Hardware Installation Review – Asus M3N78VM..

I recently installed one of the above motherboards into a client machine to a replace a first generation P4 Intel D845WM, and there are some points that I would like to make. The Asus board is a Micro ATX type c/w integrated video, sound, network port; all the usual stuff. It is at the budget end of the scale, and Asus like to think of it as ‘budget business class’.

I would not recommend that this motherboard  is installed into an older small tower case. Here is why:

1. The components to the North of the main power input are so close to the edge of the motherboard, that they would be in contact with any installed optical drive that occupies the slots which are below the level of the bottom edge of the power supply.
2. The main power input cable from the power supply ends up being very close to any hard drives and associated cabling, and the release catch for the input plug faces away from the board, which makes access to it really quite difficult if you find yourself having to replace the power supply for any reason. 

I actually installed the board into an older medium tower case where there is little choice as to where drives of any kind can be placed. The main problem with many older cases is that they lack depth, leaving no space between the edge of the board and the drive bays. This is more apparent with Micro ATX boards than the regular ATX boards where there is more space to spread the components out.

There is a really bad design point on the board which I think should be singled out. There are two integrated video ports, one DVI and one analog. The DVI port is closest to the motherboard, and is mounted very solidly to it. This is not the case with the analog VGA port which is a separate assembly soldered to the board just behind the DVI port. There is far too much leverage possible when a monitor cable is connected, and contact with the motherboard could easily be lost if the case was moved around with the cable still attached.

For single monitor use, I would recommend using the DVI port. If two monitors are used, insert and tighten the analog monitor cable very carefully and then use a substantial cable tie to bind both cables together. This should help reduce leverage.

Other than the points above, the motherboard performs very well.   

Internet Security..

We all need it, but how many really want it?

The good ole days of Windows 98, iIf a computer user wanted to transfer a file via MSN, Yahoo, AOL Buddy or ICQ to another user and it wouldn’t transfer, what was the the first thing that both users would do? If your answer was anything other than ‘turn off the anti-virus and firewall applications’, you are wrong. One way or another, the file was going to get through. You could warn people of the dangers of doing this until you were blue in the face, but it made no difference. Guess what? Nothing has changed.

Until fairly recently, I would install a variety of anti-malware stuff on every client computer which came my way. It was all free stuff because people like free, and it was all good stuff too. The problem with all of the free stuff other than Windows Defender is that it requires manual input from the user, and most do not feel disposed to paying for two or three solutions which do the job for them. Do the majority of users manually input anything other than text to their friends? Not until the computer no longer allows the user to go to a website of choice!!

I also used to install Hostsman and the MVPS hosts file, and set it to update automatically. Every user where I have done this has called me asking how to uninstall it because it is blocking some webpages or adverts on a webpage. The customer is always right, yes?

Conclusion: These people only want protection as long as it does not get in the way of anything else that they want.

64 bit issues.. Printer sharing

I am assuming that you know how to and have made the necessary share permissions on the computer which is hosting the printer.

To share a network printer being hosted by a computer running a 32 bit operating system with another computer running a 32 bit operating system, Vista or XP, you would go to Control Panel > ‘Printers’ > ‘Add Printer’ > ‘Add a network printer’. Apologies to any of you who consider that I am stating the obvious. In fairness, it is obvious.

Sharing a printer being hosted by a computer running 32 bit Vista or XP with a computer running 64 bit Vista is not obvious, because if you use the above method, it will not work.

So how? First, you need to know the name of the computer which hosts the printer, and the name of the printer to be shared.

Sitting at the host computer: The procedure is the same for Vista and XP

Start > My Computer > Properties > Computer Name tab > Change button. Write down the name that you see here because this is the computer name.

Start > Settings > Printers and Faxes > Right click on the printer to be shared > Properties > Sharing tab. Write down the name that you see here because this is the printer name.

OK. Now sit in front of the Vista 64 computer:

Start > Control Panel > Printers > Add printer > Add a local printer > Click on ‘Create a new port’ > ‘Local Port’ > ‘Next’.

The port name will look like this: \\Computer name\printer name

So enter the names already retrieved, ensuring that you use the same format, then click ‘OK’.

At this point, you will be presented with the ‘Add New Hardware’ process. You can either select the make and model of your printer from the lists or insert your printer installation disk if you can’t find yours. The printer will be added, and you should be able to print a test page.

