For techie tips and tricks, tools and sites of (dis)interest

Brooker enters the forum of Mac OSX vs. Windows Vista...

| Tuesday, September 29, 2009
... With hilarious results:


Recently I sat in a room trying to write something on a Sony Vaio PC laptop which seemed to be running a special slow-motion edition of Windows Vista specifically designed to infuriate human beings as much as possible.
LOL

I don't like Apple products. And the better-designed and more ubiquitous they become, the more I dislike them. I blame the customers.

Amen

Read the full article by Charlie Brooker

Boot up faster

| Saturday, September 26, 2009
If like me, you are still using Windows on your primary PC or Notebook, and - heaven forbid - are still using XP, and you're not a fan of re-formatting and reloading the OS every time things get bit infected, or slow and heavy... Pause for breath... You're probably either just not interested, or , quite the opposite, you're fond of poking around the registry, tweaking and optimizing.

When I get a virus, trojan or other nasty, I like to remove it, clean up all traces of it, and kill off the previous System Restore point(s). I have Nod32, Xoftspy, Malwarebytes, Spybot S&D, Spysweeper and other tools to help me out in this regard. I don't do "re-format and rebuild" - not ever. You learn nothing, and you lose too much. It takes time to lovingly customise your user experience. Reloading XP might be quick, but all the little flourishes you add over months, even years, is definitely not.

The downside of all this, is that eventually, things start to slow down over time. It gets tougher and tougher to clean up the remnants of this and that. One by one, the applications, files, pictures, movies and mp3s accumulate until you're short of resources; CPU, memory and disk space.

So, you do your best spring clean and you look at what you can optimise.

This is a minefield... Many so called optimisations can do more harm than good, so it's best to stick to the few that are known to work well. Keep it safe, at least at the start.

Boot up - we all want that to be quick.
System readiness from logon - that's really important.
Application loading times - Firefox, anyone?

I'm not going to go through all the things you can do to improve performance, because this article makes a pretty good fist of that, but the most important thing to me to start with is boot time.

BootVis can really help here. There's a really good article on it from OReilly, but the best resource is straight from the horses mouth, and was written recently. The document, imaginatively called "Windows Platform Design Notes - Fast System Startup for PCs Running Windows XP" really explains the ins and outs of BootVis, if you really want to know. Otherwise, the OReilly guide is more than good enough.

If you don't feel like using a tool like BootVis, you can always turn on boot logging and read through the boot traces. You'll be digging around for ages, but you'll learn a lot this way (I picked up a thing or two, anyway). You can really see where the bottlenecks are occurring, and can address them one by one. You can read all about this painstaking approach and try it out if you want. Another alternative is tracelog.exe, part of the Win XP SP2 Toolkit, which is described in detail in an article on citrix.com.

One way to get a startup trace whenever you want, is to add the /BOOTLOG and /SOS boot switches to a new OS entry in your boot.ini. This is pretty organic. Just don't mess it up - I promise you'll regret it if you do ;-)

Happy boot optimising.





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Help beat keyloggers on public computers

| Thursday, September 24, 2009
This is a very good tool to use to avoid your passwords being intercepted by keyloggers.
Read this:
http://windowssecrets.com/2009/09/24/01-More-tricks-to-evade-keyloggers-on-public-PCs

Microsoft's new tablet notebook offering looks like it could be useful

| Wednesday, September 23, 2009
It's called Courier and it's beautiful


Some people are complaining because it's hinged. So it has a hinge? So what!?
Journals, diaries and binders have "hinges" - nobody moans about that.



Seriously - if Microsuck can deliver on this, I might just stop calling them Microsuck. This could single-handedly make up for Win ME, Vista and even Visio.

Thinkpad owners with poor wireless connectivity read on...

| Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Most of the time I don't face issues with dropped connections, but recently I found myself in a situation where the signal was not so strong (no repeaters were located any where near me, and the access point didn't have a 5dB+ aerial). As a result, connections were dropping so often, that I was nearly driven mad.

Every other wireless device was fine, dropping either occasionally, or not at all, but my Lenovo Thinkpad T61 was, or rather the drivers for the Intel WifiLink 4965AG card were, quite frankly, performing pretty poorly.

In deperation, I visited the Lenovo site to see if there was any upgrade available. There was:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/MIGR-70504.html

However, I realised from reading that page, that it wasn't going to be all that simple. The webpage lists a daunting number of prerequisites and caveats relating to model number, card version, current installed program versions and so on. So many, in fact, that I was beginning to get turned off.

Eventually, for me at least, it boiled down to this:

Note: The part numbers are listed so that you can find each component driver easily.

