I seen a password on a computer recently that comprised 3 letters of the alphabet. Can you guess which three? This was a computer in a small business that did payroll, banking, and was the main MYOB retail server. Geesh. Anyway….

So, for those who want to know just how secure their passwords are you can use this password checker. It’s gives a rating between poor, to good and best. It is a non-recordable password tester from Microsoft.

This out of band patch is now available through Windows updates.

Here’s the patch direct link (closed).

The Windows Photo Gallery is a really useful feature in Vista to create a slideshow of your product range to prospective clients on your notebook PC, or create an impressive slideshow of your wedding pictures on your widescreen monitor.

This is really easy to setup and change configuration settings. You can go to start >all programs >Windows Photo Gallery, or start >type “Windows Photo Gal” (without the quotation marks) and it should come up as first item in the search results.

Launch the Photo Gallery, ctrl + click all the images you want to incude as a slideshow and then click the gallery start. The gallery will launch into a full screen.

You can change various aspects of the slide show using the menus.

A problem we’ve been seeing when a hard drive is formatted in Windows XP and now running a Vista upgrade is:

You don’t have permission to save in this location. Contact the administrator to obtain permission. Would you like to save in the documents folder instead?

The solution is to format the drive again. Big effort and requires recover and restore of all your files.

An easier solution /workaround is to locate the executable (.exe) file inside the programs folder for example, right click this executable, choose the compatibility tab, in the lower section you will see “run as administrator”. Check this box to always run this program as administrator.

You should now be able to save the document in the location.