Some of you who know me know I have four kids—all boys. Now when you have four brothers growing up together under the same roof there is a lot of competition. In some families this competition would be with sports or academic achievement. In my house the competition is who has the best password.
I thought I would share a tool I had developed a while back as part of my Windows lockdown procedure. Deleting files that are in use and particularly WFP-protected files can be a pain and the methods vary with each version of Windows.
X-Out is a simple utility that makes the process more consistent by deleting files using a native application that runs very early in the Windows boot process (the same place where autochk runs). At this point there are no file
permissions or applications to get in the way. Even Windows won’t stop you from deleting the files you want.
When Windows starts, it will see that those files are not there and therefore will not configure WFP to monitor those files.
You can download X-Out here.
In case you haven’t noticed, in the last few years Microsoft has released a number of different client protection tools. First it was Windows Defender, then OneCare, and now we are seeing a big push on the Forefront product line. In fact, there are a number of tools that provide overlapping client protection.
In my last post I vented out some Vista complaints I had. One of those was how Microsoft changes the Start Menu with every version of Windows. In fact, after writing that I did a personal protest and changed the properties of the Start Menu to use the Classic Start Menu, which is the same one we had with Windows 2000. I was very pleased with what I had done. Continue Reading »
