techwalker

Disaster emphasizes the need for Offsite Backup

2010-09-10T00:21:00.001-07:00

Right now I’m sitting at home watching the television coverage of a fire storm going on about 25 miles north of me. Hundreds of people became homeless within minutes of a huge explosion from a natural gas line. The fire has destroyed at least 54 homes an damaged another 124 more. This horrible tragedy which at this time has taken at least one persons life, proves one very important lesson for computer users.

Those houses were so violently consumed many people literally had to run out their front door with only the clothes on their back to save themselves. They certainly had no time to grab their computers or external hard drives, there simply was no time. So adding to the tragedy, many people affected in this no doubt also lost all their digital pictures, their business records, or their doctoral dissertation. At this time no doubt data is the last thing on their minds, but once the fire is out and they begin to piece their lives together, the loss of pictures of their house and family outings or other precious memories will end up being just another burden to deal with.

So how could this additional loss be avoided, offsite backup. Backing up your most precious or valuable data to “the cloud” is no longer an option. This tragedy has convinced me that the external hard drive next to your computer is little better than not having any backup, should a huge fire or natural disaster occur. Backing up to a cloud based service can be remarkably easy, an automated system used by a commercial program such as Carbonite can be very simple. Others like Amazons S3 require other programs to move the data to safety.

There a few free programs that will work, although the amount of storage is often limited. Mozy, Dropbox, and Windows Skydrive all offer free online storage. While free sounds good be careful, early on in the cloud storage era there were several free online backup services which disappeared suddenly leaving their clients unable to get data they thought was safe. It’s definitely best to stick with established names, like Dropbox or Amazon and maybe pay a little to backup your most precious memories or documents.

Don’t have high speed internet, then take several external hard drives and rotate one to an offsite location that’s a ways off. Weekly change the drive out so no drive is more than a week out of date. While this method works, its often the type of thing people do for a while but then tend to slack off after time. This is why I feel the set it and forget it of an automated backup online is the best.

Additional links: http://mozy.com/home, https://www.jungledisk.com/personal/, http://www.dropbox.com/, http://windowslive.com/Online/SkyDrive, https://one.ubuntu.com/, http://www.carbonite.com/

My Latest Malware kit

2010-07-07T13:39:00.001-07:00

Over the the years I’ve found malware getting harder to defeat every time I try to disinfect a machine. A few years ago running AVG antivirus and Spybot Search and Destroy, pretty much did the job. But in the last 2 years or so I’ve had to refine my techniques as malware became more prevalent and harder to remove. It seems organized criminals are now the driving force behind most of the “quality “ malware out there. There’s big bucks out there to be made stealing peoples identities, or turning their computers into spambots.

Last year I blogged about turning away from my old reliable programs and how I had adopted some new tools for doing automated cleanups. This year I’ve picked up some new tools, largely in response to what I was seeing when trying to clean up some really horribly infected machines.

My tools are similar to what I was using last year,Malwarebytes and Superantispyware are still my favorite tools. Only one change there really, Superantispyware now is my primary malware tool. I was getting consistently better results with Super and it was removing many issues that Malwarebytes could find but not remove. Superantispyware also comes in a portable version, I keep a copy on a thumb drive for emergencies. For an antivirus I’m using Microsoft Security Essentials, its free, lightweight and effective which meets all my requirements. For a paid antivirus I like NOD32 from Eset, NOD32 is the best AV in my opinion and I will install it on users computers who are prone to getting infected. http://www.eset.com/. NOD32 is reasonably priced and if you’re going to pay for an AV, this is the way to go. http://www.superantispyware.com/ , http://www.malwarebytes.org/

These tools are going to do a great job of protecting most peoples computers if they are reasonably competent online. If a computer comes to me that’s really badly infected, I’ll first run Kaspersky rescue boot CD. Kaspersky Rescue CD is a Linux based Live CD that runs the Kaspersky antivirus prior to trying to boot into Windows. This can be very time consuming, in one case it took 27 hours and Kaspersky found over 1500 infections, but afterwards I was able to boot into Windows and run my regular tools which found another 150+ after 3 reboots and scans. But in the end the machine was clean.

Another program I use as a second opinion is called Hitman Pro.http://www.surfright.nl/en/hitmanpro Hitman Pro is cloud based scanner that uses Esets cloud based scan as well as 3 others to double check your computer after a cleanup. I just started using Hitman Pro, but so far I’m very impressed. Lastly I use Process Explorer and Autoruns from Sysinternals, now a Microsoft property. Learning to use the Sysinternal tools takes time, but its time well spent for anyone who wants to get serious about knowing what goes on, on their computer. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/default.aspx

Palm saved by HP at the last minute

2010-05-01T21:53:00.001-07:00

Well I may not exactly be competition for Engadget but I'm just ecstatic that HP has stepped up and bought Palm. Palm has been a great and innovative company since their inception and I would have hated to see them go away. The new Palm operating system has never gotten the popularity it deserved. The WebOS works great, it multitasks and just elegantly goes about its business doing things most mobile operating systems cant.
I admit I'm a bit biassed I own a Pre, I use it on the Verizon network and unlike the At&T network I don't have to drive for a half hour to get a signal. But best of all is the WiFi Hotspot application. To me its the one app "to rule them all and in the darkness bind them"(Sorry JRR).
So keep your 150,000 fart apps on the "Jesus phone", I'll take my Pre and now thanks to HP I'll soon have fart apps to buy on the Pre.

Another Day in the Trenches: killing XP Antivirus 2010

2010-04-05T20:11:00.000-07:00

I hate rouge antivirus programs. They seem to be getting more numerous and harder to get rid of all the time. Case in point: At work I noticed a shared computer suddenly popped up a Window announcing to me it was doing a scan and that I was infected with over 4,000 trojans and other forms of malware. Nice try I thought, so I used Control Alt Delete to start task manager and I closed Internet Explorer and all running processes involved. Fortunately it was a limited user account that was infected, and that turned out to be a important factor in removing it. I immediately ran Malwarebytes from that user and found a number of infections including the rogue antivirus product I was afflicted with.
These cretins that come up with this crap can’t even come up with something creative, we’ve seen XP Antivirus for a few years now, each year they just tack on a year to make it look current. Sad thing is I’m sure somewhere out there is someone who renews this crap every year, imagine paying yearly to be infected, oh right we already do that it’s called McAfee, but don’t get me started.

Well back to the task at hand: I rebooted the machine and logged into an administrator account. And updated Malwarebytes and ran it again... and found more junk, actually the same junk. Malwarebytes found it but could not kill it. Next I downloaded Superantispyware, a great application that I always run at home but wasn’t on the work machine. The first thing I do now after I download a anti-malware application is rename the installer, I do this because I often find the malware knows to prevent anti-malware from installing, okay these guys aren’t creative but they re getting smarter To rename a file, right click on the file and select rename and type anything.exe and install the program. Superantispyware did its thing and found a ton of additional files. I removed the infected files and rebooted again, and ran both my programs again. I still found junk! I repeated the sequence two more times until nothing was found. I then ran a scan in all user accounts to confirm “the kill”. So far so good, until I went into the user account where the infection had started, now whenever I tried to launch any program from the desktop I’d get the “Choose what Program you want to use to Open this File” message. This means I had to fix file associations and a great site with XP file association fixes is. //www.dougknox.com/xp/file_assoc.htm I used the .exe file association fix and it worked great. The last thing I did was to run Process Explorer, and Autoruns from Syinternals, these utilities give a great in depth look at what is currently running and starting on your machine at boot-up. Finding nothing suspicious I deemed the computer clean for now.
So a few lessons I learned on that one: Don’t use IE this was caused by a flaw in Internet Explorer I believed it was just fixed this week. Second running as a limited user is still far safer than running as an administrator, even though its trivial to elevate to administrator level, most malware seldom does, and this makes cleaning an infected PC much easier. Next running your cleanup tools multiple times and rebooting after each scan is the only way to give the anti-malware tools a chance against the bad guys.
http://www.malwarebytes.org/
http://www.superantispyware.com/

Principles of Security:Keeping it Simple

2010-03-25T23:13:00.000-07:00

Computing on the Windows platform today can be very rewarding .The problem with Windows applications is that as Microsoft has made improvements in patching security holes in Windows, the Black Hat hackers have begun to focus on third party applications to exploit the platform. Recent highly publicized exploits on the Adobe Acrobat PDF reader have been the tip of the iceberg. According to Secunia creators of PSI a security tool that scans your PC for out of date software, half their users had 66 or more programs on their PC's. Once all the programs and patches were tabulated it totaled over "75 patch incidents annually". per average PC. "That averages out to a patch every 4.9 days." (Source InfoWorld Security Central http://www.infoworld.com/d/security-central/typical-windows-user-patches-every-5-days-630?source=IFWNLE_nlt_firstlook_2010-03-04InfoWorld) This obviously puts the average user at risk. Many people do well just to keep their Windows OS patched much less check more than once a week for patches to their other applications. This leads to the crux of my point, keep it simple. Don't download every application you see or hear about. Pick a core of useful applications that allow you to use your computer in the way you need and stop! Your computer is a tool that can be very useful, so treat it seriously. You still can have fun with your computer, but you don't need 5 different media players, choose one and stick with it. If you find one you prefer uninstall the old one first. Many people use old out of date programs because they don't like the "feature creep" of many newer applications. This is a mistake, keep what programs you have up to date, this especially true with PDF readers, browsers, email clients, and media players. Keeping your flash player up to date is extremely important, Adobe Flash is a major exploit vector and I frequently run with it disabled.
Trying new applications can however be fun and rewarding, the best way to try new applications though is in a virtual machine. Using a program like Virtual Box from Oracle Systems is a great way to safely try new applications without committing yourself to a new program or loading your hard drive with a ton of unnecessary applications that need to be constantly updated. And lastly run Secunia’s free PSI it will help you keep your applications up to date and add another layer of security to your computer.http://download.cnet.com/1770-20_4-0.html?query=Secunia+Personal+Software+Inspector&searchtype=downloads

Kaspersky Rescue Disk

2010-01-23T11:37:00.001-08:00

You find your computer getting slower and slower to boot, and when it finally does boot it's so slow everything runs at a crawl. So you try running the antivirus you have and just get a message that says the definitions are out of date and you can't connect to the update server. Or you may find an annoying pop-up coming up every time you boot telling you PC Antivirus has found 70,278 infections and for $49.99 they will remove them for you. Well my friend, you are hosed! Your machine is so badly infected that you have to try desperate measures. At this point you can try pulling your hard drive out of the machine and putting it in another mounting it as a slave and using your other machine to try to clean it.

Another way to get this thing up and running is to try some kind of bootable rescue disk to clean it. Bootable rescue disks are bootable CD's/DVD's that contain small operating systems with some preinstalled tools contained for repairing your computer. When you turn on your computer hit F10 or F12, select your CD/DVD drive and your computer boots into an operating system contained on that CD. There are a lot of great rescue disks out there, the problem is most are very complicated and some take forever to boot. I found one great exception to this though. Kaspersky labs creator of the very capable Kaspersky Antivirus line of products has built a great free bootable rescue CD that is simple to use. Unlike many other bootable rescue disks it has one purpose, to clean your system. To create a Kaspersky Rescue Disk, download the ISO image from this link http://devbuilds.kaspersky-labs.com/devbuilds/RescueDisk/ then burn the image to a CD. Depending on what operating system you are using you may need to download a CD burning program if you don't already have one. If you are running Windows 7 it has a built in, burning program that's simple to use and works great. If you are running XP or Vista, I like Image Burn http://www.cdburnerxp.se/ or CD BurnerXP http://www.cdburnerxp.se/ both do a great job of burning .ISO images and are free.

Once you have your rescue CD built, start your infected machine pushing F12/F10 to get it to the boot selection screen. Boot to the CD Rom drive as I stated earlier and relax, although faster than most rescue disks it's hardly fast. Follow the prompts and when it boots into the Kaspersky Rescue system you first need to update the virus definitions. Once updated do a scan, and go read the newspaper or get some coffee, it takes a while. Once it completes the scan go ahead and let it remove or quarantine all the files it has found. I've never had it delete anything that caused the machine it was fixing not to boot. But of course before you do anything like this, BACK UP YOUR DATA!!!!! But you already did that so proceed. Do the scan, remove the junk and log off Kaspersky. Just turning off your computer with the power button won't hurt anything when you are running a rescue CD.

The reason rescue CD's are so effective, is you're not trying to disinfect a computer with an infected OS. When you boot to the hard drive of an infected machine, you're playing on the bad guy's home turf. They control the machine and in many cases they've hidden the infected files so your antivirus can't see them. The rescue CD can scan your boot sector, and you hard drives from the outside looking in. The malware doesn't have a chance to hide if it's not running. It's become the first step I now use when I'm dealing with an infected machine. There are other rescue disks out there and many are very complicated and take a very long time. The Kaspersky Rescue Disk is the fastest and easiest I've found to clean an infected machine enough to allow me to boot back into Windows and complete the process by adding my favorite automated antimalware tools to keep the system clean going forward.

Login Security Tips

2009-11-27T15:34:00.001-08:00

Today many of us live online, we bank, shop, and communicate with old friends via the internet. The problem with online life is that your identity is out there in so many places eventually one of the sites will be compromised. To protect ourselves we come up with passwords that supposedly only we know. Problem is people don't take the time to use properly secure passwords because they are too difficult to remember. How many people use the word "password" for their password? It happens all the time. So to combat this many sites require passwords of minimum lengths, this is fine except if you are using a word out of the dictionary, it is fairly trivial to crack. So to really get a secure password, we need to use a password with more than a few characters and it needs to include letters, numbers, and if the site allows it, symbols to make a decently secure password. Another problem then arises how do you remember your password? Security expert Bruce Schneier http://www.schneier.com/ recommends people can write them down and post them by their computer. This may sound crazy, but his point is simple, it's more important to have a secure password you'll never remember than one that's easily discovered by hackers. The fact is if someone has physical access to your computer all bets are off anyway.

