Network shares not working

Suddenly today my network shares at home stopped working. After some investigation I found the culprit. I disabled one of the firewalls and the shares started working again.

Ahhh speed!

Yep, that's the one main advantage of a new PC. Windoze starts up faster.
Unfortunately, the old machine, still connected, is just sooooo sloooowwww...

Firewalls

Installed firewalls on both PCs - freeware Kerio Personal Firewall on my new machine and Sygate Personal Firewall on the old one. I had been relying on a hardware firewall, but felt that I need more "protection".
So far, Kerio seems more polished, but has "rules" which may be a little intimidating to newbies.
Sygate is a bit easier to use.

Word password tool not for security

The Microsoft Word password tool is not meant for security! The full story here at ZDNet

BackUp Maker Review

I just tried the program BackUp Maker version 3.1 standard.

This backup program is free for personal use, and the interface is available in three languages - English, French and German. Using the Wizard interface, you can create a ZIP file backup of a number of files, and optionally write them to a CD or DVD. The program can be configured in a number of ways.

My one complaint was that I could not save a backup set of files, for repeating the same backup later. The interface was slightly confusing, for example: what is a "Backup Protocol"?