I Am In Geek Heaven

I am in geek heaven.

I am in geek heaven. I’m typing this on my main computer. Immediately to its right an older, slower computer is doing some downloading. It’s mainly used for storage nowadays. These two PCs share a common monitor through a KVM.

My current video card has two VGA ports and I’d like to go to two monitors if I could just figure out how to hold them on my desk. I got this when we moved in 18 years ago. It’s a great desk. It still has a slot so paper can feed from below into a dot matrix printer.

Down the hall in what is still considered Stef’s playroom I am formatting and reloading a friend’s machine so it can be recycled through the family. There’s another carcass on its side nearby. Running Windows 98, the owner would like her files but can find no way to retrieve them. Worst case I pull the hard drive and plug it in to a little USB hard drive reader I’ve got

This house has a small wired lan and wireless elsewhere. My router has 11 devices logged in since its last reboot. There are actually two routers and two small hubs. This was all bought when I saw things on sale–very cheaply. I have few brand names and consider these parts totally interchangeable.

With all these machines on at the same time I’ve had to temporarily unplug the MythTV DVR. It will be back tomorrow, I hope.

I enjoy these tech projects and am usually pretty good at them. I have built PCs from a table full of components without instructions. I often take on more than I can comfortably handle.

There was a time when shade tree mechanics could work on a car with a few tools. No more. Everything’s locked down and part of a system. I suppose that will happen to PCs too. For guys like that will be sad.

Tech Support Times Three

I have three tech support stories to tell. Two are brief, the third is not. They all have relatively happy endings.

The first concerns a phone call I received yesterday from the company that provides much of the on-air weather equipment we use at work. We’d had a terrible problem, which they fixed. Now they wanted some log files.

The logs were needed because they fixed the problem, but weren’t sure how!

That sounds terrible, though it’s not as unusual as it seems. Points to them for asking me to send the files. These log will help them understand what they did for us, so they can do it for everyone.

The second story concerns my laptop. It is, in computer time, ancient. There’s a sticker on the front attesting to the fact that it was designed for Windows 98!

If you’re technically inclined, it’s a PII-300 with 128 mb of RAM for memory and 2 mb more for video.

If that was a meaningless blur, it’s got about the same horsepower as a tricycle.

A while ago, I upgraded it to a heavily customized version Windows XP. I carefully turned off as much as I could to preserve as much of this machine’s minimal power as was possible. It’s still a hog.

This has been a hacker machine for me. I’ve experimented with it by swapping hard drives in and out. Until today it had a tiny 8 gb drive.

With a weekend trip coming up, I wanted more storage, so I swapped in a 20 gb drive last night. Windows XP was on the drive, so I freshened some programs with newer versions and then went to reboot.

Before the power went off, Windows told me it had to install some updates… 57 updates!

Are they serious? Sure, this drive had been out of service for a while, but were there really that many updates (mostly security related) to XP? And this version had already been inoculated with SP2 and other fixes.

I took a shower while the laptop did its thing.

Tech support story three is a little more troubling. It started with phone calls from Matt Scott, one of our meteorologists at the TV station.

When he went to fire up his Dell desktop machine, it quickly crashed into a Blue Screen of Death or BSOD! The BSOD screen is cryptic, but it hinted at problems with the boot sector. That’s serious.

Before Matt got to me, he had spoken with Dell tech support. Their solution, after a few tests, was to send the drive to a forensic computer lab where, for $1,800, it could be resurrected!

He brought the PC in to work and Jeff Bailey, our webuy, began to work on it. I did some scouting around Google and found what typically causes this particular BSOD.

HINT: If you ever have a computer problem, write down exactly what’s on the screen and search for it on Google. You are not the first person with this problem. You can often find solutions just by looking. It’s very important to search for the exact words you see.

“Matt, do you have any disks that came with the PC,” I asked. My suspicion was, Dells don’t come with disks… and it hadn’t.

I went through the station looking for a Windows XP CD. Yes, what I was doing probably violates some stipulation in the end user licensing agreement – sue me.

By the time I returned with the disk, Bailey had the machine on its side. A panel had been removed from the case, exposing the innards to the world. As it turns out, that wasn’t necessary, though it makes Jeff and me look like &#252ber Geeks (as if knowing how to make a “&#252” on the screen isn’t enough).

