Letters from the Ed, Software Reviews, Tips, Tricks and Tweaks, Win7View

Pod (iOS) Windrivers without installing iTunes

February 28, 2013 Ed Tittel 3 Comments

I’ve got numerous PCs around here and there — I can see two desktops and two laptops as I sit here in my office, and there are two more laptops and one SFF desktop elsewhere in our domicile at this moment; I’ve also got four laptops out on loan right now to various friends and relations. My wife and I both use iPhones (both are 4S models), and we’ve got a family iPad, plus a 32 GB iPod that Gregory used to play on a lot before he got a Nook for his birthday earlier this month. That means we have no shortage of machines into which we might plug one of these iDevices, but there’s an issue in working with them that I wanted to avoid on those machines where I don’t usually play iTunes music or watch much video.

The conundrum pretty much boils down to this: the iPhone driver that Windows loads on its own is pretty ancient, but unless you want to install iTunes, it’s a tricky business to get a more up-to-date driver without carrying all the extra iTunes baggage along with it. Believing there had to be a way to get the drivers without the full-blown package, I searched Google using this string “install iPhone drivers without installing iTunes.” And sure enough, up pops a free utility named CopyTrans Drivers Installer that will do the job for you (here’s a C|Net download link for the 3.35 MB utility in ZIP form, just like the afore-linked product page itself proffers). Download the file, unzip to a directory, then run CopyTransDriversInstaller.exe (version 1.024 as I write this post), and you’re done. Not much to it, really.

The initial run screen requires you to agree to the licensing terms.

There is one catch, however: the program will download iTunes in its entirety, then extract the drivers from that download and install them for you. That’s what the Automatic install option at the lower right of the installer window above is about: it’s well worth using, because it does all the grunt work for you. It also works with the latest and greatest iTunes download available from the Apple site on your behalf — that was version 11.0.2.26 as I wrote this post — so you don’t have to check or worry about version numbers, either. The iTunes download (it’s nearly 86 MB in size) took far longer than any other parts of the installation activity. Though the whole operation took about 8 minutes or so on my Lenovo T520 laptop, more than half that time was devoted to downloading iTunes so the program could extract the drivers contained therein for installation (which took well under a minute, when it finally got underway).

If you want to dock your iDevice to a Windows PC without installing iTunes, it’s probably worth grabbing a copy of the CopyTrans Drivers Installer. Put it through its paces, and you’ll have the latest and greatest iDevice drivers at your disposal without having to shoulder the burden of iTunes (and the Bonjour protocol, iTunesHelper.exe, and anything else Apple decides to throw into the iTunes mix — see this fascinating and horrifying list of background processes that can show up when you use iTunes on a Windows PC, straight from Apple Support).

[Querelous and Concluding Unscientific Postscript, with apologies to Kierkegaard: I’d love to know what tool or technique the CopyTrans Drivers Installer uses to access the contents of the 32- or 64-bit iTunes installer files. I attacked them with both 7Zip (which is suprisingly capable at taking .exe files apart) and Legroom Software’s Universal Extractor (which is a good tool, but hit or miss, and crashed when trying to unpack this file’s contents) without any luck. Knowing how they did their thing would help me do it with other installers, which is sometimes the only way to get access to Windows drivers that may not otherwise be accessible on some PCs, particularly when, for example, trying to snag a Dell driver for use on an HP machine, or vice-versa.]

Hardware Reviews, Letters from the Ed, Tips, Tricks and Tweaks

USB 3.0 SandForce Flash Drives: True Value or False Economy?

November 19, 2012 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

I’m in a bit of a quandary on an interesting subject. I just purchased a 128 GB USB 2.0 Flash drive — a Centon DataStick Sport — that I picked up on special from TigerDirect for about $65 (as I write this blog, you can pick them up at Amazon for about $80). It seemed like a very good deal when I bought the unit, but I was quickly disabused of my enthusiasm when I plugged it into my desktop PC to copy all 29 GB of music I keep on that machine to see how it performed doing large bulk file transfers. The entire transfer took almost three hours to complete (I can do it in under 40 minutes from one direct-attached disk to another), after which I understood that while I might have purchased plenty of capacity, I didn’t get the kind of performance one might wish to have, to keep the time required for big file transfers more manageable — but then I didn’t pay for that privilege, either.

