You’ve been brainwashed. Brainwashed by clever marketing and the classic underpromise-and-overdeliver strategy employed by Microsoft to fix the mistakes they made with Vista.

I know, I know, everyone told you Vista was bad. You maybe even used Vista pre-SP1, on a “Vista Capable” machine way back when it launched and concluded that it was horrible. Or, maybe you heard all the bad press and skipped on it altogether? Stuck with XP, then switched straight to 7. Is that what you did?

Well, regardless, I am convinced that Vista is the superior operating system. So vastly superior, that I am going out of my way to ensure that it replaces all the systems that I have been tricked into installing Windows 7 on. At work, at home, and for my clients. I am going to make an argument in this article as to why I believe that Vista remains superior.

I challenge someone to list 7 reasons why Windows 7 is better than Windows Vista. Actual reasons. “Features” like Aero Snap, Jump Lists, and the new taskbar do not necessitate an entirely new operating system, so they don’t really count. Those could easily be implemented into Vista, if it were not abandoned in the wake of Windows 7 by the new CEO, Steve Ballmer. So, we begin with a mini history lesson:

Windows Vista was a major disaster. Microsoft suffered from heavily over promising on features (remember WinFS?) and failing to live up to their own hype; and they really hyped it up. Naturally, normal people don’t care or know when a new Microsoft operating system is launched, but the tech community does. So, to over-promise and under deliver, and miss your self-imposed deadlines again and again, the disappointment becomes palpable.

At the time, 64-bit processors were becoming more ubiquitous, and Windows XP 64-bit Edition had a plethora of issues with drivers and was not widely adopted — so they were under immense pressure to release the OS.

Vista Beta 2 came out in 2006, and it was an absolute disaster. If you looked at it funny, or moved the mouse too quickly, it would crash. It was completely unusable, but Microsoft insisted that it was intentional, and that they were planning to fix all of the bugs at once, at the end, prior to RTM. They did, although there was still the issues of heavy disk I/O in the final RTM as well as a large number of driver issues in the final versions.

Much of the problems with Vista stemmed from an overzealous Search Indexer, incomplete drivers from third party manufacturers, UAC, and underpowered systems. RAM was still moderately expensive at the time, and Vista did not work very well with only 1GB, which was common on low-end systems.

After Beta 2, Microsoft shipped release candidate versions and finally the RTM. They continued to fix all of the issues rapidly, releasing patch after patch. All the while, Vista was hammered in the press, blogs and forums repeatedly for problems stemming from the aforementioned.

This negative press was not without merit. Vista was truly very slow, and despite the improvements, they felt minor in the face of a computer that was so severely hampered. Especially when the computer was branded as: Vista Capable.

Finally, with Vista Service Pack 1 (2/2008), the operating system became relatively stable, and performance was drastically improved. However, plagued by the hasty launch, not enough enticing features over XP, and an insipid ad campaign (“the wow starts now“), there were very few who gave it a second review.

Microsoft later attempted to “prove” that they had fixed Vista with the Mojave Experiment, in which they secretly video taped people who had heard that Vista was bad, and had them interact with a supposed “new” operating system codenamed “Mojave.” Evidently, over 90% of the participants thought it was great and an improvement over XP and/or Vista, and expressed shock/surprise when informed that they were actually using regular ‘ol Windows Vista. Of course, bias is to be expected.

After the release of Service Pack 2 (4/2008) and subsequent updates, performance continued to improve and was on par, or superior to that of Windows 7. None of this ever made it to the press because Windows 7 was under-hyped, under-promised and over-delivered by releasing early, since Microsoft learned their lessons with Vista. Moreover, Microsoft’s “I’m a PC” ad-campaign for 7 was well executed.

So, what’s wrong with Windows 7? Why have I become so negative about it? Here’s 7 reasons why I think Windows 7 is a downgrade from Windows Vista (asterisks denote a subjective comment):

1. Windows 7 removes features

What’s missing? Well, where’d the QuickLaunch go? Oh, right, it got consumed into the massive start menu. Where’d the Show Desktop icon go? Moved, to the right hand side (this drives a lot of people batty, believe it or not). Windows Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, DreamScene, just to name a few, no longer come with the OS, they have to be downloaded manually with “Windows Live Essentials” (except for DreamScene, which is totally gone…why?!) — this is not an improvement by any means, just gives the illusion of “less bloat.” But don’t worry, you can put the QuickLaunch and Show Desktop button back — it’s just not exactly all that easy to do.

2. All system tray icons are hidden by default

Is this a problem? I think it is. Microsoft’s attempt to unclutter the taskbar by hiding all third party systemtray icons is a nuisance. How many times have you had to try to explain to someone to “click the little arrow to the left” over the phone to a client, family member, or friend? Hiding all systemtray icons does little in the way of solving the “problem” of the systemtray. As a result, I often find myself just showing all icons on the systems I administer and repair.

3. Libraries

After much annoyance, I finally get libraries. I understand why they exist. I even think it’s a semi-cool idea … but it doesn’t work. Try and copy the path of a file you’re looking at within a Windows 7 Library into another Explorer dialog box. Go ahead. I’ll wait. What’s that? You can’t?

Well that’s aggravating because everytime you click a shortcut like Music on your start menu, it takes you to the music Library, even if you just have one Music folder! Can you replace the shortcut on the Start menu to go directly to your Music folder? No. You cannot. I won’t add a separate section, but HomeGroups annoy me in a similar fashion. I’m sure they’re great for some people — but in general, I just get a lot of “what’s homegroup?!” from people trying to do very basic filesharing across their networks.

