The blog

More on PCs and TVs

I got a couple of good replies to my recent post on the debut of Windows XP Media Center 2005.

First, a note about what I use. I have what could politely be called a Frankenstein media system. I’ve upgraded an old TiVo to give it lots of storage capacity. The TiVo is connected to the big-screen TV in the den and is also connected to a device called a MediaCaster, which distributes its signal over the coax throughout the house. In the living room, the bedroom, and my office, I have infrared collectors that take the IR from any remote control and send it to the components in the den.
Continue reading “More on PCs and TVs” →

SP2 problems

In response to my recent post asking why people are waiting to install SP2, Steve Smith writes:

On my home system, I installed SP2 not too long after it came out (which has been my practice in the past for other fixes and updates)

The install proceeded uneventfully, I rebooted as instructed but the machine hung on the starting Windows screen. Going into diagnostic mode showed the hang occurring when the agp440.sys driver was loaded. My ASUS motherboard BIOS is current and I have fairly standard components on my system.

Google XP and agp440.sys and you’ll see that my problem is not uncommon. I have yet to find a solution. I had to reinstall the entire OS and all of my apps to recover. Not something I want to do again anytime soon.

Yes, I agree. That sucks. I’ve actually seen this happen in the past, long before SP2. In my case, the problem was caused by a faulty video driver. To solve it, I had to go into recovery console and disable the agp440.sys service, as described in this KB article. It is not a procedure I recommend for beginners.

For what it’s worth, I had similar problems when trying to use Roxio’s Easy CD Creator, shortly after Windows XP was released. The program installed an incompatible driver which hung the system, and it could only be fixed by booting into Recovery Console and manually removing the driver.

The problem in both cases was caused by a poorly written kernel-mode driver, not by Windows XP or a service pack. Installing SP2 just made the problem appear. The distinction may seem academic to someone dealing with the mess Steve saw, and most people will not have the patience or the knowledge to fix the problem using Recovery Console. Instead, they’ll reinstall Windows, cursing the whole while.

A recent issue of Scot Finnie’s newsletter mentions a similar problem in a somewhat oblique fashion:

A couple of days ago Microsoft released “Update for Windows XP Service Pack 2 (KB885894)” designed to solve what’s probably the most common installation problem with XP SP2: A freeze part-way through the setup process, leaving you with a failed installation. If that happens to you, Microsoft is offering this 760K download. You install it, restart your machine, and you should be able to complete your XP SP2 installation successfully.

Update for Windows XP Service Pack 2 (KB885894)

Note: This installation bug fix is poorly named. “Update for Windows XP Service Pack 2” sounds like it’s something everyone should download and run, but that is not the case. It’s only if you run into trouble with a hung installation.

I don’t know if this is the same issue, but it sounds like it could be.

At any rate, I stand by my advice that installing SP2 is the smart thing to do. I recommend you have a full backup first, of course, and I also suggest that you check all installed drivers to see whether any are unsigned. Those are the ones that are most likely to cause problems. You can use the Verifier utility (which we discuss in Windows XP Inside Out Deluxe Edition), but be careful with this one!

Update: I have more information about two specific SP2-related problems in this post.

How publishers lose readers

I subscribe to several RSS feeds from Windows & IT Pro magazine. Generally, they have good stuff, like an article I ran across today, This is how it goes sometimes. The author, Brett Hill, described how a server was infected in a lab, and how that infection got onto the network when the server was moved from the lab into a production environment.

Carl Siechert and I are currently working on a revision of our book, Windows Security Inside Out, so this was very relevant, and I wanted to explore some more.

I clicked the author’s name, which led to a list of other articles and “a blog about thwarting hackers and resolving other security issues.” Sounds great, right? Unfortunately, you and I can’t read that blog unless we pay $5.95 for a one-month pass or buy a print subscription. That’s just dumb.

I like the Salon.com model. Make me click through a special page and see an ad to get to the content behind the paid firewall. But let me see it.

Sorry, Brett. I won’t be reading your blog, and I’m probably going to take your magazine off my list of subscribed feeds. Too bad.

HDTV or PVR: Why make me choose?

I have a four-year-old TiVo that I’ve upgraded with a big hard drive so it has a capacity of several hundred hours. I have an HDTV-ready TV, but haven’t ordered an HDTV box from Cox Cable yet. Yeah, HDTV looks fabulous, but it’s worthless to me without a personal video recorder. I don’t want to be a slave to the TV.

That’s why announcements like these are so frustrating:

Hauppauge Computer Works: WinTV-PVR-500MCE

Watch one channel while recording another with the WinTV-PVR-500MCE and Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. WinTV-PVR-500MCE contains two complete TV tuners, each with their own hardware MPEG encoder!

Cool! Two TV tuners and a PVR. But no HDTV.

.:: Niveus Media, Inc ::. Imagine, Design, Create

Niveus Media, Inc., manufacturer of media entertainment devices for the high-end audio/video market, today announced their 2005 Denali Edition Media Center offering, featuring Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 software from Microsoft.

“Customers have been asking for high-definition support in Media Center Edition PCs since their inception,” said Kevin Unangst, director of Windows consumer marketing for Microsoft Corp. “We are pleased that Niveus will work with the Media Center Edition 2005 to meet consumer demand by offering its A/V form factor Denali Media Center with support for high-definition television broadcasts.”

It’s gorgeous (and no doubt very very expensive). But no PVR. So why should I bother.

