Internet they'd like you to think that without them you could never access these services. Yawn. Looks like Microsoft Windows 2000, the OS formerly known as NT5 will be going to manufacturing Wednesday of this week. Click here for more information. December 6, 1999 -- If you think it's time to start looking into what Y2K might really mean to you check out the CNET "Year 2000 News and commentary on the Y2K issue" page. Meanwhile, Microsoft has put together a collection of fully functional anti-virus software, free of charge for 90 days, to help you with virus detection through the critical season and year end dates. Click here for details. And if all the virus hype of late ("EXPLORE.ZIP IS BACK!" "DO NOT DOUBLE-CLICK OR RUN THIS ATTACHMENT" "Cookie Monster steals credit card number") then do what we do when it all starts closing in on us... go over to Computer Virus Myths and read the December 1st, 2nd, and 3rd updates from Rob Rosenberger. November 29, 1999 -- Microsoft has put together an Office Tips and Tricks site where you can get "how-tos" and tips on your favorite Office programs. Click here to check it out. Check out PC Magazine's Technical Innovation Awards for 1999. November 22, 1999 -- No we didn't take a week off... it's just been a slow news week. There's a new Melissa varient that formats your hard drive on Christmas Day (don't open unknown email attachments, duh!) but that's hardly news; Microsoft vs. DOJ goes into Round 2: Mediation! but that too is a yawner at this point. Maybe we should start doing birthday greetings as filler. Take advantage of this lull and pick up a copy of our new book The Unofficial Guide to PCs. TUGPCs makes a great holiday gift too! November 15, 1999 -- There's a bug in Windows NT Service Pack 6 that prevents users from accessing Lotus Notes without full administrator rights. There should be a fix out later this week. Click here for more information. November 10, 1999 -- The ether is abuzz about Bubbleboy the latest virus that only requires you to open your email, or preview it in Outlook Express, to infect your system. But don't panic, yet. It's not been reported in the wild yet, it's only in the lab for the time being. Plan on updating your virus filters in the next day or so when all the anti-virus companies update their packages to deal with Bubbleboy. Click here for more information about the virus. BubbleBoy reportedly exploits a security flaw in two ActiveX controls, scriptlet.typelib and Eyedog. Back on August 31st the Annoyance Update page posted a link to the fix that Microsoft has for this problem. Click here for more on this problem and to download the fix for this security flaw. November 9, 1999 -- Microsoft has announced Office Online, their Office 2000 "rent over the Internet" product. No firm price announced but it's being speculated that it will be in the $15 a month range. Click here for more. November 5, 1999 -- "The ultimate result is that some innovations that would truly benefit consumers never occur for the sole reason that they do not coincide with Microsoft's self-interest." -- Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson "Findings of Fact - United States of America v. Microsoft Corporation" November 4, 1999 -- To dampen fears of Y2K viruses running amuck while we're all spiffed at the office New Years party, Microsoft is distributing 90 day free trial versions of anti-virus software from companies such as Symantec, Data Fellows, Trend Micro and others. Click here and have a virus free New Years. November 3, 1999 -- From Paul Thurrott's excellent WinInfo column we learned that Windows 2000 will cost you $150 going from NT4 Workstation to Win2000, while going from Windows 95 or 98 will set you back $220 samolians. The retails version will go for $320. Ouch! If you've seen the Blair Witch Project then click here to take a peek at Nicholas Petreley's funny send up, "The Rare Glitch Project: The legendary search for a stable version of Windows." It's a hoot and a half. October 25, 1999 -- Microsoft has released Office 97 SR2b, the latest patch/upgrade to its Office 97 software suite. In their latest effort to keep it simple, if you have Office 97 and want to install 97 SR2b you have to first upgrade to SR1 but not SR2 because if you have SR2 you can't upgrade to SR2b or downgrade to SR1 but rather have to install two other patches that make SR2 the equivalent of SR2b. Got that? Sheesh. Click here to try to figure the details out for yourself. October 21, 1999 -- Microsoft has released a patch for Excel that eliminates two "vulnerabilities" that could allow macros to run without warning. Click here for details. If you're a licensed owner of Office 2000 Developer Edition you can get the just released Access Workflow Designer for SQL Server free on the MS site. Click here for details and to