Another solution is to use a print server. There are three options if you take this route.

1. Replace your router with one which includes a print server. This is the most expensive option.
2. Acquire a wired print server unit and connect it to your existing router. Beware the cheapest units as they will invariably be USB 1.1 compliant only.
3. Acquire a wireless print server. Setup may not always be straightforward, but the printer can be moved around.

The benefit of any of the three options above is that the printer is available all of the time, not being reliant on a host computer’s power state, but they all cost $$$ or more.

How much RAM?

Windows 2000 machines aimed at business would sit on the shelves with 128mb fitted. When the corporate buyers came along, more memory would be specified, maybe 256mb. Windows 2000 would rattle along quite nicely with 256mb powering it, but if it was fitted with 512mb, it would fair fly. But bear in mind that almost all of these machines had a video card sitting in a slot. The 256mb only had to push programs and data around. This was also true of Windows 98/ME machines of the day. They may have only been 2 or 4mb Matrox Mystiques or similar, but RAM on the video cards helped out a lot. In fact, one way to get the performance up on a machine of that era was to get a better video card. Gamers used video accelerators which sat in an adjacent slot. Voodoo is a name that springs to mind.

So, did Windows computers run on the quoted minimum RAM? Yes they did, not particularly well and they had help from the video card. But times they were a-changing, and motherboard manufacturers started to incorporate sound, network and video capability. Unfortunately, many OEMs continued to supply XP machines with the same amount of RAM as the Win 2000 machines, but now they had to share with the integrated components. One could change the amount of RAM given to the video part, but unless the full amount was given over, video performance could not deliver. Web pages were starting to get heavy with color and animations, and games (not the Windows games) needed as much as could be thrown at them. Integrated video RAM was on the rise and has been ever since, yet system RAM at point of sale has been kept low.

Laptops suffer most because nothing inside can be too high powered. Heat and battery life are two big issues, and if anything needs more RAM, it is the laptop. But no, the OEMs fit the same amount of memory into a laptop as they do a desktop. So have you worked out why your laptop is slow? OEMs don’t fit small amounts of RAM because that is all that the machines require. They do it to keep the price down, even though a 1gb ram stick can be bought for the price of a family sized pizza these days.

There is no heroism medal given for trying to work on a computer which does not have enough resources. You don’t get a prize for trying to squeeze a modern OS onto a 20gb hard drive. What you get is lousy performance. You can argue the point that no more can be done on a 4gb Vista machine as could be done on 1mb  and DOS, but to believe that you could ever win that one suggests to me that you have forgotten just how primitive it all was way back when.

Did XP run so well in 512mb? It certainly ran better than with 128 or 256mb, but put 1gb or 2gb in an XP machine and watch it fly. Applications appear very much quicker, updates are installed much quicker, the machine is no longer dogged by having to give up large amounts of RAM to video and games run more respectably, and multitasking is a breeze. Use an XP machine with over a 1gb of RAM and you will go back to your 512mb machine and cry.

Vista requirements are higher all around. You need 1gb RAM at least. That is 1gb, not 1gb – 256mb given to video. A 1gb machine with an integrated 256mb video card is actually a 768mb machine. BUT Vista needs at least 1gb all to itself, not shared with hardware components. Are you getting this yet? A 512mb XP machine with a 64mb integrated video card is not a 512mb machine. It is a 448mb machine. If you don’t allow the full RAM share to video, performance takes a dive overall.

There are computer users who will try to intimidate you, pour scorn onto you if you mention upgrading RAM. Do NOT listen to them. RAM is and always has been good, and the more you have of it, the better your computing experience will be.    

And some say that Windows 7 is really Vista SP3 and that Vista is useless!!

I have a spare box kicking around at the moment, not too well specified but OK. So I thought that I would install Ubuntu 8.10 on it. That goes well as long as one choose the option to use the entire disk, and in fact it did. Then I get a popup telling me that some of the hardware drivers necessary may not be free. They are free for Windows users. Ha.

Rather than wait for Ubuntu to discover updates, I manually started Update Manager. Two hundred and ninety one updates, in numbers 291. No wonder Ubuntu is served as a roll up every six months. Also, there is hardly any real difference in the builds apart from a kernel revision because the earlier kernel was susceptible to who knows what.