Computer repair is modern day sorcery. You must follow a number of steps, none actually documented, before you begin to fix the trouble. We started by reconfiguring the BIOS to boot from a CD instead of the hard drive and loading XP’s recovery console.

Matt looked sheepish – fearful his pictures, video and documents were about to get trashed.

We lucked out. Matt’s problem was the same as most of the others I’d read about. It took a few hours, but slowly but surely, his computer fixed itself, rebuilding files and reconstructing the recalcitrant boot sector.

Why couldn’t the Dell tech fix this? No clue. They should be ashamed of themselves for the solution they recommended. That’s totally unacceptable.

Why doesn’t Windows XP do this on its own without demanding a disk most users don’t have? Again, no clue. Microsoft should be ashamed of that and for its often meaningless BSODs.

Bottom line – always have a geek at the ready… preferably two!

On The Tech Support Trail

One of our photographers at work asked me if I’d take a look at his PC. He’s not a computer guy and has two sons who play games. It’s a guaranteed recipe for computing hell!

His wife is a sainted woman – she gets a free pass!

The computer is a Quantex! I had a Quantex too. What’s left of it is in the attic, in pieces.

They were nicely priced PCs, back when Quantex was in business. This is a Pentium III, running Windows 98.

Tim complained about “Blue Screens of Death.” Confirmed!

Actually, the biggest problem with this PC… with so many PCs… is how much is installed that wants to start every time the power button is pressed. Each little app takes a small amount of the processor’s capacity. When you’ve got dozens of these puppies starting up, there’s not much computer left.

What’s the expression? Bleeding to death from a thousand cuts?

It was sluggish, with the mouse jerking around the screen. There were BSODs at random moments.

First step, I went in and stopped as many programs as I could (and recognized) from starting by themselves. Then I started to pour through the installed base.

I didn’t want to uninstall the boy’s games. I may not have to.

There were at least two virus programs running. I’m not a big fan of McAfee. Every computer I’ve ever ‘deloused’ has McAfee on board! The other one I’d never heard of at all.

In went AVG AntiVirus – it’s free and it seems to work. I also ran AdAware.

As I removed bits and pieces of ‘stuff,’ the computer became more responsive… faster. I continued to poke around.

There were six versions of AOL’s software installed. I removed five.

It doesn’t look like any critical updates had been installed since… Oh, hell – it didn’t look like any had been installed, period. This is very common.

Tim’s machine will live to fight another day. It’s just a shame that his machine’s fate is shared by so many others.

If I were recommending a machine for someone without kids who play games… someone who wanted to surf the net and send email… I’d suggest Linux. I know it’s nerdy, but it gets the job done nicely and (at the moment at least ) it’s impervious to evil.

Windows XP Service Pack 2

Over the last year or two, the Windows operating system has started to resemble the South Bronx in the early 80s. Yes, it’s intrinsicly valuable, but it’s also become dangerous. The young and innocent must be protected from predators.

Over the weekend, Microsoft slowly rolled out a massive service pack for Windows XP – the latest version of its operating system. Since I have a bunch of machines to update at home, I downloaded the 225mb version and then passed it across my network to all the machines.

The size of the download will certainly keep people with dial-up accounts from getting the pack. It will probably intimidate many broadband users as well. That’s a massive file to download.

I’m taking few chances, so it was installed on my spare machine first. I figure there’s nothing mission critical on this machine so I can survive should the machine be unhappy with what I did.

Microsoft actually expects to see some troubles, though I have seen few specifics. Since it closes holes in certain ports with its new firewall, it’s sure to break programs that communicate in a non-standard way – even if they’re doing so for a perfectly legitimate purpose.

After the download, installation took about 25 minutes. It didn’t ask for my help, other than clicking off on the EULA.

As far as I can tell the installation was a success. I immediately noticed my wireless network, which needed me to manually start it on every reboot, was now finding its own way to operation. I’m not using Internet Explorer or Outlook Express on that machines, and I know that’s where a lot of the security enhancements were aimed.

