Essential maintainence of your Windows computer

Over the winter break, my brother brought up his wife's Win XP box which had been rendered unbootable due to a virus downloaded by their son. I pulled out the hard drive or HD and connected it as an external drive to a working XP box. I then spent many hours

1. removing the viruses. I used MS Security Essentials and then some newly downloaded AV software from malwarebytes.com
   


2. trying to get the cleaned HD to boot to no avail. Even booting via "Safe Mode with Command Prompt" which is least demanding boot process would hang in the middle.
   


3. copying the personal data in C:\Documents And Settings to a safe place. On this 2005 Acer, this consisted of copying from the main XP partition (80G) to the second "data" partition on the HD (also 80G), as Acer had conveniently split the HD into two partitions, the second being just for data. But I worried that the blind re-install might overwrite both partitions, so I also copied the personal data to another HD. And finally my brother copied select folders to another computer.


4. finally, running the Acer recovery CD 1. It turns out the recovery was a Norton Ghost image that was 2.0 GB which spanned 3 CDs. Now that the data was safe, the restore took very little time.

About 6 months ago, my own laptop got infected. I was able to remove the virus but the computer was no longer stable.

The moral: Recovering personal data and trying to remove the malware is very time consuming and stressful, as you don't want to trash anything accidently and there is sigficant uncertainty in what happened and what to do. You can easily waste 8-16 hours here. After you finally realize a clean install is necessary, reinstalling the OS is really pretty fast (less than an hour) and stress free.

Here are the essential actions you must do if you own a computer and don't want to lose your data or spend significant time/money/anguish trying to recover precious things. These are all obvious. And fortunately easier than ever before.

1. (a) Make periodic backups, say every 1-6 months. If you skip this step, eventual disaster is almost certain due to hardware failures, a virus infection, or user error. If you do this step and nothing else, the damage is contained. External USB hard drives are $100 or less for 1 TB (!) of storage at all major retailers (Target, Costco, Longs, CVS, Walmart, etc).
   (b) pick a backup program of your choice and use it. Even just dumb copying "Documents and Settings" to a new folder with the date, say "docs-2010-01-05", gets you most of the protection you need.
2. Install anti-malware (virus, rootkit, spyware) protection. Use your favorite program if you have one.
   Genuine: If you don't have a preference or don't have any protection, download the excellent free Microsoft Security Essentials which is free, lightweight and fast, comprehensive in that it protects against all sorts of malware, easy to use with a clean UI, and perpetual in that does not have a time limit. Did I mention it was free too? Reviews of it are very good with it catching most malware and it seems to be getting better. The one catch, you must be running a licensed or "genuine" copy of Windows XP, Vista or 7.
   Not necessarily genuine: If you are not running a genuine copy of Windwos, I suggest the AV and anti-spyware that comes with the free Google Pack and choose the anti-malware. (About 4 years ago a nice, super basic Norton Security Scan was included but about 2 years ago Symantec changed it to an annoying crippled Security Scan). As of today the PC Tools AV and anti-spyware package is included, which I have not tested.
3. Enable automatic updates for Windows. Microsoft releases patches regularly, some of which protect against real threats.
   
4. Use Firefox as your browser, and accept the updates. As of Jan 2010, FF is the best browser out there for security and overall usability. It keeps track of known bad web sites and will often warn you if a web site is trying to install something funny.
   What about the other browsers?
   (i) Chrome is very nice, with the ability to kill specific web pages that are causing problems, but it needs support for plugins before I can offer my highest recommendation.
   (ii) IE 8 is the best browser Microsoft has ever produced but IE 7 is only good and IE 6 is just plain scary. IE is not updated very often either, so it's simplest to stay away.

And that's it. These are the essential actions, so I've kept it short.

Assigning / mapping hard drive letters in Windows XP

Do a google search for "assign usb drive letters", but you basically get the following instructions. I used Windows XP.

Note this technique works for external hard drives that are currently mounted.

1. Right-click: My Computer -> Manage
   or
   Start Menu -> Settings -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tasks -> Computer Management
2. In the Computer Management window left pane, left click on Disk Management. (You may need to open / expand the "Storage" item in the left pane.
3. Find the disk partition in the bottom right pane that you want to assign a different drive letter. Right--click on that partition, which should have the undesired drive letter and typically has the words "NTFS... Healthy". Choose the option to "Change Drive Letter and Paths ..."
4. Fill in the desired drive letter and you are done. This mapping should persist in the future too.