Dear consumer electronics industry: Please wake me up when you get a high-capacity HDTV PVR. I know you’re working on it. I can’t wait. (And no, DirecTV with TiVo doesn’t count. I don’t want to switch to satellite and lock myself in to one source of input.)

(Via Engadget)

SP2: Why haven’t you installed it?

You probably already read the story I posted a few days ago, about the woman whose computer was taken over by some piece of spyware and then was further damaged by the software that was supposed to get rid of the infection.

I exchanged a few e-mails with her, and in one I asked whether she had installed Windows XP Service Pack 2. No, she said. She had heard there were problems with it.

Oh boy. If she had had SP2 installed, I can say with a high degree of confidence that she would not have been bitten by the spyware bug. But a few rumors were enough to scare her away from the one thing that would probably have been her best protection.

Are you running Windows XP? Are you still waiting to install SP2? If so, why? Installing any piece of software has risks attached to it, but this one is exceptionally well tested, and the likelihood that you will have problems is very small compared to the positive changes in security you’ll see.

Of course, you should back up your data first. But you should have a current backup of your important data at all times; it shouldn’t just be something you do every 18 months or so when a service pack comes out.

Seriously, if you’re still waiting for SP2, send me a note and tell me why. I don’t get it.

Oh, and I’ll be re-enabling comments soon.

Why your PC crashes

In an excellent article at Slate, Paul Boutin explains why your computer crashes:

A few years ago, Microsoft set up the Windows Error Reporting Service to help find out where crashes come from. After a Windows application — or your whole PC — shuts down, a box pops up asking you to send a confidential error report. Using pattern-matching software to sift through the data from millions of these reports, Microsoft discovered a surprising statistic. Seventy percent of Windows crashes involve one particular kind of software: device drivers.

Yep. And I would guess that 70% of the remaining crashes can be traced to either bad hardware (like a failing power supply or a bad RAM chip) or buggy software that runs in kernel mode (like an antivirus program or a CD/DVD-burning application).

We spent a lot of time in Windows XP Inside Out explaining how to track down the cause of a crash. Most of the time, it can be done, and fairly quickly.

(Thanks to Scoble for the pointer.)

Victimized by anti-spyware software

Longtime readers of this blog may recall that several months ago I wrote a negative review of a program called SpySweeper. Last night I got this e-mail message from a reader:

Ed…I saw your Feb 2004 review of Spy Sweeper and I’m the unsophisticated user you referred to, eg I “swept” everything an now I can’t log onto the internet and it takes forever to load Word, when it didn’t before I “swept” my computer.

On the advice of a friend, I tried several times to download AdAware, but when I unzipped it, it kept being saved as a .ref file that Windows could not open.

So, given that PCMagazine rated Spy Sweeper highly (keep in mind I was trying to use my infected computer and didn’t have time to research…I am at work now)…I installed and ran it last night.

It found a handful of adware and about 100 cookies….I knew a few of them were innocuous and eliminated them and then ran the sweep.

Well, after that, I can no long log onto the Internet with netzero at all!!!

Should I restore everything that was quarantined and hope I can at least access the internet?

My reply:

Argh, I sympathize. Yes, if I were you I would restore what was quarantined and start over. It sounds like the .exe file for NetZero was mistakenly classified as spyware or adware and the overly aggressive SpySweeper software locked it up so you can’t access it.

Btw, the AdAware “ref” files are simply the reference files, which contain data used to scan for spyware. The scanning engine is a different download completely. Unfortunately, AdAware has paid versions, and their Web site tries to steer you to those paid versions by making the free version a bit difficult to find.

For future reference, you can find AdAware Personal here, and you can download Spybot S&D (another program I recommend highly) from this link.

Spyware and so-called phishing attacks are an epidemic. Security software can help, but there are too many fake spyware fighters out there, some of which are actually infested with spyware themselves. Companies like WebRoot don’t help people when they release software that is too agressive. There’s no excuse for what happened to Carol–if the SpySweeper program had been properly tested, it would have never disabled her Internet access.

“Ed Bott’s Your New PC” is out

I just checked, and Amazon.com now has Ed Bott’s Your New PC available for immediate shipment. Click this link to
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amznwin=window.open(URL,NAME,”location=yes,scrollbars=yes,status=yes,toolbar=yes,resizable=yes,width=380,height=450,screenX=10,screenY=10,top=10,left=10″);
amznwin.focus();}
document.open();
document.write(“order your copy.“);
document.close();

I’m interested in any and all feedback.

Hey, I’ve got a new book!

cover
For the past few years, I’ve run a little side business in which I help friends and family replace their old PCs with shiny new ones. I show them how to pick out the right hardware, hook everything up correctly, get the latest security patches for Windows, install their programs, personalize the desktop and other settings, add virus protection and a firewall, and transfer all the data from the old PC to the new one.

Earlier this year, I convinced Microsoft Press that this would be a great topic for a book. The result is Ed Bott’s Your New PC. It’s slim (224 pages), easy to follow, and jargon-free. The book uses simple checklists to walk you through the setup process.

I’m really happy with the way the book turned out. If you know someone who’s planning to get a new PC, tell them about this book. Or, better yet, buy them a copy. Click this link to
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amznwin.focus();}
document.open();
document.write(“pre-order the book from Amazon.com“);
document.close();

or visit your favorite bookstore in early October. (Don’t be fooled by the October 27 date at Amazon’s Web site. The book should be out much sooner than that.)

As always, if you have any comments or questions, send me a note.