Category: Windows

Test your Internet connection

The interesting (and by “interesting” I mean completely frustrating) thing about networking is that it involves so many pieces of hardware and software. Adapters, routers, firewall devices, operating system components, third-party tools, applications…the list goes on and on.

If you’re going to make sense of this sort of system, it helps to start with a reliable baseline, which is where the Internet Connectivity Evaluation Tool comes in. Visit this page using Internet Explorer on Windows XP or Windows Vista, accept a license agreement, download a little code, and click the Start Test button.

Internet Connectivity Evaluation Tool

It’s not a speed test (other sites do that better). Instead, the results tell you about your router and how it works with Windows. It doesn’t make any permanent changes, and it doesn’t disclose any personally identifiable information.

Recommended.

Lost your Dell OS disks? Here’s how to get a fresh copy.

Reinstalling Windows XP is painful enough, but it becomes a real hassle if you have a system originally built by a large OEM and you can’t find the original disks that came with it. With Windows XP, the installation media for this type of system uses a technology called System Locked Preinstallation (SLP) to prevent its use on a system other than the one it came with one from the same manufacturer and the same product family. [Updated per comments.] The good news is that you don’t have to enter a product key or activate an SLP system. The bad news is that if you lose the CD that came with your system, you’re out of luck.

Or at least you were. I’m not sure how long this Dell Support page has been around, but I was pleasantly surprised to find it earlier today:

Dell Customers can now request a set of backup discs containing the factory-installed operating system as well as the device drivers and utilities specific to your system.

Requests are limited to one (1) set of backup discs per system purchased.
The backup discs requested must match the operating system that was factory installed on the original order.

Please note that Dell will provide you the most up to date Resource disc available, containing the latest drivers and diagnostic tools currently being shipped on new systems. Due to the frequent updates, this Resource disc may not have all the drivers needed for your specific system, especially if it is over one (1) year old.

One widely held belief is that Dell and other big OEMs only provide so-called recovery media that reinstalls the original factory configuration, complete with trial programs and other crapware. In my recent experience with Dell Dimension and Inspiron computers, this is no longer the case. As of July 2004, the disks shipped with those brands include the full operating system and a separate disk with drivers and utilities. The option to get back to the original factory installation using the hidden recovery partition is still there, but only via the Dell PC Restore by Symantec utility (press Ctrl+F11 at startup to access the partition).

If you’ve got a Dell (or any OEM PC), your best bet is not to lose the disks in the first place. But if they do go missing, it’s good to know this option exists.

(If you own a PC built by a different royalty OEM, such as HP, Gateway, Toshiba, Lenovo, or Sony, help me out. Was it purchased after January 2005? If so, did you get OS media or just recovery media? Does your OEM offer an option to get a replacement disk? Add a comment with any details that might expand this post beyond Dell.)

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An up-close look at Russian spambot herders

Ryan Naraine at eWeek has a must-read article on how the recent surge of “pump and dump” spam is being delivered. Working with Joe Stewart, a senior security researcher at SecureWorks in Atlanta, Ryan was able to deliver a detailed picture of how these sleazy operations work and why they’re so hard to shut down.

Sobering numbers: 70,000 infected machines capable of pumping out a billion messages a day, virtually all of them for penis enlargement and stock scams.

Excellent graphics, too. This one shows that Windows XP Service Pack 2 is hosting nearly half the attacked machines.

It would sure be interesting to find out which exploits are responsible for all these infections. 

… as Mike Dimmick points out in the comments, many of these bots are installed because users download and install dangerous software and hand the keys to their system over to the bad guys: “That’s why the ISPs have to take charge and block spam from leaving zombie computers – ordinary users frankly can’t be trusted not to infect themselves.”

Sad but true.

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XP SP3 in 2008?

Neowin reports that the Windows Service Pack Road Map has been quietly updated. Service Pack 3 for Windows XP Home and Professional is now planned for release in the first half of 2008, nearly four years after the Service Pack 2.

Crap. That’s an awful lot of roll-ups and individual patches for Windows XP users to have to deal with.

Mary Jo Foley says out loud what you’re probably thinking:

There’s no doubt that some (many?) Microsoft customers will see the latest slip as a less-than-subtle attempt by Microsoft to force them to upgrade to the latest versions of Windows that are coming down the pike. Why stick with an operating system that hasn’t gotten a full-fledged set of bug fixes and updates for two-plus years? Why not just make the move to Vista and Longhorn Server?

