This website has been having some performance problems lately, which turn out to have been caused by a server that was limiting the number of allowed connections.
To fix the problem, I have to move everything to a new server. That might result in a few glitches over the next few days. Sorry for the inconvenience. I hope when all is done it will result in better performance across the board.
This message landed in the Junk E-mail folder of Windows Live Mail today, addressed to a Hotmail account that I have used for at least 10 years. Can we count the things that are wrong with it?
1. The message was composed using the Cyrillic character set, indicating that the author was probably Russian. A U.S.-based company like Amazon normally uses the Unicode character set.
2. That return address, sirvces[at]amzn.com? Uh, no. (Amzn.com appears to be a legitimate domain owned by Amazon.com, but the Russian author of this phishing attempt failed the spelling test on the word “services.”)
3. No text in the body of the message, just a graphic, which the mail client blocked from being displayed. Hovering the mouse pointer over the image placeholder reveals its location in the status bar along the bottom of the window. Amazon doesn’t normally host its graphics in user directories at hacked websites.
Clicking the link displays a graphic that uses the Amazon logo and looks like a text message, mimicking the typeface Amazon uses in its customer communications.
So, it’s good that Windows Live Mail swept this into my Junk folder and blocked the image. But I’m curious why a message like this one wasn’t filtered out completely.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
That’s the sound of me laughing at Apple fanboys spluttering and fuming over Microsoft’s new “I’m a PC” ad, in which “Lauren” says she can’t afford a Mac and buys an HP notebook instead.
MacDailyNews calls it “a $699 piece o’ crap” and approvingly quotes Seth Weintraub, who writes the Apple Ink blog at Computerworld:
The hardware in question is the $699 at Best Buy HP – Pavilion Laptop with AMD Turion™ X2 RM-72 Dual-Core Mobile Processor… It is the epitome of what people dislike about PCs… It runs Vista Home on a slow AMD mobile processor. It has DDR2 RAM which is what $300 Netbooks run.
Oh, really?
The cheapest Mac notebook you can buy (the one “Lauren” rejected) is the $999 white model, which is based on a three-year-old design with a more modern CPU and graphics chip. What kind of RAM do you think it uses? Please, look to the right, where I have helpfully highlighted the specs as captured from Apple’s website a few minutes ago.
So, to sum up. Apple’s $999 computer uses the same crappy DDR2 RAM as the HP. You know, the junk that, according to Weintraub, should only be put in $300 netbooks. The same junk that was in any MacBook or MacBook Pro sold before January 2009.
Yes, that’s right. Using Weintraub’s impeccable analysis, if you paid $2800 for a MacBook Pro last December, you are a complete loser and you should probably remove those inferior DDR2 memory chips it came with, hone them to a sharp edge, and slash your wrists with them. Or donate that useless four-month-old piece of crap to charity or sell it on eBay and replace it with a new MacBook Pro with DDR3 RAM for (cough) another $2800.
And how about the Intel P7350 CPU in that $999 MacBook? Personally, I think it’s fast enough for most mainstream uses, but benchmarking pros would probably call it “a slow Intel mobile processor.” Check out where its performance falls relative to other Intel and AMD CPUs in the PassMark Software benchmarks. (Hint: You’ll need to scroll way down to the bottom. I’ve pasted a thumbnail of the chart on the left, with the P7350 circled in red.)
Of course, Lauren could have gone looking for a 15-inch screen, in which case she would have been able to go to CompUSA.com and spend $950 on the HP Pavilion dv5-1010us ($999 list, with $50 discounts typical). It uses the exact same P7350 Intel processor as the bottom-of-the-line $999 white MacBook that Apple offers today but also includes 4GB of RAM (Apple charges $100 for the 4GB upgrade), a 320GB hard drive (Apple will hit you for $175 to upgrade from the ridiculously small 120GB drive in its $999 model), a 15.4” screen (34% more screen area than the 13.3” MacBook screen), a wireless remote ($19 extra from Apple), draft-N wireless networking, a webcam, HDMI and FireWire outputs, built-in Bluetooth, and a 64-bit operating system (Vista Home Premium).
More memory, bigger screen, bigger hard disk, a 64-bit OS, costs a lot less. A similarly configured MacBook (but still with that 13.3” screen) costs $1293, which is a $300+ premium over the HP notebook. And the good folks at Retrevo, who make their living at this stuff, analyzed 33 user reviews for the dv5-1010us and found that 93% were positive.
