Password recovery, USB unmount, privacy and more

Here are some invaluable system helps.
Asterisk Key does one thing, but it's a lifesaver. It reveals the actual passwords hidden under the dots or asterisks in the password field. Invaluable when you've forgotten yours.
You are supposed to "unmount" USB drives before pulling them out of your computer. Which in XP you do by clicking on the little icon at the RH foot of your screen.

But sometimes when you try, you get cryptic messages saying you can't do that. Rather than just using brute force, try a little bit of freeware called USB Safely Remove.
The Blue Screen of Death is every Windows owner's nightmare. Most often it leaves you with no clue as to the real problem. Maximum PC magazine has a helpful Blue Screen of Death survival guide - everything you need to know.
Windows XP won't be around forever, and Microsoft will stop supporting it soon, meaning there will be no more bug fixes/security patches. Here's some advice from PC World for when that happens.
Internet privacy continues to dominate the news (you may have seen the hooha over Facebook in the last few weeks). Here's a list of the latest threats. And here's what you can do to fix the Facebook problem.

"Privacy is dead"

"Privacy is dead - get over it", according to Steve Rambam, a private investigator specialising in Internet privacy cases. It may well be that he is right. Far more of what you do online can be tracked than you probably realise. How much does it matter? Discussing this with a friend yesterday, he commented that he has no concerns because everything he does is above board. Robert X. Cringeley (yes, that's his real name) explains several reasons why even the innocent should be concerned. While some of his illustrations are American, exactly the same principles apply here in NZ. What he didn't dwell on is how officialdom can badly mishandle data - for instance, we constantly read stories of innocent people suffering injustices because some department or other has mistaken them for someone else, or because the department's computer is incapable of correcting wrong data that gets entered against a person. All email and cellphone traffic around the world is now scanned by government security agencies for keywords that might alert them to terrorist or other undesirable activity. You and I can quite unwittingly - and innocently - use those keywords in our conversation and have our details flagged. Huge amounts have been written on this. Erik Larkin's PC World article is a good starting point, and I would also suggest this Wikipedia article to learn more.