This is utterly awesome. This guy (with a good dose of humour) has started with MS DOS 5, and Windows 1, and followed the upgrade path all the way through to Windows 7.
(Spotted on Twitter, but it’s doing the rounds of Reddit and other places.)
Category Archives: Platforms
Email startup times
A quick timing test on my main home workhorse computer, which isn’t the fastest in the world, but isn’t the slowest either. (Windows 7, Athlon 64 X2 dual core 4400+ 2300 Mhz, 3 Gb RAM, on a fast ADSL2+ net connection.)
Having started Windows and logged onto a clean desktop:
- Start Chrome with GMail set as the home page: 8.5 seconds to ready
- Start Thunderbird: 11.6 seconds to ready
No wonder people are heading into the cloud.
Subsequent timings (without a reboot, so some things may be cached, eg later in a session when you’ve closed your email and you want to go back in):
- Chrome with GMail: 3.4 seconds
- Thunderbird: 3.1 seconds
Interesting.
Connecting to a Windows shared drive: Domain user works, local user fails
(Apologies for the long title. I’m hoping Google indexes this well so some poor sod who gets this problem will easily find it the solution.)
Many problems the other day trying to connect a shared drive on a server (Windows 2008) on a domain, but with a local user.
It would work from some hosts, but not others — returning enigmatic errors hinting that the username/password combo was wrong.
C:\>net use z: \\servername\testdir /user:servername\test Password! System error 1326 has occurred. Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password.
The weird thing was, using a domain logon would work every time.
We thought it might be dependant on whether the hosts were in the same domain, but it looks like it’s related to the version of Windows being used… with later versions able to connect okay.
I did wonder at the time if it might be due to a weird security policy setting, and that turned out to be right. It seems later versions of Windows Server have stricter security settings.
After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, then some Googling, I eventually found the solution here:
- On the server, go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Local Security Policy
- Local policies / Security options
- Check out the Network Security LAN Manager Authentication Level option
- If it’s set to “NTLMv2 response only” or similar, then change it to “Send LM & NTLM – use NTLMv2 session security if negotiated”
Voila.
This MSKB article has some material on it: Q823659 — it’s helpfully buried with lots of other security policy settings. Look about two-thirds of the way down for “Network security: Lan Manager authentication level”.
If the policy is set to (5) Send NTLMv2 response only\refuse LM & NTLM on the target computer that you want to connect to, you must either lower the setting on that computer or set the security to the same setting that is on the source computer that you are connecting from.
Yes, I suppose I could work out how to change the client host to use NTLM V2. But I really don’t want to break anything else.
Oh, and the KB article almost gleefully notes something we saw when wrestling with this:
One effect of incompatible settings is that if the server requires NTLMv2 (value 5), but the client is configured to use LM and NTLMv1 only (value 0), the user who tries authentication experiences a logon failure that has a bad password and that increments the bad password count. If account lock-out is configured, the user may eventually be locked out.
Beautiful.
Microsoft’s open-source CMS
Interesting — Microsoft has launched its WebMatrix open-source web development bundle, as well as the first version of its open-source “Orchard” content management system.
Wonder if these means MS has WordPress, Joomla and Drupal as its targets? Perhaps it’s realised that having some kind of open-source CMS is vital to winning the hearts and minds of web programmers, and weaning them off PHP and MySQL back to ASP.Net and SQL Server.
(via Mary-Jo Foley)
I hate the Mighty Mouse
We’ve got an iMac in the PTUA office which I use on the odd occasion. I’ve gradually got used to the world of MacOS, but one thing I still hate is the Mighty Mouse.
There’s something about the feel of it — the non-buttons, and the scroll wheel in particular. I hate the feel of it. It feels really uncomfortable in my right hand; it leaves my fingers tingling in a most unpleasant way. And it’s not much better in my left hand either.
I don’t recall having this kind of reaction with any other mouse. And I don’t even understand why this one feels so bad to me.
It’s odd. Anybody else had the same sensation?
(Pic credit: Wikipedia)
Thanks a lot, Apple
I was using a USB drive to move copy files from a Windows box onto a Mac.
Easy enough; plug it in, copy the files over.
Then I plugged the drive back into a Windows computer. What do I see? Oh, delightful, MacOS added some hidden directories for Trash and Spotlight.
Harumph. Annoying, but no biggy I guess.
Wait a sec, what’s inside those directories? A bunch of stuff, it turns out:
How about: .Spotlight-V100 \ Store-V1 \ Stores \ [long hex string] … and inside there, about 2Mb of junk.