Of course, if Lauren had asked me I probably would have suggested she visit Dell’s website and look at the Studio 15 notebook, which is available with nearly identical specs to the HP model above but can be upgraded to an Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 CPU that will run rings around the P7350. When I configured that model at Dell’s website a few minutes ago, it cost a mere $874.
Why do Apple fanboys have such a hard time acknowledging that Apple hardware really does cost more than similarly configured PC alternatives?
Update 28-March: As I said in the original intro to this post, I was reluctant to publish this tweak, because I have absolutely no explanation for why it should work. If someone else had posted this, I would have assumed it was snake oil and would have been extremely skeptical. As skeptical as Rafael Rivera, even.
Actxprxy.dll is one of the core libraries for Internet Explorer (along with a few others such as Urlmon.dll and Mshtml.dll). If it’s not properly registered, IE won’t work at all. And re-registering it should never be necessary except in extreme circumstances.
Having said all that, I can only point to the experience I reported in the post linked below, which has since been confirmed by others in comments and e-mails. Are they all experiencing placebo effects? That’s possible, I guess. It’s also possible that some third-party software or add-on is somehow screwing up this DLL and its associated registry settings. I have contacted some engineers at Microsoft to see if they can shed light on the issue and will follow-up after I hear from them.
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Over at ZDNet I just published the results of some performance testing I did involving the current crop of browsers. During the course of my research, I stumbled across a tweak that I was at first hesitant to publish. After thinking carefully about it, I decided to do so. I’m glad I did. I have now heard from easily a dozen people via e-mail and in comments who say the improvement in performance for them is amazing.
Please read the original post (Is IE8 really fat and slow?) to get the full background. If you’re experiencing problems with IE8 being slow to load pages, especially when multiple tabs are involved, this might be worth a try. Because this tweak is simply registering a DLL that should have been registered as part of the IE8 installation, there is no harm that can come from trying this.
Here are the instructions.
1. Click Start, then click Run.
2. In the Run dialog box, type cmd and press Enter.
3. In the Command Prompt window, enter this text and press Enter:
regsvr32 actxprxy.dll
4. Restart your computer.
1. Type cmd in the Start menu Search box.
2. Right-click the Cmd shortcut that appears at the top of the search results list, Under Programs, as shown here.
3. Choose Run As Administrator.
4. In the Command Prompt window, enter this text and press Enter:
regsvr32 actxprxy.dll
5. Restart your computer.
If this works for you, let me know in the comments below…
Larry Seltzer has always been one of my favorite commentators on PC security, and this week he has written one of the best articles I’ve read in a long, long time. Here’s a sample from Malware is Getting Formidable, But So Are Your Defenses:
You can think of Conficker as being the state of the art in conventional malware. It not only uses an important vulnerability, but it’s a sophisticated blended attack, using a wide variety of mechanisms to spread: pseudo-random domains, dictionary attacks on weakly-protected network shares, USB drives, and more. You can admire the work that went into developing Conficker once you get past the amorality and greed that inspired it.
But there’s nothing that it does that you can’t protect against with best practices. Almost everyone that was hit by it was running a version of Windows XP that hadn’t been patched in many months. And even if you ran no anti-virus at all, least-privilege, updated software versions and a few other little things like a good firewall would block most of the ill effects of Conficker and most other malware and prevent them from becoming permanent on the system.
I noticed last week that several publications were trying to whip up some hysteria over the Conficker worm hitting on April 1 and causing a security tsunami. Maybe. I’ve only been following the Conficker fuss out of the corner of my eye so I can’t really speak authoritatively on it. But those stories didn’t ring true to me, and my suspicions were confirmed when I went back to the original source that those reporters were using for their fear-mongering, SRI International’s “An analysis of Conficker’s logic and rendezvous points,” released in February and updated last week.
My understanding is that the patches issued by Microsoft last fall sealed the hole solid. The SRI report seems to agree with that judgment:
The patch for this exploit was released by Microsoft on October 23 2008, and those Windows PCs that receive automated security updates have not been vulnerable to this exploit.
Later in the same report, the authors note:
Why Conficker has been able to proliferate so widely may be an interesting testament to the stubbornness of some PC users to avoid staying current with the latest Microsoft security patches.
They also mention that the threat may be worse in countries where Windows is regularly pirated.
