Reliance PC

From Reliance PC: Why Is My Computer Slow?

2009-01-08T08:00:54Z

Why Is My Computer Slow?

by Basil Irwin

12/19/2008

Windows computing systems tend to get slower and slower as time goes along. Why is that? Based on my own experience, I've compiled the following list of major performance issues, roughly in the order of frequency:

Accumulation of garbageware and poorly tuned software is the leading cause of poor performance. Garbageware includes a constellation of programs, services, and tasks that run in the background, pointlessly and uselessly consuming memory and CPU resources. Right out of the gate, consumer-class systems come massively overloaded with garbageware, which hardware vendors are paid to install by garbageware vendors. Sony even has the audacity to offer systems without garbageware for an extra $50.00! Interestingly enough, business-class systems do not come loaded with garbageware, meaning PC vendors are quite happy to willingly cripple brand new consumer systems.

Also, as time goes along, garbageware is concurrently installed almost every time you install other software, such as a printer driver disk, a broadband installation disk (unneeded) or free software such as itunes, Adobe Reader, Java, and many others.

Vista has it's own special performance issues, namely a whole pile of built-in garbageware tasks that continuously and uselessly grind your hard drive in the background. In fact, Vista will come to be known as the great hard drive destroyer because hard drives, particularly laptop drives, more or less fail proportionately to the amount of use they get.

The solution to garbageware is to remove or disable unnecessary software. Unfortunately, this usually takes an expert to do, as it is often difficult to determine which software is needed and which software is superfluous. Additionally, some software should be removed, whereas it's best to simply disable other software rather than to completely uninstall it.

Insufficient RAM, particularly in conjunction with Item 1, will really wreck system performance. Most vendors skimp on RAM on consumer-class systems, even though this is an inexpensive component, and by far the most cost effective means for improving performance. Just out of the box, a system may perform barely acceptably, but one or two unknowing garbageware installations later, system performance can tank. Even with garbageware removed, adding RAM is a big win for RAM-starved systems.. Windows XP performs best with at least 1 GB RAM, and Windows Vista needs a minimum of 2 GB RAM. On new systems that use PC5300 memory, the cost of a 2 GB RAM kit is $30.00 for good name-brand memory!

Bloated all-in-one security systems like Norton and McAfee products consume tremendous amounts of memory and CPU resources. Even worse, they are ineffective against modern malware, and worst of all, they are annoying and frequently cause awful system behavior problems, like silently blocking access to some or all of the Internet. There are free, lightweight, non-annoying alternatives that are more effective than Norton and McAfee products.

A failing hard drive can kill system performance. Hard drives degrade over time, causing the drive to silently retry accessing failing sectors repeatedly, as well as using up the limited number of spare sectors available for reassigning to bad sectors. Unfortunately, Windows makes this failure process completely opaque to the user, and by the time the first (obscure) drive failure messages begin showing up in the system events log, the hard drive is on the verge of crashing. Aside from slowed performance, the first symptom of a failing hard drive is often the crash itself. Even more unfortunately, it doesn't have to be this way since hard drives maintain onboard health statistics that Windows ignores. However, third-party tools can be used to read these statistics and determine whether a hard drive should be replaced.

Malware infections usually create obvious havoc with both performance and usability. However, sometimes malware infections have no other symptom except awful system performance. With the proper tools, malware can be successfully removed at least 90% of the time, though sometimes malware leaves behind residual system damage that must be manually repaired.

Once a hard drive is 85% to 90% full, performance will really tank as the system struggles to find contiguous areas big enough to write new data files on. The hunt for unused areas also works the hard drive much harder than normal and can eventually cause the drive to fail prematurely. The solution is to replace the old hard drive with a new drive that has larger capacity, first cloning the old driver onto the new drive.

Performance can sometimes be improved if the hard drive desperately needs to be defragmented. Defragging the hard drive once or twice a year is usually sufficient. However, sometimes heavy, continuous system usage requires defragmenting more often.

Please don't hesitate to call or email me for a free consultation.

Basil Irwin

basil@reliancepc.com

www.reliancepc.com

303-774-1526

From Reliance PC: An Epidemic of Malware and Ways to Protect Yourself

2008-12-20T11:39:23Z

An Epidemic of Malware and Ways to Protect Yourself

by Basil Irwin

12/19/2008

The Malware Problem

Malware infections (viruses, Trojans, etc.) are drastically on the rise right now and are having devastating impacts on Windows PCs, generally rendering them unusable until the infections are removed. Such removal can sometimes be quite difficult, and often the OS is left damaged and/or deliberately vulnerable to subsequent infection, even when the malware is successfully removed.

Unfortunately, current malware infections have become almost impossible to prevent, as they are designed to trick you into installing them and then hide themselves in such a way that most protection software can not see them or remove them.

Unfortunately, anytime you click a link on a web page or in an email, malware could be surreptitiously installed. Fortunately, this is not a problem to worry about on corporate web sites like ebay.com, amazon.com, craigslist.org, yahoo.com, microsoft.com, msn.com, hotmail.com, aol.com, cnet.com, download.com, apple.com, and millions of other main stream web sites.

The malware problem mainly arises from fake web sites and from social networking web sites in which people can post their own content, such as facebook.com, myspace.com, and many others. Many of the fake web sites are porn sites. Legitimate porn sites just want to make money and have no interest in infecting your computer. However, fake porn web sites are like all other fake web sites, they just want to wreak havoc on your computer. Unfortunately, most porn sites are fake.