This flash drive is big (128 GB) but it's not fast. — This flash drive is big (128 GB) but it’s not fast.

At least, I now understand why USB 3.0 or eSATA makes more sense for big flash drives, or other forms of external storage, especially if you need to move large amounts of data on a regular basis. But if you go shopping for USB 3.0 flash drives (probably the most practical form of higher-speed flash storage available at the moment) you’ll find prices running from $1-2 GB for such storage, depending on how fast you want that storage to be. In particular, the bigger and faster such drives get, the more they cost. In particular, this $290 Super Talent 100GB USB3.0 Express RC8 Flash Drive (model ST3U100R8S) stuck me as amazingly extravagant, even if it is “Windows To Go certified” for Windows 8 Enterprise.

On the other hand, you can jump over to Newegg and purchase a Vantec NexStar 3 USB 3.0/eSATA 2.5″ drive enclosure for $30, and a very fast Samsung 830 128GB SSD for $105. Add $20 for shipping and handling, and you’ve spent $155 for more storage capacity (119 GB actual storage in Windows Explorer vs. 93 GB likewise) and similar or better speed (depending on whether or not your notebook has an eSATA port or “only USB 3.0″). Given those economics, I have trouble understanding why anybody would buy the higher-dollar UFD, except that the form factor is significantly smaller. But my Vantec drive measures out at about 5.5 x 3.5 x 0.7” and weighs under 250 grams, so it will fit into a laptop bag with no stress or strain at all. And it only takes 5 minutes and a Philips-head screwdriver to put all the pieces together.

But there must be a market, because there are lots of 64 GB and higher-capacity USB 3.0 UFDs available. Go figure!

Letters from the Ed

Dell XPS 13 Leaves Great First Impression

September 25, 2012 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

Through a strange series of events, I got selected to fill Dave Strom’s inestimable shoes at the Dell Customer Advisory Panel (aka DellCAP) meeting in 2011. Since then, I’ve been a member of that sometimes stormy, sometimes sedate, but always interesting group and have provided my input and insight — such as they are — to this hard-hitting group of social media mavens, digital community activists, and consumer rights advocates.

Such memberships apparently come with some interesting privileges, too. About two weeks ago, I drove over to the Parmer Lane Dell campus in northeast Austin to pick up a brand-spanking-new XPS 13 laptop, issued to me on more-or-less permanent loan. The reason for this largesse: the DellCAP members get issued with such a machine to work and play with as they see fit, and write about as they please. So that’s what I’m doing here: sharing my first impressions of this svelte but powerful laptop (current MSRP is around $999) after spending some time getting to know it, and using it for a variety of tasks.

Brushed aluminum top deck, carbon composite lower deck, gorilla glass display cover.

Right out of the box, there’s a lot to like about this snappy little unit, which lots of reviews compare to the MacBook Air. This is a flattering but apt comparison if you ask me, as the owner of a 2010 vintage MacBook Air myself (Core 2 Duo, nVidia GT320 graphics, and 256 MB SSD). The Dell unit is about 0.5″ narrower, but almost the same depth and thickness; the Apple unit weighs 3 lbs 7.7 oz, and the Dell comes in at 2 lbs 15.1 oz. The comparison remains favorable throughout, in fact. Here’s a look at the out-of-the-box Windows Experience for my XPS 13:

Not bad for an Intel HD 3000 based graphics architecture

Battery life for the XPS 13 is all over the place, depending on what you use the unit for. Continuous WLAN and/or streaming video cuts the typical light-duty battery life of about six to six and half hours to around three to three and half hours. This prompted a nice blog post on the Official Dell Corporate Blog entitled “Maximizing Battery Life on the XPS 13 Ultrabook…” that’s worth a read for those seeking to eke more minutes (or hours) from their units. Overall, battery life is not as good as a MacBook Air (one of the few areas in which the Apple unit comes off best in such a face-off) but it’s not bad, either.