There are two things which trouble me. First, this service pack doesn’t address problems for people running Windows 98, a perfectly fine and usable operating system. We have two machines at home (Steffie’s desktop and my laptop) which are running Windows 98. Neither machine has the firepower to switch to XP. They will continue to be susceptible to all the same attacks that brought this service pack on in the first place.

My second problem concerns whether Microsoft will allow this patch to be used on systems with bootleg copies of XP. It would seem obvious that they shouldn’t support those who steal from them, except for the fact that many of the ills this service pack stops are passed along to legitimate users. So, no inoculation for them means they may make my computers sick in the long run.

It is certainly a quandary for Microsoft. I don’t know what I’d do if it were me. However, if viruses and spam from zombie machines continues because of Microsoft’s policies, I’ll be ticked.

Blood and Guts Tech Support

Matt Scott, who I work with at the TV station, was having problems with his computer. It was running slowly and popping ads. It sounded like a typical adware/spyware/malware infestation. So, I offered to help and he took me up on it.

I brought it home and hooked it up, borrowing all the connections from my Linux machine. Almost immediately, it hung while calling a webpage. My suspicions seemed well founded.

Since I couldn’t operate on the web with a browser that was stuck, I burned a CD with Spybot, moved it to Matt’s machine and ran it. It found some cookies, and a few other minor annoyances, but nothing that would cause all this trouble.

My friend Peter Mokover (who has asked me to mention his name and put it in bold letters) suggested I clear the browser cache (which was set ridiculously high at 550 MB). Bingo. The browser opened perfectly, but the machine was still pretty slovenly.

I attempted to do a scan disk, but the computer kept writing to the hard disk – each time aborting the scan. I rebooted into ‘safe mode’ and tried again. There were a bunch of bad sectors – but again, nothing I hadn’t seen in the past. As long as I was here, I defragged the system and prepared to ‘declare’ virtual memory (as opposed to letting Windows 98 do it for you).

I have heard, and I believe, that contiguous virtual memory works better. He had the space, so why not.

As I was entering the system tab within control panel I noticed something that was very strange. The computer was reporting only 32 MB of RAM. I couldn’t believe HP would ship a Windows 98 PC with that little RAM, so I went online and looked. It should have had 64 MB. OK – we’re getting somewhere.

I opened up the machine and went to look at the 2-RAM sticks inside. If he only had 32 MB, I could throw some old memory I had (and which doesn’t work in any of my current machines) to boost it up. I took out the first stick – 256 MB. Uh oh. What’s up here? Obviously, it wasn’t being seen.

Back on the HP website, I noticed this model, HP Pavilion 8655-C, could only take 256 MB of RAM total, with no stick over 128 MB. Oops. That 256 MB stick, probably an ‘upgrade’ was taking up a socket and doing nothing.

I pulled both memory sticks and went to install 2 – 128 MB sticks. Oh my God! The memory was under the CDROM drives, squeezed where only part was partially visible and much was hidden. I had to snake my fingers through while balancing a small flashlight on some cables. I wasn’t able to reach far enough in to release the far side latch. I would hope it opened, as it should, when I attempted to insert the stick, then close when I applied pressure.

This was a whole lot easier said than done. The RAM didn’t want to properly seat. I must have worked on getting the first stick in for a half hour until I looked down and saw red. I had sliced into my knuckle. In fact, by the time I finished getting the RAM installed, I had 6 or 7 little cuts on my fingers and hand.

I’m not sure what HP was thinking when they put this machine on the shelf, but they certainly didn’t expect anyone to work on it. The computer must have been assembled from modules, meaning screws holding the CDROM drives were facing down, toward the motherboard, where I couldn’t get at them! If I could have moved the drives, the job would have been a snap.

Matt has picked up the machine and hopefully by now it’s back on the web and faster than ever. It’s just another case of a computer slowing with age – they all do. Luckily, it’s always curable.

Tough Choice for Microsoft

I’m sitting at one of my Microsoft powered computers at the moment. Since I built this puppy from individual components, I actually have a full CD version of Windows XP Home – something that seldom comes with computers anymore.

It used to be, prior to Windows XP, that Microsoft’s operating systems were easy to steal. There must be millions of Windows 98 machines running on an operating system that was borrowed from a friend.

