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One of my machines at home runs Windows Vista Ultimate.  Until last night, it had an Asus Striker Extreme motherboard in it, a Core 2 Duo 6400 CPU, 2 GB of RAM, an Nvidia 8800 GTS video card, a PCI IDE card with four hard drives attached, a DVD/CD burner, USB mouse, PS/2 keyboard, dual 19" monitors, and 3 SATA hard drives.  In total it has over a terabyte of disk space.

I chose Vista both for the experience it would provide for work as well as the fact that when you have over about 700 GB of IDE/SATA disk space, Windows XP SP2 starts to exhibit data corruption problems due to some kind of static internal area where disk cache data is stored (I lost a ton of files before digging up an obscure KB article on that).  I spent hours trying to fix that issue and couldn't.  The only solution was a hotfix from Microsoft, which they would not give me because I was using an OEM copy of Windows XP Pro.  They wanted me to go back to where I bought the OEM license, which was Newegg.com, which doesn't offer tech support like that.  So I was stuck.  When I went to Vista, I went with a retail license in case it had the same problem.

Unfortunately for me, over a year later, that Asus motherboard decided to give up the ghost.  It apparently killed a DIMM, which I replaced.  Then it pretty much just died entirely, randomly rebooting and crashing even when just sitting at a BIOS screen.  I decided it was time for a (less-expensive) replacement.  I bought an MSI P35 Platinum and 2GB of matching RAM.  Everything else from the old setup would work with this.

Last night, I received the new parts.  I removed the old motherboard and RAM, installed the new ones, connected everything back up, and fired up the system.  It came to life, then immediately choked with a "BOOTLDR is missing" error.  A bit of troubleshooting revealed what I was afraid of. In the install, Vista decided to put the bootloader on one disk, and the rest of Vista on another.  If you reassemble things such that the bootloader disk is in a different location, the machine won't boot.  I booted from the Vista disc and did a repair.  I rebooted again and got the same error.  Another repair later, the system came up and landed at the login screen.  I logged in and found I had no mouse.

Apparently, the new motherboard uses a slightly newer variety of USB2 ports than the old one did, so there were no drivers on the machine or in Vista itself.  I popped in the manufacturer's CD to load the drivers.  Guess what?  The installer was designed to be clicked on, and there were no keyboard shortcuts available!  With no USB ports, I had no mouse and I had no PS/2 mice in the house to substitute.

When I last left you, it was approximately mid-March and Vista still wasn't quite performing. So here's what's happened since then in my quest to implement Windows Vista Ultimate at home...

I ordered a replacement BIOS from Asus and installed it in the motherboard. The Asus online tech support experience was absolutely first-rate with this replacement. The machine booted immediately after the chip was installed.

With that hurdle overcome, I set out to resolve the networking problem. When I last tried, I could get maybe 60-100MB of a large file downloaded before Vista dropped the entire connection.

My computer happens to be connected to a hub that sits on my desk, which in turn connects to the router I had needed to replace earlier. Since the hub was purchased back when Windows 95 was the rage, I wondered if it might be at fault. I purchased a new 10/100/1000 switching hub at Staples and replaced my old hub with it. Sure enough, I could now download anything I wanted, no matter how large it was or how long it took. Problem solved!

At this point, Vista was functioning. All my hardware had working drivers, and it was all behaving like it was supposed to. I was happy at this point with Vista.

I began installing my software, only to run into a few compatibility issues...

First off, Ulead Video Studio 10 causes Vista to drop out of its Aero interface and back into classic Windows. Aside from that, it seems to work properly.

Nero 7.0 didn't work with Vista. I had to get an upgrade to 7.7.

VMWare Workstation, which I use to run Linux on my machine, needed to be upgraded to version 6.

Pretty much everything else did what it was supposed to do.

So, after all the work, was it a worthwhile project? In some ways, yes. I'm learning a moderate amount about Vista. I'm finding several things I like, and few that I don't. It has been completely stable, needing a reboot only to apply patches or install software. That's no surprise since the same hardware ran Windows XP Pro reliably too.

