Monthly Archives: February 2009

Trend Internet Security 2009… slow

Computer Aid Posted on by

Another system rebuild, another installation of Trend Internet Security 2009…

This system is not lightning fast, but its not slow either:

Celeron 2.8Ghz, 768Mb RAM, etc

Yet TIS seems to make the PC very sluggish at normal day-to-day tasks.

I found a perfect way to test the effect: playing the game “Winterbells” from Orisinal Games

The Game would be smooth and quick before installing TIS (in fact, the game runs well on an old 600Mhz Pentium 3).

After installing TIS (with no firewall), the game would stutter every second or two.

I tried disabling the TIS “protection against web threats”… but that didn’t help either.

I uninstalled TIS 2009, installed Avira Antivir, plus installed Windows defender and spyware blaster, and Winterbells was playing as smooth as always (even while performing a microsoft update at the same time).

I did notice that TIS seemed to have a small memory footprint, but at this stage, I’d say it looks like TIS 2009 might only work well on dual core CPUs (which are not that widespread yet).

Have you had any bad experiences with Trend / other big-name security software?

outlook: formatting buttons greyed out (bold, underline, italics, font, etc)

Computer Aid Posted on by

With microsoft outlook, you click on “new” email, and start composing a new email. You fill in the subject and email recipient.

But when you get to writing the body of the email, you notice that the text formatting buttons are mostly greyed out (eg bold, underline, italics, cut, copy, paste, font size, font color, paragraph justification, bullets and numbering, indenting).

The solution is actually quite straightforward:

In the main email window (the one with the inbox on it):

tools -> options -> mail format -> compose in this message format: HTML

Large increase in internet usage: blame Norton pulse updates

Computer Aid Posted on by

Customer suddenly got a huge increase in internet usage.

Usually, its because the “kids” discover something like limewire.

In this case its 2 elderly ladies, who only use the internet twice a week for emails, internet banking, and minimal web surfing.

They only have a 200Mb download limit (which they never exceeded for 2 years), so they increase it to 400Mb… quite small by todays standards, but it suits them.

But now they are using about 900Mb a month (with Bigpond charging for excess usage).

At first I thought an infection of some kind, but after some detective work, I find its much worse: Norton Internet Security 2009 is downloading a huge amount of data over the month.

How do I know?

Well, there are a few hints:

  • The excessive download only started the month after NIS2009 was renewed (and new version is downloaded and installed).
  • Nothing else was changed on the PC.
  • I manually get NIS to update, then restart the PC, and soon after windows XP restarts, I see network traffic from norton… using the full ADSL bandwidth for a solid 2 minutes.
  • I discover NIS2009 has a new “feature”: pulse updates. Basically, NIS checks for new updates every 5 – 15  minutes

I find the pulse updates particularly disturbing:

  1. You cannot configure how often NIS checks for updates (for your own good!)
  2. You have little control over how much bandwidth NIS uses
  3. You have no simple way of disabling pulse updates (eg if you want to play games).

Given that the customer usually leaves the PC running 24/7, then I suggest that they look at a better internet plan.

Also, switching off the modem unless they really need to use the internet (and keeping a log of when they use the internet), shows that some large download happen when the modem is on (but overall, less bandwidth is used).

So, like the Vista and AVG site scanner, pulse updates sound good on paper, but the implementation is either inefficient, or makes some bad assumptions about peoples standard internet connection (ie assume people have powerful PCs, high internet speeds and bandwidth)

Am I the only one that sees many problems with every new version of Norton Internet Security? Or is there a seething mass of unhappy Norton users out there?

SATA support for A7VBX-LA motherboard? No

Computer Aid Posted on by

I recently wanted to fit a new SATA drive into an older Compaq PC with a A7VBX-LA motherboard.

I thought: hey, its got 2 sata sockets on the motherboard… no problem.

Well, I find XP cannot see the SATA drive.

OK, that should be easy: just change the bios setting to make SATA emulate IDE (or even jumper the HDD to 1.5Mb/s as well.

Nope, there is no way the bios can detect the drive.

I search the web and find an interesting situation: Apparently Compaq commissioned Asus to develop this motherboard… SATA support was not part of the deal.

I’m guessing that Asus slightly modified an existing motherboard to suit.

But now, nobody is taking responsibility for “developing” any bios updates.

So now the A7VBX-LA could support SATA drives, but nobody is going to update the bios to do so.