Starting with XP, Microsoft made this much more difficult. Now computers need to be activated before the operating system will become permanently enabled. Windows XP versions that come with specific hardware often will not run on other hardware. And, Microsoft has found many of the bogus serial numbers used to activate XP and now deactivates those systems if they try and use Windows Update. Still, if what I’ve read is correct, much of Asia and the Third World’s computers are run on bootlegged copies of Windows XP.

There lies the problem.

I never would have thought of this myself and have to thank Slashdot for pointing it out.

With all the security flaws and weaknesses of Windows XP, should Microsoft continue to deny software upgrades to illegally obtained and installed versions of their software? Surely, if Microsoft allows anyone to keep XP up-to-date, there will be less incentive to buy the disk. On the other hand, by denying these patches, is Microsoft creating an environment where more and more bad code will infect the Internet… which affects legal owners like me!

I’m not sure what advice I’d give to Microsoft. Are they liable for the unpatched versions of their original code? Do they have any obligation to me, a paying customer, when it comes to bootleg copies of their software?

This won’t be the last we’ll hear of this. It’s a very provocative question to ask in an industry that’s anything but simple.

Tech Support

Wednesday night was tech support night. Between shows I drove to my friend Steve’s home, no more than 10 minutes from the station. He’s a great guy, and his wife is nicer.

He’s my physician, so I fix his computer and he fixes me. It seems like a decent arrangement, though there’s probably more downside risk to me should a problem go unfixed.

He had muddled along in computing for years. With the birth of his first grandchild, his computing needs increased. There were photos to tweak and upload – which led to a scanner and DSL connection (I’m much more a fan of cable modems than DSL, but that’s another story for another day).

What had been a reasonable, older Gateway system has become a problem. The photo work pushes it to its limits – slowing him down. The screen is a 15″ CRT, running at 800×600 resolution. After all the menus and taskbars are drawn on the screen, it’s got the spaciousness of a New York City efficiency.

For most applications, any old PC will do. I hear stories all the time about people buying new computers, sending old ones to the trash heap. It drives me nuts!

I’ve gotten call telling me how a computer is running slower, as if computers atrophied. “Malware” can make a computer slow down, but it’s curable.

The dirty secret of the computing world is, most CPU speed is wasted. For Internet browsing, word processing and email, the vast majority of computers up to four or five years old are fine. All they usually need are a little more memory and hard drive space – both of which are easily added. Why spend big bucks if you don’t have to?

Steve’s computing problem relates to an incompatibility between a driver for his video card and the new scanner. Every time you set the scanner in motion, you get an error message referring to NV4DISP.DRV. Then the program just shuts down, as if nothing had happened.

There is nothing as cryptic as a Windows 98 error message. It offers little information and no hope.

My first line of defense is to go to Usenet via Google. Usenet is where nerds go to find other nerds. NV4DISP.DRV has been cited often on Usenet. Still, my first looks didn’t bring me a solution – and I still don’t have one.

It is possible that this old computer, with the video subsystem an integral part of the motherboard, has a fatal dislike for the scanner and they will never play well together. I don’t have my hopes raised. I will keep trying.

Two Computer Related Problems

Things are supposed to go smoothly, but they never do. I’ve just suffered through two computer related problems – one taking a full ten hours of time without a solution.

First things first. I notice earlier today that I had only received a few emails all day. Normally, I get 100-200 emails a day, the vast majority of which are spam.

I went to my webhost’s site (not Comcast, my ISP, but hostforweb.com who runs the server you’re getting geofffox.com on and also my mail server) and used their tech support chat. It didn’t take more than a few minutes for Fred to tell me something had hung and all mail sent to me (or at least the vast majority of it) had be sent packing.

As best I can tell this had been going on for 24-36 hours. Oh well. There’s really nothing I can do. I’m not sure about he actual bounce message returned, so some might be re-queued and re-sent.

The second problem was much more time consuming and sinister. My friend John has an old Compaq Armada laptop and a pristine copy of Windows 98 from a desktop machine that’s no longer in service. All I had to do was load it up and he’d take it back. This is something I’m glad to do for a friend.

The Armada 1590 is a Pentium 166 laptop that was loaded with Windows 95 and originally came with 16 MB of RAM. Today, that’s a ridiculously small amount of memory. Windows 98 might have run, but it would have run ponderously slow.

