Windows 7 - getting my geek on

Last week Graham asked me if I was going to try and get a Beta copy of Windows 7 - I told him I didn't have the time or inclination to have to suffer Vista v.2! However - I did feel a bit ashamed that I was being a bit close-minded and I could tell by the look on his face that my geek-cred was slipping so when MS opened the Beta up past the first 2.5m downloads I snagged a copy and installed it on an old Vaio PCG-X1SP (1.5Ghz P4, 1gig RAM, 40gig HD, Radeon 7500 GFX) and was amazed how snappy it was compared to Vista on my MacBook (2Ghz Core2Duo, 2 gig RAM etc etc).

A few drivers weren't there in the Windows ISO but one check of the Windows Update installed everything. The only sub-optimal device is the Radeon Mobility display driver which Windows identified as a generic SVGA device (but got the 1400x1280 resolution correct). It'll do but I wanted to get it right so I have two option;

http://www.driverheaven.net/modtool.php

http://mobilityradeon7500vistadriver.webs.com/index.htm

Malwarebytes Anti Malware

I fell foul of this particular bit of malware yesterday - Joe called me to say that a download (a new map for Gary's Mod) had scanned fine (by AVG) when it arrived but on running the installer it became evident that it had arrived with a trojan! AVG detected it but was unable to sanitise it. My other favorite antivirus (the open-source ClamAV) was the same. Panda Antivirus (which we're meant to use at work) couldn't even detect it (yet alone stop the infection).
Malewarebytes Anti-Malware was the only thing to touch it.

The Internet today is full of scam sites, otherwise known as phishing sites that try to sell you products. These products can be potentially harmful to your computer. They install malware, provide false feedback about your computer, and can slow down the computer drastically. These products are known as rogue applications and come in a variety of forms - from anti-malware applications to registry cleaners and even hard drive utilities.

However - once removed the machine had been left pretty impotent.

• In an attempt to stop you running the Microsoft Malicious software removal tool it overwrites the ActiveX engine - try and run any Software Updates without that!
  
• It overwrites all of the previous System Restore points. Damn!
  
• It drops browser helper objects into both IE and Firefox to ensure that you're seeing their websites forever!
  

These people are very clever - I'm off to re-pave a WindowsXP machine!

Got my laptop back and the Apple/Scientology connection.

I got a new 15" Macbook Pro (the gen-1 MacBook had served me well for a couple of years). After getting Leopard right the version of BootCamp that comes with 10.5 is superb - makes installing Windows a breeze. As promised a few weeks back I went back to XP and what a revelation. It seems like I've got my computer back. It's snappy - Explorer windows appear as you double-click and network copies feel like their going over a LAN rather than a modem. If you are still stuck in Vista-hell then 'upgrade' to XP and you'll see what I mean. I used no Vista-specific features and so there were no compelling reasons for me to stay with it.
In an attempt to keep this new machine looking nice I went to the Apple Store on Regent's Street to buy one of those second-skin covers. Got a nice red one but felt quite uncomfortable being in there - I imagine it's how you'd have felt at a Nazi Youth Rally - so long as you're on-topic they love you, but mention that you run Windows or Linux on your MacBook and......
I wonder how how many of the folks who hang out in the Apple Store are Scientologists - I think the degree of compliance is similair!

Why I'm ditching Vista

I really have tried to like Vista - I've been using it for a year now on my work laptop - a Macbook (2 gigs RAM, Core Duo 2Ghz, 80gig Windows partition). I quickly turned off all the eye-candy (Aero Glass etc) but even so for the last year I've spent more time gazing at the spinning blue thing whilst waiting for trivial things (opening explorer windows or files to copy). It put me in mind of what I'd read Nicholas Negroponte say about modern electronics;

Prices of electronics keep dropping, but if you keep handing savings to the consumer, then there won't be a high price or margins. So manufacturers keep adding features, so the price can stay the same. Laptops, cell phones, etc. So an obesity occurs and turns most things into SUVs. Most of the gasoline is used to move the car, not the person....

You can listen to his keynote at CES this year - I lifted this from The World Technology Podcast's coverage. I like the way he compares the bloat of modern hardware/software with an SUV. You think that the multi-processor machine of 2008 should be able to hand file copying etc. better than the 80486 I was running in 1994!
So there you have it - Leopard, Ubuntu, and XP all run brilliantly on this machine and there are no compelling reasons for me to stay with Vista.

My server's autumn years!

My fileserver at home (the machine that carries this venerable blog amoungst other websites) has been a faithful box - bought in 1998 it is a dual-P2 motherboard (screaming along at 450Mhz!) it was the family's PC for a while but for the last six years it's been sitting in the cellar largely ignored! Aside from a couple of upgrades (mirrored disk, the odd clean) it's run 24-7 since 2001. Initially it wasn't just a web, FTP and Windows fileserver but it was our router/firewall/internet proxy. It was our mail and DNS server, it hosted our Skype-phone adaptor and did other things (scheduled backups etc). As cheap, dedicated network devices have become sensibly priced it's load has been lightened - first it gave up it's router/firewall duties when I bought a DLink router (and then replaced it for a wireless box), then my Belkin Skype handset relieved it a bit more. Now all my network backups are done by my little NAS box and since it's also an FTP and webserver my server may give up all serving duties. The last thing it's used for is as a player for internet audio and our music collection/podcasts in the kitchen - having tried a couple of the stand-alone devices that do this I'm not sure my server is due to decomissioning yet.
I've even shifted my email server needs back out to our ISP because they have much better spam filtering and mailboxes you can retrieve anywhere via a good web portal.
Anyhow - what has spured thoughts of ditching old faithful has been the failure of the RAID-1 disk set today. I'd been using the Windows mirroring which seems unable to recover from corruption without a bit of intervention. If you're lucky it's only a reboot, but often it's swapping the drives around so that the uncorrupted side of the mirror can re-boot the server. Now I know it's the Windows server software solution and if I was serious I'd stick a RAID card in there but it's a pain. So, over the next few weeks I'm going to migrate everything off this box on to my NAS and see how it all handles it. The good thing is I can switch the sites/blogs etc back and forth merely by changing the port routing in my DLink router.