I was advised that I would have to use an nVidia video driver that was not part of or supported by Ubuntu but that had been tested by the Ubuntu people. Say what?? It is asking for a restart. Isn’t this one of the bad points that Linux users level at Windows. it has been running for over an hour and so far, all I have done is install updates and had to reboot twice. After the second boot because of the video driver, I now had only two resolutions available, 800 x 600 having been lost. I don’t have these kind of problems with Windows. A few more failed attempts and reboots while getting Ubuntu to recognize and make use of the nVidia FX5500 have made me give up. It is time to write zeros to the drive, definitely the best way to shoot a penguin, and set about installing an operating system which works. In the case of this machine, it will not be Vista because of memory slot limitations, but XP or 2000 will run well and, in the time it has taken me to complete the exercise in futility as briefly outlined above, I could have a Windows computer, up, running, fully updated and productive.

How anybody could talk a Windows user into dumping their OS in favour of Linux just baffles me. There must be a law against doing so, and if there isn’t, then there should be a law passed. Linux trolls harp on about Windows being caught by open source operating systems, but the only way this is going to happen is if Linux uses roadside bombs. Linux is a ‘one percenter’ desktop environment because that is all it deserves presently. It is strictly geeks only or for people who consider 24/7 problem solving to be ‘productive’.      

Fun with numbers..

A recent report has come up with an interesting fact. Eighty four percent of IT Pro’s will not be upgrading to Windows 7 this year. This should not be a surprise, bearing in mind that Windows 7 has not even reached the RTM stage yet. I have no doubt that one or two of those questioned are still wrestling with the decision to upgrade from Windows 2000 to XP.

One has to look at reports like this in context. If your company is running processes today on reliable equipment, there are no plans to change or add to the load of the processes, and there are skilled people employed who able to keep the incumbent hardware/software running smoothly, the need to upgrade hardware and software simply does not exist. It stands to sense that no company is going to deliberately prejudice what is perfectly ok and incur major expense doing it.

The average home user faces a similar dilemma to the corporate IT Pro. I know of one lady who still runs Windows 98 because she has a chess game that she likes to play. It doesn’t matter to her that the chess game can’t play like Bobby Fischer, or that by staying with this one game that she will never become a chess master. The main consideration is that she can play her game, and send/receive e-mails from her family. I doubt that the lady in question will ever upgrade, unless one of her family give her an XP machine and a simple chess game to replace what she has now. The computer she has now was a donation through the same channel.

For the hobbyist, gamer, and advanced home user, the picture is very different. This group is always looking for ways to push boundaries. For the advanced gamer particularly, the quest to squeeze an extra fraction of a second in response time is all important. At this level, many computer users can put together their own computers or know somebody who can. In this way, OEM computer manufacturers lose out.

Something which can only be seen in retrospect is that the release of Windows XP in 2001 marked two highpoints.

1. It was the first all purpose, reliable, stable operating system, almost a ‘one size fits all’.
2. It enabled (along with better hardware) on-screen business and gaming graphics on the PC, beating the concept of virtual reality devices hands down.

Since that time, games have been made a little more realistic, but they are still not beyond the capability of XP to deliver. I use games as a marker because they are a good indication of  a computers ability to perform. Vista needed more of everything than XP ever did, but there were problems. Vista was not well supported outside of Microsoft in the beginning, and no killer application or game was forthcoming which could only run on a Vista platform. There was stuff which only runs in Vista, but none of it was in the category of ‘must have’. Windows 7 will face the same problems despite the inclusion of ‘touch screen’ technology.

So what happens next?

We wait for somebody to come up with lifelike affordable 3D, still frame and animated, which uses today’s hardware and present OS range. I am not talking about silly effects like Dreamscene or CompizFusion. As good as graphics are today, there is still a sense that if you move to fast, you will leave a hole in the stage backdrop. Virtual tours are either still frames fed in a timed stream or walk-abouts through Lego style building block scenarios. Just like the gas/petrol/diesel fed internal combustion engine, we have more or less reached stagnation point, and it is going to take something really spectacular to get anything like the response to the launch of Windows 95 way back when to get the industry back on its feet. 

Oh, the fragility..

I don’t know very much about the world of espionage, be it ‘Bond, James Bond’ style or plain old boring commercial skullduggery. I do know that all sides went to extraordinary lengths re technology in order to gain an edge. In the days of paper and filing cabinets, if a spy wanted to get copies, he/she would have to use a small camera like a Minox. Cute, and with excellent resolution, these little cameras could provide a useful working copy of any document.