My only problem with this idea is many people need to access their secure information while they're away from home or the office. Having your passwords written down while you're on the road is not a good idea, so you need to devise a way to create secure passwords that can be remembered. Doing this isn't as difficult as it sounds, devise a method that makes sense for you and use it consistently. One method I've used is to take a line you remember from a song you like and take the first letter of the line and then add numbers or symbols to it that make sense to you. I use lines from old songs I remember and I add numbers of old addresses, birthdates, or a series of numbers I just picked at random but can remember. The important thing is that it be easy to remember and totally random. The length of the password is also important less than 8 characters is too short, ideally 20 characters are considered totally secure most people can come up with a 10 to 12 character password they can remember that will be very secure.

Many people prefer to use a program to remember their passwords. A couple of very good programs I've used that are secure and easy to use are Roboform, http://www.roboform.com/ and KeePass http://keepass.info/ . While I don't use them anymore I think both offer a great service and should be considered by anyone looking for a simple way to manage your passwords in a secure fashion.

Another and potentially more serious problem which I see everywhere online, is the vulnerability in resetting your passwords. Several public figures have had their accounts hacked by the use of poor authentication protocols that websites use to reset your password in case you forget, or lose it. Sara Palin the Vice Presidential candidate in last year's national election in the United States is a great example. Her Yahoo mail account was hacked into because the security question was easily guessable and available on Wikipedia. This problem is perhaps the single largest login security hole we are facing. Typically websites ask questions like your mother's maiden name, or your first home town. This information can be often found in publically available locations. A better protocol is for sites to have the user to set their own "secret question". This is better but you still need to be careful not to use questions which can be guessed or known by others. On a more delicate note people need to realize that identity theft occurs most frequently by people that you know personally. It's not a good feeling, but it's statistically a fact, and shouldn't be ignored.

So how do you get around this problem of authentication? Simple, you lie. If you have to use your mother's maiden name, make up one you can remember. Use the name of someone else you may know or use a color you hate. There's no law that says your mom's maiden name isn't pink or you have to be truthful. Just make sure you remember the fake name you choose.

Logging into websites we use is easy to take it for granted. The problem is once your identity is compromised it can be a nightmare to fix all issues that will arise. Take the time to use good, secure passwords and remember, that your security questions you are asked are just as important as your passwords.

When it comes to malware removal use a shotgun not a rifle.

2009-11-26T00:07:00.001-08:00

Cleaning an infected computer is a challenge, unfortunately the malware writers are getting talented which translates to real trouble if your machine gets infected. Many computers ship with large all in one security suites. These all in one programs look good on a checklist comparison in PC Magazine but I prefer to use a variety of programs from different vendors, each using a slightly different method of cleaning your machine to give you the best chance of finding all the of the bad files.

Recently I had to deal with a Lenovo Thinkpad my daughter had been using. The laptop was recently given a clean install of Windows XP and is a spare machine I use only occasionally. After my daughter had finished using it, I did a routine scan using Malwarebytes a very good free anti-spyware program. The scan found 15 infections including some Rootkits, which can be very difficult to remove. So Malwarebytes told me I needed to reboot the computer to finish the removal, I complied and rescanned. Same results, same Trojans, same Rootkits, so I scanned with Microsoft's Security Essentials, a new free anti-virus Microsoft recently released. Security Essentials found nothing at all, so I tried a new (to me) website, virustotal.com. Virustotal allows you to upload suspicious files to scan to determine if they are a threat or possibly a false positive. I uploaded the file that was showing up the most frequently on the quick scans, virustotal scans the file using over 40 different malware removal engines, only one McAfee Virus scan found the file to be suspicious so I was beginning to think I might have a false positive. The fact that the file kept reappearing was very suspicious so I needed to get serious.

The next step was to run CCleaner a very good registry, and temporary file cleaner. CCleaner will make virus scans faster and may delete files that are allowing a possible payload to reload when you restart the computer. After using CCleaner I installed Superantispyware, a program I always install as one as my primary tools to combat spyware. The fact that this computer was a fresh rebuild was the only reason I hadn't installed it yet. Installing and running Superantispyware goes very fast, it's a great program that is the favorite of many computer technicians. Super lived up to it reputation and found a number of problems including one Trojan with multiple registry entries. Rebooting the machine after Superantispyware finally yielded some results. Additional scans from Superantispyware and Malwarebytes came up clean. My next test is to run a HijackThis. HijackThis is a very powerful tool which must be handled with care. Installing HijackThis is simple, using it effectively is another story. The best way for most people is to run HijackThis which will create a log file. Next post this file to a web site where experts can parse your results and determine if you still have any suspicious files remaining. My preferred site is http://www.hijackthis.de/ the site is primarily in German, don't let that deter you though, they have a scanner that will scan your log file in real time and give you a good idea right away if HijackThis has found anything.

If you have run and re-run your scanning tools run a HijackThis and everything comes up looking okay, you're probably malware free. But for the next few reboots you should continue to make sure your anti-malware programs are up to date and keep rescanning periodically. Most malware these days wants to hide in the background. You may be infected and never know your machine is stealing your passwords and draining your bank account. So stay safe, keep your data backed up and if you get infected use as many tools as it takes to get secure again.

http://www.malwarebytes.org/

http://www.microsoft.com/Security_Essentials/

http://www.superantispyware.com/

http://www.virustotal.com/

http://free.antivirus.com/hijackthis/

Windows 7 Security Essentials

2009-11-08T23:41:00.001-08:00

Windows 7 is a big deal, many people in the tech industry believe it will be the catalyst for the next tech boom in hardware sales. Could be, Windows 7 is a great OS. Staying secure in Windows 7 however still requires users to be careful. If you upgrade to Windows 7 one of the first things I recommend most users do is go to UAC in their start search click on "Change User Account Control Settings" . Once the UAC window appears use the new slider interface to move your security settings all the way to the top to "Always Notify Me", the most secure setting you can have. The reason is obvious the UAC is there for a reason, to protect you. There's no point in turning down your protection you have built in to your computer.

To back up this point I found a post from Sophos, a security software company that found a random sample of 10 malware samples 7 infected Windows 7 running UAC at its default mode. It also ran the test on a machine running no security software. http://www.sophos.com/blogs/chetw/g/2009/11/03/windows-7-vulnerable

Neowin a popular Windows blog however cried fowl, and ripped the methodology of the "study" and I admit Sophos sells sell security software so their motives might be questionable. But I still think it's prudent and wise to turn up your UAC. http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/11/04/sophos-windows-7-vulnerable-to-810-viruses-fud-alert

So the next step after turning up UAC is to make sure you have an antivirus program. The free Microsoft Security Essentials is a fine, free program and I'm running it on several machines. I'd also get Malwarebytes anti Malware software and top it off with Superantispyware another great antispyware program. Another common item on the security checklist is to type "Folders" into the start search, open "Folder Options" and select "View". Uncheck "Hide Extensions for known File Types" this way when someone sends you a picture you normally see as a .jpg file you will see the jpg.exe it really is. Pictures don't normally have executables in them, and for some unknown reason Microsoft continues to hide known extensions by default.

Security threats being what they are, a few quick techniques will help keep you safe, even with the latest and greatest from Microsoft.

Upgrading to Windows 7

2009-11-08T22:55:00.001-08:00

Windows 7 was finally released to the public on October 22^nd. The release followed over a year of Pre-beta's, beta's, and release candidates all open for public consumption. The strategy of allowing the public plenty of access to Windows was a sign of confidence that was well placed. Windows 7 is a hit; it's a great improvement over Windows Vista and has received great reviews in the tech press.

The one question that remained unanswered prior to the release was how the upgrade version would work. Would users be able to do a clean install with the upgrade media, and how would Windows 7 install on computers running Windows XP which isn't supported for doing in place upgrades?

Fortunately the upgrade version of Windows 7 for any legitimate install works just fine. For my own use I installed 3 copies of Windows 7 which I purchased last June during the special half off sale Microsoft ran for a limited time.
The first install I did was a clean install using a hard drive that had Windows Vista already installed on it. Booting from the install media I was given the option of doing either a Upgrade Install or a Custom Install. Choosing the Custom Install, you then click on advanced options, and then choose which partition to install on. At this point you can choose, as I did to format the C drive and do a clean install over the previous version. The other option is to parallel install and end up with a windows.old folder on your C drive. Installing over the old version is useful if you're not sure you have a good backup of your data. The windows.old folder can be explored and files can be dragged into the new install with no problems. Once you're done with the windows.old folder it can be deleted with no problems.

On this install the process went very fast, it took maybe a half hour to complete. This machine is running a Core i7 and a 10,000 RPM Western Digital Velociraptor Hard Drive, so a fast install wasn't surprising. Reinstalling my old applications took longer than the install but I was up and running at full steam in no time. The next install I did was an in place upgrade of a 2 year old Dell Inspiron 1420 laptop. This required a lot more time and work before and during the install. Prior to the install I ran the "Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor" available from Microsoft. This saves you from potential hardware and software conflicts when doing the install. The advisor indicated I needed to uninstall several programs including iTunes and NOD32 antivirus. This also turned out to be a good time to get rid of a few other programs I hadn't used for a while so once I had cleaned up my Program and Features in Vista I ran the install. The upgrade took about 2 hours and once completed I was able to reinstall iTunes and NOD32 and things have been running great ever since.

My last upgrade was for my HP Mini 2140 Netbook running the standard Atom 1.6 GHZ Atom Processor. This was a fairly new computer and had little if anything to be backed up. So I just used the upgrade install disc to format my C drive and do a full clean install. Once again it went without any issues at all.

Overall my experience with doing both clean installs and in place upgrades went great. Some issues have come up for some people though. When using a upgrade version of Windows 7 and installing it on a new or previously formatted hard drive you will not be able to get past the point in the install where you are prompted to enter the product key. Instead, you need to continue on without entering your key. Once the install is complete type activate in your Start Search and click on activate Windows. You will be prompted to either activate online or by phone, choose phone and then answer the questions you are asked. As long as your computer came with a copy of Windows you are entitled to the upgrade price.

Some links for Windows 7 the upgrade advisor download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=1b544e90-7659-4bd9-9e51-2497c146af15&displayLang=en and a great tutorial for upgrading XP to Windows 7: http://www.butterscotch.com/tutorial/Upgrading-From-XP-To-Windows-7-An-Overview-Of-Whats-In-Store

Superantispyware Pro Version

2009-10-01T20:10:00.001-07:00

About a year ago I reviewed Malwarebytes antispyware program and I gave it a great review. One of the comments I received was from Mike Duncan Director of Business Development from Superantispyware, a program I’ve used for a couple of years now. The representative offered me a free license for SuperAntispyware Professional Edition. I was delighted with the offer since I’ve always been pleased with free version. So I took him up on his offer and gave it a try, and that’s where my problems began. I installed the program put in the license and all seemed fine. It worked fine until the next reboot, at this point Superantispyware would ask me for a license key each and every time I restarted the computer. So I uninstalled the pro version and forgot about it.

Eventually Mr. Duncan emailed to ask me how it was going. I let him know what happened and suggested try the latest version. So I gave it another shot and this time the program worked fine. With no issues with the license SuperAntispyware Pro began to show it stuff!

SuperAntispyware free version had always impressed me with its low resource use, the Pro version carries on this behavior using only 4280K in memory when running in the background according to the “task Manager” for all users. Running a scan bumps ram use up to 6352k, on my Dell Inspiron 1420 with a 2.2 GHZ core 2 duo. The ram usage is very lightweight and impressive, as is the free version. The real time protection you get from the Pro version is very good. It can prevent you from getting into trouble when you go to a website that’s been compromised and it does a good job of cleaning a computer that’s been infected. The “quick scan” took a while, close to a half hour on a 320 gig hard drive with about 76 gigs free. The quick scan took a little too long for my tastes but it is really more of a full scan compared to the quick scan of other programs.

SuperAntispyware Professional edition is an amazing value, for just 29.99 it provides the user a lifetime license. For this price its really hard to pass up the Pro license, no yearly subscription just a one time payment. It can be used with other antispyware programs and it makes a great combination with Malwarebytes.

SuperAntispyware Professional is a great program for a terrific price, I consider it a great value and its definitely what I consider one of the best of the new breed of anti-malware programs available today.

Get SuperAntispyware Professional at http://www.superantispyware.com/downloadfile.html?productid=SUPERANTISPYWARE

HP Mini Note 2140

2009-07-19T17:48:00.001-07:00

Recently I purchased a MSI Wind U115, this is a great little netbook with a very innovative hybrid hard drive that delivered incredibly fast boot times and very snappy performance in general. Unfortunately the keyboard was just to small for me to get use too, and I returned it.

After looking around at the various retailers I realized that the HP netbooks all had one thing in common, great keyboards. The large sized keys and 92% full sized keyboards make typing much easier so I looked around for the model I wanted and found I wasn’t able to find the model I wanted anywhere locally so I ordered it online from CDW a large technology reseller. The service from CDW was awesome, they as good as you will get from an online retailer, enough said.

The model I ordered was a HP Mini Note 2140 It has a 10 inch screen and the aforementioned keyboard and a great aluminum case that has a much nicer finished than many of the plastic netbooks I looked at. The boot up times and performance aren’t bad at all, not quite as snappy as the U115 but quite acceptable. I am currently removing much of the trialware that comes with the computer and I expect performance to improve once I’ve replaced things like the McAfee’s security suite with an antivirus that will be lighter weight. Right now I’m pleased with the size and build quality, the keyboard is smaller than normal but for me useable, unlike the MSI Wind keyboard and its little tiny keys.

So for initial impressions I’m quite happy I already find the size has me bringing the 2140 places I wouldn’t have bothered with before and I find it useful having it around. Netbooks don’t replace full sized desktops or laptops but they fill a niche I have wanted for some time.

Free Cloning software Part 1: Easus Disk Copy

2009-07-19T00:38:00.001-07:00

Upgrading your hard drive can be a rewarding and simple procedure for the everyday computer user. Cloning your hard drive or making a exact copy is the easiest way to get the new hard drive up and running quickly, It’s also a popular tool for many professional IT people to backup a computer setup to be instantly restored in case of a disaster.

There is a number of paid commercial programs that serve this purpose, Norton Ghost is very popular as is my favorite, Acronis True Image. Both do a great job and have a number of useful options besides the cloning function. They are great programs but they cost money, and money is tight right now so I thought I try out a few free cloning programs that do the job just as well, albeit without the options the paid programs include.

The first program I tried successfully was Easus Disk Copy. Disk Copy allows a user to replicate their hard drive on to a external hard drive, the only option besides a full copy is to choose an individual partition a useful feature that I didn’t test.