download. October 18, 1999 -- Award winning authors Lee Hudspeth and T.J. Lee (ahem, that's us folks), have contributed to the cover story in the November 99 issue of PC Computing magazine, End E-Mail Insanity Forever. Get the top e-mail tips, the inside scoop on using Outlook, Outlook Express, Pegasus, Eudora, Netscape Messenger, and more! Click here for details and to read this feature. Drop everything and nominate Rob Rosenberger to the U.S. government's Computer System Security and Privacy Advisory Board (this is an unpaid advistory position). This represents our best chance to get a sane rational virus expert on the board. Deadline is November 15th. Click here for information on how to nominate Rob. The launch of Windows 2000 may be delayed to February 2000 according to reports. Click here for details. October 14, 1999 -- If you're using Windows 98SE and its new Internet Connection Sharing feature to share a single network connection over a network be aware that if the connection is DSL you cannot use MS NetMeeting's Whiteboard, Chat, File Transfer, or Application Sharing features. It's a bug and you must disable the ICS connection to use NetMeeting, meaning you can only use it on the machine that is directly connected to the DSL router. Oy! See the MS Knowledge base article: PSS ID Number: Q232786 Windows 2000 is not expected until February, 2000 according to reports, slipping beyond the promised 1999 release date. Click here for more details. Meanwhile back at the ranch, Microsoft is planing an Office 2000 service Release 1, which will ship at the end of this year (during the critical Y2K time frame), and is supposed to make it easier to deploy Office 2000 in conjunction with Windows 2000 because it will incorporate a Windows 2000 install patch. Click here for more. Time to get the latest patch to IE5 from Microsoft. This one fixes the recent download security bug. Click here to get the patch. October 11, 1999 -- Microsoft would rather you ask someone else when it comes to support questions about Windows 98. Redmond has cut a deal with the Ask Jeeves folks that run the Ask Jeeves search engine to answer Win98 questions through the MS support Web site. Click here if you still have questions. Microsoft has confirmed the existence of the WinNT.Infis virus, the first virus discovered outside of testing labs that is capable of making its way into the highest security level of NT. WinNT.Infis acts as a Windows NT system driver that operates under Windows NT 4.0 with Service Packs 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 installed. Other versions of Windows are not affected. Click here for more. October 4, 1999 -- Microsoft continues to work on their answer to Sun's free distribution of StarOffice over the Internet. MS plans to rent Microsoft Office over the Internet but according to company officials, "has not yet decided how to price it" yet. My guess would be somewhere between ouch and ohmigawd! just like the current for sale versions of Office. Click here for more. October 1, 1999 -- Georgi Guninski comes up with yet another IE 5 security loophole, this one allowing a Web site residing piece of Java or VB Script to read files off your hard disk. Click here for details. Meanwhile, Microsoft has a workaround... just disable Active Scripting in IE 5. Click here for an FAQ detailing how to do this. Rob Rosenberger has an interesting piece on how anyone (and boy, we mean anyone) can become an overnight computer security expert and get quoted in the press on some virus disaster or another. Click here for the straight scoop. Rob is always good reading! If you use both of the major browsers (and many of us do) you should know that Netscape has just released Communicator 4.7. Click here for more. September 29, 1999 -- Western Digital is recalling approximately 400,000 of its 6.8GB Caviar desktop hard drives because of a faulty internal chip. Click here for details. September 26, 1999 -- Lee Hudspeth and T. J. Lee contributed to this feature, Undocumented Internet Secrets in the October 1999 issue of PC/Computing magazine (page 154). Lee and T.J. have been contributing to his annual feature for the last 3 years, last year helping to win the coveted 1999 National Magazine Award (the first time any Ziff-Davis publication has won this award). Click here for details and to read this feature. September 21, 1999 -- A new virus called Suppl.doc is floating around (most notably on the alt.sex newsgroups). This is similar to the Worm.ExploreZip trojan/virus in how it replicates. The new wrinkle is that it quietly adds a file attachment to all outgoing mail on the infected machine. If a recipient opens that attachment they become infected. Seven days after infection the trojan begins to destroy files with the extension of .doc, .xls, .txt, .rtf, .dbf, .zip, .arj, and .rar. For