Intel Inside — and More!

The CPU is an Intel i5-2467M, a 1.60 GHz dual core CPU that supports hyperthreading (and shows four processor threads in various performance displays) and includes 3 MB of L3 cache, 2×256 KB of L2 cache (one for each core), and 2×32 KB for data and instructions L1 cache (one for data, the other for instructions, natch). The XPS 13 includes 4 GB of Samsung DDR3-1333 RAM (2×2048 MB modules, not upgradeable), and a zippy Samsung 128GB PM830 mSATA SSD (actual size: 119.24 GB as reported in the Windows 7 Disk Management console). The GPU is an integrated Intel HD 3000 which is fine for my laptop needs (I don’t play many shoot-em-ups or RPGs on such machines) and the 1366×768 glossy Gorilla Glass-covered monitor delivers sharp, clear video as long as I don’t try to work outside or in bright ambient light (in which circumstances, screen glare definitely impairs the display’s visibility).

There aren’t many ports on this puppy, either, thanks to its slim lines and svelte exterior. There’s nothing on either the front or back edges, and here’s the layout for each side of the XPS 13, from rear (hinge) to front (palm rest and touchpad):

Left: Power port (which leads off to a tiny 45W brick 3.5×1.875×1.125″), USB 3.0 port, headphone jack
Right: Mini-DisplayPort, USB 3.0 port.

The keyboard features a white back-lit layout with a standard QWERTY deck and nice-sized shift, caps lock, and tab keys at left, and a big backspace, enter, and shift key at right. The top row features half-sized function keys (F1-F12) plus mute, insert/print screen, and delete keys. The far lower right also offers half-sized arrow keys that double as home (left), page up (up), page down (down), and end (right) keys. Far lower left offers Ctrl, Fn, the Windows, and Alt keys with a big spacebar to the left of another Alt and Ctrl key (and then the arrow keys). Typing on the keyboard is a generally positive experience, and requires less time for me to adjust to than some of my other notebook/laptop PCs, some of which — especially my HP HDX9203 “Dragon” — feature what can only be called “wonky” keyboard layouts. For routine e-mail, light typing, and so forth, this keyboard is quite nice to use.

More on the Zippin’ Samsung SSD

The Samsung PM830 mSATA SSD produces some tasty benchmark values in CrystalDiskMark, and is certainly the fastest laptop SSD I’ve had occasion to work with (the rest of mine are mostly SATA II, and by no means real screamers, unlike some of my desktop units which include an Intel 520 and an OCZ Vertex-4). As my earlier Windows Experience screen cap clearly shows, the disk is the fastest thing about this system.

The Samsung SSD posts some serious disk performance numbers

Fresh from the factory, and…
The XPS 13 showed up with little or no bloatware. The next sequence of screencaps shows my XPS13 with its full complement of software. Of what you see in that list of 55 programs, I installed 17 of them: 7-Zip, Adobe Flash and Reader, CPU-Z, Dell Driver Download Manager, Everything, FileZilla, Image Resizer Powertoy, Intel ProSet Wireless stuff (2), Intel WiDi, ISO Recorder, MS Office (2), Secunia PSI, System Requirements Lab for Intel, and WinDirStat. The .NET Framework 4 elements are probably my doing as well. At any rate, this is not what I would call “a load of crapware” as the following list will attest.

Almost everything Dell includes has its name on it

The only Dell element that’s earned a “grrrr” reaction from me so far is its Dell DataSafe Local Backup software: it really doesn’t work as you’d want it to unless you purchase a $39/year “upgrade.” With Windows 7 offering perfectly usable image and file backup through the built-in Backup and Restore facility, I didn’t really see any compelling reason to use the program, nor to pay the upgrade fee. I am fooling around with the Dell DataSafe Online, but with only 2GB of free storage, so far I’m just using it for such stuff as I actually keep in the folders associated with my User identity/account name (18.95 MB, according to the most recent reading).