Keywords: assign drive letters Windows XP, map drive letters Windows XP, drive letters for removable drives.

Comcast Internet: save yourself $10/month on a modem

(Original post 10 Feb 2009) It's simple.

Buy your own cable modem. Here's a list of sanctioned Comcast cable modems and another similar list of approved cable modems for Comcast. These URLs were hard for me to find from the main comcast site.

Hunt around and you can find one for $20-$40, which beats paying $10/month or so. I used Craig's list and got one for $20 (the guy was asking $15 but all I had was a $20 bill). I got a Thomson (RCA) DCM425. Works great. Has several blinky lights. Got this back in Feb 2009.

I should really pick up a second one in case the first one dies.

In fact, I told this tactic to the Comcast service guy setting up our connection and even he was paying the monthly rental for his modem. After our little talk, he was going to rectify that situation immediately. The guy's not an idiot. Huzzzah.

(Update: 07 Sep 2009) My RCA modem died suddenly on me the other night. I thought it was a Comcast outage but the next morning when it was still out I called Camcast and after a bit of reseting the line and power cycling at my end, we decided it was likely a bad modem. To my chagrin, I discovered, I really miss being connected. So we rented a modem from Comcast (a new Motorola SB5120) and sure nuff, it was bad modem. That night I couldn't get the rental modem to actually connect without going through some dubious download of McAfee software so I called Comcast back up and the woman said "I don't know why they (the earlier Comcast rep) don't tell you (the customer) that you have to call back when you get your new modem". After a bit of trial and error we finally got it working.

The moral was:

1. Power cycle the modem with it unconnected to any ethernet but with it connected to the cable. Wait for it to get a connection.
2. Hook up your router or computer to the modem.
3. Go from there. And be careful your brower isn't serving a cached page if you get something unexpected.

The following day I hunted down another modem on craigslist and went down to Santa Clara to pick it up. Seems like prices have gone up as this was $40 (for a Moto SB5120 too) and this was the lowest price around.

I'll hook this up sometime when we can afford to not have internet so we can return the rental unit.

Low-end DSLRs: Canon XT Rebel versus Nikon D40

If you are considering moving up to a low-end digital SLR, but are not really sure, the choice often boils down to the big two, namely Canon and Nikon.

I use my dSLR as a glorified point-and-shoot. I don't fiddle too much with aperature or shutter priority. I just want to get good photos of things happening around me quickly and not miss out. The one area I push my camera is low-light since I prefer not to use a flash if possible. So I'm often adjusting the ISO.

Another of my quirks is I don't baby my dSLR. After all it is only a $400 item these days, and so long as you don't abuse it, it will last. Over the last 4+ years ....

• I always leave it on (which seems to not use any power, though people who borrow my camera are always turning it off, which annoys me when I then try to take a picture).
• I never use my lens cap. I have put on a UV filter protector, but that has never been broken or even scratched.
• I just throw it in my backpack or luggage. I don't have a camera bag since I just have that one lens.
• I've never had any problems with
  

If you are a higher-end photographer who needs to take very-high resolution shots for blowing up bigger than 2' x 3', spend lots of time tweaking photos afterwards, are a professional photos, or simply want to have a better camera than a low-end dSLR, then skip this post.

Back in 2006, I had had a Canon Rebel XT for a few years, but wanted to try the Nikon D40. So I gave away my Canon as a holiday gift and got the D40 with the kit lens and an SB400 flash ($120). Both cameras came with a 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 kit lens, non-IS. How do they compare?

Nikon advantages (most important to least)

1. External flash for $120. The cheapest from Canon is around $220. Being able to bounce the flash is a huge win, as you can get pretty decent looking photos whereas before you have a semi-ghastly look. Also an external flash has its own AA batteries so it recharges faster and doesn't drain the camera batteries. This is a huge gain, and I would take a D40 + SB400 over any other $1000 dSRL w/o a flash. The first $120 I'd pay is for this Nikon flash, over any lens.
   
