Phil's Techno Talk » Phil Rogers

Fix your Broken Windows PC with System Restore

Phil Rogers — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 14:17:20 +0000

I am a regular user of the Alexa Toolbar. This toolbar monitors browsing habits and sends information back to Alexa to help them determine the most popular websites. Because of what it does, some people consider the Alexa Toolbar to be spyware. However, it doesn’t do anything malicious, when you install it, you should be aware of what it is doing.

Spyware Doctor, an anti-spyware program decided that the Alexa Toolbar was spyware and removed it from my system. It didn’t do it the friendly way by running the uninstaller provided by Alexa; instead it entered the system Registry directly and went on the rampage, deleting all manner of data that it considered to be connected with the Alexa Toolbar.

Once I realised what had happened, I went back to Alexa and reinstalled their toolbar, but now it no longer worked. After several reinstallations and system restarts, it still wouldn’t work properly. Spyware Doctor had broken my PC.

So What Do You Do When Your PC’s System Files Get Messed Up?

Thankfully, Microsoft have incorporated System Restore into their most recent operating systems (XP and Vista), and I was able to reinstate my system and Registry files to how they were before I installed Spyware Doctor (which has now been banished from my PC).
I then reinstalled the Alexa Toolbar and it works just fine now.

How to use System Restore

Here’s what Microsoft say about System Restore: “System Restore works a lot like the Undo command in Microsoft Word. You can use System Restore to remove any system changes that were made since the last time you remember your computer working correctly. System Restore does not affect your personal data files (such as Microsoft Word documents, browsing history, drawings, favorites, or e-mail) so you won’t lose changes made to these files.“.

If you have System Restore enabled, every day that you use your computer, Windows saves the current state of the system files. This means that you can roll-back to any previous “restore point”. So if you install or run a program that affects the system files and makes the system unstable, you can undo those changes.

Here’s how:

Click Start, and then click Help and Support.
Under Pick a Task, click Undo changes to your computer with System Restore.
Follow the instructions on the wizard:

Select “Restore my computer to an earlier time” and click Next.

A calendar is displayed. Dates are displayed in bold if there is a restore point on that day. Click on a bold date in the calendar, and you will see a list of changes that the restore point incorporates. This includes software installed, Windows updates, and system checkpoints.

When you have found the day when you installed or ran the program that broke your system, choose that day or the one before it. I was fortunate enough to be able to find the day when I installed Spyware Doctor, and then selected the day before that.

Click on Next and you will see a confirmation page for the selected Restore Point.
Read this page. It is important to know what will happen next.

Click Next. Your system will shut down and apply the selected Restore Point to your system files settings.
Don’t worry about any other files that you have on your system, such as emails, Word documents etc. They will be unaffected. System Restore is not a time machine – it can’t save and restore everything that is on your computer to a previous time – only the system files.

When your computer restarts, you will see a message stating whether the restore was successful or not.

If you find that other software that you installed after the time of the Restore Point is no longer properly installed. You will need to re-install it. In some cases, you might even need to go into the Remove Programs control panel and remove the software and then reinstall it.

If it still fails

If your restore made no difference, or made things worse, you can even undo the change and bring the system back to today’s settings using the same System Restore mechanism.

A Final Word

It’s possible to switch off System Restore so that it doesn’t make daily backups of the changes to system files. I thoroughly recommend that you leave it switched on. You never know when it might get you out of a tight spot!

Phil Rogers is a professional software engineer who runs Phil’s Techno Talk.

How Safe is your Computer System?

Phil Rogers — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 21:36:20 +0000

Your Choice of Password May Be Letting You Down

Passwords. We have them everywhere now. Whether it’s the PIN (Personal Identification Number) for your ATM card, the password that logs you into your email account, or to set up your Internet Router, we have this need for security that our money, our personal details and our private information is kept away from people we’d rather not let near them.

However, your choice of password can let you down and even though you think you are safe, you could be leaving the doors wide open to unsavoury characters who don’t think twice about stealing your identity and looting your bank account and credit cards for as much as they can get their hands on.

There are thousands of websites that let you register and sign in with an account; each of which requires another password. It’s getting to the point where it’s difficult to remember which password you used where. And this leads you to disregard security to make your life easier.
It’s too tempting to choose a password that is easy to remember, or even use the one supplied by the manufacturer. Unfortunately, that often makes them easy for other people to guess.