How to take apart a Maxtor Basics external 3.5″ USB drive

Computer Aid Posted on by

Customer had an older PC, with a 20GB and a 30Gb HDD, and both were filling up fast.

She decides to get a 640Gb external USB drive to store her internet downloads.

Its a Maxtor Basics with a 3.5″ SATA HDD.

She then decides to get a non-counterfeit version of XP.

This is when I get involved, and I convince her it would be a lot easier to place the 640Gb drive inside the PC and use it as the main windows drive.

Getting access to the 3.5″ HDD was a bit tricky. If I had known how to do it beforehand, I would have been able to dismantle it with barely a scratch on the external case.

Anyway, here’s how I did it (remember that this WILL invalidate your Maxtor warranty):

  • Remove the small sticker at the back (near the power and USB plugs)
  • Under the sticker is a screw. Remove it

  • There are 2 long sides to the enclosure. One side has a matt finish, the other has a gloss finish, and has the word “maxtor” on it, and is near the light/LED.
  • The side with the gloss finish has 10 tabs holding it to the rest of the enclosure (5 along the top, 5 along the bottom)
  • This side can easily be popped off (1 tab at a time), with a flat screwdriver.
  • This is probably the most difficult part: The plastic top and bottom parts of the enclosure are held clipped with hooked plastic tabs. These are always difficult to undo. You just need to start at one end, and use the screwdriver to work your way around the enclosure, popping (and hopefully not breaking) the tabs.
  • Now you can remove the metal enclosure, undo a few screws, and there is you hard drive, ready to be put into a new PC (or if its faulty, replaced with a new drive).

Added 9/May/2009:

I’ve since re-assembled the external enclosure with another hard drive. It works great (except for the Maxtor label, which no longer reflects whats inside!)

Cannot use wireless on netgear wpn824

Computer Aid Posted on by

I get an amazing range of problems that I just cannot fix over the phone.

One customer wanted me to help get their laptop to use the wireless router… They already had another laptop that was connected wirelessly, so a second one should be easy.

Well, Once I get him to connect to the router vie IE, I quickly find thet they are using WEP. Given that I’m a lot more familiar with WPA-PSK, and WEP is a lot more “hackable” than WPA, and WPA allows for “friendly” passwords, then I got him to change the router encryption to WPA-PSK.

But it still wouldn’t work.

I tried changing between AES and TKIP, but that still didn’t make a difference.

The second laptop actually started working after a reboot, but not the first laptop… now this should have been a clue to what the problem was.

Anyway, I arrange to go out and take a look first-hand.

After a while, I eventually find the cause: somebody had enabled the routers MAC access control… so only computers with pre-allowed network card IDs are allowed to connect.

I’ve long since given up enabling MAC access control, since its barely a speed hump to a real hacker, whereas good WPA security (with a 20+ character password) is much more secure.

So the moral of the story is: don’t enable MAC access control on wireless routers (use WPA instead).

system restore is not able to create a restore point

Computer Aid Posted on by

Customer had some strange problems with one of his PCs

System Restore could not create or restore “restore points”.

And the internet was not working (it actually was working, but seemed intermittent)

Creating a restore point would result in the message: system restore is not able to create a restore point

Restoring from a restore point would just get to the “Confirm restore point selection, then pressing the NEXT button did nothing.

I tried disabling and enabling sys restore, but no luck.

I tried line 278 from kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_tweaks.htm, but no go.

At some point I also noticed that disk defragment also didn’t work… very strange symptoms

Next I tried sfc /scannow

That seemed to work… but after a few minutes, system restore stopped working again… curious!

I was starting to suspect that Spyware Doctor (paid version) might have been interfering somehow. It would occasionally say that an internet computer was trying to connect (which we blocked). The customer swore it was a great program (but I’ve had some difficulties with Spyware Doctor in the past).

Looking at Spyware Doctor closely, I noticed it would appear to do its normal update, but the status screen showed that it was several weeks since the last successful update.

I disabled Spyware Doctor, but that didn’t change things

But then telling an antivirus/antispyware to disable itself doesn’t always mean its really disabled.

So I totally uninstalled it… and installed antiVir, windows defender… but neither would update…

I then tried SuperAntiSpyware… and it also wouldn’t update.

I tried scanning with Superantispyware (even though it was out of date by a few weeks), and it detected a trojan infection.

The infected file was a backup from the customers main PC… So now I widened my work to the main PC as well.

In the end, both PCs were infected with trojans and rootkits.

