Over at ZDNet, I’ve got a new post on the details behind the recent successful cyber-attack on Google, Adobe, and dozens of other large corporations. After looking at the evidence, I’ve concluded that the risks of using IE6 outweigh the costs of switching:

Any IT professional who is still allowing IE6 to be used in a corporate setting is guilty of malpractice. Think that judgment is too harsh? Ask the security experts at Google, Adobe, and dozens of other large corporations that are cleaning up the mess from a wave of targeted attacks that allowed source code and confidential data to fall into the hands of well-organized intruders. The entry point? According to Microsoft, it’s IE6.

The good news is that IE7 and IE8 are dramatically more secure, especially when run on Windows Vista or Windows 7 with Protected Mode and Data Execution Prevention.

For full details, go read It’s time to stop using IE6.

I just took a look at some analytics for the last couple of months on this site and was surprised by one slice of that data. Here’s the first page of the aggregate stats for the default screen resolution used by the most recent 250,000 visitors:

I drilled into the data for a few more pages and found that approximately 59% of all visitors are using widescreen monitors, with aspect ratios between 16:9 and 16:10. Presumably that includes nearly everyone using a notebook, plus a smattering of LCD monitors attached to desktop PCs.

I was surprised, though, to see that 41% of visitors are using old-school square monitors, mostly at resolutions of 1024×768 and 1280×1024 (#1 and #3 on the list, respectively). I’m guessing most of those are CRTs, which tend to last a long time.

I run some virtual machines at 1024×768 resolution, especially when snapping screen shots for a book. It isn’t a lot of fun, especially with XP and Vista taskbars.

What resolution are you using? Are you happy with it? If you could change screen resolutions right now and cost was no object, what would you change to?

I’ve been waiting a long time for a desktop system that can handle more than two monitors. (In mid-2008, I got some great suggestions from readers, but none of them were worth the hassle or expense.

Finally, two weeks ago I found an HP Pavilion Elite m9600t at an irresistible price. The i7-920 processor and capability to expand to 12GB of memory were nice, but what sealed the deal was the presence of two PCI-Express x16 slots. The system came with an Nvidia 9600GS display adapter. I cannibalized an Nvidia 8600 GT adapter from a system that I had previously used as a Media Center and, voila! Here’s what I’m now using: two 24-inch LCDs at 1920×1200 and a 23-inch unit at 1920×1080.

I expect my productivity to zoom to unheard-of levels in the next few months.

That fourth DVI connector is looking a little forlorn. Should I pick up a touch-enabled LCD for it?

[Solved! See the update at the bottom of the post.]

Over the years, I’ve spent more hours than I care to think about delving into the innards of network connections. Sometimes, the solution to slow network throughput is as simple as swapping a cable or updating a driver. But sometimes the problem is more baffling.

It’s so baffling, in fact, that I’m posting this here in hopes that a networking expert (maybe even someone from HP, Intel, or Microsoft) will be able to explain exactly what’s happening.

Over the weekend, I picked up a new HP Pavilion Elite m9600t with a core i7-920 processor. I wiped away the messy Windows Vista installation and replaced it with a clean copy of Windows 7 Ultimate. After a few updates everything appeared to be working fine, until I tried to download a few large files from a server on my local network and discovered that the onboard Intel 82567V-2 Gigabit Ethernet adapter was delivering truly abysmal speeds.

Copying files from the new PC to any other network location were impressively fast. Here’s what the file transfer dialog box looked like for a file copy to the Public folder on that Windows Home Server box:

That’s truly impressive throughput, with that 4.36GB file (a recorded TV program) copying in under 80 seconds.

But when I reversed the operation and tried to copy that same file to the local PC, the throughput dropped by more than 97%, to roughly 2 MB/sec. I tried different files and folders on different PCs, with similarly depressing results. In some cases transfer speeds were slower than I get on an Internet connection. Yikes!