the umpteenth time be careful about opening email extensions! Click here for more. September 20, 1999 -- Beware of an email that purports to come from Microsoft and invites users to download an attached Microsoft Year 2000 Counter. It's a hoax and contains a data-eating Trojan horse attachment. Click here for more details. September 15, 1999 -- Microsoft bought Visio the diagramming tools vendor today. Look for Visio to become a division of Microsoft's Business Productivity Group. Click here for details. September 13, 1999 -- Microsoft says they've released yet another IE5 patch, this one to fix the ImportExportFavorites Vulnerability. Seems that a "malicious web site" could be set up to cause IE5's Active Scripting feature to write whatever the black hat wanted to your hard disk. However, the only information available is how to disable Active Scripting as a workaround. Could be that the appropriate Web pages on the MS site have not been updated properly. Click here for more information. September 9, 1999 -- Sun is going to make its recently acquired Star Office application suite available over the Internet for free. In a fit of "OH YEAH? ME TOO!" Microsoft is going to do something pretty much like that with Microsoft Office only it's a bit unclear about the free part. Click here for what little details are available. You can now download a trial version of Microsoft Vizact which lets you make your Office documents as annoying as any over-animated, hyper-interactive Web site you ever visited. Why use Vizact and not just code all your stuff in HTML? Because HTML is not propriety, of course! Click here for more information because as MS sez: Vizact 2000 reinvents what people can do with documents. Hmmm, I wonder if that includes putting useful information in them or just making them jump up and yodel? Not that we pay much attention to these types of studies, it's still interesting to note that according to the Gartner Group the cost of migrating to Windows 2000 could be up to $3,000+ per PC. Ouch! Click here for more. Early warning... the Cholera worm/virus may make headlines if it gets into the wild. Similar to the Melissa worm/virus users should be wary of email attachments. Check our TNPC Special Report on Containing Those Pesky Macro Viruses to help keep you safe from Melissa wannabes. September 7, 1999 -- Hope everyone had a nice Labor Day holiday... meanwhile back at the patch, Microsoft has make a patch available for the "Fragmented IGMP Packet" vulnerability in the TCP/IP stack implementations of Microsoft Win95/98 and NT4. Fragmented IGMP packets can cause a variety of problems including causing the machine to crash. Click here for information. Another Word virus dubbed the "Thursday" virus is getting a lot of attention. It infects Word 97's Normal.dot file and remains dormant on a system until it delivers its payload when it attempts to delete all files on your C: drive on the trigger date of December 13th (according to reports). Click here for more information. August 31, 1999 -- Sorry for the absence but Lee is on vacation and T. J. (that's me) has been moving this last week. Let's see... Looks like we missed the Hotmail fiasco that where an exploited security hole in the Microsoft freebie email system (ever notice that Microsoft seems to have a lot of trouble with security?) allowed people to access the email in any Hotmail account with only the username without requiring a password. Microsoft has fixed the problem according to all accounts. Click here and read what Peter Coffee (one of my favorite pundits) has to say about how we find ourselves in this position. Jeez, it's been a bad day at Redrock, er, Redmond for the 'Softies... the "Excel 97 'ODBC Driver' Vulnerability" is not limited to Office 97 as MS originally assured everyone but effects Office 2000 as well. At least they were quick with the fix. Click here to get the patch for Office 2000. Microsoft has also made a patch available for the tongue-twisting "Scriptlet.typelib/Eyedog" vulnerability (click here) found in IE5 as well as the "Virtual Machine Sandbox" bug (click here). Serious? Naw, just lets a hacker take total control of your computer if you visit the wrong page or receive the wrong email. Get the patches and hope MS gets a handle on the security thing. August 23, 1999 -- Just when you were relaxing to Y2K Microsoft has owned up that Excel may not slide into the Year 2000 without problems. Seems the =DATE() function not only has problems with the year 2000 but a lot of Y2K validation software can miss potiential problems with worksheets that use the function. Click here for details. August 22, 1999 -- Three cheers and a tiger for Microsoft. They have posted the fix for the Office 97 "Excel 97 'ODBC Driver' Vulnerability" security hole. Click here to download the fix. August 20, 1999 -- Amazon is offering our latest book, The Unofficial Guide to PCs by Lee Hudspeth, T. J. Lee, and Dan Butler, for the incredible, special low price of $12.59 -- this book is from the same team that brings you The Naked PC newsletter every other week and who co-authored the best-selling Office Annoyances series of books from O'Reilly & Associates. Get the straight scoop on buying, setting up, configuring, maintaining, and coping with today's PCs. Find the best ISP, keep your downloaded software up to date, find drivers and fine tune your system, all at this unbelieveable low, low, price. While it lasts. Click here for details. August 16, 1999 -- In Office related news Microsoft still does not have a fix for the "Excel 97 'ODBC Driver' Vulnerability" security hole. Maybe they think this will spur everyone to upgrade to Office 2000 which does not suffer from this problem. D'oh! In non-Office related news (but interesting nonetheless) Web Incognito starts offering today a $5 a month service that lets you surf the Web and send email completely anonymously. Web site operators are blocked from collecting data from consumers using the Web Incognito service. Click here for details. August 13, 1999 -- Happy Friday the Thirteenth to all Annoyance and TNPC readers! Are you a subscriber to Microsoft's Office News Service? If you are you might be invited to participate in a survey that could get you a free copy of Office 2000 Premium Edition, worth $799. Click here for more information. Speaking of newsletters... for you Annoyance readers: check out the TNPC Web site for articles and backissues from this highly acclaimed free computer newsletter. We are implementing a new and improved search engine. Click here and be among the first to try out our new engine. Not only does it search TNPC issues and articles but our PRIME FAQs and magazine articles. The TNPC Web Site -- great content on the Web, a great email newsletter. And of course it's free. August 10, 1999 -- No fix yet for the "Excel 97 'ODBC Driver' Vulnerability" security hole. August 5, 1999 -- Microsoft is working on a fix for the "Excel 97 'ODBC Driver' Vulnerability" security hole but it's not yet available. Stay tuned. The trades are agog with the battle between Microsoft and AOL and that the Redmondites are poised to offer free Internet access in order to bludgeon AOL into submission. Click here for details. Personally, we don't think it'll ever happen. Oh, Microsoft is capable of doing it, both from standpoint of business ethics and the fact that they can afford to. But since threatening to do it will be just as effective as doing it don't hold your breath. Once they get AOL to back down and capitulate on the instant messaging battle the talk of free Internet access will evaporate. The US 7th Circuit Court of Appeals is very unhappy with lawyers using Microsoft Word for legal briefs. Seems that they figured out that Word does not count footnotes when calculating the total word count for a document. With a limit of 14,000 words for a brief a lawyer can run over and not be aware of it. Click here for more information. August 2, 1999 -- Yawn... another security hole found in a Microsoft product. This time it's the 3.51 version of the Jet database engine that shipped with Office 97 and various other Microsoft and 3rd party products. The official term is "Excel 97 'ODBC Driver' Vulnerability." The black hats out there in cyberland can exploit the hole and wreak havoc on your system and otherwise doom civilization. Office 2000 users have the newer 4.0 version of the Jet engine which MS says is not susceptible to the bug. Click here for more information. Microsoft says that it, "is currently testing a solution designed for all Office 97 customers, and will post it ... shortly." Stay tuned. July 24, 1999 -- Lee Hudspeth and T. J. Lee have penned another feature, Amazing Free Stuff in the August 1999 issue of PC/Computing magazine (page 136). The best things in life really are free -- or almost free, anyway -- if you know where to look. Free software, free Internet access, free PCs, even free money -- it's all out there. We've uncovered the best steals and deals on hardware and software and the best free things you can get on the Web. Click here for details and to read this feature. July 21, 1999 -- A bug in Microsoft's Windows NT Internet Information Server involving a function called Data Factory let's someone hack the server with only six lines of code (no password required). Click here for more information. Microsoft has also reissued an advisory on this problem and the steps needed to correct it. July 15, 1999 -- PC Week Labs has tested the new and improved Back Orifice 2000 released at the DefCon conference earlier this week. BO2K now supports taking over Windows NT machines and boasts an easier to use interface. Gee, that's