4. Windows Media Player 12

Have you used Windows Media Player 11? It’s pretty simple to use. Yes, the defaults are still annoying, but the interface is vastly superior. Try it yourself. Use WMP 11 and then switch over to v.12 which comes with 7 and see which makes more sense to you. The illogical layout of the software is mind boggling to me. This isn’t exactly a Windows 7 issue per se, but since Microsoft made a specific decision to remove WMP 11, I find it worth mentioning. Also, it looks like you can fix it here.

5. Search

This, for me, is the real trouble with Windows 7. In Windows XP, you can download the optional search indexer from Windows Update. Its heyday was really with the search add-on version 2.0, which was an extremely precise search indexer that you could control with a decent amount of precision. In Vista, Microsoft took it to the next level by deeply integrating the indexer and the UI throughout the operating system. Vista’s search solution, once the Indexer was optimized with SP1+, is very powerful and incredibly easy to fine tune. Observe the control you can exert over your search in Vista:

Now, let’s juxtapose this with Windows 7′s search “improvements”:

So, here is what I can’t do with Windows 7′s search:

- Force a search in a non-indexed, or partially indexed location. So, let’s say you just added a folder and want to do a quick search in Windows 7… you can’t, because the indexer hasn’t caught up, and you cannot force the indexer to start on command. So you’re screwed. This is a constant problem that I run into all the damn time.

- Change the search path without first performing a search, and then scrolling to the very bottom of the search results. Who was the genius who designed this?

- Perform complex filters quickly. In 7, I have to use that awkward drop-down menu to manually select each filter, and then scroll back to the left to change my search parameters. This is incredibly cumbersome and unintuitive. Totally fails the grandma test. In Vista, if I want to find a song, I just type one word of the song and then click the “Music” button and bam — it appears immediately.

- Inconsistent search-related glitches (see also Bugs, #6, below) which for whatever reason cause known search results not to materialize. Video evidence of this that I documented is here, on a fully patched, legally licensed, MSDN version of Windows 7 Ultimate. I’m not the only one complaining, either. This is a real problem that simply didn’t exist before 7.

- Oh, and see how the text becomes blue in the search box once I type the word “in”? Well that’s because Windows 7 thinks that I am using a search “operator,” and thus it is not returning any results. If I type the exact same search query into Vista’s search box, it would return results. In order for me to make 7 search for the word “in” I have to put it in quotes in order to “tell” 7 to search it, and not to use it as an operator. Do you think your clients are going to figure that out? I doubt it.

6. Bugs that never get fixed

Microsoft has the capability to fix problems. They proved that with Vista. In my years with Vista, I observed Microsoft fix the operating system relatively quickly. Each problem slowly disappeared, and by the time SP2 hit, nearly everything that was a concern vanished. Yet somehow, that isn’t happening with Windows 7. My biggest #1 problem with Windows 7 is the Explorer refreshing bug.

Have a look at that link. You’ll find that this is a bug that has persisted throughout every single version of Windows 7, and despite innumerable complaints, it isn’t fixed. Windows 7 launched in 2009, and it is now 2012 — it remains unfixed, and inconsistent. I have lost track of how many times I have had to explain to clients that the reason why the file that they saved to the desktop/folder isn’t appearing is because it sometimes won’t refresh automatically and that they have to right click and hit refresh or press F5. Of course, F5 won’t work on Microsoft keyboards because you have to first press F-Lock to enable standard keyboard behavior. This is aggravating, and Microsoft appears unable or unwilling to fix bugs of this magnitude, despite their brilliant engineers on staff.

Other bugs are equally frustrating. For example, after installing a completely legal MSDN version of Windows 7 Ultimate, with keys from Microsoft, activated and operating for a few months, Microsoft released an optional hotfix to determine if your specific instance of Windows had been illegally activated. Since mine were not, I installed the patch on a couple systems that I had running at the time. After restarting, they were flagged as counterfeit copies. After calling, Microsoft double checked the keys and could not determine why they were being flagged as counterfeit. So, I had to manually remove the hotfix to get my legal copies of Windows 7 working normally again. Moreover, I then had to set all the computers to not automatically download updates because with Windows 7, you are forced to install downloaded updates when shutting down. You cannot bypass it as you could in Vista. This “problem” resulted in my having to unplug the systems that had downloaded the updates so that they wouldn’t install the broken hotfix.

There are of course many more, but those two are what come to mind.

7. Taskbar & Explorer changes

The Windows 7 taskbar is subjective. Some people like it just fine, and some detest it. I fall in the middle. I find the auto-grouping to look nice, but irritating as it slows me down. I find the missing quicklaunch, and the auto-hidden systemtray icons problematic, but we’ve already discussed that.

The “Lock” button on the start menu is missing in 7. It is now located under the “>” arrow to the right of Shut down. There’s no particular reason for this change that I can see. The “change view” button is unintuitively* located on the right side of the Explorer window, rather than on the left as in Vista. No reason I can think of as to why this was changed, and there’s no ability to customize it.

The Windows Calendar is gone from Windows 7. It came with Vista, but they removed it — but you can go out of your way and download it with Windows Live Essentials.

AeroShake. Arguably, AeroPeek and AeroSnap are useful, but AeroShake simply hides all background windows when you “shake” a foreground window. This often happens to me by mistake, and I find it irritating. It can be disabled, but it’s too technical for your average user. Moreover, why are these features OS specific? They could easily be appended to Vista, but Microsoft chooses to make them 7-only, as if they are a reason to “upgrade” your operating system (kinda like Siri on the 4S).

More importantly, sortable column headings only appear in Details view, now. There is no way to change this back.

The bottom line is: where’s the upgrade? All I am seeing here are minor changes, missing features, screwed up search, bugs that never get fixed, and other annoyances. Why on earth is this operating system still being priased so much over Vista?