I also decided to upgrade my system from Windows 7 Home Premium to the Ultimate edition (thanks to my MSDN subscription, this comes as part of that $1,000 a year or so payment, along with most of my other various Microsoft licenses). I’m not sure this was “absolutely necessary” but I like to use the Remote Desktop Connection (and RDP) to remote into my laptops and other systems, and Windows 7 Home Premium doesn’t support such use. I guess that makes it a “nice-to-have convenience” for which I’m appropriately grateful.

What to Make of Dell’s XPS 13

At $999 for the model I’ve got, the XPS is no cheap notebook/laptop. It’s a real ultrabook, with the small size, light heft, and snazzy good looks and accoutrements you’d expect for that kind of money. It’s very usable, friendly, and powerful enough to satisfy all but the most power-hungry programmers, system admins, and heavy-duty tech types. As ultrabooks go, the XPS 13 offers a nice enough price/performance ratio to be worth purchasing, and it makes a great road machine, too.

Hardware Reviews, ViztaView.com Archive, Win7View

Getting Laptops Ready for Classroom Use Teaches Some Good Lessons

September 21, 2012 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

This year, school is getting serious for my 8-year-old son, Gregory: he’s in the third grade. For the first time, he’s having to deal with real grades for his homework, plus regular quizzes and tests. And later on this year, he’ll face his first standardized test (the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, or TAKS) as well. He shares a classroom at Cactus Ranch Elementary with 18 other kids, but they have only one general use laptop for the whole group there (the kids do have more general access to computers in the library, and some classes issue laptops to students from cart set-ups for their use as well). His classroom PC is an elderly Dell D630 Latitude that’s on the last phases of its lifecycle — I volunteer in the library once a week, and the school IT guy also works there; he tells me they’re getting ready to upgrade to Vostro models running Windows 7 in 2013.

So I’m loaning my son’s teacher a couple of additional laptops for the kids to share in his classroom. One is my old and trusty Dell D620 Latitude that’s been upgraded with an OCZ Agility 3 SSD, 4 GB RAM, and a T7200 CPU (which puts it on par for processing with the D630, but where its SSD blows the doors off that unit). The other is my equally old and sometimes not-so-trusty HP HDX9203, aka “The Dragon.” I decided to roll the Dragon back to Vista SP2 and it’s been running like a champ ever since. However, Vista’s odd and seemingly random Windows Update behavior hasn’t let me believe I’ve finally caught up with all the updates: with 148 of them installed over the past two days, it’s been a dizzying sequence of download-install-reboot the entire time. Even so, Windows Update now claims I’m completely caught up. We’ll see.

The D620 has an adequate 14" screen. — The D620 has an adequate 14″ screen.

The HP has a huge and vibrant 20" screen. — The HP has a huge and vibrant 20″ screen.

I’m still debating as to whether or not I should install Paragon’s terrific $20 Migrate OS to SSD utility on the Dragon, and then use it to move the OS over to the spare OCZ Vertex 2 nominal 120 GB (actual 111 GB in Windows Explorer) drive I’ve got lying around. There’s no doubt this would speed things up significantly on the Dragon, just like the Agility 3 did for the aging D620, which laughably melds a processor rated at 5.1 in Windows Experience with a drive rated at 7.8! But there are few things you can do to an older laptop to keep it usable that are better than this, so my real question is: do I want to let the Vertex 2 walk out the door, or do I have something better I can do with it? Right now all of my laptops and desktops boot from SSDs already, so perhaps not…

Featured Books

Guide to TCP/IP, 4th Edition

September 16, 2012 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

Introduces students to the concepts, terminology, protocols, and services that the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) suite uses to make the Internet work. This text stimulates hands-on skills development by not only describing TCP/IP capabilities, but also by encouraging students to interact with protocols. It provides the troubleshooting knowledge and tools that network administrators and analysts need to keep their systems running smoothly. Guide to TCP/IP, Fourth Edition covers topics ranging from traffic analysis and characterization, to error detection, security analysis and more. Both IPv4 and IPv6 are covered in detail.

Ed brings veteran IP and networking expert Jeff Carrel into the mix on this book, where he served as lead author. Look for greatly expanded coverage of IPv6, lots of interesting hands-on labs and exercises, and an improved real-world focus on configuring and managing IP and IP services in the workplace in this latest edition. It’s bound to be a big hit, not just in the classroom, but on reference bookshelves for networking professionals everywhere.