Believe it or not, when faced with the pressure to choose a password, people are not very creative, and statistics show that many people choose the same ones as everyone else. Here’s a list of top-10 passwords:

password
123456
qwerty
abc123
letmein
monkey
myspace1
password1
link182
(your first name)

When they say “Enter password”, it doesn’t mean enter the word “password”! It means choose one and enter it!

If you use any of those passwords, you’ve fallen into the same trap as everyone else.

Don’t Keep Default Passwords
Here’s an example. My wireless Internet router is made by D-Link. To log in to the set up page, the account name is set by D-Link to be Admin, with the password set to “password”. Very easy to remember, and most people don’t bother to change it.
Now, I take my wireless laptop or PDA and go somewhere and find an open wireless network. What if the router being used is also by D-Link? What if the owner didn’t bother to change the account name or password? I can now log in and change the password, thus locking out the owner from their own router setup.
I can now come back at any time and browse the computers on that network. Who knows what personal information I might find on there?
And if “password” doesn’t work, I might try any of the ones from the above list.

Don’t Use Familiar Words
Instead of using one of the common passwords, some people resort to using the name of someone or something close to them, such as the name of their spouse, child, pet or street.
Here’s another example. When I was at university, my room-mate was a huge fan of the UK football team, Manchester City (also known as Man City). Just for kicks I thought I’d try and log into his university computer account. I knew his username, but needed his password. So I tried “mancity”. That didn’t work, so I tried the names of their star player. That didn’t work, either. Then I remembered the name of the team manager, and tried that. I was in to his account in just 3 tries.

Don’t use familiar numbers
Just like family names, some people use birthdates. Again, these are too easy to guess.

Use a Strong Password
A strong password is one that is more difficult to guess. Here are some suggestions for creating a strong password.

Don’t use words that appear in a dictionary. If you really must use a word to help you remember (but it’s not recommended), you could try replacing some of the letters with numbers or symbols that resemble the letter. For example, let’s say you wanted to use the word GUITAR as part of your password. You could change the G to 6, the I to 1, and the A to @ to make 6U1T@R.

Use numbers as well as letters. Very often, this is a requirement that is enforced when you choose a password, but looking at the list of common passwords, people are still using simple ones such as abc123.

Use symbols. Using punctuation and symbols makes passwords much more difficult to guess than if you had simply used letters and numbers.

Use upper and lower case letters. Passwords are usually case sensitive to increase the pool of letters available when choosing the password. This makes it much more difficult to guess.

Use longer passwords. It is now recommended that the minimum length of password that you use is 12 characters, using a mixture of character types as mentioned above, and preferably a non-dictionary word.
Example: 4doFg*lf /Y7s

Remember your password.
So now that you have chosen a totally random password, how do you remember it? Some browsers can remember them for you, but what happens if your browser loses that data, or you are trying to log in from somebody else’s computer?

One technique is to choose a password that looks random but has some mnemonic attached to it.
Here’s one example I just thought of:
4&20bBbIaP
This fits in with many of our criteria; it’s what looks like a random mixture of letters, numbers and symbols, with upper and lower case.

The mnemonic for it is a line from a children’s song:
“Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie”.

After the 4 & 20, the remaining letters are the initials of the words, alternating lower and upper case.
(Please don’t use this example – now that I’ve mentioned it, hundreds of people will start using it!)

If you still can’t think of a good password, have a program generate one for you. There are a lot of free password generators on the Internet. Personally, I wouldn’t use one of the online ones – they might be logging my IP address and the passwords I generate.

So, think creatively about your choice of password. Somebody could be trying to hack your PayPal account right now!

10 Ways to Speed Up Your Windows PC For Free

Phil Rogers — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 14:19:32 +0000

When you unpacked your PC the first time you got it home, or it was installed in your office, it worked like a dream. The system started quickly, programs opened quickly, did their job as expected and closed down with no problems.

Then after a few months, or maybe even weeks, the rot set in. Your PC started taking ages to start up, programs took an age to open and load your data, and then to add insult to injury, takes an eternity to close down.

