Is it me, or is Win7 simply more of the “Vista nonsense”? Played with it for a couple of hours today – pretty much the same look and feel as it’s failure-predecessor. What are MS thinking? No clue, really…

Figured out a real neat way of migrating software and files when setting up a new computer. Tested only on XP, which, in my opinion, remains the only fastest, most useful and bug-free OS so far. So you start by cloning the hard drive of your old PC onto that of your new computer – whichever one you’d want to pull out. Once you’re done with that, boot from the Windows CD-ROM on your new computer and let it find an existing Windows installation. Note: you have to match the OS version – Pro to Pro, Home to Home, otherwise it will likely not work. Select the repair option and let it upgrade/repair what you had. You might need to boot to safe mode once or twice, if after Windows setup has finished your computer freezes at startup. Then restart normally. When done, you’ll need to manually load drivers for your new computer and any peripherals you have. In the end you should get everything exactly the way you had it on your old machine – all the files, documents, programs(!), etc. There might be a few glitches due to this undocumented routine but nothing too serious. Also note: if upgrading on a custom built PC using a retail Windows XP disk, you will have to re-activate Windows.

Oh well, we’re in the middle of one of the worst epidemics, no question about it! I haven’t seen something like this for a very long time: everybody’s calling in with infected computers. Apparently, there’s a whole bunch of new nasty malware out there, invisible to most antiviruses as of yet. Be extra careful with what you click on and where you go on the Internet. Visually examine every link before clicking (point your mouse at it, watch the full address in the status bar below). Examples of syntax: payments.paypal.com = legit, while payments.paypal.paymentsforlife2010.com = bogus. In the 1st example “payments is a subdomain of paypal.com vs. both “paypal” and “payments” as a subdomain of “paymentsforlife2010.com” in the 2nd example. Here you’re really surfing paymentsforlife2010.com. A couple of days ago a client of mine received an email supposedly from “DHL” to say that they’d tried to deliver a package but couldn’t reach him with a “click here to reschedule delivery” link. It only took him one click.

A few extra steps to take to avoid getting infected:

1. Even if you’re not using it, upgrade the the latest Internet Explorer to here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/Internet-explorer/default.aspx

2. Install all the latest updates and patches from Microsoft, including those to Internet Explorer.

3. Upgrade your antivirus to the latest version. I use AVG Free Edition and you can get the full installation package here: http://filehippo.com/download_avg_antivirus If you’ve been using AVG, install on top of your existing version, it will upgrade and reboot computer. Otherwise, either upgrade what you have or remove and install something else. For faster computers I also like Kaspersky Internet Security that can be downloaded from http://www.kaspersky.com/ . Heavy guns and armor. Needless to say, I assume no responsibility for any damage directly or indirectly resulting from any advise I give here. Follow my suggestions at your own risk!

Immediately following the upgrade, reboot your computer and upon restart, update your antivirus till it there are no more updates.

4. Upgrade FireFox to the latest here: http://getfirefox.com

At least for a while, try and not browse the Internet on computers that you work on. Don’t go anywhere you don’t have to.

If you get hit with one of these, turn your computer off and don’t use it until you get help. There’s absolutely no self-disinfection this time.

Hang in there, people. Most antiviruses should be brought up to speed shortly. There’s already a few patches from Microsoft along with the new version of MS Malicious Software Removal Tool. Install it, too.

If you’re sending an email to more than one recipient and putting everyone’s email addresses into the “To”, you’re feeding spammers. Don’t we get enough spam? Well, this is how it happens, so don’t contribute! Instead, address the e-mail to yourself and put everyone else into “BCC” (Blind Carbon Copy). Also, if you’re replying or forwarding, delete all the addresses from the header of the forwarded message. Help stop spam!

You do want to give your computer some compressed air from time to time, especially for that heatsink that sits on top of the processor and all the fans (particularly the CPU and the power supply fans). At least once a year, I would say. Vacuuming also works. In fact, doing both is desirable. Dust is one major factor contributing to overheating, which results in freezes, blue screens, crashes, etc. This requires opening up your computer tower. Needless to say, you must first turn the computer off and – just to stay on the safe side – unplug the power cable from the power supply. This primarily applies to desktop computer, although I’ve seen a few laptops where clogged CPU fans cause overheating and subsequent shutdown.

