Windows

Windows XP networking advice

Dave Farquhar Windows ,

I ran into a problem yesterday with a VPN client not working in XP. After a Usenet search, someone suggested that removing the QoS client (which does nothing useful anyway) fixes the problem about 80% of the time. In my case, that worked.
If something networking-related isn’t working right in WinXP for you, try removing the QoS client and see what happens. At the very least, you’ll speed up networking slightly, and at best, you’ll fix the problem.

Palladium and You

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , , ,

There’s been a lot of talk on the Web lately about Palladium. If you don’t have strong feelings about it, it’s probably because you’re not a bleeding-edge computing enthusiast. That’s OK. You’ll hear about it in time.
Basically, Palladium is Microsoft’s initiative to reinvent the PC and make it more secure. There’s a big uproar about it because it reeks of ulterior motives. Some fear Palladium means you will surrender all rights to your PC and cede them to Redmond.

I’m not totally convinced this is a bad thing. Read more

Optimizing Windows 2000

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , ,

Since there was no Windows 2000 version of my book Optimizing Windows, sometimes people ask me what tweaks they can use to improve Windows 2000’s performance.
It turns out there are a few things you can do to optimize Windows 2000. Here are some tips that I use on a fairly regular basis.
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A dream realized: Mozilla 1.0

Dave Farquhar Windows ,

Mozilla 1.0 went gold Wednesday, and it’s a keeper.
After years of suffering through Netscape 4.x, Netscape loyalists finally have a browser that’s worth upgrading to. Mozilla 1.0 offers speed that’s comparable to the latest versions of Internet Explorer (when it’s not downright faster), along with better standards compliance, fewer security holes (did you catch the security hole in IE’s gopher implementation Wednesday?) and compelling features that IE lacks.
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Klez is nasty!

Dave Farquhar Windows , , ,

If you haven’t ever actually seen Klez in person, count yourself lucky.
I had my first run-in with it last night. I was working on a friend of a friend’s computer and everything about it was goofy.
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Guidance in re-installing Windows 98SE

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , ,

Mail from Frank Gross. I don’t know if I’ve ever outlined a process for installing Windows 98 cleanly, at least not here. There’s little need to do a clean install if the system works right, but if a system just won’t play nice, it’s not something one should be afraid of.
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R.I.P.: One W2K box

Dave Farquhar Windows ,

My video editing box bit the dust earlier this week. I loaded a rather large image into Photoshop LE, and it hung. I killed Photoshop LE, and all appeared to be well. Then the desktop and Start menu went away. A few seconds later, they reappeared. They went away again, then reappeared. The cycle continued like a beating drum.
So I did what you should always do when a Windows box starts acting goofy: Reboot. And? After logging in, the problem reappeared.

So I scanned for viruses. The system was clean. I found that if I killed explorer.exe, everything else ran fine. So I could run programs from Task Manager, bring up a command line (just run cmd.exe) or bring up the old Program Manager (remember that from the worse-than-awful Windows 3.1?) and run programs that way. It’s a safe and easy way to save memory, but I really don’t care to subject myself to it on a regular basis. Explorer isn’t perfect, but Program Manager might be the worst shell I’ve ever seen. And I fear that if Explorer is constantly crashing, there’s probably something else wrong with the installation.

I tried doing a recovery install. No go. The installation media couldn’t find a Windows installation on the disk. Figures.

I don’t know if I have a Ghost image of this machine, which is a major pain. W2K got along just fine with all the hardware in the machine, but when I added the Pinnacle DV500, it took me a really long time to get it working right.

So I’m not sure what I’m going to do.

Dave installs Windows XP

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , ,

We needed an XP box at work for testing. Duty to do the dirty deed fell to me. So after ghosting the Windows 2000 station several of us share, I pulled out an XP CD. It installed surprisingly quickly–less than half an hour. The system is a P3-667 with 128 MB RAM and an IBM hard drive (I don’t know the model).
It found the network and had drivers for all the hardware in the box. That doesn’t happen very often with Microsoft OSs, so it was nice.

I booted into XP, to be greeted by a hillside that was just begging to be overrun by tanks, but instead of tanks, there was this humongo start menu. I right-clicked on the Start button, hit Properties, and picked Classic view. There. I had a Win95-like Start menu. While I was at it, I went back and picked small icons. I don’t like humongous Start menus.

I also don’t like training wheels and big, bubbly title bars. The system was dog slow, so I right-clicked on the desktop to see what I could find to turn off. I replaced the Windows XP theme with the Classic theme. Then I turned off that annoying fade effect.

