Living with Firefox 3

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?

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

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

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

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.

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

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!