So what’s going on? Why the big difference in performance? And more to the point, can you get it working as it used to again?
The good news is basically “Yes, you can”, but there are so many things that contribute to the lack of performance that it’s difficult to know exactly what is causing the problem. In most cases, it can be a combination of different factors all working against each other to bring your system to its knees.

Here is a list of things to try to get back some or all of the performance you used to get with your PC.

1 Free up disk space
We’re all guilty of saving more files, documents and images than we really need. In some cases, we save something and then cannot remember where we put it, so we end up with a lot of “lost” files scattered around our hard disk.
Another common thing is to keep copies of files, or older versions “just in case”. There’s definitely nothing wrong with keeping backups – I recommend it. However, keep your backups on another disk – preferably a removable one such as a CD or DVD – or maybe even on a flash memory drive.

When the computer’s hard disk is getting full, the computer starts to have a hard time finding space to store things – including temporary files that it uses during its normal operation. So, we need to clean out all the rubbish. Delete unused files and folders (taking care not to delete system files and folders) to free up some of that wasted space.

Using browsers on the Internet leaves a huge number of temporary files on your hard disk. You can remove them by opening My Computer, right-clicking the C: drive and clicking the Disk Cleanup button.

2 Repair Disk Errors
From time to time, the computer’s filing system gets a bit confused and data is not saved properly. Files get cross-linked or truncated making them unreadable. They are still taking up disk space though, so you need to repair the disk to recover the documents.
Click the Start button, and select Run. In the prompt that opens, enter
Chkdsk c: /f
This will run the disk checking utility that sorts out cross-linked files etc.
It might say that you can’t run chkdsk but you can schedule it to run at the next bootup. Choose the option to run Chkdsk at startup and then reboot your PC. Chkdsk will automatically run, detect and repair any errors it finds.

3 Defragment your disk
Your disk doesn’t really get fragmented, but your files do. It means that the file is split up into small pieces, each stored in different places on your hard disk. When you want to load that file into a program, it has to go and gather up all the pieces and fix them all back together again. This takes a lot longer than if the file was already in one piece.

Fragmentation happens when you create files, add to them and re-save them or move them, delete them, install programs, load photos etc.

As disk space is used and released, the available spaces on the disk become small and scattered over different parts of the disk. As a result, if you have a large file, the filing system can’t find a large enough space to store it, so it has to split it into smaller pieces and save the fragments in the available spaces.
This takes more time to save the file, and more time to re-load it as all the pieces have to be gathered up and put back together.

Some people will tell you that with modern disks, this is not such a problem because they are so much faster. This is true to some extent, but in practice, it really does seem to make a difference. It is certainly true on slightly older PCs.

Luckily, we have a tool called a defragmenter.
1. Open My Computer.
2. Right-click the local disk volume that you want to defragment, and then click Properties.
3. On the Tools tab, click Defragment Now.
4. Click Defragment.

If your disk is severely fragmented, this might take a long time to complete. It’s best to leave the PC to get on with it than try and do something at the same time. Once done, try to remember to do it about once a month – it will take a lot less time if done regularly.

4 Remove Software You Don’t Use Any More
When you click Start and then All Programs, is the list you are presented with getting bigger and bigger? The chances are that there are programs in there that you haven’t used for months. Maybe you even forgot they were there.
These unused programs are occupying disk space (see Tip 1).
But some programs can use more than disk space; they can use system memory and processor time as well.
When you install the software for a printer, for example, it very often includes a program that runs in the background, monitoring the printer status etc. You might see evidence of this as an icon in the bottom-right corner of your screen, unless you hide the unused icons.
Open your control panel, select Add or Remove Programs and wait for the list of programs to appear. Then go down the list and remove anything that you no longer use.

5 Remove Spyware and Viruses
If you’re a regular Internet user, receive spam email or have installed unknown, free programs from a web site, you could have one or more viruses or spyware programs installed. Not only is this a security risk, it could damage files on your computer. In addition, the spyware is eating into your processor time which will slow your computer down.
Install and run spyware removers and antivirus software. There are a number of free ones available, such as AdAware and AVG.