Now, I could understand that if I’d copied anything from the Mac back onto the USB drive, thus it might have needed all that stuff to do the wonderful Spotlighty things in the future.
But just copying stuff off it? Why make that assumption and dump all this crap on it? Particularly hidden, so many people wouldn’t even spot it.
Oh well, it’s in keeping with the iTunes bloatware philosophy of dumping heaps of software onto your PC that most people don’t need. Ed Bott’s updated his guide to avoiding that with iTunes 10:
Apple still gives its customers a monolithic iTunes setup program with absolutely no options to pick and choose based on your specific needs.
Why is that important? When you run the iTunes setup program, it unpacks six Windows Installer packages and a master setup program, which then installs nearly 300MB of program and support files, a kernel-mode CD/DVD-burning driver, multiple system services, and a bunch of browser plugins. It configures two “helper” programs to start automatically every time you start your PC, giving you no easy way to disable them. It installs a network service that many iTunes users don’t need and that has been associated with security and reliability issues.
And you wonder why I dislike iTunes with a passion that burns like the fire of a thousand suns?
It’s a must-read if you’re installing iTunes on Windows.
iTunes not up to date
Downloaded the latest iTunes 9.2.1.
Installed using the less-bloat method (for people like me who just want to use it to manage an iPod):
Extract the components from the iTunes setup EXE…
AppleApplicationSupport.msi /passive
Quicktime.msi /passive
iTunes.msi /passive
All good! All up to date!
I decided to fire up Quicktime and make sure none of its stupid tray icons were configured to run all the time, wasting my memory and CPU. What do I find?
Quicktime is out of date — it tells me. It’s only 7.6.6, and you should be running 7.6.7.
Oh, bravo Apple — can’t even keep their own software up to date.
Win95 turns 15
I posted this on my personal blog because I thought it would be of general interest:
USB stick vulnerability in all versions of Windows
Zero-day flaw. EVERYBODY PANIC! (Well, if you use Windows.)
Simply browsing a USB drive, Windows file share or WebDav directory can potentially infect you via a rootkit inside a .lnk file. All current versions of Windows said to be vulnerable.
Ebooks To Understand Fibromyalgia And Other Diseases com/technet/security/advisory/2286198.mspx”>Microsoft advisory: Vulnerability in Windows Shell Could Allow Remote Code Execution — no fix yet, but they do list a workaround.
Sophos’s Chester Wisniewski’s blog: Windows zero-day attack works on all Windows systems — Chester notes a good workaround:
Today, a colleague suggested the best mitigation I have heard so far: deploying a GPO disallowing the use of executable files that are not on the C: drive. This will work for most environments, and you really shouldn’t be running executables from USB drives and network shares anyway. We tested this solution against the vulnerability and it does in fact provide protection.
…which would be nice, but I’m buggered if I can find it in gpedit.msc.
From the looks of it, most of the big anti-virus vendors are onto it, and will detect it as long as your definition files are up to date.
Win2K and XP SP2 support ended yesterday
Windows 2000 support ended yesterday.
Ditto Windows XP SP2.
The latter is pretty easy; go to SP3. At least, it should be pretty easy, though Graham Cluley notes that that an alarming 77% of organisations are running Windows XP SP2 on 10% or more of their PCs.
As for Win2K, well, you should have known about it for some time and been planning for it!
CPU pegged at 100% while downloading video under Ubuntu?
totem-video-thumbnailer at fault?
Close Nautilus, the file-system browser that you’ve got open on the directory where the files are being downloaded. It file is constantly getting pinged as having been updated, and so it’s getting thumbnailed over and over again, to no end.
Note your download speeds may improve after this fix.
Windows 7 temporary profiles part 2
I haven’t found the root cause of the Windows 7 temporary profiles troubles I’m having, though one suspect is still Google’s updater (as it popped up again last night after installing Google Sketchup).
Sure, a reboot will clear the problem, but what if you have a job running on the machine that you don’t want to stop? Like MediaCenter recording a TV show?
Here’s another way of clearing it: log onto another account (not the one you’re having problems with, but it doesn’t matter if once again you get a temporary profile), and run Regedit as Administrator. Go to HKEY_USERS, and look for the keys matching the affected user(s), eg HOSTNAME_USERNAME. Select the key and choose File / Unload Hive.
That user should then be cleared.
(via an answer in this post).
Still hunting for the root cause, but in my case it really does seem to happen when Google’s Updater is on the plot. Apparently you can use Process Explorer to work out which process has c:\users\USER\ntuser.dat locked, though when I tried that, it didn’t seem to find it. But certainly some Google processes were running at the time.