windows 7

My first Windows 7 build

Dave Farquhar Hardware, Software, Uncategorized, Windows , , , , , , , ,

I rebuilt a friend’s Windows 7 system this week.

The system includes a 30 GB SSD to boot from, and a RAID 1 mirror of 1 TB drives for storage. Aside from the two 1 TB drives, it’s basically a collection of $100 components. $100 Asus motherboard, $100 video card, $100 CPU. It seems like right now, no matter what individual system component you’re looking at, $100 buys you something really nice without going too far over the top. I’m sure certain aristocrats might disagree, but any reasonable person ought to really like using this system. Read more

SSD myths

Dave Farquhar Hardware , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
SSD myths

SSDs, like most disruptive technologies, face some questions and resistance. People will grasp at any straw to avoid adopting them. Thanks to this resistance, a number of SSD myths arose. Here are the myths I see repeated over and over again, and the truth, based on my experience actually using the things.

Note: I originally wrote this way back in 2010. The drive technologies I speak of as state of the art are rather aged now. But the principles still hold today, and will continue to do so. Hard drives have gotten better, but SSD have gotten better at a more rapid pace.

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Blocking malware at the operating system level

Dave Farquhar security, Windows , , , , , , ,

In recent months I’ve been recommending that everyone run Adblock Plus with the malware domains subscription, to get extra protection beyond what your antivirus/antispyware suite can give. Given a choice between detecting and blocking bad stuff, or not downloading it at all, it’s much better to not download it at all.

There are some downsides to this. Adblock Plus uses a fair bit of memory. It’s tolerable on my desktop PC with 2 GB of RAM, but less so on my netbook with 1 GB of RAM. And if you have to use a browser that doesn’t have a compatible version of Adblock Plus available, you’re unprotected.

The solution is to block at the operating system level, using the hosts file.

Here’s a script that does it, with instructions.
http://www.ericphelps.com/scripting/samples/Hosts/index.htm

But I know of one malware site list that his script doesn’t use: http://www.malwaredomainlist.com/hostslist/hosts.txt.

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Fixing reverting TCP/IP settings in Windows XP

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , ,

My ISP’s DNS, to put it politely, leaves a lot to be desired. I wanted to change them, but my network settings kept reverting. I’d change them, and they would change right back.

That pretty much made the fantastic DNSBench useless. I could find the fastest DNSs, but I couldn’t use them.At one point I thought it was Microsoft Security Essentials blocking the change, but nobody else reported that symptom, so I think that was just coincidence.

The solution is to completely reset TCP/IP. Either open a command line and follow Microsoft’s instructions, or click the little applet to let Microsoft do it for you. Then reboot.

Microsoft’s instructions are good, but they don’t go into much detail as to why you might need to do the procedure.

Theoretically at least, the same problems could happen in Vista and Windows 7 as well. The same fix would apply. If earlier versions of Windows break like this, you could remove TCP/IP and re-add it.

I’m happy to say now my PC is using the DNS settings I want.

Installing Windows off USB

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , ,

I sure wish I’d seen Wintoflash a few weeks ago.

It’s simple. Insert a Windows CD or DVD (anything from XP to Windows 7). Plug in a blank USB flash drive (or one you don’t mind erasing). Answer a couple of questions, and after a few minutes, you have a bootable USB stick that installs Windows. It will be much faster than CD or DVD because flash media has much faster seek times.

So what could be better? Well, slipstreamed and customized Windows of course.First, go get ctupdate and run it to get all the current hotfixes and service packs for whatever version of Windows you use.

Next, use Nlite to easily slipstream in all those service packs and hotfixes. While you’re at it, you can remove whatever non-optional inessentials you want. All the games, Media Player, Movie Maker, Outlook Express, and stuff like that are fair game. If you feel brave, you can even (horrors!) remove Internet Explorer.

Rebuilding a PC used to take most of a weekend to do, but with an up-to-date installation on a USB stick, I think the task could take an afternoon, as long as the target computer is new enough to support booting off USB.