This gave me an opportunity to try most of the obvious (and some not-so-obvious) troubleshooting solutions. I’ll write about the details of that process later, but suffice it to say that upgrading to the most recent drivers, forcing the link speed into Full Duplex Gigabit mode, tweaking Windows TCP auto-tuning settings, enabling jumbo frames, and removing or disabling various Windows networking services did no good whatsoever.

Eventually, I zeroed in on some esoteric settings for the Ethernet adapter, available from the properties dialog box in Device Manager.

Through trial and error, I found that adjusting three settings “unblocked” the connection and allowed receive speeds to zoom to the levels I was seeing in the other direction:

• Adaptive Inter-Frame Spacing This setting is disabled by default; enabling it, according to the help text, “compensates for excessive Ethernet packet collisions by dynamically controlling back-to-back timing.”
• Flow Control The default setting is RX and TX Enabled, which means that the adapter responds to and generates flow control frames that tell the other end of the connection to wait. I set it to Tx Only.
• Interrupt Moderation Rate This setting “moderates or delays the generation of interrupts … to optimize network throughput and network utilization.” Given that this system has a kick-ass i7 with eight core processor processing threads and four cores, I figured I could spare some CPU cycles, so I changed this setting from the default (Adaptive) to Off.

With these settings in place, receive speeds shot up dramatically, to rates that were exactly what I expected from a Gigabit Ethernet connection on a system with fast disks and controllers on either end.

But when the system resumed from sleep or restarted after being shut down, performance was back at those depressingly low levels again, which led to another round of troubleshooting. The settings I had made to the adapter still appeared to be in place when I checked its properties in Device Manager, but it was behaving as though the default settings were in force. After going down more dead ends and through more experimentation, I discovered a remarkable fix: If I restore the default performance settings using the Advanced Adapter Settings dialog box (clicking OK to reset the adapter) and then manually change the adapter settings back to my tweaked setup, performance returns to the speedy levels I expect.

This is completely reproducible. I’m assuming that somehow, when the network adapter wakes up after sleeping or a shutdown, it is loading its default performance settings rather than the ones I saved previously. As a workaround, I can do this Advanced Settings fandango every time the machine restarts or resumes from sleep, but that is going to get very old, very fast. I’m also considering disabling the onboard network adapter and installing a separate, non-Intel adapter in my one remaining PCI-Express slot. That’s $25 I’d rather not spend, but it’s the logical solution if I can’t find and fix the real cause.

So, what about it, networking experts? Have you ever seen anything like this? I’ll send an autographed copy of Windows 7 Inside Out to the first person who comes up with a successful solution (or at least a detailed explanation of why this is happening).

Update: Thanks to commenter BFT for insisting that I look more carefully at the network switch. When I tested connectivity using a straight-through Ethernet cable to connect two PCs directly, I was unable to replicate the throughput problems. That suggests that the problem is somewhere in the networking hardware itself. Switching to a different cable and using a different port on the switch solved the problem completely. The system now resumes from sleep with full network speeds. In addition, I restored the default settings to the network adapter and found that throughput increased by about 10%.

BFT, use the contact form in the sidebar to send me your contact information so I can get your signed copy of the book to you!

Another update: In response to some questions via Twitter and in the comments, here’s my theory of what happened. I never swapped cables as part of the troubleshooting. Intel’s network adapter control panel has a cable test that told me this cable was good. I assumed (incorrectly) that the fact I could get decent transfer speeds in both directions with the right settings was evidence there was no problem with the cable.

My theory is that the defective cable was causing the switch to get an improper signal at power-on, so the switch was defaulting to slow Ethernet mode and not auto-sensing the Gigabit Ethernet connection. Adjusting the software settings and forcing the adapter to reset also forced the switch to reset.

Bottom line, I think the culprit was mostly the cable, which in turn was causing the switch to behave incorrectly.

And one more PS: This is yet another example of a problem that appeared to be Windows-related but eventually was traced to the simplest of hardware connections. For previous examples, see here and here. This is why I am always reluctant to point a finger at any hardware or software maker until I have all the facts.