Would I recommend Vista to someone? Maybe. If you're buying a new system, you might as well get Vista. It's proving to have fewer security bugs than XP Pro and Mac OS X so far. It's reliable and stable. It looks nice. But if you have your hardware already, and you're running Windows XP or Windows 2000 and it's working for you, I can't say that I would recommend Vista. The interface is nice and flashy, but not worth $100-300. The security is better, but if you've configured Windows XP or 2000 correctly, you're probably just as safe. The Windows Sidebar is interesting, but only marginally more useful than the Dashboard in OS X is, and I rarely use that. On the other hand, if you do Windows tech support, you should probably invest in Vista soon because there are enough changes in the way things are laid out, in how you get to different things like the Device Manager, etc., that you may need some time to get familiar with. Then again, aside from things being located in different places, it's really not all THAT different.

So, last night I got home and got back to work at figuring out why Vista kept dropping the network connection.

Vista itself pointed the finger at my router, which I replaced with a new one. Things definitely got better. Instead of dropping large downloads at the 15-30MB level, it got closer to 60-100MB.

A bit of research on Microsoft's KB revealed that there is a power setting that allows Vista to turn off the network card to save energy, apparently whenever it feels like it, even if it's busy doing something. (At least it seems that way.) I turned that setting off and was able to get to about 500MB before it lost all network connection.

At this point, I took a look in the BIOS and the machine actually hung while I was looking at network card settings in the BIOS, making me wonder if there was a hardware problem with the board and/or a BIOS issue.

I downloaded the latest BIOS for the board from the Asus web site. I fired up the system, went into the "EZ Flash" utility and had it save a copy of the current BIOS to a USB drive. I copied the new BIOS to that drive, then told the utility to flash it. The flash utility confirmed that the BIOS file was a good one, erased the existing BIOS, flashed some kind of message too quickly to read, then said it was checking the version of the BIOS it had just erased. When it couldn't find any version information, it displayed an error to that effect and stopped responding to all user input. I let it sit there for several minutes, hoping it would sort itself out. No good. I rebooted it, hoping for the best. No, the BIOS was wiped out. Lovely. The machine was now effectively dead.

I submitted a request for support on the Asus web site after digging out the ridiculous lot of detail they wanted. I received a response email telling me I can expect it to take 48 hours for them to reply. The response, most likely, will be that I need to send the board back in to them for repair. I'm hoping I can convince them to just sell me a pre-programmed BIOS chip I can install myself into the board to save time, but I doubt that will happen.

So my Vista experience so far has been less than pleasant. It began with some odd hardware issues that weren't Vista's fault, some install problems that definitely WERE Vista's fault, a network problem still unresolved, and a dead BIOS thanks to the built-in utility for flashing it.

Stay tuned for more in Part 3.

Microsoft released Windows Vista a little while back. Although I had no need for any of its features, I knew that we would be using Vista in the office sooner or later, so it would be to my advantage to know a little something about it before I was asked to support it. Toward that end, I purchased a retail copy of Windows Vista Ultimate upgrade version using some gift certificates I had received. I was going to install it on my main PC at home, until I thought a bit more about its activation requirements. I realized that the odds were I would want to upgrade that machine within 6 months of moving to Vista, and might end up having to buy another license as a result of that. Better, I thought, to get the hardware in place first and then install the OS.

With that in mind, I logged on to Newegg.com. I bought the Asus Striker Extreme Motherboard, a Core 2 Duo E6400 CPU, an Asus GeForce 880 GTS video card with 640MB of DDR3 memory, 2GB of Corsair's fastest RAM, and a 250GB high-speed SATA drive. This set me back a whopping $1400. However, I had a machine that was much closer to the "curve" than I've ever had, and one I wouldn't be as likely to replace within a year (aside from maybe a processor upgrade). All the components I chose were Vista Ready, all were certified to work together, and where appropriate I had located 64-bit Vista drivers beforehand.

To this pile of new hardware I would add four hard drives from my existing system, an IDE RAID card based on the Sil 0680A chipset, a 16x DVD burner, a 625-watt power supply, a floppy drive, and quiet cooling fans.

I had read online that it was possible to clean-install the upgrade version of Vista by first installing it without entering the serial number, then "upgrading" it on top of itself using the serial number.

