I am traveling to Europe and only want to bring one laptop with me. I work for the US gov't and the IT police scan periodically for social networking software including Skype. I have been busted for this and removed Skype from my work laptop. When I use my PC outside the office, I can use the office VPN, or operate without. My question is this: If I am connected to the net and using Portable Skype without VPN, is there anyway the work IT police can detect that Skype has been used on the machine? Does Portable Skype leave any traces once the application is disconnected from the PC? I run Portable Skype on a portable thumb drive. Any advice you have will be appreciated.
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There is
way for any software run from an external flash drive to be truly stealth. Windows keeps a number of things locally for everything run in both the registry and prefetch. Unless you are an admin, you will be unable to clean up all of those bits.
While you may be able to run it from your flash drive and claim ignorance later if you are caught ('I didn't install it, I just ran it from a flash drive'), I would not recommend this to someone whose job is on the line.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Thanks much!! Disappointing, but good to know. I'll take my heavier personal PC with me.
Alan H
but if this is a serious issues with you, maybe you should get one of those slim and light netbooks. I've got one that is less than 3 pounds. it's so easy to carry one of those it's as light as a book.
"No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices." - Edward R. Murrow
I mean the talking part, not just the IM part. Have you actually tried it?
You think audio webchat takes any real computing power compared to what we have processor wise today? An Atom-based netbook has no issues with that.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I read in the Skype forums that people using Skype 4 were having their computer shut down when they used voice chat. A Skype dev kept saying that it was because their PC processors were too weak and overheating. Those threads seem to have been removed and replaced with advice about things like driver issues and dirty installs...
At any rate, there are quite a few technology rip offs on the market these days. People need to be very careful that what the see sold in a store will actually run new software as well as the new versions that will come out in a year.
@crux
now you can run it on smartphones too so where is the problem?
BTW
I had my first experience with some VoIP software in 1993!!!!
(yes I am a gruftie)
What operating system we had that time? Yes right w3.1
And given that I never had new computer in my life, all my computers were secondhand given away from someone who thought those are old and obsolete, you can think what system I used 1993. And the modem was 28k dial up to compuserve and still I had hours of nice talk to other side of the world. OK, it sounded like HAM radio on shortwave, but my first experience was on Jan.1 , 1993 , talking 2 hrs from my home in Switzerland to two boys in Fairbanks, Alaska. It was exciting experience. And the maths behind compression and decompression of voice made some progress since that time, so now we have much more quality even over not so much wide band connections.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
I have tried this out and have used the web cam on the laptop. talking and viewing work no problem.
and I am using the portable skype from here (of course)
this is using a laptop with Windows7, btw. I don't think that should make any difference. It's one of those slim Toshiba laptops. I use a mic/headset because the sound is louder through my phones than through the laptop speakers, but I have always used the headset anyway.
"No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices." - Edward R. Murrow
It sounded like you were using some kind of flim flam device that I see in electronic stores.
http://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/smartpho...
it's more like this, actually:
http://rentourlaptops.blogspot.com/2009/09/toshiba-slim-t100-series-gain...
"No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices." - Edward R. Murrow