Dwight Silverman has an interesting blog post today based on a tweak published at Windows7themes.net. The original post and Dwight’s headline all refer to this as a way to Enable God Mode in Windows 7. The reality is much more prosaic.

The tweak itself is fairly simple: Create a new folder (on the desktop is a good place) and paste this string in as the name:

GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

The shortcut icon for the folder changes to the icon for Control Panel, and double-clicking it displays a folder full of tasks, a snippet of which is shown here:

Miraculous? God-like? Uh, no.

Continue reading “That “God mode” Explorer trick does less than you think” →

I am amused by the steady drumbeat of rumors about the forthcoming Apple tablet. Before anyone gets too excited about what they’ve read, it might be instructive to go back and look at previous rumors. Here, for example, is a supposed mock-up of the iPhone, published by a now-defunct fan site in December 2006, only a month before the actual iPhone was publicly unveiled:

Love that slide-out keyboard. Whatever happened to it?

This mock-up is from a month earlier. Classic!

That one turned out to be part of a "viral marketing campaign." In other words, a hoax.

And here’s a rumored iPhone ad, previewed in August 2006. Funny, I don’t remember seeing this one.

Hilarious.

When you see pundits talking confidently about how Apple is going to revolutionize computing with its new iWhatever, just remember how wrong they’ve been in the past.

Anyone looking forward to buying a Tablet PC from Apple?

Update: A colleague points to MacLife’s amusing History of the Apple Tablet Rumor, originally produced last summer and much in need of updating…

CableCARD TV tuners for Windows have been around for several years, but they never really took off. The biggest barrier was the Windows Vista requirement of a special BIOS and activation code for a CableCARD system, which shut out the enthusiast market completely.

That all changed last September, when Microsoft and CableLabs announced that they would be eliminating those requirements for Windows 7. And within a few days after the launch of Windows 7, the Digital Cable Advisor was online; it checks your system specs and enables digital cable support if your system passes. (Details here.)

At the time of the September announcement, the only available digital cable tuners were the ATI Digital Wonder models. Although Ceton has announced plans to ship new models next year, they still haven’t provided a firm release date. The good news is that the ATI tuners, which had disappeared completely from the marker, are now back in stock at Cannon PC, as evidenced by this screen shot I captured a few minutes ago.

The price is still high, but if you’re tired of waiting, this is the only way I know to get started now. (And there’s no indication that the Ceton products will be any less expensive on a per-tuner basis.) For what it’s worth, I have three of the external ATI tuners running here on two different Windows 7 systems. As promised, they record local HD channels and unencrypted cable channels without any copy restrictions, which means those programs can be freely copied and shared between PCs and portable devices.

Anyone out there planning to install one of these devices? If so, you’d better move quickly.

(Thanks to MVP Mike Brown for the pointer.)

One question I hear often from Windows 7 upgraders (more often than I would have expected, in fact) is, "What happened to the old network activity indicator?" It’s true: the Windows 7 designers got rid of that little icon in the notification area that flashes to indicate that your network adapter is busy. One of the key design goals of Windows 7 was to make Windows "less noisy," and the Windows design team paid especially close attention to pop-up messages and other potential distractions in the lower right corner of the screen.

Personally, I don’t miss that flashing icon. But if you want it back, you can download a tiny utility written by Igor Tolmachev. It’s called, not surprisingly, Network Activity Indicator for Windows 7:

It uses a mere 1.3 MB of RAM and does exactly what it promises.

Update: In response to a question via Twitter, yes, this works with 64-bit Windows 7 editions as well as 32-bit (x86).

If you’ve been looking for a copy of Windows 7 Inside Out, here’s a great deal. To celebrate the new partnership between O’Reilly and Microsoft Press, O’Reilly is selling Microsoft Press books direct from its web site at up to 50% off. Use the discount code MSINT in your shopping cart to get the savings.