I’d like to see 7 reasons why Windows 7 is an improvement over Vista (SP2).

admin@variableghz.com

Just for fun, I attempted to bruteforce my own WPA2 (“Wi-Fi Protected Access”) network using Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery. Since I had rather awful results in the past with *.PDFs, I thought, perhaps I would have better luck with WPA cracking. The PDF algorithm doesn’t work with GPUs, but it does work with WPA, so I thought that maybe I’d be in luck!

In order to bruteforce WPA/2, you have to capture a 4-way “handshake” (tutorial below). You can do this using BackTrack, or WireShark to listen and capture the packets to a file, specifically a *.CAP file. If you don’t capture it correctly, you won’t be able to even try cracking it. Not that this makes much of a difference…

So, is it possible to bruteforce a WPA/2 network? As it turns out, the answer to that is a resounding no. Shocked? The algorithm is so strong that the passwords-per-second that you can achieve in bruteforce are incredibly low. For example, I loaded the distributed agent on my Quad-Core (Q9450) system w/ just one NVIDIA GTX280, at full power it average just ~10,000 passwords per second. Even if I could double that to ~20,000 passwords per second, it wouldn’t even amount to a drop in the bucket. This would be more like a drop into the Hoover Dam.

Have a look at a tiny cluster of just7 systems (excluding the above-referenced rig), mostly CPUs (one GPU rig) w/ 11 cores going at it. All those systems combined produced a whopping 2,556 pw/s.

WPA/2 has a minimum password length of 8 characters, and for good reason. This length is just enough to make things impossible without serious power.

So, at 2,556 pw/s, you’re looking at ~1.1 million days to recover an 8-character password. Hey, that’s only ~3,013 years! But wait, there’s more. I only have uppercase and lowercase letters and numbers. What if they use a symbol or a space? Then it’s even worse! Or, what if it’s a 9, 10, or 20 character password? Forget about it. Moreover, if someone has an irregular SSID. you won’t be able to run a rainbow table attack on it.

If, however, you somehow get control of all the current GPU power of Bitcoin… then maybe you could successfully bruteforce my WPA/2 network, anything short of that, you’re out of luck.

Forgive my sarcasm, I just cannot wrap my mind around why this is even offered as an option in this software. Under what circumstances would it ever be possible? OK, I suppose if you knew some of the characters of the password, you could mask off the known characters and bruteforce the rest. In that instance, it could be a useful tool.

But hey, if you really don’t believe me, and want to give it a try yourself, here’s what you need to do:

- Download a BackTrack ISO (“BT”) and burn it to a disc (or use a VM if you know what you’re doing). (Note: different versions behave…differently. I found that, for example, BackTrack 3 worked with a certain wireless card of mine while BT4 did not recognize the same card. So, if you find that you have trouble with one version of BT, try out another before giving up. It is a really tremendously valuable distribution.)

- Boot up BT and open a terminal (command-line prompt).

-Type iwconfig to determine your wireless card interface name. (For example, “eth1″ or “wlan0″). If nothing shows up, then BT did not detect it, and you’ll have to do a lot of Googling to figure it out, or try another version of BT.

- Type airmon-ng start wlan0

- This will enable monitor mode on your wireless interface.

- It should be called mon0. So, go ahead and type: airodump-ng mon0

- From the list of wireless APs (Access Points), take note of the channel, ESSID and BSSID.

- Type airodump-ng -c [channel] -w [ESSID] –output-format ivs mon0

- The [ESSID] will be the filename. Note: don’t type the [brackets] themselves, just enter the data directly in. (As an example: airodump-ng -c 6 -w VGHzNetwork…)

- Open a new console.

- Type aireplay-ng -0 1 -e [BSSID] mon0

- This performs a deauthentication (“deauth”) — in order to acquire a 4-way handshake, someone needs to connect to the network. Since most computers automatically reconnect when the connection is interrupted, we use this command to kick them off. Note: You may need to do this several times, at different intervals. Depending on the router and devices connected, it can be tough to get the handshake. So, be patient. If no one is home, and no devices are connected… you can’t get the handshake no matter what you do. Someone must connect successfully.

- So, keep an eye on the previous console window and look for the words “WPA Handshake” to appear in the upper right corner. Once you see it, you can stop the console window (with Ctrl+C). The aireplay-ng window can then be closed as well since the handshake has been acquired.

- Type aircrack-ng -w list.lst [ESSID]

- Note: Remember the filename you specified earlier on. It will be a *.ivs file. Example: ESSID-01.ivs; type ls to locate it if you don’t know the name.

- You can use this file with ESDPR, or you can use the built-in dictionary attacker w/ aircrack-ng. You’ll want to use a pretty beefy dictionary — and it will likely fail, unless someone has a weak password consisting of something matching your dictionary. If you go this route, you’ll likely need a much larger  dictionary than the one provided with BT.

admin@variableghz.com

What is UltraVNC SC? It’s a solution for fast remote-access to a client’s system. It’s free, too.

What’s the difference between UltraVNC and UltraVNC SC? UltraVNC SC takes all of the complexities of setting up a VNC server, and puts the burden on the admin, rather than the client side. Forwarding ports, installing services, setting up passwords, configuring firewalls — all of that is transparent to the client. All the client has to do is double-click a custom *.exe that you set up ahead of time by following this guide.

So, let’s get started.

First, the prep work. You’re the admin, so you need to lock down your local IP and get your ports forwarded appropriately.

1. Determine your local IP. Start > Run > cmd > ipconfig — write down your local IP. Mine is 192.168.1.6. What’s your default gateway? Mine is 192.168.1.1, yours will likely be similar.

2. Log into your router administration panel by navigating to your default gateway address using your browser. (Note: more complex routers may have other methods of getting into the admin panel, check your documentation).