great. Not! PC Week points out "No one security application will protect corporate networks from Back Orifice 2000, and the fact that it is open source will make the task doubly difficult" and that "Back Orifice can change the size and name of the files it uses" which makes it harder to determine if a system is infected. Click here for all the gruesome details. Keep up to date on all the legal woes of Microsoft at this InfoWorld Electric site. Click here for the ongoing sagas. July 13, 1999 -- Cult of the Dead Cow must of hired a PR firm because instead of screaming "In your FACE!"" while showing off their new Back Orifice 2000, they're calmly pitching it as a full featured remote administration tool. And they've gotten some pundits to buy into this. This from people that won't give anyone their real names. Guess you can only hope that it's you that's remotely administering your computer and not some hacker, er, I mean cracker. Sheesh, who can keep up. Click here for details. Meanwhile, as you might expect, Microsoft is not amused. Click here to get the Redmond take on Back Orifice 2000. July 7, 1999 -- We don't like to add to the general virus hoax hysteria going around at any time but this one is probably worthy of mention. Seems that there is a hoax email running around the Internet that purports to be from Microsoft with an attached executable that the email says you should run to fix some Year 2000 problems with MS software. Wrong! It's not from Microsoft and you should never, under any circumstances, run something on your computer that just shows up in your inbox. Be aware. Click here for details. July 6, 1999 -- Seems everyone is all abuzz over speculation on Microsoft's next two versions of Windows. First up is code name "Millennium", the absolutely, positively last ever version of Windows based on the Windows 9x kernel. Un-huh, didn't we hear this before from Microsoft? Next up is code name "Neptune." This is gonna be the Windows for the "rest of us" based on whatever NT is destined to morph into. Neptune will use the new WinTone service which makes PCs self-healing and self-updating. Sounds a little new age, no? Anyway, click here for details. July 2, 1999 -- Users running Chinese or Japanese versions of Word should be aware of a new macro virus called July Killer that can add a line to the system's autoexec.bat file that will delete the contents of the C: drive. Click here for details. While Microsoft sends a Windows 2000 release candidate to manufacturing a number of shortcomings with the successor OS to NT have been raised by IBM. Click here for details. June 30, 1999 -- Microsoft has made most of the fixes and upgrades available in the Windows 98 Second Edition in what it is calling Windows 98 Service Pack 1. Win 98 SP1 is available for downloading. Click here for details. June 29, 1999 -- Microsoft admits to a bug in the System File Checker tool. The System File Checker may locate and install the wrong file in place of a damaged or missing Windows 98 system file. The workaround requires you to have a Windows 98 Startup Disk so if you can't locate yours better make a new one! Click here for details. If you're an Office shop already and you entertain open bids that include competiting Suites beware how you handle conversion costs. Corel was awarded 10 million dollars because adding conversion costs skewed the contract bid process in Microsoft's favor. Click here for details. June 22, 1999 -- Attention Annoyance shoppers... Amazon and Barnes and Noble both are now shipping copies of our latest book, The Unofficial Guide to PCs from the award-winning team of T.J. Lee, Lee Hudspeth, and Dan Butler. Buy your copy from Amazon or Barnes and Noble today. If you love your computer making sounds whenever you click a button, scroll a scroll bar, call a dialog box, zoom in or out, or when you send mail then you need the new Office 2000 Sounds for Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint (or maybe a checkup). Anyway, click here for Office 2000 sound heaven. June 22, 1999 -- Dell and Gateway are refusing to ship computers configured with both Office 2000 and Windows NT 4.0. The word from the computer makers is that Office 2000 is only certified to run on Windows 98 and Windows 2000 not NT. Sounds like Redmond narrowing the options in what looks like a plan to force migration to Windows 2000 whether users like it or not. Click here for more. Speaking of Windows 2000, the esteemed Jesse Berst has declared Windows 2000 a failure even before it is released. Click here for Jesse's reasoning. Microsoft has released NetMeeting 3, which is available for downloading over the Web. Click here for more information. Microsoft has pulled all their converters and viewers onto a single page for downloading. These utilities let documents be shared between different