Letters from the Ed

Upgrading to OS X Mountain Lion

July 26, 2012 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

When I got the news yesterday that the latest 10.8 version of OS X, aka “Mountain Lion,” was available, I jumped on the opportunity to download and install the new OS upgrade for a mere $19.99 at the Apple Store. I’m not sure if it was heavy demand for the approximately 4 GB download file, or online Internet traffic related to the Olympics (the US women’s soccer team played a very strong French team, and managed to beat them 4-2), but it took nearly two hours for me to download the file. I’ve downloaded similarly-sized .ISO files from MSDN many times before, and it has seldom taken more than 45 minutes to an hour for those downloads to complete.

Home screen for the OS X Mountain Lion installer
Screen cap from Ars Technica review

But once I got the file downloaded, the install was a breeze. I fired off the download package, and it took me through the rest of the process in about an hour (half an hour or so to unpack the files and prep the machine for the actual OS install, and another half-hour to perform the installation). So far, the handiest tip I’ve seen in using the slightly altered UI is to place two fingers next to each other near the right edge of the touchpad: this calls up a “fat scrollbar” at the right-hand side of a scrolling window and makes scrolling very easy. Other than that, I haven’t yet noticed too many other dramatic changes except that iCloud is better integrated. In fact, I’ve gone ahead and sprung for a big enough storage subscription to cover all of my iDevices–iPod, iPad, and two iPhones–under a single iCloud account now.

I’ve read other reports online that have recommended against the upgrade, and mentioned that older MacBook Airs run more sluggishly on Lion and Mountain Lion than they did on Leopard. I have a 2010-vintage 13″ model with a 2.13 GHz Intel Dual-Core CPU, 4 GB (2x2GB) DDR3-1067, and the same Nvidia GeForce 320M that’s in my HP dv6t Quad Core notebook, which Apple seemingly uses to better effect than HP does. I haven’t really noticed anything like this, but perhaps that’s because I bought the unit used from an Apple employee who had already installed Lion on this machine. At any rate, it’s somewhat faster than my older dual core notebooks, and not too much slower than my quad-core notebooks, so I have nothing to complain about.

For more information on the latest OS X version, I heartily recommend John Siracusa’s mammoth and detailed review for Ars Technica, which digs very deeply into what’s new with and how best to tweak settings and configuration data. There’s also a nice article on the Ars Technica site entitled “How to create a bootable, backup Mountain Lion install disk” on a USB flash drive or optical disk. Warning: you’ll need to do this BEFORE you install the new OS, because the last bit of that process cleans up the file you need to manipulate to create the backup install image (wish I’d read the article before pulling the trigger on my install, in fact…sigh).

Letters from the Ed

An Interesting Trip Down Windows Vista Memory Lane

July 16, 2012 Ed Tittel 4 Comments

This weekend, I had the chance to rebuild and repair an extremely finicky Windows PC on loan to a friend. It is an HP Dragon (model number HDX9203) that HP released in 2008 prior to the release of Windows 7 (October 2009) as a Windows Vista-based “killer media machine.” It includes an AVerTV cable interface for TV access, a Blu-ray player, a hefty-for-the-time T9500 Core 2 Duo processor, and a huge 20.1″ LCD display.

HP's Dragon is Huge but Gorgeous — HP’s Dragon is Huge but Gorgeous

When I say the machine is big, I’m not kidding. It’s dimensions are 18.7″ (47.5cm) x 13.36″ (33.95cm) x 2.3″ (5.85cm), and it weighs over 15 pounds (6.8 kg). It’s packaged as a laptop, with a special hinge between the keyboard base and the screen, that enables the screen angle to be altered independently of the angle of the hinge with respect to the base. Don’t get it? It lets you pull the screen closer so that you can position it right past the top edge of function keys on the keyboard (as shown in the preceding photo), even though the edge of the lower deck itself is about 2.5″ further back. The screen also has a 1980 x 1200 native resolution, and offers very good brightness and color output. I’ve watched plenty of movies and Blu-rays on it, and it’s a great personal media station for sure.