As Seltzer writes, “you can get yourself a pretty substantial level of protection by being scrupulous about a number of these important measures, with the most important one probably being least-privileged access.” I agree completely. Set yourself up with a standard user account, use the Windows firewall or a third-party replacement, be aggressive about updating your system and all important applications (Office, Acrobat, Flash, QuickTime), and run up-to-date antivirus software.
It’s not rocket science.
Update: for more on the Conficker worm, visit the Microsoft Malware Protection Center.
While poking around in the latest Windows 7 beta, I discovered a nifty surprise. The Windows Easy Transfer utility supports a slew of new programs, including (drumroll, please) Office 14. Yes, the one that won’t be in beta until this summer and won’t be released till early next year.
Even more interesting is the confirmation that Office 14 will be delivered in 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x64) versions. I’ve got the details over at ZDNet: Next Office version to ship in 32-bit and 64-bit versions.
I’ve been spending a lot of time with Windows Easy Transfer lately, in preparation for Chapter 2 of Windows 7 Inside Out. It’s got some very nice surprises in it. (More on that next week.)
I hope Microsoft’s big bet on x64 pays off and inspires other developers to move their apps to 64-bit as well. The 32-bit compatibility layer in Windows Vista x64 and Windows 7 x64 works very well, but native code should be more robust and reliable.
A reader sends in this question:
Hi Ed, no one at MS seems to want to address this issue. How do I remove the IE 8 beta so that I can install the final version? There is no instance of it in Add Remove Programs and the final version will not install over the beta.
Good eye. Microsoft has made a confusing and inconsistent decision in the way it handles IE8 under XP/Server 2003 and Vista/Server 2008.
If you want to remove an earlier IE8 beta or the release candidate, or if you need to install the released version and roll back to IE7 on your Vista machine, you should be able to do so pretty easily at this point.
Update: In the comments, Dan asks whether it’s necessary to uninstall the Release Candidate first. I checked the Release Notes and the IE8 Readiness Toolkit and the Internet Explorer TechCenter and found no indication that uninstalling the older version was required. It is a reasonable precaution, but probably not necessary.
If you’re obsessed with college hoops and you have a PC with Vista Home Premium or Ultimate, you might want to check out the new College Hoops feature (complete with interactive bracket).
The Microsoft/CBS joint venture is pretty easy to miss. You have to go to the Media Center main menu, click the Sports strip, then choose Sports Channel. A slightly clunky install process asks whether you want to trust sp.miomni.com to add a Sports Channel link to your Program Library list. (Never heard of ’em, but OK, I guess. That’s not a good user experience.) If you say yes, you go straight to the Sports Channel main menu. The screen below shows a clip playing in the central pane; click the OK button to zoom it to full screen:
A link at the bottom of the screen launches the interactive bracket, which is indeed a cool way to browse the schedule in each of the four NCAA regional tournaments and tune in for some commentary and interviews from cbssports.com. Use the arrow keys and the OK button to move through the brackets.
I was pretty underwhelmed with the quality of the video clips, which were fuzzy and notably worse than standard-def TV. They looked tolerable in their small window on a 20-inch monitor, but when I blew them up to full screen on a 24-inch monitor the flaws were noticeable. That’s fine if you’re catching up with the action on a break at work, but not so fun if you’ve connected your PC to a big-screen TV.
Don’t bother if you’re using a Media Center extender; you’ll be stymied by the need for Flash (which doesn’t stream to extenders). Likewise, you can fuggedaboutit if you’re running the Windows 7 beta.
Eventually (sooner rather than later, I hope), this stuff will be commonplace and quality will be greatly improved. Microsoft showed at last summer’s Olympics that it could deliver very high content using Silverlight. If this feature had been built using a similar technology, it would be irresistible. Maybe next year.
At Mix09 today, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 8 is out of beta and officially released. You can download the installer for Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 or 2008.
If you’re using the Windows 7 beta, you’ll have to stick with the build of IE8 included with the OS (plus this compatibility and reliability update); Microsoft will almost certainly include the final version of IE8 in its Windows 7 Release Candidate, but is unlikely to create an interim update for beta testers.
Over at ZDNet, I’ve just published a new post that takes a close-up look at usability-driven improvements in the IE8 UI. I’m also working on a follow-up post to address the question of performance.
If you’ve installed the final build of IE8, hit the Comments section below and let me know how the upgrade went for you and what you think of the new IE.
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Ed Bott 