3. Forward port 5500 on your local IP address. (Not to be confused with 5900, the default VNC port — make sure you do 5500).

4. Configure your firewall to allow connections over port 5500 (this is really important, don’t forget!)

Now that you’ve got that all set up, you have a choice to make. You can compile the .exe with your current WAN IP, or you can lock it down using something like DynDNS, similar to the way you normally do with UltraVNC. I strongly recommend you lock it down using DynDNS, and use the DynDNS Updater on your system. So, with that in mind, let’s continue:

5. Head over to the UltraVNC SC “Create” section of their website and download custom.zip.

6. Inside custom.zip, you’ll find 6 files. These files are there for you to customize and then have UltraVNC SC compile them for you in the cloud. You can customize quite a bit with this, but for this tutorial we’re just gonna get the remote access up and running as fast as possible. Once you master this, you can then go back and tweak with all the settings and options and make a very “pretty” UI for your client.

7. Extract custom.zip and open up helpdesk.txt. Inside, you will see a *.ini-like file which contains defaults for all the settings you need to instruct UltraVNC SC what to compile in the final .exe.

8. Under the first [HOST] section (“Internet support”), change the default IP to be your DynDNS (or WAN IP) and be sure to leave the :5500 (port) at the end. Then delete the second [HOST] entry “Internet support encryption” because we won’t be using encryption in this guide. Save the helpdesk.txt file and close.

9. Go ahead and delete the rc4.key file, because we aren’t using encryption right now.

10. Highlight all the files and create a *.zip file. Call it whatever you want (do not have a folder inside of the *.zip, just the data).

11. Now, we need to “compile” the .exe with the UltraVNC SC website. So, head on over to the “Online Creator” section of their site. For reasons unbeknown to me, they require you to use the username: foo, password: foobar. Then upload your newly minted *.zip file.

12. Download the resulting *.exe, which will be named whatever you called your *.zip file.

Now you’re ready to give the *.exe to your client, right? Not just yet — now we have to set up your host computer to “listen” for clients which are going to try to connect to you via port 5500. To get the UltraVNC viewer, you’ll need to have the regular UltraVNC installed, and just choose Viewer if you don’t want the server as well during install.

13. With the UltraVNC viewer installed, go to your start menu and find UltraVNC > UltraVNC Viewer (Listen Mode). Run it. When you do, you’ll see a green eye appear in your system tray.

Curiously, this icon is the same color as previous versions of UltraVNC server which would change from blue when idle, to green when connected. Nonetheless, you know it’s in listening mode by just hovering over it. Again, make sure your firewall isn’t blocking anything. If you want to “verify” that the port is listening, open up a command prompt and type netstat -a and check for port 5500 and a status of “Listening.”

14. With all the aforementioned in place, your clients are ready to connect! Send them your *.exe and it will look like this by default:

Most aspects of this awkward looking client executable are changeable. You’ll obviously want to change this if you plan to use this seriously. Your client simply has to double click “Internet support” to initiate the connection. When they do, you’ll be presented with a popup that looks something like this:

15. Click Yes and you will be able to see their desktop, and your client will be presented with this default, incorrectly spelled message:

Your client can close the connection by right clicking on the VNC icon on his/her system tray, and choosing close. Or you can close it at any time by just closing the UltraVNC Viewer window.

Important: My tests conclude that when doing an UltraVNC SC connection with a client running Windows Vista or 7 with Aero enabled, there is a 15-21 second delay even over lightning-fast connections. This is unacceptable. If you believe your client is running a system with Aero enabled, you must disable it or UltraVNC SC will be nearly unusable! Because your client is in dire need of remote assistance, they probably have no idea what Aero is — so make it easy for them and disable it via a simple batch script on their system which runs the following commands:

net stop uxsms (to disable Aero), and a pause with a message then, net start uxsms (to enable Aero). All you have to do is hit any key in the command prompt window before closing your session!

Download >>

You will find that with Aero off, the speed is super quick. It seems a lot more complex than it really is with all the steps laid out like this — but it’s really not that bad. Once you’ve got it set up, it’s easy to deploy to all your clients. Good luck!

admin@variableghz.com

I’ve used a lot of different software in a tireless effort to brute force a password out of a single PDF. So far, Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery certainly helps to speed up the process dramatically, but is it enough to reasonably crack a standard 8 character password in a reasonable amount of time?

As it turns out, that depends on what type of file you are trying to recover the password on. For example, PDF files are unable to take advantage of GPU acceleration (such as NVIDIA’s CUDA), while WPA/WPA2 (.cap/.wph files) are supported. Either way, be prepared to wait a long time, or drop a lot of money on a lot of CPU/GPU power because once you get up to just a measily 8 characters, it can take years.

Brute forcing passwords is awful. It takes a really long time, even for the simplest of passwords. I started off using Elcomsoft’s Advanced PDF Password Recovery. Tried their dictionary attack, when that failed I then tried their brute force attack which averaged ~17,000 passwords per second on my old work system, an Athlon X2 4600+ (circa 2006). Of course, using “all printable” characters including spaces and special symbols, upper and lowercase letters and numbers promptly gave me an ETA of “more than one year” after it reached six characters. That’s when I began trying the distributed recovery.

Using normal household CPUs, it’s pretty hopeless. See for yourself, in the photo below, I’ve got 11 systems (23 CPU cores total) at 161,018 passwords/sec.

On the “Recovery” tab (shown below), you’ll notice a few things. The “average speed” is how the remaining time is calculated. In this case, 43,962 passwords/sec, and at that rate it would take 732 days to complete a full brute-force using only lowercase letters and numbers. Since the current rate is 161,018 passwords/sec. it’d be completed about 3 times earlier, but that’s still a really long time!

