Hallelujah! Production Vista System Finally Behaves Like One

ed@edtittel.com — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 05:00:00 +0100

All I can say when it comes to finally getting my production Vista desktop working as I think it should be is "It's about (expletive deleted) time!" After building this system over the summer and dealing with the usual shakedown issues involved in getting all the software and settings installed, I found myself fighting a series of mysterious and frustrating hardware problems that lasted from the end of August through the first week of November, 2008.

At that point, I finally b [...]

Patch Tuesday For December 2008

ed@edtittel.com — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 05:00:00 +0100

The second Tuesday in each month is when Microsoft schedules its patches, fixes, and security updates. Recently, Microsoft has begun to offer Advance Notification for its Security Bulletins, which makes it a lot easier to tell what's coming down the pike. For December, 8 updates have been pushed to the Windows Update servers

Of today's 8 items, 6 are rated Critical and 2 Important. Here's a brief summary of what to expect:

MS08-71: Vulnerabilities in GDI Could Allow Remo [...]

Grab this great, free rootkit detector if you need it!

ed@edtittel.com — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 05:00:00 +0100

A rootkit is a particularly stealthy and nasty form of malware designed to take over complete control of a system (root level access in UNIX terms means "access to everything, no holds barred"). Rootkits seek to hide from detection via standard operating system based security mechanisms, and require special tools for detection and cleanup.

For more information on rootkits, and how they work, see the following:

1. Wikipedia Rootkit entry
2. WhatIs.com definition

Secunia Personal Software Inspector Does a Bang-up Job

ed@edtittel.com — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 05:00:00 +0100

As somebody who's been researching and writing about malware since 2003, I've come to recognize Danish information security firm Secunia as a reliable source of good intelligence about what's happening on the threat landscape. When a malware alert, proof of concept exploit, or news story shows up with their name on it, I will invariably pay attention. That's why I was very interested to read in a a recent issue of PCWorld (November 11, 2008) about the Secunia PSI vulnerability scanner.

[...]

Begone! Dratted (Old) System Files: Begone!

ed@edtittel.com — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 05:00:00 +0100

When one member of my mirrored pair of system drives failed earlier this year, I replaced that pair of Seagate 7200.10 320 GB drives with a pair of Samsung SpinPoint HD501LJ SATA II 3.5" drives with 16MB Cache. I also installed the still-working member of that pair in my system, so as to retain access to all kinds of files and information from that machine.

Recently, I decided that I'd mined some portions of that disk as much as I ever cared to. In the wake of running the Secunia&n [...]

A Change of Memory Makes a Difference?

ed@edtittel.com — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 05:00:00 +0100

In writing about my trials and tribulations with Windows Vista on my production PC over the summer, I summarized my situation in a blog entitled "Time for a new motherboard?" on September 20. By the beginning of October things with the system had quieted down enough, thanks to switching to a single-vendor security solution (PC Tools Spyware Doctor with Antivirus, plus the PC Tools Firewall, and their ThreatFire behavioral malware blocker) and making some other software and configura [...]

Snapshot: PC Tools Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus

ed@edtittel.com — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 05:00:00 +0100

I've been using Spyware Doctor to handle spyware on my machine for over two years now, with great success in handling spyware. In the past three months, I have switched to PC Tools Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus thanks to issues documented in my story "Best-of-Breed Apps Aren't Always Best for Vista" --namely, incompatibilities between AVG AntiVirus 8.0 and Spyware Doctor 6.0 that kept causing blue screens on my primary production machine.

I dillied and dallied on this review b [...]

Out-of-cycle Security Patch Posts to Fix Huge, Gaping RPC Hole

ed@edtittel.com — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 05:00:00 +0100

Normally, Microsoft reserves its security patches, fixes, updates, and other software tweaks and maneuvers for the second Tuesday in each month, aka "Patch Tuesday." Yesterday afternoon I was somewhat surprised to see various sources trumpeting the release of an out-of-schedule security patch through Windows Update on the fourth Thursday in October.

As described in Knowledge Base article 958644 and MS Security Bulletin MS08-067, this update addresses a vulnerability in the Windows Serve [...]

Is It Really "Game Over" for Vista Already?

ed@edtittel.com — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 05:00:00 +0100

Given the focus of this Web site, I hope it makes sense that I also follow industry news about Windows Vista as well as its technical ins and outs. Recently, I've noticed a growing swell of journalistic opinion/reporting that Vista has failed, that Vista is no good, and that the business world is aleady passing Vista by. Jason Hiner's 10/6 story for ZDNet is a pretty good example of this genre: it's entitled "The top five reasons why Windows Vista failed" and it reports the Vista OS as having [...]

Sysinternals TCPView Reveals Port Activities

ed@edtittel.com — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 05:00:00 +0100

One of the many things I do for a living is to develop and revise courseware for a local Austin company that provides "Learning Centers" for all kinds of Fortune 500 companies. This includes some companies whose high tech products and business activities overlap with my interests and expertise. Right now, I'm hot on the track of revising a course on spam and spyware that somebody else developed back in 2004. Among other things this means revising statistics, information, and tools supplied du [...]

Shadow Copy Puzzle Partly Deciphered

ed@edtittel.com — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 05:00:00 +0100

In yesterday's blog, I reported on the appearance of reports for numerous (9 one day, 10 the next) "corrupt and unusable" VolumeShadowCopyXX entries in the System Log in Event Viewer. All of these originated from source Ntfs, the Vista file system manager.

As I researched the matter, it looked like the best way to fix the problem would be to disable automatic daily restore point generation (which creates a volume shadow copy as part of its operation) for my primary C: and D: hard drive [...]

New Graphics Drivers, New Shadow Copy Puzzles to Ponder

ed@edtittel.com — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 05:00:00 +0100

In the past couple of months, I 've been grappling with graphics stability issues. Mostly, this has meant driver restarts where you get a message that reads something like "Display driver stopped responding and has recovered." Occasionally, this has involved a BSOD that mentions the Nvidia driver files nvlddmkm.dll or nvlddmkm.sys. When it happens, it seldom occurs more than twice a week. I keep checking the Nvidia driver download page, grabbing new drivers as they become available [...]

Restart Manager Surfaces In Event Monitor

ed@edtittel.com — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 05:00:00 +0100

Any time something surfaces in Event Monitor that I've never seen before, it always piques my interest. My usual practice is to scan the Event Monitor's Windows Application and System logs every Monday morning to see what might need my attention. This morning, among the items that caught my eye was this message "Application (pid 4684) cannot be restarted - Application SID does not match Conductor SID" from an unfamiliar source--namely the Restart Manager.

Fixing Vista Mouse and Audio Nits

ed@edtittel.com — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 05:00:00 +0100

Now that my production system has been stable for nearly two weeks, I'm finally getting around to dealing with other aspects of its behavior that aren't quite right. This morning, I resolved to address two issues that have been vexing me lately: an occasional but frequent case of "cursor freeze" from my mouse, and regular but brief stuttering or freeze in audio playback through Windows Media Player 11 or Windows Media Center. Let's tackle these in their order of occurrence here.

Thawing Cu [...]

Mystery Solved -- 103 Devices, 5 Volumes