Thus began the Vista installation saga...

First, I installed the Core 2 Duo onto the Striker Extreme. I then installed the cooling fan. Then, I installed the RAM. I removed the motherboard, video card, and RAID card from my existing system case. I installed the Striker Extreme, the new video card, the RAID card, and hooked it all up. I left the RAID card disconnected because I knew I had experienced install problems in XP Pro with it plugged in during the install. I wanted to avoid that with Vista if I could. When I had everything all buttoned down nicely, I plugged in the monitor, keyboard, mouse, network cable, and power cord and pressed the power switch.

Something happened, but not much. Lights on the motherboard began to glow, but no tell-tale signs of booting up. I looked at the "LCD Poster" on the back of the machine, which indicated the machine was stuck at "CPU INIT". Guessing this probably meant that it couldn't talk to the CPU, but not sure, I looked in the manual. I couldn't find any listing of POST codes. I looked on the Asus web site. Still no listing of POST codes. I did a Google search and found on a tech forum somewhere a user who indicated that he'd had this same message on a different Asus board, and that the problem turned out to be a tiny piece of plastic on the pins on the CPU socket of the motherboard.

I removed the heat sink from the board (no easy task), un-did the CPU retaining clip, and looked carefully at the socket. No plastic on the pins. I turned the CPU over and, sure enough, there was a small piece of plastic wrap (or something that looked like it) covering a couple of the pins. I gently blew it off and looked for any more potential connection problems. Seeing none, I reinstalled the CPU, clipped it down, put the heat sink back on (which was hard to do with the motherboard in the machine), and reconnected everything. This time, it fired up on the first try.

Unfortunately, I heard the tell-tale sign of a dead hard drive. (Experienced techs will know what I mean when I say one of the drives started "tick-tick-ticking".) I removed the drive and replaced it with another I had. This time the system fired up and the Vista 64-bit DVD began booting. I began the installation, telling it I wasn't entering the serial number now.

Vista asked me where I wanted to install it. No matter which drive I selected, it kept telling me that it didn't think my BIOS would let it boot from that drive. Finally, after a couple of abortive attempts, it begain installing.

It seemed to be installing slowly, incredibly slowly, excruciatingly slowly. (We're talking a couple of hours here.) It was somewhere around this time that I began noticing one of the brand new hard drives making a kind of high-pitched chip. At first, I thought this was due to it being a high-speed model and moving at a higher rate of speed than I was used to. Later, I discovered that when I disconnected the drive Windows Vista installed considerably faster. It also stopped bugging me about the drive not being suitable for installing Vista. I'll have to see if I can return that drive for repair.

Regardless, I eventually had Vista 64-bit installed and working. I rebooted from the DVD and "upgraded" Vista Ultimate to Vista Ultimate. That also went flawlessly. When I logged in for the first time, all my hardware had been detected and had drivers installed for it. I was rather impressed. Now all I needed was to attach the RAID card and load drivers for it. I shut down the system and inserted the card. I rebooted. I removed the Vista DVD, since I no longer needed it.

I went into the BIOS and adjusted boot settings to boot of the SATA drive I'd installed Vista on, pushing the CD-ROM to a lower spot in the boot order so the machine would boot more rapidly. Again, a reboot to make the settings change take effect.

The RAID card BIOS kicked in and told me I had properly connected all four hard drives to it. Then I got the error that there was no disk to boot from. What? What do you mean no bootable disk? What do you think I installed Vista on, twice? OK. Not thinking this through, I installed Vista yet again. I attached the RAID card again. I rebooted and found that it would only boot with the Vista DVD in the drive. I decided I'd sort that out later and moved on to working on the RAID card.

Meanwhile, I noticed some Windows files on the IDE drive attached to the PATA channel. I tried to delete them to recover the lost space. No dice. Windows said it needed those files and was using them. Right... I'll deal with this later, too.