Another thing you may have noticed on the Recovery tab is that it only really supports two methods of recovery. Brute, and key. Key decryption naturally only works for 40-bit keys since it will essentially try every possible key for that space and guarantee a recovery. I would imagine that you are very unlikely to encounter an outdated encryption method such as this. As for brute, well, there’s very little control. You can only choose between so many options, and there’s no ability to load in a custom dictionary or perform a hybrid dictionary/brute attack. The “mask” feature is only useful if you know a part of the password, and let’s face it, you don’t.

So, you’re stuck with a very crude set of brute force “options” and without a huge number of PCs in your swarm (hundreds? thousands?), it’s going to take centuries. That brings me to another thing, this software is seriously expensive. The smallest package is $599 for 20 clients. And, as I’ve demonstrated, that’s definitely not going to be enough. The next tier up is $1,199 for 100 clients, which would seem more likely to actually recover a password in a more reasonable amount of time, I suppose…

ESDPR will work with a clusters of Tableau TAC1441s, but, as you’ll see, that’s gonna cost you quite a bit of money to get any serious performance out of your recovery.

In order to get any real performance or results from this product, I’ve concluded you need far too much money to be worth the effort. In addition, there’s several features missing from software this expensive. For example, what if I want to have 10 computers working on a PDF while I reserve the other 10 computers (that possibly have GPUs) to perform an attack on a different filetype such as an Excel 2007 file? You can’t. You have to wait until one file has finished before the next will begin. So, mark your calendar for 2039.

The calculations take a really long time, so, what if you need to change the hostname on your distributed agents remotely? You can’t. You have to go to each agent computer manually and change it, and if you have hundreds of systems…

Other issues are an ongoing concern as well, as an example, sometimes pushing “disable” on an agent won’t stop the calculations. The agent will keep running the math even with the “disable” button set for a long time. I’ve found that setting an agent’s “limitations” to “off hours” to be more reliable to stop the calculations than to attempt to use the “disabled” button. Of course, these kinds of issues can be fixed with updates, but nevertheless I still don’t really have a clue as to how good of a job the server is doing at managing which agent is handling what passwords attempts.

If this software had some advanced custom & hybrid brute/dictionary attack methods, it would carry far greater value. Unfortunately, as it presently stands, it’s just too limited and far too expensive to be of any use to anyone.

admin@variableghz.com

Power settings matter a great deal, especially on notebooks. Many pre-built computers come with their own power settings built into the OS, usually called something like “Dell Recommended.” These settings are usually decent, but to be sure you’re getting the best power management it is advised to instead use Balanced which will likely do a better job of dynamically setting the CPU as necessary. There’s always more to power settings than meets the eye, however; for example in XP, power settings were curiously hidden in various names like “Home/Office Desk” and “Minimal Power Management” — and, what’s the difference between “Presentation” and “Always On”? Turns out, if you wanted XP to use full power you’d have to set it to “Home/Office Desk.”

In Windows Vista & 7, the power settings have been dramatically overhauled for the better. Here’s what’s different and noteworthy:

Vista and 7 both give you more control over your energy consumption, yet a simpler interface by which to control it. The three defaults, Power Saver, Balanced and High Performance are good enough for most people. Thing is, Balanced does an excellent job at ramping up the CPU when necessary, but tends to err on the higher end of the spectrum whereas Power Saver will actually throttle down the CPU dramatically resulting in a much cooler system, rather quickly. You could operate a laptop in a warm environment (like on a bed or carpet) and the CPU will stay mostly cool, certainly a lot cooler than if you had it set to Balanced. On Power Saver, I noted the CPU’s Maximum Frequency remained fixed at 36% while the system was mostly idle. Even during spikes of CPU usage, it remains fixed at 36%, refusing to budge.

Power saver is perfect for reading, browsing, light word processing, and any other tasks that aren’t heavy on the CPU/GPU. However, once you start taxing the CPU, Balanced is ideal for keeping things, well, balanced. Thing is, if your system is “idle,” all sorts of processes are pinging the CPU’s resources incessantly. Often, many of these requests aren’t mission critical such as a request from Java to check for updates. Nevertheless, it may cause the Maximum Frequency to increase momentarily to allow the process full access to the CPU’s resources. Because this happens every few seconds, the overall effect on a laptop is higher energy usage and a warmer CPU and thus a louder fan to increase cooling.

From my tests, I can’t tell a difference between Balanced and High Performance at all. Balanced seems to immediately crank up the Maximum Frequency to 100% if needed, and High Performance simply leaves it at 100% the entire time, even if the CPU is hardly being utilized.

So, on a notebook. It makes plenty of sense to toggle between Power Saver and Balanced, but much less to switch between Balanced and High Performance.

By default, Windows will invariable put your system to Sleep after a certain period of “inactivity.” So, if you’re downloading a large file, or running a long virus scan, it will invariably interrupt that process. For this reason, I always set it to “Never” sleep — on all operating systems, XP, Vista and 7. I trust you’ll be able to put your own PC to sleep.

In the advanced power settings, you can control much more. Many USB devices have issues with the “USB selective suspend setting” feature, so I tend to disable this. For kicks, I created a custom power plan called Extreme Power Saver & set the Processor power management’s minimum processor state to 1%, and maximum to 2%.

After enabling my custom Extreme Power Saver, I checked the CPU Maximum Frequency in the Reliability and Performance Monitor — it stayed flat at 36%, same as the regular Power Saver. To be sure, I fired up SpeedFan and checked the CPU frequency on both Power Saver and my Extreme Power Saver — both registered at 798MHz (maximum is 2,194MHz, or 2.1GHz). So, Vista/7 both don’t let the Maximum Frequency fall below 36%.