Easus Disk Copy is simple to use, you download the program and burn the iso image to a CD. You then boot to the CD and follow a simple set of windows guiding you through the process. Once your target disks are selected you simply wait for the process to take place. This is where Easus falls short of the paid programs I’ve used. The entire operation took over 3 hours to clone a drive with about 140GBs of data to the new drive, not a big deal for most situations but if you’re in a hurry you’ll want a different program.

Another issue which was no big deal but could be for some people, was that out of the 3 drives I cloned 2 required me to repair the Windows Boot Loader using an install disk. No big deal for me but if you don’t have an install disk for the operating system you have or don’t feel comfortable doing this, it would be a real hassle.

Overall I think Easus Disk Copy did a fine job, it’s free and relatively simple. Since hard drives have become so inexpensive it seems silly to pay for software if you’re only using it on rare occasions. I give it a conditional “fully recommend” rating’ the condition being the user knows how to burn an ISO file and is able to repair the boot loader if needed.

Get Easus Disk Copy here http://download.cnet.com/Easeus-Disk-Copy/3000-2248_4-10867157.html

The MSI Wind U115

2009-07-06T18:33:00.001-07:00

The MSI Wind U115 is in a class of its own in the world of netbooks. Unfortunately it’s destined to stay exclusives a few months after being released, MSI is discontinuing the U115 due to the nuances of Microsoft’s licensing policies. The Wind U115 features a bit of technology people have been asking for, for some time. The U115 has a combination of a solid state drive 8 gigabytes in size with a 160 gig spinning hard drive for data.

This hybrid technology delivers a fast booting extremely responsive little computer that gets up to 12 hours battery life running several applications at a time, wireless on, with the screen brightness turned up all the way. Right now I’ve got 81% battery life left after almost 4 hours of use showing 9:35 remaining.

Like I mentioned this great little machine will not be available long, thanks to Microsoft. The guys from Redmond have decided that the standard netbook pricing for Windows won’t apply to models running the two drive hybrid configuration. Its a shame looking at the U115 no one would ever aware of the quick launching of programs and the excellent battery life.

The U115 works very well, but its 8 GB SSD drive is almost full when you get the machine. So you start getting nag screens telling you that your C drive is almost full after installing just a few applications to the C drive. The 8GB C drive is the U115’s biggest weakness, to make this design work the SSD needs to be at least 16GB and preferably 32. 32 would allow you to install Windows 7 and a number of applications without running into the space issues. The other negative to the little MSI is the keyboard, its just way to small for my hands. The keyboard is better than the early Eee PC’s but much smaller than some netbooks, and it may be the deal breaker for me. The touchpad isn’t bad many netbooks do strange things with their touchpads, like sat them to one side and put the buttons in the front, MSI keeps it conventional clicking is a bit stiff and requires a deliberate push to click on something.

The finish quality of the Wind is quite good, it looks nice and has a solid feel to it. I really like the U115, but you have to be selective about the apps you install unless you want to put them on the D drive. If your going to install iTunes or the Zune software you have to put it on your D drive. I’ll continue to use the U115 but the time to return it for a refund is drawing near and I’ll have to seriously consider if I can live with the keyboard and C drive limitations.

Extreme Tech Website and Podcast has been given the axe

2009-06-23T22:58:00.001-07:00

Over the last few years Extreme Tech the great enthusiast website for computer builders and do it yourself guys and gals has been one of my top reads on a daily basis. Lloyd Case, Jason Cross, Joel Durham and Jim Lynch have done a great job over the last few years and they will be missed. PC Magazine which was the corporate parent (Under Ziff Davis) has been going downhill for some time. It started with the Departure of Bill Machrone former Editor in Chief a few years ago and ended up going to online only at the end of 2008.

Also gone is the Extreme Tech podcast hosted by the same crew. The podcast was quite informative but it seems PC Mag has ended all its west coast content and is going to run entirely by the east coast branch. Too bad, from what I've seen of the PC Magcast lately they could use some substance. The new "After Dark" iteration of the show is a quick fast forward, once I figure out what it is. The regular show is fine but not really for enthusiast who build their own PC's or think slightly differently from "conventional wisdom".

So it's quite disappointing to see where PC Magazine has gone, there's nothing there for me anymore, nothing I can't get in a million other places. Anandtech, Tom's Hardware, and Maximum PC all do a great job reviewing computer hardware, they don't do the "best bang for the buck" type articles in the same way Extremetech did but, they will have to do.

So to Lloyd, Jason, Joel and the rest of the Extreme Tech crew, goodbye and good luck! And thanks for all the great information over the tears. I'm sure they'll all do fine as cream rises to the top, I look forward to visiting their new sites which I'm sure will be up soon.

Troubleshooting a uninstall gone bad

2009-04-28T23:58:00.001-07:00

Today I was doing a little maintenance on my daughters Gateway laptop, uninstalling one ant-spyware program and upgrading another to real-time protection. It seemed to go fine, I ran the Uninstall from Programs and Features in Vista and enabled the full time protection in Malwarebytes with the registration codes and rebooted. When the computer shut down I noticed it installing several updates, I didn’t think much of it at the time but when the machine restarted, the brown stuff hit the fan. I didn’t have any mouse! The trackpad was totally unresponsive so I plugged in a old USB trackball mouse, success! So I clicked on the admin account I keep on the machine and went to type my password, nope the keyboard didn’t work either. So I rebooted after plugging in my usb keyboard. Windows went through its usual routine and told me the keyboard had installed and was ready to use, except, it wasn’t. It wouldn’t work at all.

Basically I was hosed, I couldn’t run the device manager from the limited account, or do a system restore. I had to get into the admin account or I was stuck. So I did what any red-blooded geek would do I Googled “resetting a password in Vista”. I came up with usual Microsoft solution, you know the one where you use the password reset CD you made when you set up the com-pu-ter, yep that one, the one no-one ever makes! Fortunately for me I also found a reference to TRK or the Trinity Rescue Kit. TRK is a Linux based bootable CD, that can be used for resetting passwords, recovering files and a few other things relating to Windows calamities. It took a few tries, TRK is command Line based tool and none of the instructions worked exactly as they said they would. Once the CD booted normally I ended up typing winkey u admin, this started TRK searching and mounting all the files in the system. I choose 2/enter in the next dialog then typed an * confirmed with a y, and this created a new administrator account with no password.

I was able to log into the Administrator account and then began the next phase of fixing the corrupted drivers. This took a while longer than I anticipated, I tried deleting the trackpad and keyboard in Device Manager , both had the little caution signs next to them indicating a damaged or corrupted driver, rebooted but this didn’t work. I finally resolved the problem but using a restore point, fortunately you can get there with just a few clicks of the mouse. So I got lucky, the USB mouse worked and the TRK worked after some trial and error. Get the Trinity Rescue Kit here http://trinityhome.org/Home/index.php?wpid=1&front_id=12, I recommend it for your toolkit, it definitely saved my bacon.

Repair Install in Vista

2009-04-12T18:11:00.001-07:00

I’ve heard a number of tech experts including the esteemed Mr. Lloyd Case from Extreme Tech podcast as well as others like Steve from the Podnutz podcast state that there is no way to do “repair install” in Windows Vista similar to XP, or all recent editions of Windows for that matter. Actually Microsoft has given Vista users a way to repair Vista with the install DVD, they're just hiding it a little. And although Vista doesn’t make it obvious like it used to be, it still exists.

So here’s where they're hiding it, you get a repair install in Vista by doing a “In-Place Upgrade”.

1. Start the computer boot to Vista OS.

2. Insert the Windows Vista DVD in the computer's DVD drive.

3. Use one of the following procedures, as appropriate:

If Windows automatically detects the DVD, the Install now screen appears. Click Install now.

If Windows does not automatically detect the DVD, follow these steps:

a. Click the Start Button, type Drive:\setup.exe in the start search box and then click OK.

Note: Drive is the drive letter of the computer's DVD drive.

b. Click Install now.

4. When you reach the "Which type of installation do you want?" screen, click Upgrade to upgrade the current operating system to Windows Vista. Please make sure the edition of Windows Vista is selected correctly.

I didn’t get these instructions by reading a 1000 page manual, I got them from Microsoft when I needed tech support installing SP1. I followed the instructions and it worked great for me. Of coarse if you’re doing anything this extreme make sure you have a full backup and are using the correct disk. If you have SP1 already installed you need have a SP1 disk to do what Microsoft calls an In-Place upgrade (Repair install) in Vista.

Using Malwarebytes Antispyware Program

2009-04-09T22:12:00.001-07:00

I spend a lot of my day listening to podcasts and one of favorites is Podnutz and Podnutz Daily hosted by Steve Cherubino. In his latest episode Steve talks to Bruce Harrison lead researcher for Malwarebytes which is the best antispyware product currently out there, in my humble opinion. The biggest eye opener for me was that Bruce kind of squashed two old habits I've had for running antimalware programs, since I started using them. Bruce stated that Malwarebytes should be run in normal user mode, not safe mode as I've done for ages. He also stated that for the vast majority of users need only run the "Quick Scan" and not the deep scan which can take hours, especially on my Terabyte desktop drive. Bruce stated that Malwarebytes concentrates on folders where malware is targeted these days and ignores folders not targeted in the quick scan. He also gives good advice about running as limited user, and actually sounds pretty optimistic about the war against the cretins who create this junk. For once someone not spreading FUD, it was refreshing.

Check out Podnutz at http://podnutz.com/ and take a look at all of Steve's great content. He's a regular working stiff who still finds the time to put together an amazing amount of online audio and now video content for tech junkies interested in either fixing their own computers or people with their own computer repair business.

PC-BSD Best Unix for Beginners?

2009-03-21T11:25:00.001-07:00

I recently downloaded and installed the latest versions of PC-BSD http://www.pcbsd.org/ and I have to say I’m extremely impressed. The install went fast (18 minutes), and it was extremely simple and straight forward. I downloaded the 7.02 version using the DVD option. Downloading using http went fairly quickly, I tried to use bit-torrent and there were simply not enough seeders to make it reasonable. During the install you get the option of adding various additional components already on the DVD including Firefox 3.0, Thunderbird, and Open Office 3.0. Based on FreeBSD version 7.0 PC-BSD is stable and secure, the GUI is the new KDE 4.1.2 and I really enjoy it. Installing new apps is far easier and straight forward than Linux in my opinion and I’m comparing it side by side with Kubuntu 8.10 which also uses the new version of KDE.

The secret to improving usability in PC-BSD is the PBI or Push button Installer or PC-BSD Installer. The .pbi extension has all the files needed to install the applications by simply double clicking the file, this is essentially the same as an setup.exe file in Windows or the .DMG file in OSX. The pbi applications can be found at http://pbidir.com/ where an great variety of programs can be had. For more hard core Unix geeks the FreeBSD Ports are also available. FreeBSD Ports are similar to the apt-get found in Linux systems and any FreeBSD Port can be downloaded with all their packages and dependencies to install them in PC-BSD. But for beginners everything you’ll need not on the install DVD will be found at pbi.dir.com site.

The default browser in KDE is Konqueror which is what the Safari browser was originally based on, it’s a very fast browser but I vastly prefer Firefox. Firefox on PC-BSD came with all the plug-ins installed to play you tube video’s and to render most web pages as they were meant to be seen.

PC-BSD seems like the perfect OS for a netbook, it’s lightweight and simple, and has great applications like the Flock browser available which are perfect for social networking sites and cloud based email. Unfortunately a netbook isn’t in the budget right know but I’d love to hear from anyone who’s installed it on one.

I’ve tried at least a dozen different Linux distros over the past few years and although they all worked fine, I really feel PC-BSD has surpassed them in ease of use for the beginner. There were a few issue’s though. Although it runs flawlessly on my desktop, PC-BSD did have a few problems on my Thinkpad R60. The Ati video card isn’t supported for 3D graphics and the proprietary driver available on Linux builds doesn’t work. It also had a issue with my wifi card, although it would connect it never showed better than a 25% signal despite being in the same room as the router. The signal would also occasionally drop out only to reappear shortly afterward. So It’s worth looking through their support page and checking to see if your hardware is supported. If your trying it on a laptop with network cards not supported I’d hold off. It’s main feature is simplicity, but that will go away quickly if your hardware has know issues, in that case Ubuntu or Kubuntu might be a better choice.

Despite the few glitches I still recommend PC-BSD it’s well worth a try especially if your the sort of person who always like to try new Linux builds or are looking for a secure and stable operating system to put on your machine without shelling out for Windows.

Windows 7 UAC Security Issue

2009-02-06T16:00:00.001-08:00

Although generally lauded, Windows 7 the next version of Windows due out later this year has a potentially dangerous security flaw built into it. User Account Control (UAC) is a security feature first introduced in Windows Vista that has been a source of complaints from many long time Windows users. UAC in my opinion was a good idea, and does improve security in Vista compared to XP. Unfortunately in the beta version of Window 7 Microsoft has changed the UI in UAC allowing users to use a slide which determines the level of annoyance UAC will operate at. At the bottom of the slide UAC is essentially turned off, at the top of the slide UAC is in "Vista" mode which notifies you anytime you try to change anything about your system. By default Win 7 leaves the setting in a position were changes to Windows does not notify the user. This makes UAC less, "in your face", and is appropriate when you are off line and setting up your new operating system. It is however far less secure than many users think they are, as two independent Windows researchers recently discovered. Rafael Rivera and Long Zheng have found that running a basic script on your computer can turn UAC off without the user knowing it. http://www.withinwindows.com/2009/01/30/malware-can-turn-off-uac-in-windows-7-by-design-says-microsoft/.This would allow the computer to be completely compromised. This seems like the type of flaw beta releases are meant to find, Microsoft feels differently however. Seems this is one of those "it's not a bug, it's a feature" routines and Microsoft feels the feature is finished, locked into the final build, as is. The fix seems obvious, they could make changing the UAC level require administrative permission which would alleviate the problem. The least's they could do is to set the default level at the highest level so unsophisticated users are less likely to be bit by this.

I understand UAC in Vista was the source of many complaints and at least one "I'm a Mac" Apple commercial which cleverly (albeit dishonestly) made fun of the feature in Vista. So Microsoft must feel it can't win on this one. Personally I felt UAC in Vista was a worthwhile and effective security measure, and I'd argue, well worth the minor inconvenience it caused. But many people complained and so in 7, Microsoft tried to allow the user to turn UAC down so people would complain less. So to a certain extent I feel users are getting what they asked for, and you can protect yourself by turning UAC all the way to the highest setting, essentially the same as the default Vista setting.