6 Clean the Registry
The Registry is a set of system files where Windows and programs that you install save data and settings about themselves. Some programs are not very good at cleaning up after themselves when you uninstall them, so data gets left behind, and links get lost.
Windows itself is just as guilty of leaving the Registry in a mess and provides no tools to clean it up. However, Microsoft have created RegClean a free tool you can download from their website. It does a very basic job though, and doesn’t fix all problems.
Several 3rd-party Registry cleaners do exist, but you generally have to pay for them.

7 Delete Unused Network Connections
If you connect to a network, whether it’s in an office or at home, if you have set up a network connection, Windows will spend time trying to establish that connection when it starts up. If it can’t make the connection after a specified time, it gives up (called a time-out) and tries the next one. If computers to which you connect are frequently switched off, Windows will not make the connection, so you’ll have to wait until the connection attempt “times out”.
Delete network connections you don’t ever use so that you don’t waste time trying to connect.

8 Remove Fonts that you Never Use
Many people, when they first get a PC, discover fonts that they can download from the Internet, or see discs of 1000 fonts in their local PC store, and catch font-fever. In no time at all, they have a huge selection of fonts on their PC, most of which are never used.
Some software installs additional fonts without you even knowing it, too.
Each of those fonts uses up a little disk space and some system memory. The more fonts you have, the more resources are used up and your system takes a hit in performance.
Go to your Control Panel, open up Fonts and delete the ones you never use.

9 Keep Drivers Up-To-Date
Drivers are small programs that let Windows access a certain piece of hardware, such as the video card, sound card, or a printer.
New hardware often comes with drivers that were hurriedly put together, almost as an after-thought.
In some cases, they rely on generic Windows drivers for them to work. These are seldom optimised for a particular piece of hardware.

After the product has gone on sale, the developers have more time to improve the drivers and eliminate errors in them. Very often, these updated drivers improve the speed of the device, or use fewer resources, so it is worthwhile checking with the manufacturer to see if they have updated drivers. You will often find them by going to the manufacturer’s website and looking for the Downloads or Support links.

10 Reinstall Windows
This is a very extreme way of getting your PC to work the way it did before, and I’d only recommend it if your PC is performing very badly, crashes often, or often runs a disk check when you start it up.
Whatever you do, backup your important data, photos, files etc., before you start.
Bear in mind that if you do a full, clean installation, you will also have to re-install any programs that you had installed before.

You will need your original Windows installation disk or rescue disk that came with your PC. If you don’t know what you’re doing, seek further advice, or leave your system as it is.

Kodak PhotoCDs - A Warning

Phil Rogers — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 10:29:41 +0000

Back in the early 1990’s, when I took a photographic film to my local shop to be processed and printed, I chose to have my negatives scanned and the resulting digital images written to a Kodak PhotoCD. At the time, it cost an incredible £16, including the disc to have this done.

But how fantastic to collect not only a set of photographic prints, but a shiny, Gold coloured CD with all my pictures on in digital format. Now I could load any of my photographs into Paintshop Pro, remove any unwanted artefacts, crop it, zoom it, change the brightness and contrast, and generally process it into a form that I wanted. Best of all, I could save the image as a Windows Bitmap and then load it in as my Windows wallpaper. You might not hink twice about doing that today, but at the time, it was cutting-edge.

I recently came across my old PhotoCDs and I thought it would be interesting to go through those old pictures again. Most were from a holiday in Australia, and some from time spent in India.

So I loaded a PhotoCD into my DVD-RW drive on my PC and found that it couldn’t read the disc. I tried another disc and it struggled to read that one, but managed it in the end. The third disc was ok though.

I tried the first disc again and this time it managed to read it and I was able to open some of the pictures.

The discs were all clean and had been stored in a cool, dry place. None of them had warped or become damaged in any other way.

It is my guess that the technology of my DVD-RW is quite different from the CD writer used to create the gold PhotoCD. DVDs use a higher track density, so the laser beam used to read them is narrower. To achieve this, they use laser light of a different frequency (colour) than used in earlier CD drives. It is also possible that the alignment of the tracks on the PhotoCD are not as precise as on a modern disc because the beam width was much wider, meaning a lower tolerance was required. Finally, the gold surface of the disc will have different characteristics to the modern silver surface.

All these factors put together could mean that the old gold PhotoCDs are not compatible with modern CD or DVD drives.