What if your computer dies tomorrow? Are you backed up? Wouldn’t you hate to lose your files? One easy thing that you can do to minimize the risk is to have your PC connected to a battery backup. Never underestimate the power source! This time my father got in trouble, and isn’t it always the same thing: you’re in the middle of something on your computer when all of a sudden the power goes down? Then you’re turning your PC back on, and… at this point you might get the famous blue screen of death, which is what he’s got. And it’s the least harmful of all, for it’s got to be merely a software issue. Other times your computer will be dead in the water. There are things to try, of course but why take chances? So, remember: backup, power, security!

Audio engineers have a saying: “it’s all about finding that one button”. And the way that this wisdom translates into virtually anything that requires skills is that “it can take very little time, if you know the magic trick”. You wouldn’t believe how often “IT Consultants” tell people they need to have Windows reinstalled, and sometimes even have the hard drives wiped clean prior to the reinstall, to address the lost password issue. The truth is that there are very few situations that really require “Windows reload” and the more expert the IT Consultant is, the more likely it is that he will avoid doing that. The opposite is certainly true, as well, for performing an OS reinstall requires very little knowledge these days. So due to the rising demand, here is a quick 5-minute do-it-yourself workaround. On a PC running Windows XP Service Pack 2 or higher, you turn your computer on and in a couple of seconds you start hitting the F8 key repeatedly until you see the black-and-white startup options menu. Select “Safe Mode” and hit “enter” twice. Wait until the system boots up and you should have “Administrator” among other users on the Windows Welcome screen. 9 out of 10, this account will not be password protected. So you click on it, it lets you in, you give it a few more seconds and go to the control panel to get to “user accounts”. Click in, pick your name and select “change password”. Was that easy?

Those itty-bitty AA1s are real cute. Most of us have them by now, as they are fairly cheap. And “cheap” usually stands for “trouble”. So, when you want to set the BIOS password, there’s a bug that can give you a heart attack: you have to supply your password with CAPS LOCK on, even though it was off, when you set it up. Though, if it was on at the time, then your little netbook may not boot at all. Here’s how I got around it. First, I figured it would be a lot more efficient and secure at the same time, if I disabled my Windows password and enabled the BIOS security lock. And so I do that, saved changes and restarted my computer. Then I type in the password that I just set up, and it’s not accepting it. A few minutes of googling around told me of the CAPS LOCK bug on this model. Nuisance, of course, but works for some. I intended to come up with a workaround and reset the password to all caps. And on the next boot the computer was dead. The only other option was to flash the latest BIOS in an “emergency mode”. That is, you get a USB flash drive, (using another computer with Internet access) format the drive into FAT16, download and extract contents of this archive to the root directory of the newly formatted drive, rename the file zg5_3310.fd to ZG5IA32.FD. Then attach the flash drive to a USB port of your netbook, turn it off, press the “function” and “escape” keys simultaneously and hold them down. Press the power button while still holding those two keys down to turn the computer back on. Be sure that you have both the battery and the power cord connected, by the way. Now the power light should be flashing and you can release your grip. Firmly press the power button once again and the computer should start the BIOS upgrade. The power button will continue to flash, as well as the activity LED on your USB flash drive, if it has one. When it’s done, your computer will reboot and that should resurrect it. You will still have to enter your password with CAPS LOCK on, though, so keep that in mind.

A friend of mine had a scary one yesterday: when a video card goes out a new Toshiba laptop (oh, those Toshibas!), you take it in or ship it out for the warranty repair. And, by the way, it’s always good to pull the hard drive out or at least make a backup, as they will likely wipe it clean “just in case”, even if they’re only replacing the keyboard. And this time, they did have to replace the keyboard, indeed – scary to even think of the design of this gizmo. So imagine: a black Toshiba with silver macbook-like keyboard. One of a kind, I tell you! Well, you put the hard drive back in, turn it on and it begins to boot up but then, two seconds into the startup it flashes blue and restarts and so on till the second coming. It’s almost a classic by now, if you have a newer PC (applies to both laptops and desktops) running Windows XP: you have to set your sATA controller to run in compatibility mode, as opposed to AHCI, which is the default for most computers these days. Otherwise, you can’t even install XP. Sure enough, they had to wipe the BIOS, as well…