I reformatted the hard drive, checked for and installed a BIOS update and then set out to load Windows 98. This is a task I’ve done dozens of times… and never with a problem.

Windows loaded fine, but as soon as I got to the first screen after the installation and the computer began to play it’s little “I’m Ready” music, it locked up tight as could be. It would neither respond to keystrokes or the mouse/touchpad. Rebooting brought me back to the same problem.

I went on Google’s Usenet site which often has great tech support ideas, only to read a series of unhappy Armada owners who tried and never quite got Windows 98 to work.

I reformatted and tried again from scratch. Each time you do that, figure an hour or so until you’re at the first workable screen. I loaded Windows 98 totally at least four times.

After a while, and after staring at those cryptic Microsoft error messages (never had so many words and numbers given so little insight into what’s going wrong), I decided the problem might be with the audio driver on the Windows 98 disk. For some reason it didn’t seem to get along with the hardware which was, after all, designed long before Windows 98. I turned off the audio hardware from the control panel and booted again.

Success – but not for long.

Even a freshly loaded Windows 98 (or XP for that matter) PC needs loads of updates, patches and fixes. The more I downloaded and fixed, the more unstable the laptop became. BSODs (“Blue Screen of Death”) came fast and furiously.

Finally, I got to load DirectX 9. I have no idea what DirectX does, other than to say loading this update into the laptop brought it to its knees! Not only did the laptop crash but the Registry (which tells the computer where and what all the programs on it’s drive are) was now corrupted. Windows 98 was more than glad to restore a prior version of the Registry, which of course brought me back to square one.

I played this game twice.

Finally I called John on the phone and said, “No mas.” OK, actually it was Roberto Duran who said that, and neither John nor I speak Spanish, but you get the point.

Can this laptop be made to play nicely with Windows 98? Maybe. But, is it worth it? Probably not – I’m not really sure – oh who knows. I’m just so frustrated at this point.

The few fleeting moments I did have it running, it seemed reasonably nimble with web browsing. And, in that there’s some Internet wisdom that needs to be shared. This computer is only a Pentium I at 166 MHz. Lots of people throw machines of that speed out as too slow. With enough RAM – and John had boosted the 16 to 82 MB – even a slower Pentium is plenty fast for working the web.

Would I play games with it or edit video or run Photoshop or other high end multimedia programs? Hell no. But, most of what everyone does on the web demands much less horsepower. The laptop I use most is a Pentium II 300 MHz and it kills.

As for John’s laptop, before I attempt any more software loading, I am going to bring it near the sink with the water running full blast and explain what we do to computers that don’t cooperate. That trick always works.

The Geek In Me Speaks – III

Got RedHat 9.0 working on the laptop. It runs like a pig! Contrary to what Linux zealots say, this configuration needs more horsepower than Windows 98 on the same machine.

I was able to get the wired network card working, but not the wireless. Configuring the printer was fairly simple after looking at instructions by the router manufacturer that were intended to get things installed with XP.

While I sleep, I am downloading Mandrake 9.2. From their website, this looks like a promising distribution. But, of course, the proof is in the using.

A very nice blog reader offered my Lindows. I’ve read some very good things about Lindows, but for now, I’ll remain a purist with Linux.

Computer Speed – No Big Deal

A friend, whose company was upgrading its laptops, got me an old PII 300 model. In this gigahertz era, that’s awfully slow. The street value is probably a few hundred bucks, if that much.

Because it was from his business, I agreed to wipe the hard drive clean and then reinstalled Windows 98, its original operating system. After plugging in a wireless network card and adding the drivers, it was time to go to Microsoft’s site to get all the updates and security fixes.

Whose kidding whom? There’s no possible way dial-up users are keeping their software up-to-date. And, the vast majority of high speed at home users are there too.

I downloaded all the Microsoft stuff, Real player, OpenOffice, Spybot Search and Destroy, Dimension4 to keep the clock on time, favoritesync to keep my bookmarks aligned between computers, iespell and pokerstars.com’s client.

They’re all free… though pokerstars can cost you in the long run.

Then I went to the Navas Cable Modem/DSL Tuning Guide and got the registry hack to speed up my broadband access. Finally, I moved the virtual memory to a small disk partition and specified the exact size, which keeps it from fragmenting.