The problems with this machine were its cost (these units cost $3,200-4,000 when sold in 2008, depending on configuration and components), size (enormous), and weight (no way you could hold this on your lap for any length of time). Battery life is less than 2 hours (less than 90 minutes when watching videos on DVD or Blu-ray), and thus, it more or less requires a wall socket nearby at all times. By the time Windows 7 got released in October of 2009, HP had apparently decided to orphan and abandon this capable but monstrous media PC. They never updated the drivers for Windows 7, and they never really kept up with Vista on that machine terribly seriously, either.

I went ahead and upgraded the machine to Windows 7 anyway, and was ultimately able to get everything working except for the Authentec AES2501 fingerprint scanner, and the AVerTV miniHDTV TV tuner card. I did have to fiddle about with graphics, media card, and network drivers, because I couldn’t count on getting the latest and greatest Windows 7 drivers to work on this machine. Most of HP’s Vista drivers for this machine peter out around 2008, though there are a couple of items with 2009 dates, and I found another HP driver for a different Vista PC with a 2011 date that actually worked on the Dragon as I re-installed Vista and found my way to a functional and reasonably current set of drivers this weekend — mostly by virtue of a painstaking process of trial and error. I bounced between the HP Support pages, various manufacturer download sites (Intel, Marvell, and nVidia), and the DriverAgent driver scanner utility that has become an important element in the top tray of my PC maintenance and upkeep toolbox.

In the end, I was able to get all but three of the drivers for the Dragon running Vista current as per DriverAgent’s scans. I had to stick with a 2010 version of the nVidia 8800M GTS driver, and go with the AES2501 driver that Windows Update supplied for me (later updates were available through DriverAgent and Authentec itself, but didn’t work). Same for the AVerTV tuner card as well: newer drivers were available, and would install on the machine, but rendered the tuner useless.

It ended up taking me the better part of two full days to get Vista installed (about 2 hours) and up-to-date (150 updates took almost ten hours to download, install, and in some cases re-install when first tries failed). Getting the drivers right took about another 7-8 hours, but mostly because I tried to get as current as possible, then backed off to what worked, through trial and error. This was a case where letting Windows pick the “iffy” drivers (video, TV, and fingerprint scanner) would have been my best strategy from the get-go. But I didn’t figure that out until the course of events rubbed my nose in this realization. Live and learn, I guess!

But now the machine is back in fine form, and running Media Center properly. I can return it to my buddy, knowing that he can put the machine to work as it was intended to be used. For some reason or another, I find this immensely satisfying. It is too, too bad that HP didn’t support an upgrade to Windows 7 for this machine, though. What I cobbled together for Windows 7 on my own — thanks in large part to the wealth of information available on the Notebook Review HP HDX 9000 DRAGON Owners Lounge (see Part 1 and Part 2 for thousands of posts, many informative, especially the instructions and links at the beginning of Part 2) — worked well enough for desktop and test use, though it did not work as a fully-functional media center. And in re-reading the Owners Lounge Part 2 stuff just now, I find myself oddly tempted to try a Win7 install again, as several users have indeed gotten everything to work under that OS, and it sounds pretty fast with an SSD as the boot drive. Hmmm….

Letters from the Ed, Tips, Tricks and Tweaks, Windows OS Musings

Goodbye Gadgets, Goodbye!

July 12, 2012 Ed Tittel 1 Comment

Since the introduction of Windows Vista in 2006, Windows Gadgets have made colorful and useful additions to Windows desktops everywhere. At this moment, Windows Gadgets work on Windows 8 as well as on Windows 7 and Windows Vista. But a planned discussion of profound security vulnerabilities in the Gadget architecture at the upcoming Black Hat DEFCON Conference(July 21-26, Caesars Palace) appears to spell doom for these desktop denizens.