The good thing is, Microsoft can change this, at least turn the default setting to fully protected. This is what Beta testing is for and it in no way takes away from the otherwise fantastic job the Windows 7 team has done. Windows 7 is fantastic and a ton of great features which I'll no doubt upgrade all my Vista machines because I believe it worthwhile upgrade.

UPDATE

Microsoft has come through and done the right thing. They will be modifying the UAC in 7 to require administrative rights to change UAC settings. Good for them and thanks to the Windows blogging community for holding their feet to the fire on this one.

The Peasants are at the gate

2009-01-29T20:19:00.001-08:00

Windows 7 is a hit. On January 10^th Microsoft released the public beta of their next operating system Windows 7, and to say the least it is a hit. So much in fact, it has spawned a movement of Windows enthusiasts that want it released right now. The website http://www.releasewindows7.com/ is trying to gain support for exactly that. Their argument, that Windows 7 is not only stable and well polished, but ready to be released immediately is founded on more than fanboi enthusiasm or wishful thinking. With the poor sales and the horrible perception of Windows Vista a reality, Windows 7 is being developed by an entirely different team at Microsoft. Their approach is to only include components of the OS that are fully baked for public consumption, and apparently it worked. I've yet to see a credible review of Windows 7 that doesn't give it high ratings. This is great news for Microsoft, the economy is the worst it's been in decades and the company needs a home run with the next operating system. I haven't seen this kind of enthusiasm for an OS from Microsoft since Windows 95 and it's about time.

So as of now the peasants have armed themselves with broomsticks and pitchforks, and are beating on the doors in Redmond, demanding Windows 7 be released, and the captors couldn't be happier.

Have Win32/Conflicker? No excuses for the infected

2009-01-23T10:07:00.000-08:00

The latest worm to plague Windows users the Win32/Conflicker, also known as "Downadup" is spreading like wildfire. Sadly there's no excuse for people catching this junk and joining the bot-net. Microsoft patched this hole on October 23rd 2008 in a out of cycle security patch. So, people who have their updates turned on automatically are protected, those who don't can get Microsoft's updated version of their Malicious Software Removal Tool here, at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=ad724ae0-e72d-4f54-9ab3-75b8eb148356&displaylang=en
I imagine most anti-virus programs will find this as well, but if your anti-virus is expired and your updates aren't turned on, you're probably hosed by now anyway.

It’s All About the Data

2009-01-23T00:00:00.001-08:00

Today’s computers are amazing, when you consider the processing power available, and the amount of storage you can have for incredibly little money, even the low end bargain computers today can do amazing things. You can easily build a $500 desktop computer that has a multi-core processor, and a terabyte of storage, with the power to edit video and photos, or play graphic intensive video games. But whether you’re running a $7000 custom high end gaming machine, or a $399 special from a sale at the local retailer the most important and precious thing in your computer is your data. Data is everything, it’s your kids baby pictures, your entire music collection, or possibly that book you've been writing for the last three years.

The problem with data is, even though it’s the most important thing on your hard drive, it’s frequently the least considered. To protect your data generally isn’t very hard, but its very easy to put off. People rationalize that since the hard drive from that Windows 95 machine still runs that their current machine will be fine for now and I’ll just do that backup next week when I have time. Unfortunately just when you least expect it, your hard drive crashes the night before you finished the report your boss wanted first thing in the morning or you lose the pictures of family members that can’t be replaced.

So now you know, backing up isn’t an option. Backing up isn’t hard, and it doesn’t need to be complicated. If you’ve never backed up before it can be as simple as buying an external hard drive, or even a large thumb drive, and dragging your important files over to the external drive periodically.

Saving your important files to a external drive is the first step. The next step will be to implement an automated system of backing up at least once a week. For that you need software. If you are running Windows Vista and you want to keep it simple the built in “Backup and Restore Center“ will help you set up weekly backups of all your important data. It’s very simple and works well, I’ve successfully used it to back up and restore all the important data on my daughters computer after a disaster.

For a more thorough backup solutions I prefer third party programs. Acronis True Image Home, is an excellent program. http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/It has more capabilities than some users may want, but it has the ability to make an entire image of your hard drive as well as do incremental backups periodically afterward. Programs that create an image, allow you to take the hard drive you backed up on, and put it in your computer and boot up like nothing ever happened. It saves your operating system, all of your programs, settings, and your data. The new version of Acronis has great new feature, it will perform dual backups to both a flash drive and a hard drive at the same time.

This leads me to my last point, backing up to more than one location is very important. A simple solutions is to use two separate external hard drives, swap out one and backup to the second while you keep the other off site. This could be at work, at a friends house or anywhere away from your home. Another effective off site backup is to do a backup to an online service of some kind. Microsoft offers a free 25 gigabyte storage service called “Skydrive” available to anyone with a Windows Live account.http://download.live.com/ Amazon S3 service is another reliable online backup service, S3 isn’t free but you pay only for the space you use, unlike some flat rate services.http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

Backing up is necessary inconvenience, developing a routine that fits your needs will make it relatively painless, and some day it will save you a lot of heartache. Remember there are two kinds of hard drives, those that have failed and those that will fail. Many people get serious about backing up only, after they've lost all their pictures or music on their hard drive. There are many very good programs for backing up, either to local storage, or to an online service. I mentioned two which I’ve had experience with and trust, but there are many, very good ones out there.

One last point.Some people using a new online backup services which offered “free” online storage from a relatively new and unknown company suddenly got a surprise when their online storage recently went offline forever. This left them with no backup at all. So staying with companies like Amazon for your online “cloud” storage feels like a safe bet. So backup early and often, because "it’s all about the data".

Traditional Technology Media changing

2008-11-28T00:44:00.001-08:00

Last week I learned that 2 of my favorite tech magazines, PC Magazine, and PC World have made immense changes, either in their staffing, or in their formats. PC Magazine has announced it will be ending its print edition altogether. The January 2009 edition of PC Mag. will be their last. I have to admit I’m bummed. PC Magazine has been one of favorite magazines for years, from their reviews on hardware, to their “Ask Lloyd” and Ask Neil” advise pages, the magazine has been a great source of technology news for more than 2 decades. The good news is, that they aren’t cutting any staff. According to the PC MAgcast podcast, they’ve been transitioning for the last few years to a digital only model, which will still be available for subscription. I’m looking forward to seeing how this works out, I wish them good luck. http://www.pcmag.com/

I wish I was as enthusiastic about the changes going on at PC World. Apparently in an attempt to remain solvent, they’ve cut several of their highest paid, and in my opinion, best writers. Steve Bass has been writing a fantastic tech advise column for over 14 years and was the first place I’d turn to when a new issue arrived. Steve was let go without much ceremony, last month, without even an opportunity to say goodbye to his loyal readers. Apparently he will be writing an occasional piece, but his old column is gone. Fortunately for his fans, Steve has started his own newsletter which is available for email delivery. I encourage everyone to visit his new site at http://www.techbite.com/ and sign up and support this great tech writer.

Windows 7 is coming

2008-11-07T15:07:00.001-08:00

For the last two weeks Microsoft has been unveiling their next operating system, Windows 7. Windows 7 will be built on the framework of Windows Vista and will strive to remain compatible with Vista drivers. That said people who avoided Vista for performance reasons may have reason to try Windows 7. One fact that gives hesitant XP users hope is that Steven Sinosky the Vice President running the Windows 7 team uses a Asus eeePC netbook computer as his daily machine running Windows 7. These netbooks are a relatively new class of computer with 7-10 inch screens and running either Intel Atom, or Via, mobile processors, at around 1.5 GHZ. The netbooks are usually shipped with either some form of Linux or Windows XP Home, operating systems largely because of their modest hardware requirements. If Window 7 will run well on a netbook than it should fly on more modern hardware commonly found on most new hardware.

More Security Applications

2008-11-04T21:58:00.001-08:00

I recently blogged about my favorite security applications, I neglected to mention one of the best antispyware apps available at any cost. Malwarebytes is available in free or paid versions from here http://www.malwarebytes.org/index.php

Malwarebytes is fast, lightweight, and very effective. I use it along with Superantispyware on all my machines as well as a antivirus application to keep me safe online.

Another new recommendation I can make is for Norton Antivirus 2009. Symantec started to greatly improve the performance of their antivirus product with their 2008 version. I was happy after using it for around 8 months of trouble free use, I felt it was vastly superior to the 2004 version I had last used. That said, Norton 2008 still slowed my computer down significantly when it would run a scan. Recently Symantec offered users of Antivirus 2008 a free upgrade to their Norton Antivirus 2009. After the download I was immediately impressed with the improved performance. The scans can either run at full speed or in the background using far fewer system resources, (and taking a lot longer). Either way there seems to be far less of a performance hit, a CPU meter displayed on the side of the display window shows how few resources the new Norton 2009 Antivirus uses.

While I do recommend Norton Antivirus, I still don't recommend the Norton Security suites. I recently tried a version of Norton Internet Security that came preinstalled on a new laptop I bought for my son. It suffered from all the bloat and connectivity issues security suites always do. So I commend Symantec for the new antivirus, but I'll pass on the bloated, all in one suites.

Acronis True Image on Sale

2008-09-19T17:05:00.000-07:00

You can get a great deal on Acronis True Image 11 Home by using the coupon code ATIH20 and save 80%. The deal is good until September 30th 2008.
Acronis is a great hard drive imaging and backup program for Windows (Vista compatible).
I use Acronis to image all my installs, I think its the easiest solution out there for baking up or upgrading to a larger/faster hard drive.

Online Security Tools Revisited

2008-09-12T09:58:00.001-07:00

Online security is getting more difficult, as the bad guys trying to infect you change their tactics. Some of the older tools that we could rely on to do the job just don't cut it anymore.

Older Programs that haven't kept up:

Spybot Search and destoy

Adaware

Norton 360

McAfee Antivirus/ Security Suite

Trend Micro Antivirus

Any, all in one security suite.

There are many reasons I don't like these various applications anymore. In general security suites, like Norton 360 are bloated, slow down your computer, and aren't that effective. Adaware and Spybot, just don't seem to be able to get rid of anything they find, if they do detect a infection.

Newer Programs that do work:

Superantispyware

Smitfraud Fix

PC Tools Threatfire

PC Doctor Antispyware

Nod 32 Antivirus

Sunbelt Software's Vipre Antivirus

AVG Antivirus (Free)

Avast Antivirus (Free)

Returnil (Virtualizes your sessions)

WOT (Web of Trust) browser filter

Sysinternals Process Explorer,Autoruns, Rootkit Revealer

Hijack This

This list of programs I feel are, in general, lighter on your computers resources, and more effective at dealing with threats. Returnil isn't really an anti-malware program, but a program that virtualizes your sessions. Any changes to your system are removed when you reboot. Now this can be a pain, when you forgot you were running Returnil and downloaded a song off of Amazon or installed a new program, but its great if your just going to be surfing or if you want to keep a teenager from hosing a computer while they use it. Smit Fraud Fix is a specialized program designed to eliminate the new epidemic of phoney Anti-spyware programs out there today. The Sysinternal applications aren't new at all, but have been updated. They are incredibly useful tools to find out what's going on on your computer. They're fairly complicated looking at first glance, but after a while a user will be able to detect a process that isn't right, or not supposed to be loading on your computer at startup. Hijack This is a great tool to find out what's going on with your computer, its fairly complex to use effectively and should only be attempted by an experienced user.

I still believe that the best defense against malware is to have an ongoing backup program, preferable an automated backup to an external drive as well as periodic data backups to CDs or DVDs. Even better, a third backup to an online provider such as Carbonite or Amazon's S3 service truly keeps you ready for the the really bad infection, that you can't remove or a hardware failure, which can happen at any time.

One last thing their are many other programs out there that are effective a great site I read daily is Bill Mullins blog over on wordpress http://billmullins.wordpress.com/ Bill is a blogging machine! He comes up with an enormous number of useful free and shareware apps, I highly recommend his site.

Stay Safe.

Dual Booting Vista and XP

2008-08-13T22:02:00.000-07:00

Booting more than one operating system has been possible for a long time with Windows. It's also possible to load several different types of operating systems at once on your computer including Linux, OSX and different versions of Windows. With Windows Vista now being installed on virtually all new Windows PCs these days many people still might have a few legacy programs, or hardware that will only work with XP. This post will show you how to install XP on a computer that came with Vista preinstalled.

There are two solutions available to run XP on a machine with Vista pre-installed. You could run XP inside Vista running some kind of virtualization software, such Virtual Box or using VMware. Virtualization is a good solution for those who would be using the "other" OS infrequently or for non resource intensive applications. But if you want to run the other OS for an extensive period of time or have application that needs the entire resources of the computer for than dual booting is the way to go.

When you are setting up a new machine with nothing on the hard drive dual booting XP and Vista is fairly simple, always load the older OS first, and newer one after. The reason, the older OS XP, doesn't know what Vista is, so if you have XP on a computer, its a simple matter to create a new partition on the hard drive and install Vista. The Vista boot manager will recognize XP as "Older Version Of Windows" and list it along with Vista in a DOS screen at boot up and allow you to choose which OS to load.

When you have the newer OS on first, in this case Vista, it takes a bit more work to get XP to play with Vista in a dual boot environment. First off, you do have to determine if your machine can run XP. I previously blogged about issues some people were having when downgrading Vista machines that were manufactured recently and there were no XP drivers written for them. For this post I assume the computer can run XP, the machine I used to implement the installation was 9 month old Dell Inspiron 1420. Dell had all of the XP drivers on a very well laid out Drivers and Downloads section in their support site.

So starting with a stock Inspiron 1420 running Vista, the first procedure is to create an additional partition on the hard drive. To do this I used the built in Vista Disk Management tool, found by right clicking on Computer>Manage>Disk Management. Right click on you primary C drive and select shrink volume. As long as you have a large amount of free space on your C drive Vista will be able to shrink the volume and the create a new volume. If your hard drive is more than half full, you will need to use a third party tool to create a new partition, or you can boot into your Vista Dvd and shrink the volume using a Diskpart. I prefer to use Acronis Disk Director or the Partition utility found in most Linux Live CDs.