There’s no advantage to making an extreme power saver plan. Toggling between Power Saver and Balanced is the way to go. My test system here is an HP tx 1000 running Windows Vista x86. The same applies for my desktop and work systems running Vista and 7, respectively.

admin@variableghz.com

I’ve got a lot of data. For me, storage is critical. As I mentioned in my previous article on how to archive large files on SkyDrive, sometimes I want to move files to the cloud for an extended duration of time or permanent archive.  It’s good practice to keep a copy of critical data off-site to prevent against theft, fire, earthquakes, human error, and whatever other paranoia you can come up with.

So, since you’re being cheap and searched for free online storage reviews, here are the current best 5 free five online storage services:

1. ADrive.com – 50GB, 2GB upload limit per file

The most surprising thing about ADrive is that they’re still around. I cannot count on one hand how many times I’ve seen gigantic free online storage services disappear within months after making their debut. ADrive has been around since 2007 and hasn’t disappeared yet. You get 50GB with the basic plan, but the real icing is the astonishing 2GB per file limit. SkyDrive gives you a measly 50MB in comparison.

On my server, (yes, the one I had the awkward Windows Home Server experience with) I decided to keep a small, heavily compressed backup Acronis True Image .TIB archive on a spare 4GB SD card set to run once per week in addition to the master backup image which runs nightly. I did this mostly for fun, but also just in case someone deleted or overwrote a file by mistake from the server during the week, I’d be able to recover it using this little extra backup measure. Because of ADrive’s incredibly generous 2GB file limit, I was able to upload the entire compressed .TIB file to their servers, but even if it gets too big, I could simply split the archive.

One final thing: ADrive allows two ways to upload files. You can use their simple Java uploader, or, if you prefer, their “basic uploader” which requires nothing but the browser. I elected to use the basic uploader so that I could keep my server free of potential exploits in Java or Flash.

2. Windows Live SkyDrive – 25GB, 50MB upload limit per file

Ever since Microsoft unveiled this service back in 2007 (then called Windows Live Folders), it underwent several changes while Microsoft experimented with their ongoing cloud strategy. Initially offering just 5GB, they dramatically boosted the storage in late 2008. It should come as no surprise that that is when I became interested in the service.

SkyDrive makes #2 because they, like ADrive, have thus far withstood the test of time and it’s being run by Microsoft, so if they decide to close the service you will likely receive a grace period to remove your files before they are purged forever. Unfortunately, SkyDrive only allows for 50MB per file, which is understandable considering the impressive sharing tools they provide and the fact that they are hardly making any money with the service (there is no ability to “upgrade” or to pay to remove the ads). I work around this limitation by splitting large files with WinRAR, but it’s certainly not ideal.

3. iDrive – 2GB (up to 12GB), no filesize limitations

I use iDrive as a simple backup utility on many of my client’s systems. It is very easy to configure and quick to get up and running. Most importantly, it’s mostly silent. There’s very few prompts, and amazingly no nag screens (even when you exceed the free space). Evidently, you can also increase the 2GB free limitation to as high as 12GB by simply referring your friends to iDrive, they don’t even need to sign up. If you have a relatively small amount of data, look into iDrive first as a painless, simple, fast, reliable real-time backup solution.

4. Uploadingit – 20GB, 200MB upload limit per file

This is an interesting service for a few reasons. They currently only offer a free plan with no possibility to upgrade yet; their website says to check back soon. Secondly, they offer a very generous 20GB of storage, 200MB upload limit per file, advanced interface chock-full of features but there is one very real downside to Uploadingit — and that’s their expiration limit. Presently, if you do not keep your account “active” by logging in at least once every thirty days, they will flag your account as “inactive” and delete all of your files — all 20GB. Good news is they notify you via e-mail 5 days before doing so. This may change in the future as this service seems to be undergoing numerous changes.

5. 4shared – 10GB, 200MB upload limit per file

4shared is similar to Uploadingit: advanced feature rich web interface, large capacity, relatively large 200MB per-file upload limit. Unfortunately, the 30 day expiration is also similar to Uploadingit. All of your files will be deleted within thirty days if you do not log into your account. 4shared also has a desktop utility which you can use at your option for more advanced features such as suspending and resuming uploads/downloads.

They used to offer 15GB for free, but they since reduced it to 10GB. If the 30 day expiration limit hasn’t scared you away, then 4shared is as good a place for your files as Uploadingit.

Due to reseller programs offered by a myriad of large providers, there are dozens if not hundreds of services that are remarkably similar to one another. It’s important to read all of the fine print and terms of service for each service you intend to use, especially if you intend to trust it with sensitive data or else you may not notice something like the above mentioned expiration dates.

admin@variableghz.com

In a previous article, I detailed my awkward experience with Windows Home Server and setting up a stable FTP server. In the end, I converted it into an XP server and assigned my clients with NetDrive so that they could mount the FTP server as a drive letter and browse effortlessly.

Problem is, NetDrive’s performance was subpar with large files, such as PDFs. For example, if I were to open a large PDF, instead of caching the entire PDF and reading it locally, NetDrive would proceed to download the PDF in parts much the same way it works when you view a large PDF from within a web browser. Because many of the PDFs on the server are large (100MB+), this resulted in extremely slow performance. Moreover, a client requested that the files be made available offline so that data from the server could be reviewed and edited while on a plane, for example. Dropbox’s impressive core sync engine evidently left quite an impression, and rightfully so.

I began an epic quest for the perfect realtime, bi-directional sync utility that I could use in conjunction with NetDrive to sync between a local copy of the server data and the server itself — in an effort to essentially replicate the Dropbox-like sync experience.