And to a tinkerer, it could be very nice. Speeding up installation and modification would allow a tinkerer to be more aggressive with Nlite in terms of changes. Make a fatal change, and it’s no big deal–just back out of the change and reinstall, and in about 15 minutes you’re up and running with a new configuration.

A better registry cleaner

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , , , ,

Note: I wrote this back in the Windows XP days. It worked really well under XP, but if you’re going to run the registry cleaner portion in Windows 7 or Windows 10, be sure to create a restore point first.

I’ve been messing around with a registry cleaner called CCleaner. I like it a lot better than the commercial tools that used to come with Norton Utilities and the like, and I like it better than the freebies that we used to use like Microsoft’s Regclean.

And you’ll never beat the price.CCleaner runs on Windows 95, 98, 98SE, ME, NT4, 2000, XP, and Vista.

One thing that I liked about it is that the program is intelligent and relatively dummy-proof. If you click around and do all of the defaults, it’s not likely to harm your computer. I inadvertently wiped out my Firefox browser history (I wanted to keep that) but that’s not a showstopper. It will populate itself again in a few weeks. Unlike commercial utility suites, where I’ve written 20-page explanations how to use them safely, this program doesn’t really need any explanation.

CCleaner actually does more than just clean up the Registry, although it does a fine job of that. It also does a great job of weeding out useless temporary files. I ran it on my old laptop and it found 386 megabytes of junk on my crowded C drive. I’ve been manually cleaning it up by searching it by hand, and I think I do a pretty good job of finding a lot of stuff, but what can I say? The program found 386 megs of stuff that I didn’t.

There are three benefits to getting rid of that cruft. First, Windows needs quite a bit of free space just to function properly. When you start getting too little free space, the system just acts goofy. Second, large numbers of temp files in the system directory just seem to make the system act funny. This was a bigger problem in Windows 9x than in the newer NT-based Windows versions, but there’s still no reason to have hundreds of those laying around. In my desktop support days, just getting rid of temp files used to clear up all sorts of mysterious problems. And finally, not having all those large and useless files on the disk makes your defragmentation programs work better. Those programs need free space to work with, and they don’t have to work as hard when they don’t have hundreds of extra worthless files to move around.

Cleaning the Registry is another important job, since a lot of uninstallation programs don’t do a very thorough job of cleaning up after themselves. The extra bloat chews up memory and slows down searches for the legitimate data the programs you actually use need. Since I tend not to install many programs and I use most of the ones I do install, CCleaner didn’t find a whole lot in my Registry, but it found some stuff to clean up.

So what happened after I ran it? The most noticeable effects were that my Start menu was a lot peppier, and my Web browsers loaded and ran a little bit faster. I understand the Web browser speedup, but the Start menu puzzled me a bit. Not that I’m complaining–it’s irritating when you press Start and have to wait for your list of programs to come up.

CCleaner isn’t a miracle worker and it won’t turn my P3-700 into a Core Duo, but the two systems I’ve run it on do run noticeably faster afterward. It was certainly more than worth the 10 minutes it took for me to download it and run it on each.

So what about the commercial utilities suites? Skip them. In this day and age, there are better, free alternatives for everything those utilities suites could do. CCleaner is one of the superstars. In coming days, I’ll talk about free substitutes for the other most important components of the utility suites.

Open a blg file in Windows

Dave Farquhar Servers and Networking, Windows , , ,
Open a blg file in Windows

In some versions of Windows, the usual method of viewing a file–double clicking on it–doesn’t work for BLG files. If you can’t view a BLG file just by double clicking on it, here’s the other way to open a BLG file in Windows.

This works in current versions of Windows and all the way back to Windows 2000.

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Disadvantages of Windows 3.1

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , , ,

Note: I wrote this way back in 2003, so my advice as far as replacing Windows 3.1 is a bit dated, but the strengths and weaknesses remain valid. If you’re thinking of a new computer, please don’t run anything older than Windows 7.

I found a search in my log analysis for “disadvantages of windows 3.1,” which I found interesting. I can talk about that.
Someone asked for it, and I aim to please. So let’s head down memory lane.