Vista detected the RAID card, but said it had no drivers. Odd, since XP x64 had them built-in. I downloaded them from the manufacturer's web site, making sure I had the final 64-bit Windows Vista drivers. Again, Vista said it couldn't find drivers, even when I pointed it right at the directory they were in. A few web searches revealed that the 64-bit version of Vista has "problems with certain RAID cards", mine being one of them. The same messages indicated that the 32-bit version has no such limitations. OK, fine, I'd install the 32-bit version. Why not? What's one more install among friends (or at least casual acquaintence)?

I completed the 32-bit install with the RAID card out of the system and all went well. I rebooted again, with the Vista DVD out of the box. Once again, I was told that it could not find a bootable disk. I figured this meant that the problem was the lack of a Master Boot Record on the SATA drive. Using a utility I had around, I saw what had happened. Vista had placed the MBR and some other files on the IDE drive, and the rest of Vista on the SATA drive... even though I'd told it to install on the SATA drive.

That was easily fixed. I disconnected the IDE drive and booted off the Vista DVD. Then, I had the DVD repair the Vista installation and, sure enough, I was in business. I was ready to install the RAID card again, and I did. Vista detected it and loaded the drivers immediately. It worked! A check in the Device Manager showed that not only was it working, all the drivers were there and doing their jobs. Gotta like that!

My Vista saga was over. Or was it? I had another box in the room that I wanted to put the 64-bit Linux on, to do some code-breaking work for the Zodiac 340 Cipher (mentioned elsewhere on this site). I told Vista to begin downloading the first 3 of the Red Hat Fedora Core 6 CD images from different mirror sites, so I could maximize the download speed. About 10-20MB into each download, the downloads began to slow down and finally stop completely. At that point, Vista had no network connectivity until it had been rebooted.

I asked Vista what was going on. It said that my router wasn't responding to it, and that I should reboot the router. I looked across the desk and my XP Pro machine was busily downloading away, through the same hub, bridge, and router. No, the router was working fine. Maybe it was the drivers for the motherboard's network card. I downloaded new drivers and installed them. Same problem. I tried getting Vista to renew its IP address. It appeared to hang. Something was definitely wrong.

I came to the conclusion that the problem had to be one of three things. Either the RAID card was conflicting with the IRQ used by the network card, causing a problem that prevented the network card from working, or the drivers were still faulty regardless of what the Device Manager said, or maybe the router WAS at fault somehow and needed a firmware upgrade or replacement.

A search of the Microsoft knowledgebase (KB) turned up an article stating that Vista implements a number of new networking improvements that "older routers" might have a problem with. A quick check of my router's manufacturer web site turned up the fact that my router's firmware could not be any NEWER than 2001, since that was the last time they'd released an updated version. Score one for Vista. Maybe.

I happened to have ordered a 4-port Wireless router to resolve another problem I had, and that router was relatively new. Hopefully it will be "new enough" that Vista presents no problem for it. If so, when I unbox and connect that router tonight I will once again have unfettered network access. If not, time to look for that IRQ (or other resource) conflict.

On the bright side, the Vista interface is slick. It makes OS X look as dated as OS X makes Windows 3.1 look. The window animations are nice, but not distracting or cartoonish like some of the ones in OS X. When it wants your attention, it asks for it in subtle but effective ways like flashing a button in orange, rather than making a Dock icon hop up and down "like a f-cking Jack Russell terrier" (as the Mac commercial parody said). Sounds have a soothing effect. In fact, the whole interface has a kind of soothing effect on me. I like it. There are things I don't like, though. Some things that I used to be able to get to quickly, like Network card settings, are buried a couple of levels deeper than they were. Vista also likes to go out of its way to simplify the language it uses, to the point that (as a techie) I don't know for sure what the heck it's doing. And, like the spinning beach ball in OS X, the spinning ring used in Vista is (as my step-son pointed out) not as easy to associate with "you need to wait while I do this) as the hourglass in Windows XP was. Still, on balance, I think I like Vista. If I get this network problem resolved. And if the applications I care about actually work on Vista. And the games look good. And I can do stuff I need to do, like submit articles to this site...

I'll share more of my Windows Vista experience in Part 2. Look for it here on the site in a day or two.