The problem in using one of these is that you had to be on the premises, and this could involve a lot of travelling. The Minox has been replaced by the hacker, which is a nice sit down job, working from home.

I know less about sabotage but, if movies are anything to go by, huge explosions, large construction machinery and fires have all played a part. As with espionage, there is the problem of having to be on site which again involves travelling maybe, and one has to plan a quick exit in order to evade the three constituents of all good sabotage attempts. It requires a less technical approach, but one has to know something about explosives and/or portable nuclear devices.

OK, so you are not a hacker or an explosives expert or bull dozer driver, but you want to cause a bit of a stir and inconvenience a great many people, while bringing down a few commercial enterprises without having to run from flying glass. All you need is knowledge of underground cabling and a hacksaw (pictured left) available from all good hardware stores. Some bods recently cut through underground fiber optic cabling in San Francisco. It caused havoc and took a few hours to repair.

Get a mix of hackers and hacksawers together and you could reduce major national or world centers to sprawling wastelands without having to set a single fuse. If you want to know where anything is that would make a good target, all you need is a netbook, GPS and Google maps. Kind of scary, isn’t it. No Vodka Martini drinking suave operatives required. No training re how to kill a person with a Rolex watch. No training re how to use a Minox light meter. Just a handyman hacksaw and a couple of spare blades.

Vista and keyboard scroll wheels.. part 2

How to disable the keyboard scroll wheel after having gotten it to work by installing the Win 7 driver until the next reboot. BTW, this is the ultimate detrimental side effect.

Depress the SLEEP key..

Now, when one wakes the computer by swishing the mouse around, the keyboard scroll wheel does absolutely nothing except take up real estate on the left side of the keyboard.

Possible workarounds:

1. Never put the computer to sleep
2. Change the keyboard for a less annoying model
3. Carefully shape a piece of duct tape and apply over the scroll wheel (Canada only)
4. Shoot the scroll wheel (USA only)
5. Petition the government to legislate against keyboards with scroll wheels (Europe only)

A Cloud burst?

Yesterday, many users of the Hotmail e-mail service thought that they had lost their mail accounts for good. There is no direct link to Hotmail, so some took to the newsgroups. Let’s face facts here and accept that it had to be the fault of Vista, IE8, and Windows Live Mail. Everybody knows that Vista is crap and one only has to resurrect blog and newsgroup postings from the early days of the operating system to prove it.

Some excerpts from the Vista Mail newsgroup..

“I would like to know if there is a way of retrieving our old mail because I had a lot of important things saved in my hotmail account.  Please let me
know how I can retrieve my stuff...thank you”

“this sucks”

“After making the grave mistake of downloading internet Explorer 8 my inbox suddenly disappeared.”

“Why is my mail button on Messenger automatically opening Outlook/Windows Live mail? I don't use these and want to know how to get it off.  I want my button to go back to opening hotmail. GRRRRRRRRR stupid microsoft...It wasn't broken, u didn't need to fix it! Now you've just screwed it all up!”

“helloo...i cant get to my inbox in both of my accounts! r u serious..i have them for years...i dont want this... i dont understand it..!! and even worst
it seems like my old mail is gone!! ...i hope u understand that some people have important things on their inbox !!! please put it back as it was..”

“Where is it? Where are my old mails? You cant just come in and take them away without any notice or instructions on how to use your new interface properly. Over 7 years Ive been using hotmail and just like that you guys mess everything up with your "upgrade", come on. Id check the "Notice me of
replies" option, but, OH YEAH... i wont know anyway.”

“WHERE are my inbox and ALL my emails? I owned this account for over 9 years, Im not going to start a new one just because you have a new stuff going on.
Want it back now, this is an abuse on your side!! And awaiting for some explanations also. How can you decide to do something like this without
warning your users?”

OK. So it would have been nice if there had been a warning of a possible outage sent to all Hotmail users, but not everybody would have had time to see it, and if the warning had been sent out weeks ago, many would have forgotten all about it.

This is a small taste of what could happen if we all turned to cloud computing, and why ALL computer users should use the e-mail account facility supplied by their ISP’s. I don’t know about you, but when I get up in the morning, I do not intend to rely a server miles away from me. I store documents and e-mail on my computer and, while my computer could fail taking everything with it, there are just too many things which could go wrong between me and a cloud, some of it accidental and maybe some of it not.