versions of Office. Click here for details. June 17, 1999 -- Microsoft has a temporary workaround for the NT server security flaw (see Annoyance Update June 16). Click here for the Microsoft workaround. June 16, 1999 -- Big trouble for NT server administrators. A company not only discovered a security bug in Windows NT, but when Microsoft did not seem to take it seriously enough they posted information about the bug showing how a hacker can take over any NT server from "which a Web page can be retrieved, even if a firewall is present." And they tossed in some working examples on how to do it. MS is said not to be amused. Click here for details. June 15, 1999 -- Microsoft has posted an alert about a bug in the newly released Windows 98 SE (see June 10 Annoyance Update) that can cause your system to hang. There's a simple fix detailed in the alert. Click here for details. June 14, 1999 -- Lee Hudspeth and T. J. Lee have authored the Search Engine Secrets Superguide in the July 1999 issue of PC/Computing magazine (page 174). Cut down on your search time or get more traffic for your own Web pages with the tips and tricks in this giant Superguide! Click here for details and to read this feature from the award-winning team of Lee Hudspeth and T. J. Lee. Microsoft has posted an information alert page with information on the Worm.ExploreZip worm/virus. This page has links to several anti-virus vendors that have a fix for Worm.ExploreZip. Click here for details. SPECIAL ALERT! -- Okay, we usually don't like to hype a virus threat but this one could be worse than Melissa (which was a bit of tempest in a tea pot). This morning we read about the Worm.ExploreZip worm/virus that combines a Melissa like replication method with a destructive payload along the lines of the Chernobyl virus. If you get infected it sends an email message to everyone it finds with a message sitting in your inbox. This is both clever and insidious. Recipients get an infected file from someone they recently sent a message to. The message reads: Hi (Recipient Name)! I received your email and I shall send you a reply ASAP. Till then, take a look at the attached zipped docs. Bye And there's what looks like a self-extracting zip file attached. But it's an executable file that will, if you're silly enough to run it, trash files on your system by searching drives C: through Z: and deleting any with the file extension of .h, .c, .cpp, .asm, .doc, .xls, and .ppt which makes it extremely harmful to MS Office users. Let's be careful out there! Click here for details. June 10, 1999 -- PRIME for Office 2000 Utilities rated FIVE STARS! ZDNet has given five stars to our PRIME for Word 2000 and PRIME for Excel 2000 utilities saying: "The interface is attractive and it's guaranteed that more than a few of the tools will be just what you've been looking for to fill the gaps in [Office] 2000" Click here for more information. Microsoft has rolled out the much anticipated Windows 98 Second Edition but without the fanfare usually associated with operating system debuts. Available to licensed Windows 98 users on CD-ROM for $19.95 this service release includes the new IE5 browser, a plethora of hardware and software bug fixes (most of which are available for piecemeal downloading for free over the Internet), and at least one new feature not available via a free MS download. Second Edition includes Internet connection sharing which allows two or more computers in a home to use a single Internet connection simultaneously. Click here to order from Microsoft. If you're looking for an ISP that supports FrontPage extensions, Microsoft has a new page to help you track one down. Click here for more information. June 7, 1999 -- Microsoft rolled out Office 2000 today. There's a ton of information on this latest version of MS's best-selling software suite. Click here for more information. Speaking of Office 2000 (and you'll probably hear little else over the next few weeks) Jesse Berst offers some insight on whether or not you'll be wanting to upgrade and some speculation about this being the first step in Microsoft's plan to have everyone renting Office over the Internet. Click here for more. And check out some hot installation tips for Office 2000 before you slip that first CD-ROM disk into the drive. June 2, 1999 -- The Unofficial Guide to PCs by Lee Hudspeth, T. J. Lee, and Dan Butler can now be ordered on Amazon.com. This book is from the same team that brings you The Naked PC newsletter every other week and who co-authored the best-selling Office Annoyances series of books from O'Reilly & Associates. Get the straight scoop on buying, setting up, configuring, maintaining, and coping with today's PCs. Click here for details. Microsoft is testing a rental model for its BackOffice software as well as NT. Click here for more. Return to Top