Assuming you have created a new volume on which to install XP, at this point you reboot your computer, hit F12 on Dells to go into the one time boot menu, select boot from Cd/Dvd RW and boot into your XP install disk. One problem you may have is that Windows XP will not recognize your hard drive if its a sata drive so you can do 1 of two things. Before loading XP you can boot into your Bios and find the setting for your hard drive setting. You can select to set your sata drive as ide and XP will recognize an Ide drive and install fine, once the bios has been changed. The other option is to load the sata driver using an internal floppy drive or on to a custom install disk using a program called nlite, but that won't be covered here.

XP will see both partitions and can then be loaded on the new, empty partition. Once you go thought he XP install process XP will be on the E drive. This will be no problem for XP but keep in mind many programs, starting with the XP drivers will want to install on the C drive. Simply change the drive letter on the install path and it should work fine. Now I recommend you install the drivers in generally this order, chipset, audio, graphics, Ethernet,then wireless and the rest.

Now when you restart your machine, you will automatically boot into XP, you need to repair your Vista boot manager so you can use Vista. To do this, you again will need your Vista install Dvd any will do fine, so borrow one if you didn't get one with your machine. So when the "Install Now" prompt comes up, select "Repair Your Computer". The next screen will show you a "System Recovery Options" box, it will only see the Vista install, select Vista you will get another "System Recovery Options" box, "Choose a recovery tool" the first choice is "Startup Repair" click this option it will discover and repair the Vista Boot Manager. Restart your machine, now you will boot into Vista.
Now you will need to get a third party app to amend your boot manager to include XP. There are several out there the 2 I recommend are, Vista Boot Pro from Pronetworks, http://www.vistabootpro.org/ and Easy BCD from Neosmart Technologies,http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1

Either of these will be able to modify your Vista Boot Manager to include XP. I used easy BCD and the operation took all of two minutes. Open the application, go to "Add Remove Entries" under "Add an Entry" under Widows use the drop down menu "Windows NT/2k/XP/2k3" change the drive to E (or D or F in some cases) to "Windows XP" click "Add Entry" and click save. Reboot your machine, you will be presented with a screen allowing you to boot into either OS.

Your done! Yes it's much easier to start with XP but that's not always an option. Of course back up an image of your Vista install using Vista's backup and Restore if you have Ultimate or Business, if you have any other version of Vista you need a third party application, my own favorite is Acronis True Image. But definitely make sure your backed up before undertaking anything this intrusive. But you're already backed up right?

Latest tech Faves

2008-08-09T23:23:00.001-07:00

Active Virtual Desktop

One feature of Linux and Leopard that Vista doesn't have that is very useful is multiple virtual desktops. I tried several 3rd party apps. available on the Windows platform. Of these the best I found is a little shareware app appropriately named Active Virtual Desktop. A small 1.25 MB download, the app works basically the same as virtual desktops on Linux. Numbered tabs in the lower right hand side of your task bar allow you to quickly change between desktops and applications without cluttering up one desktop. Its especially nice for keeping your email, calendar, and Word documents accessible and convenient. Active Virtual Desktop is 20 bucks and can be found here http://www.active-virtual-esktop.com/index.html a free 15 day trial is available and worth a try.

Acronis True Image

The plethora of backup programs available can muddy the waters a little, sometime its best to go back to an old reliable program you know just works. When you want to create an exact image of your hard drive, including operating system and all installed applications and data Acronis True image will do the trick. I recently used it to move my data on my Lenovo Thinkpad to a larger hard drive. The process took a little over an hour including changing the hard drives into the notebook. Booting into the new hard drive confirmed success, all three operating systems worked fine, all the data was intact. Acronis True Image 11 can be had on Amazon now for 29.99 http://www.amazon.com/Acronis-True-Image-11-Home/dp/B000VLZCEW/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=software&qid=1218343390&sr=8-1

Windows Live Calendar

The Windows Live Suite of free applications continues to get better with several recent updates. The Live Calendar while still in beta is every bit as good as Google calendar. What's to say about a calendar, it works great, email reminders, color coded event categories, it's all seamless and works great with your Windows Live mail accounts. I wish it had a built in desktop client similar to the mail client, hopefully that will be coming soon.

Is Security Software a Scam

2008-06-30T22:11:00.001-07:00

While researching reports of the various vulnerabilities facing computer users, and the monetary incentive of criminal hackers to keep malware on your machine, I came to the realization that we are wasting our money with the current crop of anti-virus software products. One security expert, Greg Hoglund of HBgary called anti-virus programs snake oil because of their expense and inability to detect and remove the modern forms of malware.

Indeed many programs are totally ineffectual in finding the worst threats out there, especially those containing root-kits. Malware payloads are frequently written by several different teams of highly paid, professional software developers. This new form of business, often originates in the eastern European Countries were development and sales of these products is totally legal. Furthermore these "companies" often net profits in the hundreds of millions of dollars so the incentive to keep your machines and networks vulnerable is very high. Although the home user is at risk and is frequently assisting the malware purveyors unknowingly the ultimate target of many of these enterprises is big business. The theft of intellectual property and proprietary information is the real target. The losses from these attacks are staggering, and are measured in the tens of billions of dollars every year.

So what can the home computer user do if antivirus software is ineffectual and the threats are so serious? Several basic fundamentals are necessary these days for safe computing, regardless of whether you are running Windows XP or Vista, Mac or PC. The first and foremost is never operate online as administrator, this is far more important than running antivirus software. This is much easier to do when using a Mac or running Vista, it can be done with XP although it's much more of a hassle. The second thing is to make sure your operating system is up to date, both Windows and Macs have built in software updating built into their operating systems. Safe online behavior is a must, never clicking links or opening attachments in email or downloading pirated music is absolutely necessary, and if you visit porn sites and are running as an administrator you're infected, no doubt about it.

So should you dump your antivirus? Only if you are extremely careful online, and with your computing habits in general? Even then, running an online scan from one of the many security vendors out there will make you feel a little more protected. In reality most people should run some form of antivirus to protect them from the less serious threats out there. All users should also keep an up-to-date, complete backup of all their important data and programs. If a computer gets infected these days it's virtually impossible to trust your computer again until you do a clean reformat, reinstall of your operating system, programs, and data.

Living with Firefox 3

2008-06-28T20:35:00.001-07:00

The much ballyhooed final release of The Mozilla Foundation’s browser, Firefox has finally happened. Mozilla generated a fair amount of buzz with a highly publicized Firefox Download day, where they wanted to break all records for downloads in a 24 hour period. The publicity worked, and over 8 million people downloaded Firefox on June 17th. For many people including myself Firefox has been our primary browser now for several years. The last version of Firefox had managed to gain significant market share on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Firefox 3 has been touted as a vast improvement to Firefox 2’s few shortcomings. The memory leak, a very real issue with Firefox 2 has been fixed. In addition Firefox 3 has been touted as significantly faster than any other browser on the market.

I’ve been running Firefox 3 since beta 3 and have been generally very impressed. The new version still doesn’t run all the extensions and add-ons that the previous versions could, but that seems to be changing quickly.

Since downloading the final release, I have a few issues with version 3. First and foremost, it’s been crashing. Not every time and not on every machine, but it seems to hang when first started on several of my computers, it almost seems to want to “warm up” before it will respond quickly. When it works, it works great, it loads pages fast, and is everything its been purported to be. Oddly the most stable version seems to be the 3rd release candidate version downloaded prior to “Download Day” although it must have been the final code, as no updates are available when I check. The issue with crashing, has made me decide to hold off on upgrading my primary desktop which runs Firefox 2 just fine.

To make things interesting I also tried the portable app version of the browser from http://portableapps.com, the portable version is even more buggy. I tried the portable app on both XP and Vista machines and the browser hangs for several minutes before responding. For portable app fans I recommend the new Opera Browser 9.5 which works great. It was very fast as well as stable and can be found here, http://www.pendriveapps.com/2007/06/10/portable-opera-usb/.

So if you are using Firefox 2 and are happy with it, you may want to wait or download 3 and try it, but don’t delete 2 yet, I think in the near future it will be fine. The Mozilla people do great work and deserve your support, Firefox 3 can be found here, http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/firefox3

Can You Downgrade to XP?

2008-06-14T20:58:00.001-07:00

A lot of people who recently bought new computers are asking this question. I tend to ask why would you want to do that, as I generally think Vista is a big improvement. But many people still want or need to downgrade to XP for some specific hardware or software application that won't play well with Vista. Or perhaps they are just more comfortable with XP, and anyway it's their buck, so whatever they want, right?

Well maybe, maybe not. It seems that a number of the new computers, especially notebooks were designed and built after Vista had released. Device drivers for XP were never written for these computers, especially for the video cards. Many people have tried using generic drivers, but you won't get a great result with these generally. So if you might want Windows XP buy a computer with it pre-installed on it . Any new computer today, with the exception of these new ultra portable laptops, will run Vista fine if you want to upgrade or dual boot.

The 31 Days of the Dragon continues

2008-05-30T23:33:00.000-07:00

I was remiss in not posting about the incredible contest sponsored by HP, and Buzzcorp before but they are in the process of giving away 31 HP Pavilion Dragon HDX Entertainment Notebook PC's. This is an extremely powerful 20 inch notebook PC with a list of specs that would make most hard core gamers smile. A sample of the system specs include Intel Core 2 Extreme Processor, 4 GBs of Ram, 512mb GeForce 8800GTS Video card and an 20.1 inch display. The giveaway also include a boatload of software in addition.
The catch, time is running out the end is June 8th so jump on over to the following sites to enter and maybe win this incredible rig.

Site	Contest Starts	Winner Announced On
AbsoluteVista.com	2-May	9-May
Ars Technica	3-May	10-May
OSNN.net	4-May	11-May
JKontherun.com	5-May	12-May
Barbs Connected World	6-May	13-May
BostonPocketPC.com	7-May	14-May
The-Gadgeteer.com	8-May	15-May
TheDigitalLifesetyle.com	9-May	16-May
DigitalHomeThoughts.com	10-May	17-May
Windows-now.com	11-May	18-May
WindowsConnected.com	12-May	19-May
Geekstogo.com	13-May	20-May
Bink.nu	14-May	21-May
MediabLab.com	15-May	22-May
Last100.com	16-May	23-May
Digital Inspiration	17-May	24-May
Notebooks.com	18-May	25-May
SlashdotReview.com	19-May	26-May
Neowin.net	20-May	27-May
Geek.com	21-May	28-May
Lockergnome.com	22-May	29-May
Planet x64.com	23-May	30-May
TheGreenButton.com	24-May	31-May
Istartedsomething.com	25-May	1-June
BleepingComputer.com	26-May	2-June
HardwareGeeks.com	27-May	3-June
GeekNewsCentral.com	28-May	4-June
Geekzone.co.nz	29-May	5-June
TheTabletPC.net	30-May	6-June
GearLive.com	31-May	7-June
GottaBeMobile.com	1-June	8-June

Please note many of these sites have already ended their contest, I included the whole list because there are some great sites here and you should check them out.
Good luck.

The New Ultra Portable Class of Laptops

2008-05-25T23:51:00.001-07:00

Once again the marketplace has reared its head and the things which were assumed a year ago are no longer. The Asus EeePC is the driving force behind the change. Although the one laptop per child project and its creation the XO may have pre-dated the Asus laptop, it's the EeePC that is the vehicle of change. I don't think any of the big name players had any idea that the tiny 7 inch screen, with a Celeron processor, running Linux would have the impact it did. It comes in bright colors with a well finished plastic shell. Best of all it was only $299.00, for a reasonable fast and very useable little computer. With the Linux installation that includes a number of useful applications such as Skype, the Open Office suite and Firefox, for browsing. It's a fine tool for business travelers or students on a very tight budget. With a tiny keyboard and 800x480 screen, no CD/DVD drive and very limited storage (starts at 2GBs, goes up to 12GBs) it's not for full time use, at least not for big hands and adults with bad eyesight. But for kids or occasional use it works fine.

Now that the EeePC has become such a success, a number of competitors have launched similar machines, most notably the HP 2133 mini-note. The mini-note is slightly larger than the EeePC with a slightly faster processor made by the low power specialists Via, and comes in standard configuration with a 120GB hard drive. The HP has a Linux version as well as a couple that run Windows Vista Basic and Business. Prices on Amazon range from $520.00 -850.00 for the 2133 and has upgrades available for the hard drive and processor. The nicest feature of the 2133 is the keypad which is close to ¾ of a normal full sized keyboard. It has a beautiful brushed aluminum finish that gives it a very professional look to it.

As the popularity of the new mini-notebooks as spread, Microsoft has decided to offer and support Windows XP Home edition for this new class of notebook. While the end of line for XP availability is fast approaching for mainstream OEM's, the people in Redmond have seen the popularity of all these devices and seen them coming equipped with Linux, and not wanting to see this free and open sourced operating system get a toehold they've wisely (in my opinion) decided to offer XP. Since Vista is much larger and demands more powerful hardware than most of these new mini-notebooks carry, XP is a perfect fit. The EeePC is already being shipped with a larger screen, flash drive, and can be had with XP. Of course the price for the higher end EeePC is up to $549.00. The venerable XO of One Laptop Per Child fame is also switching to an dual boot option with XP and its original Sugar OS, albeit not without some controversy. It seems a core group of open source advocates got their panties in a bunch over the move to XP, there was some resignations or firings depending on who's blogging about it. I'v never used an XO although I did hear a number of reports from various sources that the Linux OS it originally shipped with was difficult to navigate. Hopefully the move to XP will accelerate the purchases of the XO and get it into the hands of the educators and children that can be helped by it.

The advent of a new form factor is here. The new ultra-portables showed that the market place will respond to a reasonably priced small computer, WITH A KEYBOARD! Unlike some of the earlier UMPC's that were pushed out a few years ago I believe this trend has legs, time will tell.