I must have installed over a hundred sync applications. This was an exhausting and defeating endeavor. Many sync software applications are remarkably similar and there is heavy competition among them. At one point, I had a near-perfect sync using this remarkably capable (albeit not-entirely-user-friendly) program called FTP Auto Sync which I could get working about 80% of the time. However, all of the programs were unable to handle multi-client scenarios. My server is intended to handle changes from multiple users simultaneously. So, one user may delete a file while another user adds a 10GB worth of new files somewhere else. What I was essentially asking all of these programs to do was “check whatever was done last on the server and sync it back with whatever I did last locally and figure it out.” A tall order. Problem is, a locally residing program is blind to the changes the remote FTP server is doing while offline and is unable to monitor all folders at all times anyway.

Let’s say I delete four files from the server. How is the local client to know whether to delete the files from the local client, or the sync the local files back to the server? To get around this, some programs maintain a database of changes, however, they still do not work in a multi-client environment unless I were to switch to an entirely different platform, such as iFolder. Many programs simply were unable to handle syncing in realtime between a pseudo-drive such as NetDrive altogether.

I ended uninstalling everything, including NetDrive and installing WebDrive to replace it after discovering that it had advanced caching and offline synchronization features. The main WebDrive interface may look similar to NetDrive, but the underlying technology is much more robust and feature rich.

By default, WebDrive is configured for “Single User” under Cache Settings. This infers that you will be the only one affecting changes on the server. Since my server data will be changed by many users, I wanted mine to be Multi-user which makes WebDrive check the modified date/time on the server files to verify that the cached files are up to date, if they are not, it will re-download the files as necessary.

You’ll also note that on the bottom, there are two additional options for flushing the cache upon connecting. Since this is the default behavior for Multi-user, I selected Custom and unchecked these two so that the cached files would remain.

Once you have connected to your FTP server, WebDrive has a useful little tool called the WebDrive Monitor. You can access it by right clicking on the WebDrive system tray icon and selecting “Show Monitor.” The Monitor displays the raw FTP commands as they are executed between the client and server as well as file transfers, speed, and a handy progress bar. In addition, the WebDrive system tray icon flashes a world icon whenever data is being transferred. Whenever there is any kind of delay, it’s nice to be able to open up the Monitor and see what is slowing things down, or even to troubleshoot an issue on the server if necessary.

Now, to test the offline sync, I created a test folder entitled “server copy”; I placed four PDFs in the folder and selected the drive made available offline. To prepare a system to be ready for offline files unfortunately requires a few steps to be taken. Those steps can be found in complete detail here, so please refer to that PDF and read it entirely if you intend to use WebDrive for this purpose. First, I open the WebDrive program settings and check both “Synchronize Offline files at Connect time” and “Synchronize Offline files at Disconnect time” for full synchronization. With the server in “online mode” I right click on the “server copy” folder and under WebDrive> select “Make Available Offline.” Since I have the Monitor open, I can see that they are “Set offline.”

Once the files are marked for offline mode, I reconnect to the WebDrive in “offline mode” by checking the “Connect Offline” box next to the Connect button, then reconnect. Of course, you must first disconnect from the server in order to reconnect, even in offline mode. Once connected, I then VNC’d to the server unit directly and deleted 4.pdf and added a new text file called “server.txt”; on the local “offline” copy, I deleted 1.pdf and 2.pdf and added a new text file called “local.txt”

WebDrive has several ways to perform a sync: (1) you can right click on the drive letter itself and select WebDrive > Synchronize Now; (2) right click on the system tray icon, select your WebDrive and then choose Synchronize Now; and (3) simply going back into Online mode where WebDrive will automatically perform a sync on connect. I right clicked on the system tray icon and selected “Go Online” to initiate an auto-sync. The sync was near instantaneous since my files sizes were trivial.

I was hoping for a solution that would free my clients from having to right-click and generally be reminded so much that they are using a workaround for Dropbox, but without Dropbox’s core sync engine, this is as elegant as it gets. I am informed that Novell/kablink’s iFolder (server software not available for Windows) and SparkleShare (not yet available) as well as other utilities such as Unison (no longer under active development) could potentially solve my FTP sync issues as well. My quest is over, at least for now, and while it may not be entirely seamless, my clients will be given the closest thing to the perfect sync.

admin@variableghz.com

Having just (relatively) recently begun using Windows 7 in a complicated and demanding work setting, I can truly see why it takes businesses years to upgrade to the latest from Microsoft. My office uses a series of encrypted volumes, which are mounted and then shared across our network. It’s not terribly complicated since there are no multiple domains or active directory stuff, but it does need to have effortless n0-nonsense sharing and be totally reliable.

So I installed Windows 7 on my primary office system which acts as a bustling hub of data. Several computers access and search across hundreds of gigabytes of data from multiple encrypted volumes. For this reason, this particular system is mission-critical and downtime must be minimized; as a result, I stuck with XP since 2007 because Windows Vista was simply not up to snuff at the time and launched only a few months after I built it.

Windows 7 beefs up the security significantly over Vista. It still retains certain quirks I find obnoxious, like UAC. For example, UAC continues to prompt me every time I launch CCleaner — while I can of course completely disable UAC, there’s still no simple checkbox to “never ask again” for individual programs. That kind of thing makes me want to disable UAC for good, however, I’ve noticed that some programs won’t install correctly if you have UAC disabled so for that reason I am leaving it on for now.

In Vista, to share an encrypted volume all I had to do was mount the volume using TrueCrypt, go to Computer, right click the drive and hit Properties, go to the Sharing tab and then click Advanced Sharing then click `Share this folder`, click Permissions, then click Allow for full control for “Everyone” (or enter in the individual computers as necessary). A lot of steps, sure, but at least it worked immediately without any other fiddling around.