Gadgets from a Windows 8 Release Preview desktop — Win8 Gadgets

What you see in the screen capture to the left comes from one of my Windows 8 test machines running the Release Preview: my Lenovo X220 Tablet with touchscreen. I’ve found the CPU Usage and Network Meter gadgets from AddGadgets.com to be particularly useful over the years. I also use the analog clock that’s built into the Windows base gadget set, and a handy little gadget called Shutdown as well. That last item is useful because I tend to remote into my test (and other family member) PCs over the network, and it gives me the ability to shut down or restart those machines quickly and easily through a remote desktop session.

But as security researchers Mickey Shkatov and Toby Kohlenberg have discovered (as reported by Ryan Naraine “Security flaws signal early death of Windows Gadgets,” ZDNet), the gadget interface is rife with points of vulnerability that could lead to attack. Hackers could, in fact, take over a system through a malicious gadget foisted on unsuspecting users, or by direct attack on gadgets already running on a Windows desktop. From there, a successful exploit could lead to the attacker obtaining the same level of system privileges and access that attaches to the current logged-in user account. Because so many users routinely log in with system admin privileges, this effectively transfers complete system control to the attacker.

The details aren’t completely clear yet — I guess we’ll have to wait for the presentation and demonstration at DEFCON — but Microsoft has already issued a security advisory (Vulnerabilities in Gadgets could allow remote code execution). This web page includes two “Fix It” tools numbered 50906 and 50907. Because MS fails to describe what these tools do, I learned by experimentation that 50906 disables gadgets (and the Windows Sidebar in Vista), while 50907 turns them back on again.

It might be simpler for users with admin privileges who manage their own systems to simply remove all gadgets from their desktops, and not to add any new ones. I’m not sure it’s necessary to disable underlying support for gadgets if none are running. Apocalyptic warnings aside, I’m going to leave my gadgets up and running until more information emerges from the upcoming DEFCON conference. I need to better my understanding of the nature of the vulnerabilities that already-installed gadgets can pose before I do anything more. Frankly, I’m not sure that a gadget I’ve been using for years actually poses a security risk on my heavily firewalled home network, so I’m willing to wait and learn more about the potential risks of ongoing exposure before I wipe my desktops clean of these helpful bits of software.

It is interesting to understand that Microsoft will do away with the gadget interface, rather than attempting to repair its security issues. The company had already indicated it was deprecating gadgets in Windows 8 (though I discovered to my relief that they still worked on the Developer Preview release late last year, and have continued to use them anyway). However, it now seems likely that they will disable the Gadget interface in the upcoming RTM and GA releases for Windows 8. Thus, production versions of the new OS cannot fall prey to whatever security vulnerabilities gadgets might pose. It should be interesting to mull over what these researchers have learned, and what they’ll reveal, to decide if even trusted gadgets must go on Windows Vista and 7.

I am sorry to see this happen to gadgets. If it turns out they must be removed from my desktops, I’ll also be sorry to see them go. I’ll report back again later this month after the word on gadget vulnerabilities comes out in more detail.

[Note added on 11/18/2013: Thanks to an article I read recently by Deb Shinder, as recounted in a recent post to my Windows Enterprise Desktop blog entitled “Say! You CAN user Gadgets in Windows 8…” I’m very pleased to report that, thanks to 8GadgetPack, you can restore and use Gadgets in the Windows 8 and 8.1 environments. Whoopee! You may do this at your pleasure; I am doing it on several of my Windows 8 and 8.1 machines already.]

Letters from the Ed, Tips, Tricks and Tweaks

Use SP Cleanup Tool to Pare Down Winsxs folder, Reduce Windows Footprint

July 10, 2012 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

If your Windows 7 install has been around long enough, it will pick up various bits and pieces of leftover install information. The Windows Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) tool includes a plethora of command line options that work on a running operating system (in addition to its more common use in setting up images for automated Windows deployments). For use on an active OS, however, your best reference is to start up cmd.exe using “Run as administrator” then type dism /online /? at the command line for a complete listing of commands and options.