2. Better folder naming/numbering. The D40 lets me name the suffix of the current folder on the flash card using any 6 letters I want so I can name things like "July4" or "Home" or "SFTrip". I don't offload my photos very often, say once every 2-4 months, and its super annoying to have a numeric ordering.
3. Much better LCD screen, mostly because the Rebel XT screen sucks. But this is not very important anymore because the newer Canons all have much better screens, though apparently not as bright as the Nikons.
4. Able to focus quickly more often. Every so often, both cameras would not focus, perhaps due to not enough light or not enough contrast. The Nikon seemed to do this a bit less than the Canon.
   
5. Lens feel. Of the 3 Canon Rebel XT kit lenses I've played with (I was giving these away as gifts), only 1 had silky zoom feel. Pverall, I'd give the three Canon kit lenses an A, B+ and a B-. The Nikon kit lens has a A- feel.
   

Canon advantages.

1. Faster, sharper focusing. The Canon snaps into focus so fast most of the time it seems like should jerk the camera. The Nikon in contrast is downright slow, though still much faster than point-and-shoot. Note both have trouble if there not enough contrast, e.g. if in a moving car, and the camera is partially aimed at the sky.
2. Better access to the controls I care about, namely ISO, and resolution. The Canon has one-button access to both of these important fns. The Nikon only let me have a single programmable "Fn" control, for which I chose ISO.
3. Ever so slightly better image quality, it being 8MP versus 6MP... but really this was very minor.
   

Other than that they were comparable. Battery life. Weight. Feel. Ruggedness. Lens optic quality.

In short, the fact that Nikon had a good cheap flash was the tie breaker. You can't go wrong with either camera. As of mid 2009, the Nikon D40 is available for under $450, making it hard to pass up. For another concurring opinion about the beauty of a D40, see Ken Rockwell's site.

Were I buying today, I'd probably get the D40 again or wait until a model that took video was under $650. Note too that so far video taken by dSLR cameras is not that great; a good camcorder does better job. I'd really like a full-frame camera with an FX sensor, instead of the DX sensor on lower end dSLRs, but full-frame costs much more at $2500+ and are much heavier. And people would probably laugh at me if I used some crappy kit lens with a full-framer.

Automatic login and file vault in Mac OS X

If you cannot enable "automatic login" for a user in Mac OS X Leopard or Tiger, make sure that user is not using FileVault. Although no documentation seems to indicate this will cause problems, it makes sense that auto-login and FileVault conflict.

The purpose of FileVault is to leave a user's files encrypted so if the laptop is stolen, the contents remain unreadable. To read a FileVault directory, you need the login password. However if auto-login is enable for that user, then the laptop will automatically apply that user's password, offering decrypted access to all the files, hence defeating the purpose of FileVault.

My wife found out the hard way, know as trial and error and lots of internet searching, to figure out why she was not getting the option to enable auto-login on her account on her Leopard laptop. Her login was simply missing from the menu of choices for auto-login. It was only after stumbling upon a web page alluding to this issue for Tiger that she thought to try disabling FileVault. Apparently FileVault and auto login were much closer together in the UI for Tiger than they are in Leopard, where now they are in separate System Preferences.

In any case, mystery solved.

Fixing iTunes to get CD track names info once again

On a MacBookPro, iTunes suddenly stopped being to download the track information on a CD I wanted to rip, giving the error "Unable to connect tothe CDDB server". I have iTunes setup so that when I insert a CD, it automatically rips it and then ejects it. Only now it could not get the CD or track info. I had ripped hundreds of CDs (my own of course). ITunes was reasonably upto date at version 8.0.2.

It wasn't the network connection.

Doing a google search, leads one to possibly try an update to the gracenote software, as gracenote is the company that runs the CDDB information service. But the update was for windows, not Mac OS.

And it turned out to be my firewall settings. You have to let iTunes "share" its information. Turn this on via: System Preferenes | Sharing | Firewall | iTunes Music Sharing.

Who stole my MacBook wifi card?

After upgrading to the latest Leopard release 10.5.6, my wifi connection wouldn't work. Hitting "turn ON" did nothing.

So I rebooted.

And now, the machine states "no airport card". Gah!

A quick Google search showed that resetting your NVRAM (or PRAM) is a solution that usually works. The first time I only hit restart and might have held the keys down too long and that did not work. The next time I shut down and then held the P, R, command and option keys down for exactly two chimes. That did the trick.