In all fairness, let’s talk about what’s good about it first. The main thing is that it’ll run–or at least load and execute–on pretty much anything, as long as it’s old. It’s anything but ideal on a 286, but it’ll execute. And on a 386DX, plain old Windows 3.1 is reasonably zippy if you cut down the number of fonts it has, only load a few applications, and install 16 MB of RAM in it. On a 486 or a low-end Pentium, it’s plenty fast.

Windows 3.1 freeware doesn’t have much in the way of strings attached–no need to worry about spyware. That’s a good thing.

Fine. Now for the hatchet job. To be completely honest, I didn’t like Windows 3.1 in 1993 and 1994 when it was what everyone was using. I ran it for a few months and then went out and bought OS/2 and never looked back. So you’re getting a perspective from someone who’s been willing for a long, long time to run anything other than Windows 3.1. But I’ll do my best to be fair.

You may have trouble running it on newer hardware. Let’s face it, it came on the market 10 years ago and not many people use it anymore. There’s not a lot of demand for drivers, so it can be hard to find a modern video card with Windows 3.1 drivers. And not only does Windows 3.1 have spotty capability with new hardware, it’s very limited in its ability to take advantage of anything made since 1995 or so.

More importantly, modern operating systems give full pre-emptive multitasking, or in the case of Windows 95/98/ME, at least something that vaguely resembles it. Under pre-emptive multitasking, the OS decides what applications get CPU time and how much. In Win3.1’s cooperative multitasking, the apps just have a knock-down, drag-out fight for CPU time. If you send an application to the background, it’ll get some work done, but not as much as it would under a newer OS.

My biggest beef with Windows 3.1 was its crashes. If you just run an app or maybe two all the time, it works reasonably well. But I’m the kind of guy who always has three or four or twelve apps open–the first multitasking systems I ever used, Unix and AmigaOS, had no problem doing that–and if you try that with Windows 3.1 for very long, you’ll see a lot of blue screens.

I wasn’t a fan of the Windows 3.1 Program Manager interface. I’m not in love with the Explorer interface of newer versions either, but it’s easier to use and faster to navigate than Progman was.

And although its software selection is pretty good, I guess Windows 3.1 now falls victim to the same argument I heard time and time again against my preferred alternative operating systems: What, don’t you like software? Sometimes Windows 3.1’s available offerings are adequate and sometimes they aren’t: Microsoft Office 6.0 is certainly adequate for 99% of all people’s needs. If you dig deep enough (I found a copy here), you can find Internet Explorer 5.0 for Windows 3.1. It’s not the best browser in the world but it’s the best one you’ll find for Win3.1 and it may be good enough for you. Sticking with Windows 3.1 limits you to a much smaller selection of software than newer operating systems. At this point, ironically, even Linux, which was once notorious for its lack of software that Joe Sixpack would want to use, now has a better selection of mainstream software than Windows 3.1 had.

At this point in time it’s hard to recommend Windows 3.1. PCs capable of running Windows 95 adequately are very, very cheap (I see 133 MHz Pentium computers sell for $35 when people are willing to mess with them, and a 66 MHz 486 will run Windows 95 decently and just about anyone who works in the computer field can find one of those to give you for free if you ask nicely enough), and although support for Windows 95 is starting to dry up, it’s much easier to find hardware and software compatible with Win95 than it is for Windows 3.1. Windows 98 is better still, but I definitely recommend a 200 MHz Pentium and more than 32 MB of RAM for Win98. Still, that’s doable.

And if you’re thinking that Windows 3.1 is adequate for you and you’re not totally strapped for cash, you might want to give the $199 Wal-Mart PCs running Lindows a look. Lindows is basically Linux with a pretty graphical user interface, and it’s perfectly fine for word processing, web browsing and e-mail. The budget Wal-Mart PC is hardly a barn burner, but it’s much faster than any computer you’re likely to be running Windows 3.1 on, and since it will be much newer, the hardware itself will also be a lot more reliable. Double check with your ISP before you buy one to make sure you can get connected (they’re probably getting used to that question by now), but if you can get connected, think about it.