Using Vista Backup and Restore Utility

2008-05-05T22:41:00.001-07:00

I recently blogged about my daughters laptop getting infected with one of the many phoney anti-spyware programs out there today PC-Antispyware. In the end we ended up having to reformat reinstall Windows Vista to finally free the machine once and for all of this malady. I would also like to point out an excellent blog I found when trying to research the PC-Antispyware, Bill Mullins blog post on rogue Antispyware programs was very informative about rogue programs out there now and can be found here http://billmullins.wordpress.com/2008/05/04/dont-install-pncantispyware-rogue-security-software/. Bills blog is quite informative and very well done. I recommend you check it out for a number of helpful hints, tools and software programs his homepage is here, http://billmullins.wordpress.com/

Now back to the system restore,that went better than I had originally hoped. In some ways it turned out to be a bit of a Godsend. First let me explain, this computer is not the highest powered machine out there. It was basically a bargain buy at Christmas time from Best Buy, for $599.00 we got a 14.1 inch Gateway 1616 running the AMD mobile Turion at 1.9x2 Ghz, it came with integrated graphics which will use up to 256 MBs of system ram for video use. I upgraded the ram from a pathetic 1 GB to 4Gbs. Ram is cheap and even if the 32 bit system won't see all 4 Gigs so what, its far better than a stock 1 GB. So performance wasn't great, although it wasn't horrible on this machine.

Now however the machine was infected and I doubted it could be fixed by traditional methods. To fix it, I believe I used the term "nuke the bastards" a frustrated comment from one exhausted father, dealing with child's computer. Fortunately the machine came with a system restore disk, but no disks for drivers or pre-installed software, strange but no big deal. Note I choose to install from the OEM Vista OS disk provided rather than use the restore partition, I wanted a clean install, you see I didn't want the pre-installed trialware or more accurately crapware that comes with new computer these days. So the re-install went fine, Vista installs fast compared to XP, and in half hour it was done. Next the drivers, I was surprised that more drivers weren't included with Vista install, as was the case when I installed Vista for the first time on my desktop. So I plugged in the Ethernet from my router and went to the Gateway site were I found a fairly intuitive, and easy to use driver download section. Within an hour or so I had the machine loaded with the latest drivers so then time for service pack 1, which went without a hitch. So now it was time to reinstall the data. Fortunately we had been making incremental backups using Vista's native backup and restore utility, as would turn out, very fortunate indeed.

I wish I could say this went perfect, but it really didn't, even though I have 2 excellent books on Vista, I did manage to screw things up the first few tries. First I wanted to restore her precious itunes library. I download the latest version of itunes as I had a data backup on a DVD of her songs , play lists and ratings. Doing this had always worked fine before, when moving to a new computer. So with the fresh install of itunes I tried the DVD and it only installed about one third of the songs, even though I could see all of them. Not good, no not at all. I tried to install the backup on another PC with itunes, same result.

So now my last chance, the backup on an external hard drive, I had made using Vista's Backup and Restore Center. At first my main problem was trying to be too specific in giving instructions to the program. I tried to restore only specific data, by searching the program and installing all things with the keyword itunes. I got another small amount of songs and metadata but not nearly all of it. I tried the same for pictures with similar results. Frustrated, I was beginning to think this was headed for a total disaster. I tried again, this time selecting to restore the entire contents to the desired drive(c) and let it go. I immediately was queried by the program on how to handle a duplicate file, I told it to just keep the original and not save the second version. This kept happening, I finally noticed the little box to check,"do this with all duplicates" . Now, we were finally getting somewhere!

I took a while, maybe an hour, but in the end after a re-boot, Vista's Backup and Restore Center had done it. Even her desktop icons were back in place. All photos were restored as well as her entire itunes library, with play list and ratings intact, very cool indeed! A program actually performed as it was supposed to.

As for the Godsend, well that's a bit of an exaggeration, but with the latest drivers, combined with no crapware, makes for a far better performing machine. It boots quicker than when it was brand new, and is much snappier opening and running programs even after the ram upgrade. It also illustrates one of the older axioms of computing. Unless you have multiple backups, you aren't backed up. It also highlights a new rule for my daughter and her computer, no passwords for you! I'll control the administrator account on her machine from now on, I'll let UAC handle the rest.

Ed Bott Fixing Vista one PC at a Time.

2008-04-24T20:47:00.001-07:00

Ed Bott Windows expert and Vista blogger extraordinaire, recently took on a friends Sony Vaio laptop computer. It seems his friend bought this machine shortly after Vista released. The laptop was a replacement for a older Sony laptop, that had been stolen. Apparently when the friend used the machine a few times it quickly became a nightmare. Boot times for the $2500 Sony were in the 3 minute time frame, that is insane, I bought a $599 Gateway with a relatively modestly powered AMD machine for one of my kids that boots in around a minute. The report continued on to indicate that performance once booted was equally disappointing. The friend eventually became disgusted, put the Sony in a closet and bought a MacBook.

Enter Ed Bott, former editor of PC World, Windows Blogger for ZDnet, and Microsoft MVP. Ed has written detailed guides to Microsofts operating systems for some time and is well respected in his field. Few people are as knowledgeable about the various incarnations of Windows as Ed is. Ed took the gentleman's PC with the hope of salvaging the PC, into something use able.

The story is a bit more complicated though. Seems his friend had contacted tech support and was told his experience was typical of the computers running the new operating system Windows Vista.

The story is fairly involved, to make a very long story short. A clean install of Vista and a new set of up to date drivers turned the machine around completely. Ed's post on the story can be found here,http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=429 and here, http://www.edbott.com/weblog/?p=1927

I think there is a very important point to the story. Many of the problems of the guys computer can be traced to a couple of things. One, a miserable load of crapware, that many new machines ship with these days significantly slow down and wreck the computing experience of new computer users. Two, poor driver support from the hardware manufacturers has made the Vista experience worse than any new operating system rollout that I can recall. My first Vista computer was a home built desktop, obviously no crapware there! The drivers on my machine worked fine and improved gradually over the months. The second Vista machine was a Dell Inspiron 1420 I bought from the Dell Outlet store, it had a fast processor, 2 Gb's of ram and a 7200 RPM hard drive. Dell also installed little or no crapware as well, the machine works great, always has.

This story should (but probably won't ) be a wake up call to the major PC manufacturers. I understand the thin margins they operate on these days. The crapware aka trialware, provides a small subsidy to the computer makers to boost their profit a little. Folks, it's not worth it, if you continue to push this junk on the consumers we will vote with our feet. Dell seems to get it, Lenovo's seem pretty good, even Sony is offering some models crapware free. HP and Gateway seem pretty infested with this stuff, the only way to get rid of this stuff is to not purchase machines that have it installed.

Now not all trialware is crap. Some things like a trial of Office 2007 may be useful for people and can be uninstalled easily. If you read Ed's account of the process of making the computer usable, you learn some of this junk like an AOL trial was difficult to uninstall from the control panel. Another problem he had was navigating the driver support site from Sony. This is just crazy, you should just type in your machine model number, or even serial number and all drivers should be arranged by release date so you can get the most recent one.

I've heard Sony support wasn't the best but in this case they managed to chase a customer right into the lap of a competitor.

Removing PC Antispyware

2008-04-22T22:15:00.001-07:00

I really thought I'd beaten malware, and so far on my own PC's I have. Running Vista in limited user mode is very safe, if, the end user is careful. Enter one teenager running Vista, as a limited user as I set up their machine. No problem, if something tries to install just don't let it. The screen will darken and ask you for a password, just stop what your doing, and log off. Well what works for some people won't work for others, especially teenagers, who love adding pictures and screen savers and watching youtube ect.

So she sheepishly calls for me and tells me that she thinks she "let something install onto her computer". I take a look, and sure enough, a large window in the middle of her screen that looks similar to the McAffe antivirus. This program is called PC-Antispyware, and it's telling me that I'm infected with some bogus virus, and for 14.95 it will fix it for me. Sure thing I thought, infected yes I am, by you!

So I start the routine, running antivirus, antispyware, making registry changes. Rebooting doing it all in safe mode. After a few hours I thought I had it.

Of course I didn't have it, it still had me. These things are almost always impossible to rid of these days. After a half hour or so the PC-Antispyware window popped up again. After that some other bogus virus scan window appeared, not only do they infect you, then they have to invite their friends to the party. At this point there really is only one option: Nuke the Bastards!

I knew it would come to this, the malware these days is just way to dangerous. A clean install is good for the soul, a nice clean machine runs great, and it will get rid of all the crapware that comes with PC's these days.

Save it, this will be a pain in the ass, but it has to be done!

What's the Best Upgrade for Notebook computers

2008-04-08T14:26:00.000-07:00

People frequently wonder what would be the best way to upgrade their notebook computer. The answer would largely depend on what sort of machine they already have. If the computer is a fairly recent model chances are it will probably have a fairly powerful processor. Often OEM's cut corners on a new machine to lower cost by skimping on other parts of the hardware. I recently bought my daughter a very nice Gateway laptop for a great price, problem was it only had 1 gigs of ram installed. Now, when Windows XP was the current operating system 1 gigs was fine, unfortunately Windows Vista really likes at least 2GBs. This wasn't much of problem however as ram is very cheap right now, so buying extra ram was relatively pain free. I opted to put 4 gigs of ram from the online vendor Crucial. It was very reasonable and was at front door in a few days. Even though Vista 32 bit will only recognize 3.25GBs I wanted the additional ram as she had a integrated Video card that would use up to 128 megabytes of her available ram. The machine runs far better with the ram upgrade and it was well worth it. Installing additional ram almost always improves your performance and in most machines, even laptops is not very difficult. It must be, as my kids remind me if I was able to do it, it couldn't be very hard!

A little more difficult, but frequently even more beneficial is to upgrade your hard drive. In notebooks upgrading to a larger and faster hard drive is a great way to extend the life of your machine and increase performance. Most notebooks come from the factory with 5400 or even worse 4400 rpm hard drives. A slow hard drive in a modern laptop running a dual core processor of some type will often bottleneck the performance of the machine.

Recently Fujitsu announced that they have a 320GB @ 7200 rpm laptop hard drive, ready to ship. A 200GB 7200 rpm hard drive, can be had for around $170.00 right now from http://www.newegg.com. Now you certainly pay a premium for the 2.5 inch laptop drives over their desktop counterparts, but the performance increase and additional space can be worth it. Upgrading your hard drive can be a bit daunting as it will require you to backup all your data and reinstall your operating system. Several commercial applications that allow you to clone your hard drive to another make this much easier. Acronis True image, Norton Ghosts and Drive Snapshot all work very well for full disk imaging. People who have shelled out the extra money for Windows Vista Ultimate or Vista Business can use the built in back up and restore feature to image their hard drive, it work for day to day incremental backup as well as the other programs mentioned. There are a number of USB to Sata adapters on the market to connect your new hard drive to your computer. You will need to format the new drive first

Accessing a hard drive on many Windows based notebooks is often easier than removing a hard drive from a desktop. Several manufacturers on including HP, Dell, Gateway and Lenovo all required no more than 4 screws to remove the hard drive from their notebooks. Some Dells and Lenovo's only have one screw to get the hard drive out, then 4 screws to remove from a bracket surrounding the hard drive. Unfortunately some notebooks, such as the old PowerBooks and the new MacBook Pro's require almost complete disassembly of the laptop to get at the hard drive. Several manufacturers including Dell, Lenovo and Apple allow you to spec the machine with a faster hard drive when you buy it. The MacBook Pro uses top of the line processors and some of the best video cards on the market, the 7200 rpm hard drive should be standard although right now it's only a $50 upgrade for the 200GB 7200 rpm hard drive.

If you do ever decide to upgrade a hard drive or ram yourself make sure you unplug and remove the battery first. Also make sure you are very careful with static electricity as that can destroy computer components of any kind. Wear a wrist strap and discharge any static electricity before working on the internals of any computer.

Why all the Vista Hate?

2008-04-01T23:53:00.001-07:00

Just do a search on Windows Vista and my guess is you will get a number of sites that are dedicated to bashing Windows Vista. Countless articles litter the net about how bad Vista is, and all the resources it consumes, and what a hassle UAC is. Blah blah blah...save it!

My guess is, that many of these people never used Vista. They certainly haven't tried it for any great period of time. Many of the problems that were present when Vista first shipped had to do with a lack of decent video drivers, especially from Nvidia. Many other people blamed Vista because their all in one printers didn't work, but the blame should have been laid at the feet of the hardware makers. Many of them didn't write drivers for Vista because they wanted people to upgrade to "Vista Compatible" hardware,rather than enable the older stuff to work.

My own experience with Vista I believe is far more typical of what you would hear from everyday users of Vista, if the pundits bothered to ask. My experience has been quite good,in fact, better than I expected, being am early adopter of an OS that had so many changes from its predecessor. I've been using Vista for 11 months on my primary desktop computer. It's a modestly powered by today's standards,but it does have dual core processor 2 gigs of ram and a outdated Ati Raddeon 1950 Video card. When I first put it together I ran it on integrated graphics with only 64mbs of video ram and aero glass worked fine. The machine has been very stable and the only real crash I experienced was when I tried to install service pack 1. I detailed that in previous posts, but in general it works great, and whenever I go back to XP I always miss many of the features in Vista that make going back to XP not an option. I like the UAC, I know it gets a lot of complaints from some people, but it saved me at least once when I was half asleep and checking email not paying attention, and accidentally clicked on a nasty attachment. The start search is awesome, the ability to find a specific email, document or program before you get half way through typing it is great. There's no 3rd party search that work nearly as well, neither Google's desk top search or Copernic come close. I have even come to really enjoy the sidebar. I have to admit I just turned it off for the first month or two but now I keep track of the weather, a few stocks and my calendar with the sidebar, I find it quite handy, when I'm using XP I'm always looking over for the sidebar or trying to do a start search, and I just think oh, yea it's not there,crap!

As for performance and hardware needs I recently installed Vista Ultimate on a 2 year old Lenovo Thinkpad that shipped with XP Pro and had the dreaded "Vista Capable" logo on it. Now I'm aware Microsoft is getting sued by some people that claim their Vista Capable machines were inadequate to run anything above Vista Home Basic, but the machine I have works fine. It runs an early 1.83 ghz core duo processor and a ati 1400x graphics card with 128 mbs of video ram. I installed 2 gigs of ram, which is a minimum for running Vista. I also upgraded the hard drive since the original only had 60 gbs and I wanted a multi-boot system, I put in a 7200 rpm 200 gb Hitachi hard drive. This machine boots Vista 2 seconds faster to the login screen than XP. Now I'm not saying Vista runs faster than XP, the XP partition has the Lenovo suite of applications they include with new machines and runs Symantec Corporate Antivirus and Firewall. The Vista side has no manufacturer installed "crapware" and runs AVG free version 7.5 . I used MSCONFIG to turn off all but the security software at start up so it a reasonably fair contest.