In order to allow sharing of a volume in Windows 7, you must take ownership by entering your “username”, which is different than your hostname or computer name. (You can quickly determine your hostname by opening a command prompt and simply typing “hostname”; or, right-click Computer on the start menu and clicking Properties, you’ll see it under there as “computer name”). The username — the name you set for yourself which appears on the login screen — can be identified quickly by hitting the Windows Key + L to “lock” the screen. So, I can take ownership of the drive by typing in my username, or by typing “everyone” if I trust my network. In addition, Windows 7 does not provide “Everyone” there by default, making this necessary.

Without taking these steps, you get the dreaded “Windows cannot access \\hostname [...] The network path was not found.” This is particular infuriating error since the network path can obviously be found, since the system is clearly visible on the network and Windows provides very little information on how to resolve this newfound problem which did not exist on any prior versions of Windows. So, the photo below shows how I enabled full root access for Everyone on the network to ensure foolproof access.

The good news is that you only need to do this once, even when you dismount the volume Windows will still remember your ownership settings. So once we’ve taken ownership of the volume, we can then enable sharing like before.

To get the sharing done, we have to right click on the drive, click Properties, then navigate to the Sharing tab. Because we’re attempting to share an entire drive, and not just a folder, Windows 7 disables the simple “Share…” button (see below), so we must click Advanced Sharing and then click “Share this folder” checkbox. Then we can select Full Control – Allow for Everyone which will allow everyone on the network full root access to the drive with no questions asked.

Under the Share Permissions, you can enter different usernames of specific systems you wish to share the volume with. Unfortunately, if this is an encrypted volume, you will need to do it again for each time you mount the drive which can be a hassle. For physical hard drives, Windows 7 should remember your sharing preferences each time you plug in the drive.

admin@variableghz.com

All of my years of experience with proxies doesn’t much help those who want the benefits of a proxy, yet don’t have the technical wherewithal to accomplish it. As such, I set out in search of a sure thing, a foolproof proxy that anyone could use with minimal setup. I was surprised to find Vidalia.

Vidalia has proven by far the simplest (free) proxy solution. By GUI-ing Tor & combining a Torbutton for Firefox, it couldn’t be simpler. Here’s how to anonymize your Internet activity in just a few minutes.

- Go to www.whatismyip.com and take note of your IP address.

- Go to the download page.

- Select the Installation Bundle for Windows.

- Install with default options. Install the Torbutton extension for Firefox. Restart Firefox.

- Let Vidalia connect — it should connect in about 10-15 seconds.

- In Firefox, go to View > Toolbars > Customize; find the Torbutton icon, click and drag it somewhere to the right or left of the address bar. Single click it to enable Tor. At the bottom right it’ll say “Tor Enabled” in green.

- Go to www.whatismyip.com again to verify that you are indeed browsing via another IP address. All done.

In my experience, performance has been acceptable — not blazing fast, but not entirely sluggish either. I’ve read that it is horrendously slow for some, your experience may vary.

admin@variableghz.com

I was terribly busy working on a case this week. Many of the documents in the case were scanned in .TIF (also known as TIFF, Tagged Image File Format) format. So, browsing through the documents in this manner proved terribly inefficient and I didn’t have enough time to look into third party programs that might help me look through .TIF files faster. So, my solution was simple: I would take the CD full of sequentially numbered .TIF files and create a PDF out of them.

As I begun adding blocks of .TIF files to Adobe Acrobat, near the end of the disc, in the 6000′s, Acrobat would freeze up and hang and eventually result in a crash unless I ejected the disc. My assumption, was that certain files on the disc were corrupted either due to scratches or aluminum erosion/decay (they are very old discs).

Of course, there is no way to tell which files are corrupted this way. So, I decided to copy the entire folder of .TIF files to my hard drive to take note of the corrupted file(s). Big mistake. As Windows XP ran into corrupted files, it would halt for a tremendously long time, and then finally return an error:

Cannot copy 00006337.tif: Data error (cyclic redundacy error)

After I press “OK” I then had to re-select all of the uncopied files, avoiding the corrupted file, and then continue. This proved futile since there were various corrupted files scattered throughout the disc. (As a side note, a couple of fantastic tools for recovering data from damaged discs that I have personally tested are: photorec and object rescue). So, this seemingly simple task of “copy usable data from disc, ignoring corrupted files” has suddenly become a big problem on Windows XP and I am seriously short on time.

Without hesitation, I opened a new command prompt. I navigated to the directory of the files on my faulty disc and typed the following command:

XCOPY *.* “C:\CASES (Sam)\Clair\FPD CDs\FPD” /C

What does *.* mean? Well, it essentially means “wildcard dot wildcard,” meaning that I am stating any file with any extension. I type this because I am too lazy to type *.TIF since it’s the same thing. If, for example, I only wanted to copy the 00006000′s, I would type “00006*.*” Simple enough.

Note how I placed my destination folder in quotations? That stems from a long history of inconsistency dating back to the early DOS days when you had a 8 character limit. That was eventually extended in Windows95 which allowed for shortcuts for long directories in DOS like “C:\PROGRA~1″ for “Program Files.” Putting quotation marks prevents (prevented?) DOS from interpreting a space as an end to your command.

Now, for the flag: /C. Doing a /? on XCOPY indicates:

/C      Continues copying even if errors occur.

Exactly what I was looking for, right? Right there, in DOS, built right in. All you need to know is where to look to save lots and lots of time. After executing the command, it worked flawlessly without the need for any further user intervention:

(simple xcopy solution for bypassing erroneous data)

Hopefully you won’t have to put this technique to use, but if you do, it’s nice to know you have the right resources and knowledge at your disposal should you need them.

See also: Vista’s robocopy

As always, comment or e-mail with questions.

admin@variableghz.com