The computer is a champ. There’s little it’s doing that’s not fast enough. I suspect an upgrade from 64 to 128mb of memory will make a some difference, and I have ordered a stick for under $30.

I can’t begin to tell you how often a friend or co-worker will come to me (because I seem to be tech support for most of my friends – except those who are tech support to me) and ask for advice because their computer isn’t fast enough.

Usually, it is fast enough and they’re about to piss away money.

The CPU speed is certainly important, but nowhere as important as most people think. Most Pentium class PCs are totally usable, if you have enough memory (usually very cheap), the right video driver (crucial – and free) and get rid of spyware, malware and the other junk that’s leeching off your limited resources.

So, as I type this up on the ‘big machine’, I’m playing poker on the laptop. Life is good.

I Am Tech Support

To many friends and a large portion of my family, I am tech support. They know, and I’m glad they do, that a call to me can sometimes solve their PC problem.

It’s not that I’m smart… I’m experienced. I’ve reinstalled operating systems, configured disk drives, modems and network cards and made dead machines come to life.

My own computer, the one I do most of my work for this site on, was designed and then built by me, on the floor in my upstairs office.

I love the challenge. There are so many ways to bust a system and so many ways to fix it (though only one or two work in any given situation).

Today, I received a call from some very good friends. They have a Gateway PC (Brand is actually quite inconsequential. Most systems are built from a finite set of motherboards and components) which went part way through its boot and then stopped. No icons on the desktop. No taskbar below. No reply to ctl-alt-del (which should bring up the task manager in Windows 98).

I assumed it was a corrupted registry. The registry is a list of customizations which tie programs to the operating system. Without the registry on a Windows machine, there is nothing.

I went to the Windows program which restores an old, non-corrupted registry, only to find it didn’t have enough memory to run. Gateway let this box leave the store with only 32 MB of RAM. Small then, ridiculous now.

I had a few memory sticks in my drawer and threw them in, raising the total from 32 to 160 MB. The registry program ran and I turned back the hands of time with an older, working version.

Reboot – a Windows tradition.

The machine came up, showed its icons and task bar and then a succession of programs began to load. What was in this machine?

It seems the owners had downloaded dozens of programs, each carrying spyware, malware or adware. Boxes were opening on the screen by themselves with ads. At one point, a full screen ad, full of links to other sites, appeared. There was no way to close it that a casual user would ever discover.

I quickly tried to download Adaware, a program made for dealing with this stuff, but the computer locked. I rebooted and tried again. Adaware ran for 3 hours while I went back to work and then returned. But, it wasn’t doing its job. The computer reported Adaware was not responding.

There have been reports of these rogue programs looking for Adaware and its siblings and shutting them down. That could be what happened here.

I switched to Spybot Search and Destroy. So far, it seems to have worked.

Still, there might be so much garbage embedded in this computer that, in the end, the only prudent decision will be to reformat the hard drive and start again.

I have never seen or even heard of a computer so infected with stuff that the owners never intended to put in… and I haven’t even done a virus scan yet!

Were there licenses and releases that were clicked but never read? Probably. Was some of this done by teenagers, who really don’t have the authority to enter into a contract? Probably there too.

The bottom line is, these programs are invasive in nearly every way and well hidden from the computer’s owners. They are probably legal, which is a shame. That means, these folks are going to have to get a lot more savvy and wary when dealing with their own computer.

Visiting Ivy

Poor Ivy is still at the hospital. I went over around 7:00 PM tonight. Everyone was busy, and treatment was taking place in proximity to Ivy, so I was asked to come back.

Fine. Enough time to run over and try and help my friend Harold, who had crashed Windows 98 while installing the latest DirectX. I couldn’t help.

I got to Ivy about 8:00 PM. It was a good visit. Ivy came out wearing one of those cones they put over dog’s heads so they won’t touch sutures or IV tubes. She wasn’t panting. Her breathing seemed normal. This is a very good sign.

Ivy ate 1.5 pieces of American Cheese before turning away. That’s her norm when she’s full.

She has heart troubles. The ultrasound tonight showed that… and it had been expected earlier. But, more than likely, medication will control her problems.

We will all be happier when Ivy returns. Maybe tomorrow.