I was able to fix the main PC, as it wasn’t showing any sign of being infected (so I could update antivir/defender/superantispyware and remove all nasties)

But the other PC had so many files on it, that the scan process was incredibly slow.

So in the end, I took it back to the office, scanned the HDD from my main PC (and removed some infections).

But that was still not enough to allow any updates.

In the end I downloaded the latest version of SAS, installed it, and it managed to clear up everything.

I must say that in cases like this, SuperAntiSpyware has a huge advantage over many of its competitors: Downloading the latest version also downloads the latest malware definitions.

Most other security software seems to be a few months out of date, and relies on the user to perform an update once the software is installed.

Thats crazy, as nowadays, a lot of malware targets security updates first, such that the anti-malware program is virtually useless unless it can do an update.

Vista SP1 error code 80200010

Computer Aid Posted on by

I did a Vista recovery for a customer, and after the usual batch of updates, I was finally asked to install SP1.

OK, I knew SP1 can take a while, so I decided to start it, then come back a few hours later, and see what happened.

Well, it looks like it generated an error code 80200010

So I figure: Oh well, I’ll try it again.

This time it seems to “resume” the SP1 download from 47%

Hmmm, looks like either the download got interrupted, or the wireless network connection dropped out, or the PC went to sleep / standby during the download.

So this time I regularly check the progress of the download, and I have no more issues, and SP1 installs without any more hiccups.

ipconfig: an internal error occurred: the request is not supported

Computer Aid Posted on by

This XP PC was very confused.

It seems it had run out of disk space while updating to SP3.

I managed to free up some space, but the wifi connection was acting weird:

The XP wireless would say that it was connected normally, but an ipconfig /all from a CMD prompt would return with:

ipconfig: an internal error occurred: the request is not supported

OK, maybe the IP stack is corrupted (its a common problem), so I try:

netsh int ip reset resetlog.txt

Now, an ipconfig returns with:

mswsock.dll not found

I copy mswsock.dll from another system, but then ipconfig complains about:

ifmon.dll cannot be loaded.

At this point, I try LSPfix, but that doesn’t help.

Next, I try to delete the registry entries:

HKLMSystemCurrentControlSetServices and remove winsock and winsock2

But the network still doesn’t work.

At one point, I was getting:

wuauserv.dll was loaded, but the dllregisterserver entry point was not found.

I couldn’t do sfc /scannow (customer didn’t have the original windoze XP CD)

At this stage all I could do is a repair install of windows (which finally did fix the problem).

repair install of XP (SP2 or SP3) without uninstalling IE7

Computer Aid Posted on by

This is a mistake that is so easy to do, that I have done it twice 🙁

It seems that the internet is littered with victims who have done a repair install of XP (SP2 or SP3), only to find that internet explorer 6 no longer works, and upgrading back to ie7 is nearly impossible. Thanks again, Microsoft.

I’ve found that ie 6 will usually load the home page, but any further browsing results in 2 blank ie6 windows appearing, and then ie6 stops responding.

Its easy enough to avoid this: uninstall ie7 BEFORE performing a repair install of XP.

Of course many of us find we cannot uninstall ie7 because XP is stuffed in some way (hence the need to do a repair install in the first place!)

Or if you are like me: oops, I just forgot to uninstall ie7

The reason is that after a repair install, you are left with system files that are a combination of ie6 and ie7

Anyway, microsoft have a page that explains what to do if you didn’t uninstall ie7 before the repair… but its only after you have read half way down the page, that you realise that the instructions are for fixing the ie6/ie7 problem with the repair install.

Basically, if you have XP SP2 or SP3, then you need to start the XP recovery console (you normally need an XP installation CD to boot from).

Boot from the XP CD. When prompted, press “R” to enter the recovery console

Enter the Administrator password when asked (for most people, its blank, so just press enter).

Now, enter the following commands:
CD ie7spuninst
batch Spuninst.txt

You might get a few errors (permission denied)

Once its all complete, enter:

exit

to restart the PC.

After this, I still had a damaged ie6, but I got around it like this:

– run the ie6 internet options (either from ie6->tools, or from the control panel)

– change the home page to microsoft.com

– start or re-start ie6 (so it goes to microsoft straight away

– on the MS website, go for the update option, and you will find all the MS updates will work (including ie7 !!!). Note: at first, I installed all the updates except ie7. I rebooted, then installed ie7.

– after a restart or two, the PC will finally be “fixed”.

I wonder if microsoft are trying to make XP worse, so that more people will consider “upgrading”…