Protagonists of cloud computing like to put across images of soft white fluffy clouds but, having lived in the UK and Canada, I know a little about how quickly clouds can change from beneficial to outright nasty.

Vista and keyboard scroll wheels..

I wrote about this when Vista first appeared. It took a while for the manufacturer to produce proper drivers for Microsoft keyboards, and when it was finally released, everything worked except for the scroll wheel. Subsequent driver releases were made, but the scroll wheel never worked. Up until now, I had given up on it ever working in Vista. Tonight, I received an e-mail from a Vista 64 user asking if I ever found a solution. I replied back that I hadn’t, but it gotten me thinking.

I knew that it worked in XP, and via beta testing Windows 7, I knew that it worked for ‘7’. On the basis that Windows 7 is owes much to the core of Vista, I decided to try out the Windows 7 driver, installing it into Vista. OK, some good news. Finally, after the longest time, I have a working keyboard scroll wheel and no obvious detrimental side effects.

I have only tried out the 64bit version, but would like feedback from anybody who has/had the same problem with the 32bit variety. 

Conficker alert - here we go again..

Apparently, Conficker is out in the wild and doing it’s stuff according to those ‘in the know’. Just for the record, other worms are doing exactly the same.

So don’t panic. Ensure that your system is up to date. Run your anti-malware programs, use common sense, and we will all meet unscathed on the other side, ok?

Have you been ‘confickered’?

You may not necessarily realize that you have, but there are people out there who monitor the progress of worms, Trojans and viruses. The good news is that on this day, April 1st 2009, the Conficker worm does not appear to have propagated as the rumors would have had us believe. So should would be even more vigilant tomorrow? I read somewhere that the nice people at Symantec have promised to be on the ball, but I personally think that the damage has already been done. So, have you been confickered? If you were panicking because you thought that your computer was going to stop working, that the entire Internet was going to crash big time, that your online business would be devastated, then yes, you have been confickered. If it makes you feel any better, we all have.

Security experts throughout the civilized world felt the need to step up and publicly make it known that Conficker was out there waiting to pounce. There were brief interviews on national and regional TV and Radio, blogs, forums and newsgroups. Microsoft put a reward of $250,000 dollars on the table for the capture of the Worm authors, presumably alive. Techs like me were obliged to recognize that Conficker could be a problem, and we sent out warnings via our client mailing lists. At the end of the day, it all came to nothing, but it could have been so different.

We looked foolish because we responded to a rumor of an April Fools Day prank. Today, we looked foolish as we powered up our systems, still half expecting to see the worst. Some are still going to look foolish because they will be looking tomorrow, and we all know that April Fools Day pranks have to be completed by midday on the day. It was a ‘no win’ for the technical community and a sure fire victory for the people behind Conficker. Rumor did as much damage as the worm itself. We all bowed to pressure ‘just in case’. If we hadn’t, and the worm had spread like all hell, our credibility would be zero. It isn’t looking much better today.

The Worm actually appeared a few months ago, but largely infected computers in parts of the world where computer security is not taken as seriously as it should be. We knew that its impact in the Western world had been limited and yet we all still let paranoia get the better of us. It doesn’t help when we read about the recent discovery of a botnet numbering some 1200 or more computers, all based in government offices around the world. What hope do we have of protecting ourselves when the professionals in high places are unable to protect computers used in national security?

I could be wrong but I think that breaches like the recent discovery above are inside jobs. I also believe that 99% of malware infections in home computers are inside jobs too. The threats posed by holes in stuff like Adobe Reader or any kosher program for that matter are infinitesimally small by comparison the to the malware let in when signing up for ‘free casinos’, smutty chat emoticons which will shock online friends, and utilities which claim to fix all computer problems in one click.

The best way to defeat Conficker or any malware is to be alert, use the common sense we had at birth, use a magnifier to read the ‘4 point’ print at the bottom, and keep our systems properly updated. If we personally know people who are using a pirated version of Windows or somebody who refuses to properly update because he/she doesn’t agree with Microsoft’s WGA, tell them in no uncertain terms that they are posing a threat to our computing experience by becoming part of huge botnets. Tell them to use a niche computer like a Mac, or a niche OS on their PC like Ubuntu if they care so little about our security.