patrickdaley.com

No, I did not get a 4G (yet). I did, however, upgrade my 3G with the new 4.0 IOS. I have to say it was a complete mess. The upgrade took forever and when it was done my phone was basically unusable. I’m not sure whether it was a problem with the IOS or one of the apps on my phone, but something was causing it to be unresponsive to the point where I couldn’t even receive a phone call. I tried powering off and rebooting multiple times with no luck. In the end I completely wiped the phone, reinstalled 4.0, and then added my apps and e-mail accounts. After all of that it seems to be working fine. Good luck to anyone else out there eyeballing the 4.0 IOS.

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This is the removal process I’ve used for this piece of malware. Since it hooks the .exe extension in the registry launching AV apps can be difficult. If you’re not careful with Autoruns and the registry you can brick your Windows install. I take no responsibility if that happens to you.

If you use Process Explorer while it is running on a machine you will find where it is.
C:\Documents and Settings\USER\Local Settings\Application Data
- MSASCui.exe (XP Guardian 2010)
- AVE.EXE (XP AntiSpyware 2010)
- o7yIC10ETb (or some other randomly named file)

If you kill the process tree and move fast before it can restart you can delete the files. It also makes a few changes to the Registry, which Malwarebytes will find. Basically you want to export these keys from a good machine and import them into the bad machine.
- [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Security Center
- HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.exe

- Run Autoruns and look for gibberish DLL files and delete them.
- Run a follow up scan with Malwarebytes to make sure everything is gone.
- Double check your Security Center/Firewall/Automatic Updates settings to make sure they’re where they need to be.

I can’t help but be slightly annoyed that the copy of MCE 2005 I bought two years ago has been completely dropped by Microsoft. I get it – MS wants people to buy Vista or Windows7. If my version of MCE had the same features as Windows7 MCE I’d have no reason to upgrade. For the most part I use my copy of MCE to record TV in SD and to stream online content. When I heard that Netflix was going to be integrated into MCE I thought that actually sounded pretty cool. Any chance to use the MCE remote over a mouse and keyboard is a good thing, right? No such luck for me. There were a few projects to get Netflix working inside of MCE 2005, but they are pretty much dead now (in addition to most other development for MCE 2005). It’s a shame, really. My HTPC isn’t my primary computer and I really could care less whether MCE is running on top of XP, 7, or Windows 95 for that matter, but alas, here I am stuck with the prospect of shelling out another $100 for another copy of Windows7 just so I can record/stream TV.

www.patrickdaley.com

There are still a few kinks to work out.

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This is so awesome and crazy at the same time. For IT geeks only.

www.patrickdaley.com

Oh, Microsoft. Just when you had me won over with Windows 7 you had to go and do this. A much used feature in XP for an IT guy like me was the offline repair installation. It was great for fixing a corrupt OS or upgrading a system’s hardware. I recently got stuck in a bit of a quandary where my Windows 7 install wouldn’t boot and Startup Repair couldn’t fix it. Trying to start an install off the boot media just resulted in being told that an upgrade install could not be performed from boot and that I should restart and log into Windows. Well, that would have been fine, but my problem was that I couldn’t boot into Windows in the first place.
Microsoft: Please add this feature into Windows 7.

Oh, the joys of older hardware.

I’ve been running Windows 7 since the beta came out and installed it without issue on a number of my work machines, but when it came time to do the install on my primary home computer things got a little dicey. It had nothing to do with Windows 7, mind you, but rather my aging Pentium 4 system. My machine didn’t even have a DVD drive. I know, that’s kind of crazy for 2009, but I just honestly never had a bona fide need for one in that particular machine. Windows 7 (on DVD) became the reason. With my DVD burner I was all ready to install Windows 7! I threw in the DVD and nothing happened. I hopped into the BIOS only to be presented with more puzzlement: my hard drive was the only listed boot device. It turns out that my motherboard doesn’t know how to boot from a SATA optical device although it works fine once Windows is loaded. Undeterred I grabbed a spare hard drive and a spare PATA DVD drive I had sitting around. I figured out I had another issue since Partition Logic and Gparted were both unable to interface with the SIS chipset on my ASUS motherboard leaving me unable to create a partition on which to install Windows 7. Are you following me? Ok, good. With the spare PATA hard drive and DVD I got to work getting Windows 7 installed. Once it was installed on the spare drive I was able to view my primary drive, the one I wanted to resize and repartition all along. I created a new partition alongside Windows XP, disconnected the spare hard drive, and ran a second install of Windows 7 on the newly created partition. Voila, I now had Windows 7 and Windows XP both running on my 500GB SATA drive. My goal is to eventually get almost everything off of my Windows XP partition so that I can shrink it down to something small like 20GB. This is going to take some time, though, since I have to keep shrinking and extending each respective partition as I move things from XP to 7. Hopefully your installation of Windows 7 was a little less painful than mine.

I had been running 4GB of memory in my 32-bit version of Windows XP for a while even though I have a 512MB video card and Wndows only recogizes about 2.8GB.  Why?  Memory is cheap and I wanted to run two pairs in dual channel so it was just easier to use four 1GB sticks to do this.  I was fine with the fact that Windows was never actually going to acknowledge all of it, as it mapped some of it off to things like my video card.  This article blows the doors off of this long held belief by indicating that it’s simply a Microsoft licensing issue that prevents you from addressing more than 4GB.  To give an analogy, I have a plain vanilla Nvidia 6800 card that I bought on purpose because I knew the chipset was the same as the higher end 6800 cards and that through a BIOS hack I could unlock more pipelines on the card.  This has often been the case throughout the history of technology; it’s cheaper for a manufacturer to make one product, but disable/enable various features to sell it at different price points.  For a really interesting read on this subject follow the link.

http://www.geoffchappell.com/viewer.htm?doc=notes/windows/license/memory.htm

On Valentine’s Day Cindy and I streamed Casablanca on the HTPC out in the living room and I have to say I was very impressed.  I use that box for streaming frequently, but this was the first Netflix streaming I had tried.  The movie did stutter a for a few seconds at a few different points, but for the most part it was very smooth and looked great.  I think this was a very good test of Netflix’s streaming capabilities because I’m sure Casablanca was in high demand that night.  The more interesting test would be a highly detailed modern DVD with a lot of movement and color; maybe something like Revenge of the Sith.  It’s very exciting that we’re at a point where you can get most of the content you want online.  (See my MLB.TV post from yesterday).  If Netflix had their entire catalogue online there would really be no reason to ever rent a physical disc again.  Someday…

Tonight marked the Simpsons jump to HD.  I’d say the biggest advantage is that it’s now in widescreen; the animation doesn’t benefit all that much from HD because it’s a lot of solid color swaths.  I did notice a few scenes that had small details placed in the background, such as text, that could easily be distinguished.  The beginning of the show was new, too, which was kind of neat.  It made me think about Bart vs. The Space Mutants on NES.  Supposedly South Park is going to be in HD this coming season although I don’t know when Comedy Central HD is going to land on Comcast here in the Twin Cities.  Cartoon Network HD would be great, too.  I picked up my HD box back in August and I don’t think any new HD content has been added in that six month span.  Time to get to work Comcast Twin Cities!