Intel Wireless LAN (11abgn, abg, bg) driver: 6hwc05ww.exe
ThinkVantage Access Connections for Windows XP - Notebooks : 6hcx41ww.exe
ThinkPad Power Management driver for Windows - ThinkPad : 6hku06ww.exe
Hotkey driver for Windows Vista, XP, 2000 - Notebooks : 6jvu32ww.exe

From the readme notes for Intel Wireless LAN (11abgn, abg, bg) - 6hwc05ww.exe:
Make sure that the following driver prerequisite were installed on your system
  before installing this driver:
  - MSXML6.0 Parser or higher
  - Windows Installer 3.14 or higher
      (Download installer from http://www.microsoft.com)

- If you use ThinkVantage Access Connections, the following software must be
  installed.
  - ThinkVantage Access Connections for Windows XP/2000
      version 5.1 or higher
  - ThinkPad Power Management Driver for Windows 98 SE/Me/2000/XP/Vista
      version 1.51 or higher
    or
    ThinkPad Power Management Driver for SL Series
      version 1.44 or higher
  - ThinkPad Hotkey Features for Windows 98/98 SE/Me/NT 4.0/2000/XP
      version 1.24.0603 or higher
    or
    Hotkey Features for Windows Vista/XP/2000
      version 2.09.0002 or higher
    (Note: Refer to each Hotkey package for which version to use.)

- If you currently use IEEE 802.1x authentication on Windows XP Service Pack 1
  and do not use WPA encryption, Lenovo recommends you to uninstall Q826942 (WPA
  Supplicant update rollup package in Windows XP) and Q815485 (WPA Wireless
  Security Update in Windows XP).
  This does not apply if you are running Windows XP Service Pack 2.

  To check if Q826942 or Q815485 is installed and to uninstall it:
  1. Start Windows XP and logon with administrative privileges.
  2. Click Start and then click Control Panel.
  3. Click Add or Remove Programs.
  4. Click Windows XP Hotfix (SP2) Q826942 or Windows XP Hotfix (SP2) Q815485
     if it is listed under Currently installed programs.
  5. Click Remove and follow the instructions on the screen.

  Note:
  The above action will remove all the fixes within the update rollup package,
  Q826942. You may need to re-install the other specific hotfixes you expect for
  this rollup package.

- You may need to re-enter security information after updating the Wireless LAN
  driver.

- If you use Single Sign-On with the following authentications, ThinkVantage
  Access Connections version 4.22 or higher is needed.
  - LEAP on Windows XP

- [Specification changes] 2200BG/2915ABG Network Connection will report lower
  signal strength than with previous driver versions. Because the 2200BG/2915ABG
  methodology was changed to be more accurate and responsive, similar to the
  3945BG/3945ABG. However, wireless network performance and functions are not
  affected at all by this change.
 I don't know about you, but I find even the readme a little bit discouraging.
So from the notes, check you have the right MSXML parser 6.0 +, and the latest Windows Installer, and from there:

Switch off wireless radio (use the hard switch to be sure it's not going to come back on)

For the T61 with the 4965AG WiFi card:
Install the following parts in this order:

  1. Hotkey driver for Windows Vista, XP, 2000 - Notebooks : 6jvu32ww.exe
  2. ThinkPad Power Management driver for Windows - ThinkPad : 6hku06ww.exe
  3. ThinkVantage Access Connections for Windows XP - Notebooks : 6hcx41ww.exe 
  4. Intel Wireless LAN (11abgn, abg, bg) driver: 6hwc05ww.exe
You will have to restart after each install. Make sure you do this. Messing this up is not an option!!!

Note: you may find that you are already at some of the minimum driver / program levels, but still look for the latest for your platform. For the Vista versions of the drivers above (points 3. and 4.) visit those pages and you'll find the link to the page for the Vista drivers / programs.

So, after doing all this, how was the performance of the new wireless adapter driver?
In short, pretty much perfect. Not one droped connection, and even a 40% signal could be used to get acceptable transfer speeds (18-24Mbps out of a possible 54).

What was an added bonus wass that the new Access Connections program is pretty cool and flashy. It's still the same underneath, but there are some extra features. I won't spoil the surprise for you in this post. Maybe later.

If you are suffering at work or at home from all-to-often dropped connections (and I know many of you are), you could do a lot worse than upgrade. Your sanity will thank you for it.

Ever wonder how you spend all that time on the PC?

| Saturday, September 05, 2009
Well, no need to guess. ManicTime is a handy little freeware utility that allows you to track your time spent on your computer, by program, and your idle time too.

All this information is stored in a local database, isn't transmitted anywhere (for those with security concerns, rest assured), and can be displayed in all manner of views, graphs and charts. It's not a mindreader, so you might have to tag your time, but that's pretty easy.

It might not be something you'll use often, but it's interesting to give it a try at work, you might be surprised just how much you spend time switching applications when you see the results, not to mention the surprising amount of downtime. An eight to ten hour day doesn't amount to as much real work as you might think, especially when you take away the time lost to meetings, lunch, coffee breaks and other meanderings.