In looking over my web server logs for the past year, I found that a significant number of people were searching for information about this particular Trojan.  I suspect the reason they came to my site is that I mention it in my review of the free open source antivirus program, Clamwin, which happened to detect this Trojan on one of my systems.  Given that I wasn't quite sure what it was, either, I figured I do a little research so that the next one of you to come to my site looking for the answer to this question will find it instantly.  It took a bit of digging, but here's what I can tell you.

Java.Downloader.Openstream.A is one of the aliases of a Trojan also known by the following names (or at least is related to these):

• Troj/Openstr-B
• Trojan.Java.Openstream.w
• Java.Downloader.OpenStream.A
• Trojan-Downloader.Java.OpenStream.w
• Java/OpenStream.W
• Java/OpenStream
• Trj/Downloader.DMY
• Java/Openstream.W

Doing a search on the above names can provide more information.

This virus spreads during web browsing on Windows PCs.  It downloads and runs a program from a website.  The program it downloads is apparently a variation on a Trojan called "Win32/IstBar". Computer Associates also categorizes this program as Spyware, meaning it can capture personal information and transmit it to others.

My advice to you is that if your antivirus program detects this Trojan on your system, have it remove or delete the infected file.  Run another virus scan of your entire computer (all drives, all files, all directories) after doing that, since these Trojans often drop another "payload" (virus, program, etc.) on your system.  That other program is usually the dangerous one, and your antivirus software should pick it up.

It may also be worthwhile (for Windows users) to use a tool such as "Hijack This" to determine if there are any programs set to run at startup which should not be running.  (I can't really advise you on specifically what should and should not be running at startup on your system, as each computer can be different and not everything running at startup is bad.)  Hitting "Control-Alt-Delete" to bring up the Task Manager and looking at the processes running on your system can be helpful as well.  Processes that are unfamiliar could be viruses, Trojans, or spyware running on your PC.  (Again, I can't tell you which specific processes those might be, but you can usually do a search on each process name that appears in your list and often find out if it's something safe or potentially dangerous.)  In any case, I don't recommend disabling anything in Hijack This or killing anything in the Task Manager unless you're sure you know what it is.

 

If you've ever installed Microsoft Windows on a PC, chances are you've seen it in your Device Manager:  the dreaded "Unknown Device" item.  What do you do to help Windows "know" what that device is?  For that matter, how can YOU know what it is?  Let's take a look.

The "Plug and Play" architecture used on most modern Windows PCs makes it possible for Windows to recognize potentially millions of different devices and automatically load the correct drivers to make them work.  Unfortunately, it's not a perfect system.  If Windows itself doesn't contain the correct driver for a device it has identified, and if there isn't a suitable driver somewhere on your system, that device will often show up in your Device Manager as an "Unknown Device".

The first thing you should try when confronted with such a device is to locate all the driver discs that you have for the hardware in your system.  Then, open the Device Manager, right-click on the "Unknown" device and select "Update Driver" from the context menu.  Point Windows at the various driver discs you have and see if one of them recognizes this particular hardware.  If you're lucky, you'll find the right driver, the device will be recognized, and you'll be finished.  But what if that doesn't work?  How are you supposed to know what this mystical device is if even Windows XP can't figure it out?

 

For Christmas this year, I received a $300 gift certificate to one of my favorite online stores, Newegg. I used the certificate to purchase some upgrades I've long wanted to do to my main PC. That PC used to contain an AMD Athlon XP 3000+ CPU, 1GB of DDR400 RAM, an Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard, a GeForce FX 5700LE video card with 256MB RAM, and various other components, including a very nice Antec power supply (550W).

Using the gift certificates, I picked up a refurbished Asus A8N-SLI Premium motherboard, an Athlon 64 3200+ CPU, and an MSI GeForce 6600LE NX6600LE 256MB PCI-e video card that was SLI-capable (thinking ahead to running two of them). I had to drop another $100 of my own in to get all that, but it was well worth doing so, I thought.

If you're not familiar with ReactOS and you are involved in the use or support of Microsoft Windows, you should take a moment to learn about it.  ReactOS is a serious competitor to Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux as a desktop OS.  Or rather, it will be someday.