If you have any of the old gold coloured PhotoCDs, I’d dig them out and see if your computer can still read them. If not, find somebody with an older computer that can read them, and get the files copied onto a new CD or DVD.

In fact it’s worth making a copy even if your PC can read them. It’s always better to have a backup. And as technology changes and improves, you might find that some time in the future, you won’t be able to read them, and your pictures will effectively be lost.

Fix Outlook Problems the Easy Way

Phil Rogers — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 10:34:18 +0000

I recently had problems with my Outlook 2007 on my Windows XP Pro system at work.

Basically, the program wouldn’t start up properly. It would start and then encounter an error and try to restart itself (unless I unchecked the box to tell it not to).

It would then try to start itself in ”Safe Mode” (does that imply that the normal mode is unsafe?), but that would also fail.

I tried uninstalling Outlook and re-installing it, but that made no difference.
I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the entire Office 2007 suite, but again, that made
no difference.
In the end, I found a website that described the same symptoms and proposed a solution. It was the User Profile that was corrupted - not the program itself. By creating a new profile, I was able to get Outlook running again, but it would still throw a few errors, especially after I had imported my folders and messages from my old profile.

Then I found an even easier way - a FREE program that fixes up corrupted Outlook Profiles. After running this on the old profile, Outlook worked perfectly.

OLFix (Freeware) for Outlook 97 to 2007 combines some tools for repairing common things like the profile, contact links and features, for example calling the internal Outlook repair command line switches with a click of a button. Also some hidden settings can be set for example reminders in different folders.

Highlights:

a) Repairs Outlook profiles.
b) Repairs Outlook contact links.
c) Extends reminder folders.
d) Enables Outlook address book in Outlook express and other programs.
e) Searches of dupes in Outlook.

Outlook sometimes has problems with the profiles, if you for example delete a data file while Outlook is running, Outlook sometimes forgets to delete some registry keys. At next start Outlook will try to load the deleted store provider but will fail because some of the keys are deleted and some not. This gives you sometimes double personal folders, double OLfolders, double Exchange folders, slow Outlook start and errors on start up.

Open repair profiles and select the profile you want to repair.

OLFix will display all registry entries for this profile. Some of them are pre-selected; the pre-selected entries usually can be deleted. Most data files require two registry keys, one main key and one detail key. Exchange usually has one more than two keys, the main key for Exchange and detail keys for your email accounts, shared folders, personal folders, delegates etc.

If you find PST files, OLfolders files etc. with only one key or with more than two keys, they usually are damaged. In Outlook, elements can contain links to contacts; Outlook stores the entry ID of the contact. If you export the file into a new one, the links will still point to the old file, if that is not present, the contact link no longer works. There may be other opportunities to damage contact links. Outlook also stores some other information about the contact, which allows us to find the contact and repair the link.

Editorship valuation of “WinTotal - The Windows Portal”: Outstanding!

So if you have the same problem of Outlook not starting up, check out Olfix.
It might just save you a lot of time and frustration.

Successor To Vista On The Cards

Phil Rogers — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 09:35:08 +0000

Bill Gates has said that Windows 7, the successor to Vista, could be released sometime in “the next year or so”. We guess this means in 2 years because he went on to say that the new version is scheduled for 2010.

Microsoft’s estimated release dates are notoriously optimistic, so it’s certainly unlikely to be within the next year.

Bill Gates did not reveal any details of changes or novel features to the operating system, although he did say that he was “super-enthused about what it will do in lots of ways”.

The Developer Programme for Windows 7 has already been started by Microsoft and there are rumours that an early test version of the new OS, named Milestone-1, has already been given to Microsoft’s biggest customers.

Good Things Come To Those That Wait

Phil Rogers — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 20:31:45 +0000

A domain name has just been sold for an incredible $1.3 million.

Chris Clark registered the domain “www.pizza.com” in 1994, just when the World Wide Web was starting up. Since then, he has paid around $20 per year to keep the registration.

He sold the domain by auction to a bidder who has not been named.

Chris Clark from North Potomac in Maryland, was quoted as saying “It’s crazy! It’s just crazy!” He also added that “It will make a significant difference in my life, for sure”.

Originally, he had hoped that www.pizza.com would help him to get a contract with a pizza firm for his consulting company. He sold his business in 2000, but continued paying the $20 annual fees to retain the domain. He also used the site to sell advertisements.