Now I still think XP is less resource consuming and is slightly faster in running applications once running, its just not that noticeable.(with identical hardware) With Service Pack 1 for Vista installed, it runs even better, file copy is much better and Vista is now compatible with hundreds of programs that originally it broke. There's no doubt XP has evolved into a very solid OS from the buggy and very insecure system it was, when it shipped originally. So if your older hardware still work fine, stick with it, but if your hardware's getting old and its time for an upgrade, don't fear the Vista, don't listen to the so called experts, bashing a Microsoft product takes about as much guts as bashing President Bush right now.

Vista SP1 day 3

2008-03-27T14:06:00.001-07:00

I recently blogged about my trials and tribulations with installing Vista Service Pack 1 on my desktop computer. To put it mildly it did not start out well. I blue screened,for the first time with any Vista machine I've worked on and was only able to salvage the computer by starting in safe mode and reverting to a restore point. This is the point when I start looking for help from Microsoft.

Fortunately it came,and it was quite good. I emailed tech support and they got back to me the next morning. The suggestion was to do a upgrade install (Repair) of my system. The "Problems and Solutions"log had informed me I was using a beta version of Vista when I needed a retail version, even though I had bought one when I built the PC last year. This indicated to the tech support person that it was most likely corrupted system files. She also suggested I install SP1 in a clean boot mode, which is done by turning off all startup items using MSCONFIG. In short it worked great, and I actually notice a faster machine with SP1.

File copy after SP1 is also considerably faster and the machine does have a certain pop to it that it didn't have after doing the repair install, and had turned off the startup items in the System Configuration.

So Vista SP1, it was worth the initial headache, if you have Vista and it's available when you check for available updates, do it.

Ubuntu 8.04 new Install Options

2008-03-25T23:50:00.001-07:00

Linux a Unix based open source operating system has long been clawing its way up in a attempt to gain a small market share for a long time. One of the most popular versions of Linux is Ubuntu, they have just released the beta of version 8.04 and it has some great new features. For years many of the Linux distributions (distro) have had the ability to run the operating system off a "live CD" which allows you to try out the operating system running off a CD drive so you to check the compatibility of the drivers and give you a taste of the OS, while never touching your hard drive.

One of the new features of Ubuntu 8.04 is a new install option called the Wubi installer. The Wubi installer allows you to install Ubuntu directly into Windows. The experience is very similar to installing a normal Windows application. While it does install the system on to your hard drive, it doesn't change your Windows boot loader, and has a simple uninstall feature. The Wubi install option is far less intrusive than the old and still available install which replaces your window boot loader making an uninstall a true hassle. Dual booting now is far easier and has less of a pucker factor when hitting that install icon. This is a great way to get your feet wet with an excellent version of the Linux operating system. I tried the new installer today on a Thinkpad with XP and Vista already installed. I've been playing with it all night and the new OS works great, even got my wireless to work for the first time with Linux. (don't forget to back up first your results may vary)

Vista SP1 day 2

2008-03-24T13:32:00.001-07:00

Well computers can be a challenge. My attempt at installing Vista service pack 1 crashed and burned. To make a long story short, the best I can do for now was to get the machine to boot into safe mode and pick a restore point just before I started the install. When I checked Vistas "Problem Reports and Solutions" one of the issues it claimed was that I needed to install a retail version of Vista, and that I was using a beta! WTF, I bought my copy of Vista at Fry's so I guess you never know, funny it never caught it before today though, considering I had updated the OS ever since I bought it with no problem. Well that was a helpful.

At least it's up and running fine again, it might be a while before I try SP1 on this machine again though.

Next on the pain train install Linux Ubuntu 8.04on a Thinkpad already running XP and Vista. Should be a piece of cake. The only question is should I install it into Windows with the new Wubi installer, or on its own partition.?

Vista SP1 2 outa 3 ain't bad

2008-03-24T00:03:00.001-07:00

Well so far I've installed Vista or rather attempted to install Windows Vista Service Pack 1 on 3 computers. Service Pack 1 which became available for general download some time last week, was widely lauded in the tech community for adding some solid performance and compatibility improvements to Microsoft's latest operating system. I decided that I'd grab an image of the service pack, burn it on a CD, and just install it that way. In the past, with Windows Xp service pack 1 and 2, I had always paid 5$ for shipping, and had gotten a CD directly from Microsoft. This time I wanted the CD as I am using a satellite Internet service that limits my bandwidth usage. With a total of 4 machines now running Vista in the household, it seemed to make sense to download the entire 450mb image at an alternate location and proceed with the installation without any bandwidth penalty.

The first two installs went great, it only took about a half hour, (which is slower than the original install). But when I put it in my main production desktop disaster seems to be striking as I sit here, typing. First, it was taking forever, then after it's second reboot, blue screen! Oh #&%* ok it restarted again, this time I restarted in safe mode, it seemed to pick up the install at 33% it slowly, very slowly advanced to 100% on step 3 out of 3 on the install process. Next reboot, black error screen with boot up options, tried normal boot, Blue Screen! it restarted, this time I tried safe mode again, as I sit here now its in a "Service Pack did not Install.Reverting changes. Do Not Turn Off Computer" message staring at me. It's been an hour, guess I'll let it run all night and see what I get.

Wish me luck.

Using Vista’s Disk Management tool to re-partition your hard drive:

2008-03-14T00:57:00.001-07:00

Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system has a hidden feature that users of Microsoft's older operating system had to get from outside vendors in the past. In Windows Vista Microsoft has added the ability to re-size and partition the primary hard drive without destroying the data on it. Although not as full featured as Norton Ghost or similar programs, the tool in Vista allows adequate modification of the primary partition to perform several useful functions. For Example, if you wanted to add another operating system to your computer and duel boot Vista with Windows XP or one of the popular Linux Distro's out there, the tools that ship with Vista work just fine.

To re-size and partition your hard drive in Vista click the start button and then right click on the start menu item Computer. Choose Manage off of the drop down menu, you will be prompted by UAC (user access control) to allow the user to access this procedure. The Computer Management window will now appear on the screen. On the left side of the screen the second to last item just under storage is Disk Management, double click Disk Management, and a diagram of the active hard drives, their size and space available will appear on the lower half of the window. Right click on the partition that you wish to resize, when the dialog box appears select Shrink Volume. Another dialog box appears after the computer queries itself to determine how much you can shrink the volume. The most the Disk Management tool will allow you to shrink the volume is 50% of the total available size. You can make the second partition smaller than 50% but no larger. On the Shrink C dialog box that has now appeared drop down to the line that says, Enter the amount of space to shrink in MB: and manually select the size of the new partition using the up/down arrows. Once you've selected the size click the shrink button, and Vista will resize your new partition. Next you will need to decide if you want to reformat your new volume.

If you want to use your new volume as an additional partition within your Vista system for storing data such as media files, or you want to install a copy of Windows XP on it, then you can use Disk Management to reformat and create another partition. using the NTSF file system. However, if you are going to install a Linux operating system on the volume, there is no need, as Linux operating systems uses a file system not available in the Disk Management tool in Vista. To format the volume just right click your new volume and select Format and your new volume will be formatted, it's all quite simple, and surprisingly fast.

Cool Apps: Launchy

2008-03-07T00:45:00.001-08:00

One of my favorite new applications I found recently is a little open source project called Launchy. Launchy is a great way to search your computer and then open documents, applications or even music. The nicest part of this app is you launch, Launchy by hitting Alt then space bar and it's there on your desk top. You begin typing an application you want to launch and two or three letters into the name the application appears in Launchy, usually at the top, of a list, hitting enter launches the application.

Windows Vista users will find Launchy similar to but not as powerful as the start search included in the OS, so considering you just hit the Win key and begin typing to do a start search, it may be of little use. In XP though it's way faster and more convenient than the built in search and is a must have. The developer is planning to make Launchy cross platform so soon it may be available on Linux or Mac OSX.

Check it out at www.launchy.net/ and if you do decide to use it, and enjoy it, please consider making a small donation to the developer.

Saving Money on a Computer

2008-03-06T23:45:00.001-08:00

I'll admit it, I'm a bit on the frugal side, well actually I'm cheap. I seldom buy brand new cars, if I do they're always with the base features and few options. When it comes to buying computers I never like to pay full retail. So, how can you buy a decent computer without spending a ton? Well you could try EBay, I've bought several computers on EBay and it's worked out fine. I think the key to EBay in general is only buy from sellers with lots of feedback. Usually you never have to buy from anyone with less than 99% positive feedback. When you buy from someone on EBay, ask lots of questions, make sure the deal includes the operating system disks. Also don't buy a computer that's running a operating system that's more than 1 generation older than the current OS. In other words don't buy a PC running anything older than Windows XP, unless it's going to be a Linux box or won't be used online. I also wouldn't buy any computer if it didn't have some kind of return policy. At least 30 days or more, if possible. At least if it's DOA you can return it. All of that said, EBay is still a bit risky, people still get burned, usually for not following common sense rules.

Craiglist.org is another great place to find great deals. An advantage Craigslist has is you get to check the item out before you buy it. Never...never buy from Craigslist unless it's cash and carry. Don't send money to someone on Craigslist as there's no recourse if you're burned. Going to some strangers can be a little creepy, so use common sense when you buy from someone you've never met before. That leaves one last category for getting a great deal on a computer.

Buying from a manufacturers outlet store, is my favorite way to save money on a computer these days. Most large computer makers have online stores. Somewhere on the home page you can usually find a link to their outlet store. The great thing about the outlets of major manufacturers is you get the same warranty as a regular, full price product. Also the computers sold from outlet stores have all been checked out by a technician prior to being shipped, unlike a new factory built computer that ships directly from the factory. People shouldn't worry about buying a so called refurbished computer from the original manufacturer. If a computer is merely opened and then returned the manufacturer cannot call it new anymore, by law it has to be listed as used or refurbished.

A quick check of the online stores from Apple, Dell, HP, Gateway and Sony all find outlet stores with substantial savings. My own experience was with Dell and I was totally impressed. I was looking for a current model the Inspiron 1420. I found at least 150 different machines available. I specifically wanted a dedicated graphics card, a 2.2 core 2 duo processor and a 160GB, 7200 rpm hard drive. I found several and quickly had one in my cart and was checked out. I was very happy with the Dell, it was on my front porch in 3 days with standard shipping and was equipped with no extra "crapware", exactly as I wanted. The machine came with the install disc for the operating system and all the necessary drivers ect.

About the Dell Outlet in particular, I am amazed at the sheer volume of product on the Dell site, and how fast it changes. For people needing XP you can find plenty of machines with XP installed. This is important, if you need XP on a new computer for some reason, either an application or piece of hardware you need, that wont run with Vista you don't necessarily want to downgrade a machine that shipped originally with Vista. Not only will you waste money by buying a copy of XP, negating most of your savings you just scored. You might find XP won't run that well on a computer that shipped with Vista. Some recent models of computers that shipped with hardware developed after Vista was released, don't have an XP compatible driver available. This is especially true with some of the newer video cards. So try to find a deal on a machine built with the operating system you intend to stay with.

Just browsing a few of the major PC makers online stores you find a great selection of refurbished computers selling at a considerable discount from their retail list price. Dell and Sony appear to have the most models in sheer volume. HP Lenovo, and Apple have many models but no where near their full selection of what's available new.

So if you want to save money on a new computer certainly check the outlet of the brand you are interested in before you shell out full price on a new computer.

Vista Tip, Add Run to Start Menu

2008-03-02T23:10:00.001-08:00

Windows Vista has a lot of great features. It also has a few annoyances that hide or change features previously available in earlier versions of Windows. By default the Windows Vista start menu does not contain the Run command. To get to the Run command with the standard configuration, click the start "orb" type run in the search box, and Run should be at or near the top item on the list. To add the Run command to the start menu, right-click the start menu, select properties this brings up the Taskbar and Start Menu Properties page. The "Start Menu" tab will be highlighted, click on the Customize" button. This will bring up the Customize Start Menu, scroll down to the near the bottom, you will see Run next to an unchecked box. Check the box, and click Ok to exit and save the setting. Now you have the Run command available, with one click at the start menu.

On Antivirus Applications, Malware, and Safety on the Net

2008-02-29T15:58:00.001-08:00

Over the years I've tried numerous antivirus apps. I've used several versions of Norton, used McAfee, Kaspersky, Avast, AVG, Panda, and Nod 32 from Eset. For years Norton was the standard with McAfee a close second. Around 2003 or so Symantec the maker of Norton piled on the features and became ridiculously bloated and unmanageable. Around this time I tried Panda which sounded better and in fact slowed my computers down far less, and seemed very effective. I've tried AVG and Avast both excellent for free software. AVG in particular is a lightweight application that seems effective.

Lately after reading a recommendation in PC Magazine I decided to give Norton 2008 a try. The new version of Norton is less hassle than the old versions and seemed to slow down my PC less. I was happy with it until it did its daily scan, at that point everything slows way down. I frequently have 3-5 applications open at once and often have Firefox and or IE 7 open with multiple tabs. But when AVG or Nod 32 are running scans I saw little or no performance hit. Another point of annoyance is that I also have an IBM ThinkPad which has Symantec's corporate edition of Antivirus and Firewall. This application runs extremely fast both in the background and when doing scans. Why can't Symantec use this antivirus engine in their consumer grade product? Why does their consumer grade product suck so badly compared to the corporate version? I've noticed pretty much the same thing with McAfee which I use at work.

Of course do antivirus suites work anymore? With today's virus and spyware writers having the huge monetary incentive to keep crap from being removed from your machine probably the best antivirus/malware is the end user.