Still, the system dragged. I went into Control Panel, System, Performance. Bingo. I could pick settings for best appearance (whose choices are certainly debatable–I guess they look good if you like bright colors and have a huge monitor) or best performance. Guess which I picked? Much better.

Next, I went into Networking. I saw some QoS thing. I did a search. It’s intended to improve the quality of your network, at the price of 20% of your bandwidth. Forget that. I killed it.

After I did all that stuff, XP was reasonably peppy. It logs on and off quickly. I installed Office 2000 and it worked fine. The apps loaded quickly–just a couple of seconds. That’s how it should be. If I went in and edited the shortcuts in the Start menu to turn off the splash screens, they’d load instantly.

WinXP brings up a bunch of popups that I don’t like. If I wanted unexpected popup windows, I’d run a Web browser. I couldn’t quickly figure out how to disable those.

I couldn’t run Windows Update. It froze every time I tried.

I found a Windows XP tuning guide at ExtremeTech. I suspect turning off the eye candy will help more than most of the suggestions in that article. I suspect if I dug around I’d find other things. We’ll see if I get some time.

XP isn’t as bad as I expected, I guess. But I’m still not going to buy it.

This, on the other hand, is worth a second look. And a third. You can now run MS Office on Linux. No need to wait for Lindows, no need to abandon your current fave distro (at least if your fave distro is Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, Debian, or Caldera).

It’s 55 bucks. It’s available today. It brings Office 97/2000 and Lotus Notes r5 to your Linux desktop. Other Windows apps work, but their functionality isn’t guaranteed.

You can get some screenshots at CodeWeavers. It even makes the apps look like native Linux apps.

Wintendo must go…

Dave Farquhar Windows , ,

Some l337 h4x0r is watching this as I type. Yeah, I got the new virus. Fortunately it doesn’t look like it’s smart enough to look at an IMAP store, so it didn’t replicate. That’ll be the last time I use Outlook at home, and maybe at work. Yes, Linux has security vulnerabilities, but they’re benign compared to this crap. Especially if you’re behind a firewall with Telnet and even SSH access turned off. A root exploit on a machine disconnected from the world doesn’t do any good.
So kiss off, Gates. You embarrassed me. Yeah, I wrote a book about your worthless OS. I know a lot more about your worthless OS than about any alternative. That’s fine. I learned Wintendo, I can learn something else.

And to the loser who’s now recording my keystrokes: I’ll rebuild the system. Enjoy what little you get. Meanwhile, get a life, OK? Get interested in girls or something.

Webshots and Weatherbug, away with you!

Dave Farquhar War Stories, Windows ,

The bane of the NT administrator’s existence banished. I had a problem last week with a user who was complaining about lockups. I went and looked at the system, and it turned out not to be lockups at all–the system was running out of CPU cycles, so it appeared to lock up, but if you let it sit long enough, it would recover. The system had so many user-installed toys, such as Webshots and Weatherbug and RealAudio and RealJukebox, that it didn’t have enough punch left to do real work. I disabled the toys, to many objections, and told the user to call me if the system had any more problems. I told her that yeah, the way I set up computers is drab and boring and utilitarian, but they work.
Supposedly Windows NT won’t allow regular users to install software. In reality, they can install a lot.

Here’s the trick. Open regedt32 (not regedit) and navigate to HKLMSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun. Go to Security. The All Users group has special access. Change that to read-only access.

We did that at work on one machine, then logged in with a non-priveliged account, and we must have been the first people in history who had problems installing Webshots and Weatherbug.
Some programs may install anyway, though they fail to write the run key. But in order for them to start up, the user will have to drag the executable to their personal startup group. Most of the users who install this garbage don’t know how to do that.
Hard drive first aid. I had an external Mac SCSI hard drive that was acting up. I was able to get it to run once, for about 5 minutes. From then on, when you powered up, it would just seek incessantly. Stiction, I hoped–though it’s unusual for stiction to set in while a drive is actually running. I shut it down and let it rest. No improvement.

My normal cure for stiction is to blow-dry it to heat it up above operating temperature to loosen the oil. Lacking a blow dryer, I resorted to something I really don’t like to do. Well, since this was a Mac peripheral, I didn’t really care. And I made a pretty big show of it. I held the drive about six inches off the floor. “I’m gonna do it!” I said. My coworkers looked up. I released the drive, sending it hurtling to the floor. The force of the impact knocked the front of the enclosure loose.

“You’re recalibrating it?” someone asked.

I grinned, picked up the drive, snapped the front cover back on, and plugged it in. The drive ran. I copied the data off to another drive. It was a bit slow–this isn’t a healthy drive–but it copied. And the drive ran all day, to my amazement.

Incoming links: http://gsw.edu/~oiit/techsupp/software.html