In particular the command DISM /online /cleanup-image /spsuperseded is a handy one to know, because it gets rid of superseded install packages left in the wake of a service pack or other major update. It was designed as a post-SP-install cleanup tool, but I’ve run it on several systems that were built from the Windows SP1 slipstream install media, and it still found elements to remove from the installed image, as shown in this screen capture:

DISM removed two packages from my post-SP1 slipstreamed Windows 7 Ultimate installation

This recovered about 3 GB of disk space on my primary production machine — a welcome capability on the 120 GB SSD drive that I’m watching carefully to make sure it maintains at least 25% free disk space, to give the OS and applications room to breathe. On the other hand, if you run it on some systems, you’re more likely to see a result like this one, when DISM finds nothing to clean up on your behalf:

Nothing to clean up on my Lenovo T520 running Win7

Still, it’s a useful post-SP-install trick to keep up your sleeve. Another SP for Windows 7 is pretty likely to appear around the same time that Microsoft ships Windows 8 (late October is when that should happen, say most pundits). If this doesn’t do your system any good now, it will surely come in handy after you install the next SP!

Letters from the Ed

Veeeery Interesting! Meet the MYSOD

July 9, 2012 Ed Tittel Leave a comment

In this case, MYSOD stands for “Mustard-yellow screen of death” and it just hit me this morning on a new-ish production machine on which I’m having video driver problems. It’s got an Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 graphics card in an Asus P6X58D-E socket 1366 motherboard with 24 GB of RAM, an OCZ Vertex 2 SSD, and various other odd’n’ends. The driver version is the latest WHQL (301.42, aka 8.17.13.142) and there are a dazzling number of potential causes for my recent but not so-very-welcome experience. My only other tangible symptom is from Event Viewer, which reports Error code 4101 “Display driver nvlddmkm stopped and has successfully recovered.” This turns out to be a distressingly long-standing and popular problem for Vista and Windows 7, with a long and distressingly ominous list of potential causes and fixes.

Event viewer details for the 4101 video driver error

My searches for enlightenment have turned up some incredibly humorous stuff, however. Thus for example, I found the unwittingly hilarious “Screen of death” page on Wikipedia. It lists many colors of the rainbow for this symptom of hard and irremediable system crash, not all of which are for Windows, but when taken altogether create a lovely rainbow of hues for failure and distress. In addition to the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) and the Black Screen of Death, both of which I’ve experienced in my days mangling and messing with Windows, I also found a Green Screen of Death (Xbox), Red Screen of Death (Game consoles and early Vista versions), the Purple Screen of Death (signals a fatal kernel error in the VMware ESX server). There’s even a white screen of death (Apple iPhones and iPads, among other systems) and — wait for it — a yellow screen of death that “… occurs when an ASP.NET web application encounters a problems and crashes.” I was surfing the Web, with a boatload of open IE Windows when the MYSOD hit me this morning, so maybe it’s involved. But I don’t really think so…

It was clearly something with my graphics driver. My researches so far have turned up the following possible causes, which in turn suggest various fixes:

Bad graphics drivers: but alas, this problem has plagued me for the past four WHQL updates to the Nvidia drivers, and I’m not sure if I want to roll back into 2010 to fix a problem that fixes itself (it does recover automatically, except for my MYSOD today).
Bad memory module: I’ve run memtest86 and gotten a clean bill of health on all six of my brand-new G.Skill 4 GB modules, and the system will run Prime95 with all cores maxed indefinitely at reasonable temps (under 70°C). I know memory controllers sometimes freak when all slots are occupied, and I’ve maxed memory on this motherboard to be sure, but I don’t see a lot of traffic about memory issues for this motherboard, so I’m going to leave the RAM in for the time being.
I’ve tinkered with the Registry, and added a long time-out (10 seconds) to the Timeout Detection and Recovery (TDR) issue that is often associated with the 4101 error code in combination with the nvlddmkm.sys fail and recover error message (see this great discussion on SevenForums “Help me configure registry correctly to solve TDR issue” for more info). Hasn’t made a lick of difference in my case, though…

I’ve asked the TweakTown guys for any insight they might care to contribute, and continue noodling around with my system as I have time and energy for such things. This is one of the things about Windows that truly drives me bananas, but that also helps to keep me busy and to guarantee full employment to legions of Windows support staff and technicians. Go Microsoft!

Author, Editor, Expert Witness