In January, Mr Clark decided to sell it after hearing that another domain; www.vodka.com, was sold for $3 million 2 years ago.

Mr Clark said “I thought, why don’t I just try to see what the level of interest is?”.
“If someone is willing to pay that much for www.vodka.com, then maybe there’s more interest in www.pizza.com.”

The online auction was launched on 27 March. The first bid placed was for $100, but this rose to a staggering $2.6m one week later.
Mr Clark accepted the offer and expects to receive the money within the next few days once the transaction is completed.
He said he now regretted not buying more domain names back in the 1990s.

[Editor's note: Don't we all?]

Searching in the Dark To Save Energy

Phil Rogers — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 12:44:45 +0000

Computer monitors use more energy to display white pixels than black. Other colours use varying amounts of energy between the limits of black and white.

This is the theory proposed by Blackle (www.blackle.com), who have come up with a black search engine. It’s a front-end to Google, but with a black background, hence the name.

Heap Media, the company behind Blackle claim that by making Google searches using a black background, Internet users could collectively save thousands of kilowatt hours in electricity.

According to EnergyStar, a typical monitor displaying a full screen of solid colour might use the following amount of energy:

White - 74W	Fuchsia - 69W	Yellow - 69W	Aqua - 68W
Silver - 67W	Blue - 65W	Red - 65W	Lime - 63W
Gray - 62W	Olive - 61W	Purple - 61W	Teal - 61W
Green - 60W	Maroon - 60W	Navy - 60W	Black - 59W

But this theory doesn’t hold up. The power consumption figures correspond to old-style CRT monitors. The power consumption for new, LCD monitors does not significantly vary depending on the colour displayed. Most of the power consumption of LCDs is from the backlight, which is constant, whatever the colour.

For LCD monitors, using all-white screens and turning down the brightness of the backlight would save more energy than using Blackle.

Cracked - Blu-Ray Copy Protection Falls

Phil Rogers — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 12:15:50 +0000

Slysoft claims that the latest version of its AnyDVD program lets users make copies of the new high-definition movies on Blu-ray discs.

Sony, who launched Blu-ray’s BD+ anti-piracy system in 2007, claimed that it would take 10 years for it to be cracked. SlySoft claim that they had cracked BD+ as early as November 2007, but they waited until the High Definition format war was over before releasing a product.

The developers of BD+ say that the system will react to attempts to break it and that they can re-lock copied discs, making them unusable in the future.
SlySoft say that they will simply work on cracking it again if this happens.

AnyDVD works in the background to automatically remove the copy protection of a DVD movie or audio CD as soon as it’s inserted into the drive, allowing you to backup the movie using a disc backup tool.

AnyDVD HD allows you to watch movies over a digital display connection, without an HDCP-compliant graphics card or HDCP-compilant display, so there is no need to buy expensive display equipment to watch the movies.

Free Energy Goes Largely Unused

Phil Rogers — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 13:38:58 +0000

In just 40 minutes on a sunny day in the UK, we receive enough energy from the Sun to provide the country’s entire energy requirements for a whole year.

That’s a pretty amazing statistic! it makes me wonder why we’re not doing more to make use of that free energy. We’re trying to build fusion reactors - why don’t we use the one we’ve already got?

Of course, there are two big problems with this; the first is capturing that energy, and the second is storing it.

We can not cover the entire UK with photovoltaic cells or heat exchangers, but there’s no reason why individuals cannot put them on their property.

Even on overcast days, we are still receiving energy, and water heaters that use the sun as
their energy source do work rather well. Photovoltaic panels are becoming more efficient.

So why are new houses not built with these devices already fitted? They would add only a few thousand pounds to the price of the house, yet in the lifetime of the house they would save the owner(s) many times that extra cost. If legislation and regulations were introduced to fit these devices to newly built houses, then the cost of manufacturing them would fall.

There are examples of energy-efficient houses that generate so much electricity that the owners actually sell the surplus electricity back to the generating companies. This just goes to prove that in a lot of cases, many people could become self-sufficient in power for their homes.

As electric and hybrid cars become more popular, any surplus electricity could be used to fuel them.

Energy crisis? Not while we’re still orbiting the sun!