I think this is a sign that Microsoft’s development resources are stretched awfully thin.

Processors, cores, and licenses

A handy Microsoft page explains the ins and outs of Multicore Processor Licensing. Short version: Windows is licensed on a per-processor basis, not a per-core basis. So, despite the fact that the operating system treats individual cores as if they were separate virtual CPUs, the license agreement does not:

The customer will incur the cost for one software license per processor, not per core. So if a customer replaces the single-core processor on their system with a multicore processor, they will need to have only one license per processor.

[…]

Microsoft Windows XP Professional and Microsoft Windows XP Home are … licensed per installation and not per processor. Windows XP Professional can support up to two processors regardless of the number of cores on the processor. Microsoft Windows XP Home supports one processor.

This also means that quad-core processors (due to hit shelves in November) will not cause any licensing problems. Nor, in fact, should the 80-core processors Intel says it will have within five years.

(Via Raymond Chen)

… And I almost forgot this article on Windows Vista’s support for 64-bit and dual-core CPUs.

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Working with ISO files

If you’ve downloaded the beta releases of Windows Vista or Office 2007, you’ve had to deal with the ISO file format, which consists of an image of a CD or DVD. You can use most CD/DVD writing programs to copy the ISO file to a physical disk. In Nero 6, for instance, you use the Burn Image command on the Recorder menu.

In addition, there are software utilities that allow you to read an ISO file or mount it in Windows without burning a physical disk. This MSDN page has some useful links: 

Copying the contents of ISO files
The contents of image files may be accessed directly using third-party tools. Using this method you can extract the files from an image file to a temporary folder on your hard drive, then run setup. The following tools offer such image file support:

The products listed above have been known to work. Other products that can manipulate ISO files may work, but have not been tested.

Mounting ISO files virtually

The following tool for Windows XP allows image files to be mounted virtually as CD-ROM/DVD-ROM devices. This tool is provided here for your convenience, and is unsupported by Microsoft Product Support Services.

Nero 6 Ultra Edition (and presumably Nero 7 as well) has an ISO mounting tool called Nero ImageDrive. It’s incompatible with Windows Vista, however, as is the free Microsoft tool linked here.

Can you trust Automatic Updates?

Do you have Automatic Updates for Windows turned on? If you knew that it might take a week or longer for all Critical updates to arrive on your PC, would you still use Automatic Updates?

I’m still trying to get answers on some important questions here, but I’m not reassured when the Microsoft Security Response Center says it’s “perfectly normal” for updates to be delayed by a week and possibly more. 

New security release format? It’s about time

Update: I’ve replaced the link at the bottom of this page, which originally contained search results from Microsoft’s support site, with a Knowledge Base article that has permalinks to all monthly security releases in ISO format.

Microsoft has been doing this since the beginning of this year, apparently, but this is the first time I’ve noticed it. Security patches for August 2006 are now available as Bulk Updates in ISO-9660 CD image format. The files can be burned onto blank CDs, used on multiple machines, and archived.

This is good news for people who prefer to do updates manually. No more downloading a dozen or so individual patch files and then saving each one. Just make sure you get the right CD image(s). One is for Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003; another is for Windows XP; and a third is for IE.

If you want to go back and get earlier releases, try this page, which lists all updates in ISO image format since January 2006.

Piracy doesn’t pay

Over at ZDNet, I’ve posted an account of my attempts (so far in vain) to get busted by Windows Genuine Advantage for installing a bootleg version of Windows XP. (See Another WGA failure for the details.)

In my quest for an illegal Windows product key, I visited a lot of very unsavory sites before I finally found one that actually contained the information I was looking for. It was a case study in how shady searches lead to personal tragedy. During the process, I was presented with multiple opportunities to install spyware and even a Trojan horse program.

  • One site offered to install an ActiveX control that identified itself as an “Internet Explorer add-on” from Inter Technologies. It turned out to be a toolbar from Dollar Revenue, which McAfee classifies as a Trojan for its “deceptive practices.” According to my ZDNet colleague Suzi Turner, it downloads “a bucketful of other adware.”
  • Another site offered to install that same set of scumware plus another ActiveX control that was identified only as “Click here to agree” from E.C.S. International. That turned out to be Dollar Revenue again.
  • One site that claimed to offer cracks and product keys for every imaginable software product had a clever gimmick. Following any of the links generated an executable program with the name of the program you were looking for, ostensibly containing key codes. In reality, every download was the same: a copy of a Trojan that Windows Live OneCare identified as Agent.LM.