OK, so it’s time to open a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, even though I’ve been mostly honoring local wines lately. It has to be something special tonight, for the occasion is nothing less than that: it appears that I’ve found the cause of one of the most nonsensical nuisances on a Windows PC machine, that’s been troubling me for almost a decade now. On the surface is would seem rather common: the PC will just freeze for no reason and out of the blue. Big deal with Windows, right? Well, not quite, as this one would really freeze everything, when you can’t move the mouse and when even the audio that was playing freezes into a tiny loop of a few samples (a few milliseconds, that is – really painful to human’s ears), so that you know exactly when it happened. Needless to say the screen stops refreshing at that very moment. What drives people absolutely insane is that it appears to be completely random, not specific to anything they do – the PC can be just sitting there idling with no windows or applications open, not even a screensaver, and it would happen. Again and again.

The first time I ever encountered this one was back in the school days on a new custom built and ridiculously expensive Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) PC running under Windows 2000 in our recording studio at the academy where after I’d done my internship and started working, I was to attend to everything that went wrong with all the gear. And of course, I tried most everything: running all kinds of tests on the hardware, installing all available OS patches, updating device drivers, eventually wiping and completely reloading the OS and all the software. Then on to replacing parts: power supply, memory; disconnecting all the expansion boards, etc. – felt like a new computer at the end, really. What’s interesting is when I would attempt to narrow it down to either “software” or “hardware” to focus on, and say, boot the PC in safe mode or off any pre-installation media for that purpose, it would work just fine. And that led me to believe it was a software issue. Nevertheless, the hard drive got replaced “just in case”. Even though you can generally distinguish a “software” problem from a “hardware” one, at times it can be pointless, since software runs on hardware. What that translates into is you will have a certain issue on one computer but not on another. And the issue will be purely software-related.

Trying to scour the online forums for any recollection on this issue didn’t give me anything relevant, as the symptoms were totally non-descriptive. It’s like trying to google out the blue screen of death: you won’t really find anything because you will find just about everything from the filesystem error on the hard drive to an incompatible or poorly designed device driver. It can all be a cause of it and error messages or log files are of no use most of the time.

Before I would really start tearing that big tower apart replacing the motherboard, it was decided to let the pros from the company that built the machine to take a look. No problem was diagnosed and we were told that doing any more than what had been done on the hardware side would leave us with no warranty, which was unaffordable, as it covered digital audio processing boards roughly $2K each.

Years later I ran into the exact same problem with one of my customers’ home PC here in the bay area. The computer got shipped back to Dell and again, no problem was detected.

So, it all came to end today, another couple of years down the road after we’d got that same gal a new PC and I was to recycle the old one. But how could I pass it up, right?

In order to start with a clean slate, I wiped the hard drive and began loading Windows waiting for the first show. Luckily this time, over the past couple of years it got much worse with this machine – up to a point when it would freeze every 5 to 15 minutes. But so far, everything was flawless, as I zipped through the Windows setup. Done there and on to the next step, which is almost always installing device drivers. I usually load them all at once, ignoring prompts to restart after each one, and sure enough the show began shortly after. I then started to roll the drivers back one by one reverting to where I was just after the OS install. The last one was the display adapter. And that was it! Defying any logic or common sense, as soon as I uninstalled the video driver, the PC just stopped freezing. It all came together then: booting from a pre-installation media most of the time results in using generic video driver. And the same applies to starting up in safe mode. However, video adapter is the last thing you would think of, as the symptoms are so different. When a video card goes bad, what you see on the screen is either garbage or nothing at all.

So all that’s left now is to wait for another one of these machines with the same problem and try the same solution. After all, what did the trick on the computer that I was playing with, may not necessarily work on the next one. Time will tell but if I’m right, then all it takes is replacing the video card. If the PC is mostly used for office applications and web browsing and the machine is running Windows XP Service Pack 3 or higher, one can simply uninstall the display driver and set the screen resolution to anything that looks right (on earlier versions and prior configurations of the OS it will be limited to 800×600 dpi at low color bit depth and look ugly). So, for an office user, the trade-offs are really minor and almost unnoticeable in this case. Otherwise, when replacing an integrated video adapter, remember to first install an extended one and then disable the onboard video – preferably through BIOS.