If you found this page, I'm going to assume that you have a problem with a particular piece of software and you'd like to remove it from your system. I'm also going to assume you're familiar with Windows Explorer, RegEdit, and the dangers of deleting something when you don't know what it is. If you don't know these things, or are in the least uncomfortable doing something that could seriously mess up your computer, please don't attempt to do what you read about here.

The right way to remove it is to go to the Start Menu, to Control Panel, to Add or Remove Programs, select "Change or Remove Programs", locate the program in the list, and click the "Remove" button.

Sometimes, though, an application simply refuses to uninstall when you want it to. In those cases, you will need to remove it manually. Some people will tell you that it is enough to simply delete the program's files from "C:\Program Files" and move on. In a very small number of cases (maybe 1 in 50) that might be true, but most programs' installers make any number of changes, such as:

• Create a directory under "C:\Program Files" named to match the application and/or its manufacturer, then fill it with additional files and subdirectories.
• Create a directory somewhere other than "C:\Program Files" (such as one directly under "C:\" and populate that with files and subdirectories.
• Place files and subdirectories under "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users" and "C:\Documents and Settings\Default User" to ensure that all users of a computer can see that the program is available for use, to store temporary data files, etc.
• Place files in "C:\Windows\All Users" to make them available to all users.
• Create or modify one or more INI files on the system.
• Add an entry to the Registry to tell the "Add or Remove Programs" control panel where to find the application's uninstaller.
• Add entries to the Registry to tell the Windows Explorer to associate this application with specific kinds of files (e.g., ".doc" to Microsoft Word, as well as ".rtf").
• Add entries to the Registry that store the application's preferences, such as what font you like to use in an editor, where you last saved a file, where to place the application's window on the screen, etc.
• Add DLLs and other files to the Windows directory.

The installer might do other things, depending on what kind of an installer it is. For example, a screen saver installer might put some ".SCR" files in "C:\Windows\system32". A device driver installer might put items in the System Tray (which it does by creating Registry entries). A resume package might add templates to Microsoft Word directories.

Because of all this variation, there's no single set of instructions I can give you that will get every file an application might have installed 100% of the time. However, if you follow the instructions I provide later in this article, you have a good chance of being able to remove the bulk of the application. If you want to get rid of ALL of it, one thing that might work for you is to follow my instructions, then try reinstalling the application and using its own uninstaller to remove it. That would theoretically get everything you missed. (I have to warn you that some applications' uninstallers don't remove everything they installed, either because they're trying to keep you from losing data you created yourself, because they're buggy and incomplete, or because they are cautious and trying to leave behind files that other applications from the same manufacturer might be using.)

Pointing out that while they've confirmed that they can crack the security of Windows systems using a simple USB device, security experts at SPI Dynamics indicated that the design of the USB protocol would enable similar cracks to be created for any operating system that uses USB devices.

The gist of the "attack" is that most USB drivers (including those built into Windows) have been designed for speed rather than security.  By exploiting the lack of proper error checking in the driver, a USB device can be created to take control of the machine and perform further actions with a high level of security status (i.e., "system level privileges" like a component of Windows).  The experts displayed a USB memory device that was programmed to take control of a system and extract a copy of the most recently used files to the device.

While such an attack requires physical access to the machine you're exploiting, the use of USB networking and wireless networking devices could extend the vulnerability of a machine outside the physical machine.

For more information, read this article on eWeek: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1840141,00.asp

Panda Antivirus Platinum dutifully reminded me tonight that I have only 28 days to renew my subscription to their update service.  Last year, I blindly renewed because I didn't want to take time out to look at my other options.  Panda's product is a good one, though I had some problems with its firewall and update procedures.  The firewall didn't like MMORPGs very well, especially if they had updated recently, which most do pretty often.  Other network based games had similar problems, where Panda's attempt to bring up a warning about a program trying to access the network would crash, slow down, or at the very least interrupt a gaming session.  The updates often had trouble connecting to Panda's servers, and frequently displayed messages about it, even though they would connect a few minutes or hours later successfully.  So I decided it was time to look at alternatives.  And being a bit of a cheapskate, I decided to look at open source (free) alternatives.  This search brought me to the open source "ClamWin" AntiVirus package.  I'll review that package here.