The best part is that O’Reilly offers the option to purchase e-books in addition to those heavy dead-tree versions. So you can get Windows 7 Inside Out in either edition: the printed version, which includes a PDF copy on the included CD, for 40% off the normal price of $49.99; or a DRM-free ebook (in any or all of the Android, Mobi, PDF, and ePub formats, suitable for use on Kindle, iPhone, and other e-reader platforms) for half off the normal price of $39.99.

If you want more information about how the ebook formats work, see the explanation here.

Remember to use the discount code MSINT at checkout. This offer is good for the rest of this year and expires on January 1, 2010, so don’t wait too long…

Have you cleaned your CD or DVD burner’s laser lately? Until this week, I had never tried using a special disk to clean dust from the laser in my optical drive. But that turned out to be the sure cure for a stubborn problem I encountered recently, and I thought it might be worth sharing my experience here.

For the past month or so, I’ve been frustrated when trying to burn music CDs. In a typical session I might be able to burn one music CD successfully, but trying to burn another would fail. The writing software would hang or appear to complete successfully and then return a write error. In some cases the drive itself would lock up so tightly the disk couldn’t be ejected until a restart. The burned disks wouldn’t play back properly on any other device.

I probably turned 30 disks into coasters while investigating this problem, trying every troubleshooting trick I know to find the source of the problem. Converting the source files to WAV format and caching them locally didn’t help. The problem wasn’t software, either, as I found by repeating the issue with multiple burning programs, including Media Monkey and Easy Media Creator 10.

I knew the cause wasn’t the media itself (high-quality Sony disks). I also knew the cause wasn’t specific to my original test system, as the problem was reproducible with a clean install of Windows 7 on a separate PC from a different OEM using a different brand of CD/DVD burner. Both systems had plenty of RAM and fast quad-core CPUs and had burned plenty of CDs over their lifespan. Searching forums and support sites I found scattered reports of people with similar problems but little in common with my configuration. In fact, I found several posts from people who had experienced similar problems using OS X.

By this point I was beginning to suspect a conflict between Windows and the drive or drive controller—both drives were connected to a Intel ICH8R/ICH9R SATA controller using Intel Matrix Storage drivers.

To rule out the controller, I tried an external drive, using an LG combo Blu-ray reader and DVD writer. This SATA drive is mounted in an external enclosure with its own power supply, and I used the USB output to connect it to my Windows PC. This time I was able to burn multiple CDs in quick succession with no problems using every imaginable combination of file formats and software. But when I hooked up a second drive to a SATA-to-USB converter and tried using it as a burner, I got coasters again.

In several forum posts, I had read recommendations for special disks designed to clean the laser on a CD/DVD player/burner. I found this Memorex model at Amazon for $6.03 (the price has since risen to $7.98), and decided to take a chance. (This Allsop model costs about $5 more at Amazon but also gets excellent reviews.)

When I received the product and removed it from its packaging, I have to confess I was skeptical. It looks like a regular music CD with instructions on the label side and a half dozen small brushes arranged in a track on the bottom (shiny side) near the center of the disk. In Windows Media Player, it plays like a music CD, with 14 tracks that include audio instructions delivered in a friendly female voice, along with some test tones to help you determine whether your speakers are wired correctly.

After completing the entire suite of tests in 10 minutes or so, I popped in a blank CD, fired up Media Monkey, and told the software to burn a collection of FLAC files from a network location to CD, converting them to WAV files in a local cache on the fly. Surprise! The first disk burned just fine. As did a second, a third, and a fourth.

Still slightly skeptical, I ran the disk cleaner on my other test system and tried the same operation. The results were the same: 100% success using multiple disks, multiple burning programs, and multiple source file formats.

The Memorex marketing copy says the disk “has 6 ultra-soft brushes designed to safely remove dust and dirt from your CD/DVD player’s lens” and recommends using it “after every 10 hours of playback to ensure optimum laser performance.” Given my results here, I plan to do exactly that.