Some general rules to live by in today's computing world are:

Keep Windows updated, keep your Automatic Updates on and set for a time your machine is usually running.
Keep your Virus and antispyware definitions up to date.
Scan your machine daily, with antivirus and antispyware. Run only one antivirus but use multiple antispyware tools. Generally it's best to run only one antivirus at a time. However you can run as many antispyware tools as you like. The 3 best known free spyware programs are Ad-aware, Spybot Search and Destroy, and Microsoft Defender. It also makes sense to run a commercial antispyware program such as Spyware Doctor. All of these programs can be had at www.download.com
Do most of your computing especially online work as a limited user. Not operating as an administrator is always safer even if you are using a Mac or Linux system.
Don't click on links in an email. Never log on to EBay, PayPal, or any online financial site from a link in an email. Always type in the website manually to go to your bank or EBay account.
If you have teenagers using a family computer always have them log into the computer on a non-administrator account. Consider using Microsoft Windows Steady State program which will undo any changes done to the hard drive by limited users at the next re-boot. This program works great but may be a little on the geeky side. It does take some time to set up properly, but I've been playing with it and find it quite remarkable. Its designed to be used on public computers, such as in libraries so at the end of the day the administrator just re-boots the machine and it returns to its pre-configured condition.
Use Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, or Opera. Internet Explorer 6 is notoriously insecure and should be upgraded to 7 ASAP. Even IE 7 should only used for windows update on Windows XP. Firefox or Opera are generally less targeted by hackers and mal-ware writers. Firefox is getting more popular and is now becoming a target for exploits more and more. Use the add on, "No Scripts" which allows users to opt in for sites running scripts. "No Script" disables all scripts on a site until the user allows scripts to run hopefully preventing dangerous java script exploits from unknown or miss typed URLs. Vista users are safer in IE 7 than XP as Vista runs IE 7 in "protected Mode" which attempts to sandbox the browser from the hard drive. IE 7amp; also has a fairly effective phishing filter, which notifies the user if the link you clicked on in an email isn't taking you to the banking site you thought you were going to.
Use Windows Vista, if you can. Windows Vista was built with a priority of safe computing being one of Microsoft's primary goals. Unlike Windows XP which claimed to be safe when first released Vista truly does have a number of features that make you safer. The UAC or User Account Control is a feature similar to account permissions contained in most UNIX based OS's, that asks for an administrator's password whenever the user install software, hardware, or changes the system in a major way. This has saved me, it can save you from, "drive by malware attacks" where just browsing to a website with malicious code and infect you without clicking on anything.
Use virtual machine software such as Microsoft Virtual PC or similar software from VMware. Or a simpler solution is to use Sandbox IE. Sandbox IE allows you to use your browser in a "virtual sandbox" that protects your computer from malware as long as you don't save anything to your hard drive.
Last but certainly not least, use a nat router. A cheap but effective router either wired or wireless is a must have, in today's online environment. A router will reject traffic from the Internet that was unsolicited thus effectively acting as a hard ware firewall. Even if you only use 1 PC and it's connected to your modem, you should put a router between you and the internet. This applies to high speed connections of course, I'm not sure they make routers for dial up. Dial up users should probably use a third party software firewall such as Zone Alarm or Comodo both are free and work quite well.

Sayonara Powerbook

2008-02-15T23:15:00.000-08:00

Today I finally unloaded my old G4 PowerBook. It was a great little computer but it's age finally caught up with it. For a long time I've gradually become distant from the old girl, my last fling with her occurred after I installed Leopard. It wasn't pleasant, it took seven tries at a clean install, finally I reinstalled Tiger and then tried an upgrade install and finally, it worked. But, in the end it was to little to late. Leopard is not really at its best on a G4, I never really got used to it and I never bothered to go back to 10.4.

I think the 12 inch Powerbook had the combination of elegance and utility that the new MacBook Air can't even come close to. In fact the "Air" is well, kind of like a beautiful woman with no substance or depth. Sure it looks incredible, but without well, everything, a decent ultra potable needs it's pretty much useless. Instead we get an under powered over priced, style is everything, substance can't be found, piece of crap. I think it's proof you can be to thin. A 12-13.3 inch MacBook Pro with dedicated graphics, a Superdrive, and high end core two duo processor with a 250 gig hard drive would have been a world class, kick ass, road warrior machine. The MacBook Air is a fine lapdog for some spoiled, whinny, air head, who mindlessly stairs at her Myspace page, pouting cause daddy won't buy her a bimmer.

Enough already on the "Air". The PowerBook was hard to part with. I almost backed down on the sale at the last minute. Now it has a nice home with a young college student who will hopefully get some more quality time with her. I gave it a clean install of Tiger so the thing is actually useful. Fact is, I just didn't need it anymore.

My new production laptop is a beautiful 4 month old Dell Inspiron 1420. It's not as pretty as the PowerBook but with 2.2 ghz core two duo, and a 7200 rpm 160 gig hard drive it it pretty much smokes any other computer I've used.

One of the better jokes going around right now is that the 15.4 MacBook Pro is the fastest notebook for running Windows Vista out there. The hardware spec on the high end Mac's is impressive, but I doubt it will match the high end XPS Dells or Alienware machine's out right now.

Another compelling reason for not buying a Mac notebook is the difficulty of doing an upgrade. I recently upgraded the hard drive on a 4 year old Dell. It took exactly 1 screw to get the hard drive out of the computer, 4 more screws for the enclosure, and that was it. Try that on a new MacBook or MacBook Pro. Just forget about it unless you have a weekend to kill.

Windows Live Writer

2008-01-14T23:23:00.001-08:00

Tonight I thought that I would try out Windows Live Writer. This is part of the new Windows Live suite available from Microsoft, as a free download for either Windows Vista or Windows XP. The suite includes several very nice applications. I've already tried Windows Live Photo Gallery, Windows Live Mail, and Windows Live Spaces. I've found the photo gallery and the mail application to be excellent. The photo gallery is similar to the Windows Photo Gallery that ships with Windows Vista. It allows basic editing functions and the ability to add tags and or captions. It also allows you to upload to your photos to your Windows Live Spaces account. The Windows Live Mail application is meant to enhance the standard Windows Mail in Vista or Outlook Express in Windows XP. You can add multiple email accounts from either web mail accounts or specific domain based email. The Windows Live Mail supports IMAP or POP mail.

Another interesting component to the new Live Suite is Skydrive. Skydrive gives you 1 Gigabyte of online storage, similar to how you might use a portable USB drive. You can password protect the files or encrypt them for security, and then retrieve them later when needed. You could store a Power Point presentation or a spreadsheet online in Skydrive then retrieve them any where at an remote location with an Internet connection.

Overall Windows Live improves the standard computing experience with Windows XP or Vista. The new mail application allows you to increase you Hotmail account to 5 gigabytes, and you can convert your old Hotmail address to a Live.com if you prefer. The mail application is an improvement over the standard mail applications Vista and XP ship with, without having to go to Outlook, which is just to much for some of us, who aren't tied to it at work. Download it for free and give it a try at http://www.windowslive.com/

Technorati Tags: windows live,Vista Xp

Vista is a disaster?

2008-01-02T00:59:00.000-08:00

I was reading an article in the latest issue of Cpu. Magazine. The authors point was basically that Vista has been a disaster. No one wants it or needs it. Okay it seems that many people with-older hardware, peripherals, or older software applications have had problems with Vista. He also points out Vista is an resource hog.

So the question is, is it worth it?

I run Vista on several machines, all run dual core processors, and each has at least 2 gigs of ram. The new dual and quad core processors available today easily run Vista with a great user experience. DDR2 ram is very inexpensive now, running 2 gigs or more of ram is very cheap. A home built system with the lower end core 2 Intel processor with 2 gigs of ram and a reasonably priced video card can be put together for under $600. Unless you need a computer for extremely high end graphics rendering or high end gaming, a modest computer will give the end user a very nice computing experience with Vista.

One thing can't be argued, Vista is far more secure than XP ever was. Drivers and other software are no longer written to the kernel, this fundamental change makes crashes much less unlikely. The User Account Control or UAC has taken a large amount of the criticism. Having used Mac OSX and several Linux distros, Vista didn't seem to be much more intrusive than these Unix based systems which asks you for a administrative password whenever you install a new program or modify the system in a major way.
One of the major complaints heard about Vista is the lack of compatibility with older hardware. My 3 year old printer works great 1st time, every time, as do all my peripherals.

Unlike XP you can and should operate as a limited user with Vista. Programs can be run or installed with administrative rights safely without having to log out of the regular users account, unlike XP.

Seems some of the high tech mavens have forgotten the nightmare pre-service pack 2 XP was. The firewall was off by default, and difficult to find. You had to buy a 3rd party firewall at the store and install it before you could safely go online. Without the firewall you had the blaster worm before there was time to download the patch. Not to mention many of the gamers were complaining about what an resource hog XP was compared to 98, many didn't switch to XP for a year or two.

So, in short, for me Vista has been stable, and reliable. The new photo gallery and media center work great. I use the sidebar to track my stocks and keep a short term to-do list where I can see it.
Vista certainly has some warts though. Having 5 different versions, not counting all the different combinations of OEM or upgrade licenses is absurd. Just give us 1 version, or maybe a home (Ultimate) and Enterprise for businesses and be done with it. Paying $200.00 for the full Ultimate version would be fine, but $399.00 is ridiculous. And just get rid of Windows Genuine Advantage. Apple has it right with their OS upgrades, $129.00 is reasonable and well worth the price for most versions they deliver. If the price was reasonable less people would pirate and you wouldn't put your users through the activation nonsense.

New Zune 8gb review

2007-12-29T23:15:00.000-08:00

I recently bought the new Zune flash player it's the 8 gb model and gave it a quick once over. So far the player appears to be a solid competitor to the ipod nano. The first thing you notice when trying out some of the pre-loaded content is the outstanding video quality. The screen is a bit smaller than the nano (1.8 inches vs 2.0) but the clarity of the picture seems a little better. That's a subjective observation and could change in time. The sound quality with the same bit rate song ripped from the same cd sounded slightly better on the zune, again a totally subjective observation. I should note that neither in my opinion have the sound quality of the hard drive based Cowon iaudio6 a 4 gb player with the best sound quality of any mp3 player I've tried.
The interface on the zune is also excellent. The squircle? if thats whats it called was easy to learn and is only slightly less functional than the ipods click wheel. I prefer the the menu as it starts up , choosing between the various categories is easy, better for me than the ipod because the larger font make it easier for my eyes to quickly pick out a catagory, than on the ipod. That however changes quickly when a category is chosen. Individual songs are very small when trying to find your selection. The ipod however is really no better, anyone without perfect vision will strain to see what they're playing on either player.
I find the players to be basically equal head to head at this point. The wireless features of the Zune for both syncing with the Zune software and sharing with other Zunes I haven't yet had a chance to use, and I don't expect to any time soon.
The Zune does have an FM radio, a nice feature I will use in time. the ipod has an equalizer that I've never bothered to use, the Zune does not.
My own preference for the players themselves while using them out in the field and in the car would go to the Zune but not by much.
The software on the Zune is very nice. I was able to find pretty much all the podcast I was interested in and I'd say it presented the podcast in a way that I ended up trying several new podcasts that I never saw or just didn't notice in itunes. The music library seems well stocked with a great selection of artists and tracks. But there is no way this compares to itunes or the seamless way it finds your artist and then tells you what others have downloaded. I find itunes superior overall to the Zune store for overall use, and I must say the color of the Zune store is hideous, pink, what where they thinking.
Compatibility: Zune is a windows based product, period, xp service pack 2 and beyond only. Itunes I believe goes all the way back to windows 2000 and beyond and of coarse Mac os 10.2 and beyond!
Well that's my first impression I'll continue to use both my 8gb nano and the 8gb Zune for the forseeable future until I get sick of some feature in one or the other. I have a huge collection on itunes but the zune software allows for a monthly subscription service I'll try out eventually.

Leopard installation hell

2007-12-18T19:25:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago I decided to upgrade my Powerbook G4 with Leopard. I knew I was at the lower end of the hardware requirement spec. 1GB G4 processor and 768 of ram, I was just above the minimum. I decided a clean install seemed in order so I backed up my data and went to work.
I put in the disc went to disc utility and did a reformat then installed Leopard. I'd heard it was a slow process so when it took an hour and a half I wasn't to concerned. Finally the machine rebooted and I waited to do the usual registration sign in to start. I got as far as the pre login screen with the spinning wheel below the apple logo, and this was where it stayed. I waited for about half an hour and still no progress. I tried rebooting several times and this was as far as I got. So I decided something went wrong during the install. I ended up trying a fresh install 5 times. I never did get past the spinning wheel and apple logo. Finally I decided it wasn't to be and reinstalled Tiger.
After a day or so I decided to try one more time with Leopard. This time I decided to just upgrade. For some reason the install took about half the time, and worked perfectly. I've been looking around the blogs and support pages and most people end up doing a clean install when having Leopard install problems.
Well I am glad thats over, I'm enjoying the new features of Leopard and it doesn't seem to be much slower than Tiger.

Pre storm fun

2007-12-17T20:17:00.000-08:00

Always enjoy a good rain storm especially since a below average rainfall for 2006-07 in this part of California left us pretty dry. One good storm and and we might get a coho run in time for Christmas. Went for a short bike ride, my favorite short but sweet single track, 1300 feet up and then right back down. The Titus Switchblade I ride is a few years old but climbs and descends better than any bike I've tried.
Tried installing a beta version of Office 2008 for mac on my old Powerbook G4 running Leopard. It runs but it's sooo slow. Beta releases are always a crap shoot, this one looks nice but it's very buggy, definitely not for production. I prefer Office 2007 on Windows I love the ease of use, for me the ribbon works, although some people hate it.
Mulled over the idea downloading RC of service pack 1 for Vista. Think I'll pass,I'm having 0 problems with the OS as it stands. Looking forward to the final release. On the Extreme tech podcast( http://www.extremetech.com/)someone mentioned that most of the service pack will not be, re-releases of updates already pushed by widows update. But have new features, a modification of UAC to lessen the steps in some cases from 4 to 1 "allows". I think Vista is an awesome OS, not without its glitches but all my hardware has always worked, it seldom crashes a program and runs fast and stable.
So much for conventional wisdow.

Introduction

2007-12-16T20:44:00.000-08:00

Welcome: I wanted to create a blog about the things that interest me. Mainly I enjoy everything technology related, computers, digital music, video, and photography primarily. I love to try different operating systems and different hardware, when ever I can. I listen to a ton of podcast mostly technology related with a few of the NPR offerings thrown in once in a while. I like to try various download services and different mp3 players.
My other alter-ego is that of an outdoor enthusiast. Backpacking, canoeing, mountain biking or cross country skiing is what I love. I've been into the outdoors for over 40 years.