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Patches for Microsoft productsThere has been a blitz of patches for Microsoft products. And it has been very hard to keep a list in your head or in a database of what you have patches you have applied, what is vital to apply and so on. Independent tracking in my opinion, is having a hard time because of the sheer blitz of patches. My current rationale is: Go to the source - Microsoft Websites:
A note about these examination thingys - you need MSIE of a recent vintage - i.e. 4+ installed on your PC. You may browse with Netscrape but the examination thingys need IE to run their job. It probably means that your IE should also be configured properly with proxy settings and so on. This method is cool if you are working on a per machine basis and have a fast Internet connection (cable modem or corporate T1 line). Don't have one or need the same patch for multiple machines? Well, the examination thingy will prompt / display to you which patches you will need. You can then head over to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads and get them as single files to apply. Having multiple machines of the same hardware is an accomplishment to be attained. You can then use Symantec Ghost or some other imaging / cloning solution after you have made one good PC. Note: Index of -patches-microsoft is the Australian site where Microsoft patches can be obtained. This is run by AARNET. Not every new patch is there but it's useful if you are having problems with US transfer speeds. Web Sites that feature Security Alerts
Microsoft AccessAccess 9.0 / 2000 - 10.0 / 2002Jet 4.0 SP5 has been released. This does not contain the Jet Compact Utility. That is available separately. Access 2002 may require the Jet 4.0 SP5 patch. See Office XP and Access 2002 Don't Install Latest Jet 4.0 Update Access 8.0 / '97Access 7.0 / '95
Access 2.0
All Access Versions (pre-2000)ACC:
Data Changes Are Saved to the Incorrect Record MDAC / ADOMDAC 2.6 has been released. There is a Release Manifest document which details the file dates and details. It is not compatible with clustered SQL Servers. MDAC 2.6 does not contain Jet or FoxPro or Desktop drivers. Jet 4.0 SP5 has been released. This does not contain the Jet Compact Utility. That is available separately. For all these patches go to http:/www.microsoft.com/data/ Old: BUG Access ODBC Keyset Cursor Becomes Corrupt After a Delete SQL Server / MSDEVersion 7.0On December 15, 2000, Microsoft released Service Pack 3 (SP3) for SQL Server 7.0. Microsoft Visual StudioService Pack 3 and MSDE now available. Fixes and enhancements:
Microsoft Windows '98For a full list of patches see the Windows 98 Download Windows Update site. Either that or by now, you should be using Win'98 Second Edition already which incorporates extra features. Microsoft Windows '95Full list of patches for Windows '95 - Download SiteMicrosoft Windows NT 4.0Microsoft has a Full list of patches for Windows NT 4.0 and NTBugTraq has a categorising tool in NTBugtraq - NT Fixes. Please exercise caution before upgrading to Service Pack 5 and beyond. I personally had NTFS corruption on NT partitions that had been re-sized with third party utilities with this Service PackMicrosoft IIS 4.0 / PWS 4.0Outlook '97Please, please, please, don't use Outlook '97. I know it comes on the Office '97 CD. But it's so old and the clunky. Outlook '98 is free to all Office '97 users. Free Microsoft Outlook 98- Another Benefit of Office Update is not a patch to Outlook'97. It is a complete program and once you use it, you'll give Outlook'97 the heave ho. However, you do need 32Mb RAM on your PC because it uses and automatically installs IE4 to carry out some of it's functions. For a security bug fix, see here. Outlook '98There is an Email bug reported by AUSCERT Advisory AA-98.02 affecting Microsoft Outlook '98. To get the Outlook '98 patch click here. Outlook'98 uses a newer MAPI32.DLL than Win'98. If Outlook'98 complains that it cannot start because the MAPI32.DLL is of the wrong version, look for MAPI32.DLL on your hard disk. There may be more than one copy. The auto-archive feature in Outlook '98 has a bug. Read about it here and Download Now!. Please, please, give move to Outlook 2000. Microsoft Office'97More importantly for all Office '97 applications - Download the Office 97 Service Release SR-2 Patch from http://officeupdate.microsoft.com/Articles/sr2fact.htm. There are some Post SR-2 bugs you should be aware of:
PowerPoint '97PowerPoint '97 supports hyperlinks embedded in it's slides. Microsoft was told of a potential security issue and rectified this in the Office SR-1 patch. The downside is that the hyperlinks now do not work as expected unless you disable macro virus protection. Related Site(s)
Reader / Viewers of Electronic DocumentsEnvoy DownloadsEnvoy is similar to Adobe Acrobat. It allows you to create a portable document format (it's own proprietory file format, not Adobe's) by just printing from Windows '9x or Windows 3.1x. Originally designed by Tumbleweed and it was then sold to Novell who gave it as a freebie n Novell Perfect Office. Hands again changed when Corel bought the Word Perfect products so I got my hands on it as part of Word Perfect Suite 7. Since then, it has disappeared from the official faces of these webites. I still use it heavily, whenever I am in Win'9x. To get the free viewer if someone gives you an Envoy document to read, follow these links:
Efax DownloadNow that Envoy is deceased and Acrobat Distiller / Writer is still expensive, the no cost alternative is EFax - this instals as as a printer driver in all current Windows versions and captures a read-only document that you can send it. It can be delivered as an .efx which requires that the recipient get EFax themselves or an .exe which contains the viewer module. The recipient can opt to extract pages to .tiff format. VBA/VB and Y2KFor all versions of Visual Basic for Windows (including its predecessors such as Visual Basic for DOS and QuickBasic) prior to and including 3.0, two-digit years were always assumed to be in the 1900s. The code to implement this default was built into each version's run-time library and does not depend on the version of the operating system or the century of the current system date. Between the development cycles for Visual Basic 3.0 and 4.0, two new entities emerged: Visual Basic for Applications and OLE Automation. Prior to the advent of these technologies, Visual Basic's runtime library contained the code responsible for converting a two-digit year to a four-digit year. OLE Automation exposed a great deal of functionality that other applications could access. Visual Basic for Applications did not need to implement this code; it could make calls to the OLE Automation libraries instead. Visual Basic 4.0 was developed with this interoperability in mind and began to rely on the OLE Automation libraries to convert two-digit years to four-digit years in most cases. The exception to the rule is the DateSerial function that was implemented in the Visual Basic runtime library because Visual Basic required more functionality than the OLE Automation library could provide at that time. During the Visual Basic 4.0 development cycle, Microsoft decided that the defaults used in previous versions of Visual Basic were reliable but not necessarily practical. So, a new rule emerged. A two-digit year would be converted to the current century of the system date. Thus, Year(Date("1/1/00")) would evaluate to the current century. This new rule was implemented in the OLE Automation libraries used by Visual Basic 4.0 and Visual Basic for Applications. The Visual Basic 4.0 runtime library also implements the rule for the DateSerial function. Microsoft later reconsidered and changed the default in the OLE Automation (now simply Automation) libraries as of version 2.20.4049 of OleAut32.dll. This change does not affect 16-bit applications that rely on the Automation libraries, only 32-bit applications. Now, a two-digit year between 00 and 29 (such as 17) is interpreted as 2017 while a two-digit year between 30 and 99 (such as 72) is interpreted as 1972. The new Automation libraries provide the functionality that Visual Basic requires for the DateSerial function. Thus, Visual Basic 5.0 and subsequent releases no longer implement rules for this function in their runtime libraries. BDE (used in Inprise/Borland Delphi and Corel Paradox)Inprise has now released BDE Version 5. This covers problems with FAT32. See Technical Information Document TI3188 and get the latest BDE. Have patience, it is a 11+Mb download. If you are interested in Delphi, you may want to see the Feature Matrix comparison table between the different versions. Paradox 7 users should have patched their Paradox from Corel Useful Drivers and Clients
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