Now, the fact that I was running Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista means that I didn’t get any “in your face” prompts for these downloads. I actually would have had to go out of my way to install any of this malware. But the fact that I ran into so many examples of truly awful security threats underscores the problems you’re likely to face when you go looking for underground stuff.

As Bob Dylan once sang, “To live outside the law, you must be honest.” You’d better be careful, too.

You’ve got Windows XP questions, I’ve got answers

A few weeks ago, I asked readers to send along their Windows XP questions. Here are some answers.

Jim Konzak had a tech support question:

My question is how to fix what seems to be a corrupted Windows XP (driver?) file related to USB devices. If I plug in a USB drive, it is recognized and functions fine. But when it is removed, an immediate BSOD results with the message

NO_MORE_IRP_STACK_LOCATIONS

I have Googled this and posted to several sites, including Dell’s forum (the PC is a Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop) to no avail. Thoughts?

I exchanged a bit of e-mail with Jim over this one. I’ve seen similar issues before and my first suspicion was that it was caused by a third-party firewall product. Sure enough, the culprit was the latest release of ZoneAlarm. Disabling ZoneAlarm made the error message go away. Apparently other ZoneAlarm users are experiencing similar problems.

Ken asks a performance-related question:

You have made me a big fan of task manager. But what do you think about the Performance console? Do you use it to monitor performance on a workstation, and if so what performance counters do you recommend tracking? It seems to yield more detailed information than task manager, but that can be a good thing or a bad thing. [Related question: does Vista have a Performance console as well, and how [if at all] is it new and improved from the XP version?]

The Performance console includes two snap-ins to the Microsoft Management Console. System Monitor tracks data from different counters, and Performance Logs and Alerts allows you to set up log files for those counters. You can open the Performance console by typing Perfmon in the Run box and pressing Enter, or use it from the Administrative Tools menu. We have written extensively about Perfmon in Windows XP Inside Out, but I rarely use it in day-to-day operation. It’s a great troubleshooting tool for those times when you’re trying to figure out why something that was working well is suddenly slower. It’s also good for benchmarking new hardware. System Monitor is still around in Windows Vista (although it’s been renamed Performance Monitor). Its interface is cleaned up, but its functionality is essentially the same. But it’s just one part of the new Reliability and Performance Monitor, which you access by typing Perfmon. The new tools include a resource overview that’s like Task Manager on steroids, and there’s also a Reliability Monitor (I’ve written about this new tool here and at ZDNet). If you liked playing with the XP version, you’ll love the new toys in Vista, which provide much more accessible information for easy scanning as well as many more logging options.

Kishore is looking for a Windows utility:

Is there an easy way to backup the device-drivers used by the system. The manufacturer supplies only exe files to install the drivers (along with all those “helpful programs”). I need those when I reinstall my machine.

I ran across something like that years ago, but haven’t seen anything like it lately. Because of the way drivers are installed, I’m a little leery of the concept. (My preference is to save drivers to a known good location and keep them backed up.) But if anyone can point me to something that does this I’ll be happy to take a look.

Sanza reports an annoyance:

Can this be ‘fixed/changed’?

When I’m in a folder (let’s call it MUSIC) that contains 400 other folders and I go into one of those other folders (let’s call it PINK FLOYD – THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON) and then go back out into the MUSIC folder, I want to be where I was when I left that MUSIC folder. That is, looking at the PINK FLOYD – THE WALL folder, not back at top of the folder list looking at AC/DC – BACK IN BLACK where I have to scroll all the way down to to the PINK FLOYD folder again.

Does this happen in Vista also? It bothers me all the time when I’m seraching through folders I have arranged by date and such.

How are you getting back to the original folder? If you use the Up button, this is the normal behavior. You end up at the default folder in the parent directory. To fix this annoyance, change your habvits. Use the Back button in Windows Explorer (or press the Backspace key) to return to the previous folder. That option remembers your previous settings.

I just tried this on two computers running Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 and one running Windows XP Home Edition and can reproduce the behavior.

And that’s all for today!  If I didn’t get to your question, sorry. Maybe next time.