Another common means of infection is via user-initiated software downloads, particularly antivirus programs, most of which are fake. With only a handful of exceptions, free antivirus and free "cleaner" programs are themselves malware. Further, most software download sites are fakes. A few of the legitimate software download sites are download.com, majorgeeks.com, tucows.com, pcmag.com, pcworld.com, brothersoft.com and snapfiles.com, as well as thousands of vendor-specific web sites. My advice is to avoid downloading software from sites other than the listed ones or vendor-specific sites, unless you know with 100% certainty that the site is legitimate and the software you are downloading is legitimate.

During routine web surfing, however, infection usually occurs via trickery, using popup windows that look legitimate and which scare you into clicking on a button that does something entirely different than what the web pages says the button does, namely installing malware instead of the indicated operation. These popup ploys are too numerous to describe, but typically indicate that a codec or flash viewer or some other piece of software must be installed to continue, or they indicate that a malware infection has occurred (it hasn't) and that you must take the indicated action to protect yourself (if you do, you'll actually be installing the malware).

Unfortunately, a tiny few of these installation requests are legitimate, but the best course of action if you are not 100% sure of what to do when such a popup occurs, is to gracefully shut down your system and restart it by pressing Ctrl + Alt + Del at the same time so as to activate the Windows Task Manager. When the Task Manager appears, you can restart the system by clicking the “Shut Down” tab and selecting “Restart” as shown below:

By the way, if you have accepted my recommendation for having Avira Antivir installed, the only legitimate malware warning message that you will receive looks like the following popup that occurs when Antivir Guard has detected malware:

(By the way, one should always select “Move to quarantine” as the action to take if the AntiVir Guard screen appears.)

A Good Way to Fix the Malware Problem

However, even with all of these precautions, malware can still slip in. For example, a legitimate web site can be unknowingly compromised and subsequently distribute malware until its operator detects the compromise and repairs it.

So, I've finally concluded that the only way of really being safe from infection is to work from a user login id that is set up as being a "limited account" login id, which is explained in the following paragraph.

Windows provides two levels of privilege for login ids: 1.) "administrator" privilege, in which the user and the user's programs are allowed to perform all possible system modification or configuration operations (even dangerous or malicious ones), and 2.) "limited account" privilege, in which no system modification or configuration operations are allowed, though performing most ordinary operations are allowed, including surfing the web, reading email, using Microsoft Office and almost all other applications. But because "Limited account" login ids are inherently unable to install any software at all, malware installation is prevented as well.

For several years, I've established limited account login ids for clients with children or teens because they are extremely vulnerable to being tricked into installing malware, and these limited accounts have worked quite well. In fact, in some cases, their parents have also requested a limited account login id as a safety precaution. The adults use the limited account for ordinary work but can temporarily login to an administrative account if they need to install a new program, etc. This strategy has worked very well also.

So, I’ve recently concluded that the best strategy for many people is to have an administrative login id that is used only for administrative work, and also to have a limited account login id used for all ordinary, everyday activity. In particular, if you tend to surf web sites outside of the main stream or are very uncertain about which action-requesting popups are legitimate, or you just want to be super safe, you might want to consider the dual login id strategy.

For brand new systems, it's fairly easy to establish both limited and administrative login ids. For older systems, conversion can be a little more involved, as usually the best thing to do is to add a new administrative account and change the existing login id to a limited account. However, the main complication for the conversion method is that many system files continue to be "owned" by the converted login id, and ownership of all of these files must be changed to fully secure the system.

Some Parting Advice

It is always essential that Automatic Updates be "On", and that a good antivirus program such as Avira Antivir be active and automatically maintain its signature database. An antispyware program is also a good idea. I recommend Windows Defender. Antivir and Windows Defender are both free, lightweight, unobtrusive, and update for free.

Furthermore, I recommend Firefox version 2.0.0.18 instead of Internet Explorer 7 as your default browser, since Firefox is less prone to the numerous security breaches that continue to plague IE7. However, I don't currently recommend Firefox 3.0 as I don't think it is stable yet. Also, a bit of tuning along with a handful of "add-ons" can make Firefox browsing even better than it is right out of the box, paticularly add-ons that stop advertising and stop automatic playing of flash clips.

And lastly, never click on a web link in any email unless you are 100% certain that the link is safe. If you must visit the link, copy the link into the clipboard and then paste the link into the address bar of your browser, at which point you can look at where the link is really going, and decide whether the destination looks legitimate.

Basil Irwin

www.reliancepc.com

303-774-1526

(Please feel free to forward this email to others. Also, this newsletter and all previous newsletters are archived at: www.reliancepc.com/menu/newsletters. Oh, and remember what I said about clicking on links in email!)

Tips from Reliance PC about: XP Service Pack 3, blank CD/DVD media, printers, hard drives, and RoboForm

2008-07-12T11:46:22Z

This update gives tips about several different subjects that may be of interest, namely:

1. Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3),

2. The importance of high quality media for burning CDs and DVDs,

3. Recommended printers,

4. Recommended hard drives, and

5. The usefulness of a program called RoboForm for remembering passords and login ids.

Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP)

Service Pack 3 (SP3) for Windows XP was released by Microsoft in May of this year. It's been 5 years since XP SP2 was released, and SP3 will be the last service pack for XP.

I'm writing about SP3 because it will eventually arrive on your system as an automatic update. For the most part, SP3 is a roll-up of the almost 200 updates issued after the release of SP2, plus a few extra things. Therefore, since most of you have had automatic updates enabled, you'll already have had most of these updates automatically installed, and SP3 shouldn't represent too much new. Furthermore, I've manually installed SP3 on almost all systems I've worked on since SP3 was released in May, so you lucky folks don't need to worry about this issue.

For the rest of you, I've had very few problems with these SP3 installations. However, I've been diligent in making sure that all antispyware/adware, anti-virus, etc. programs were disabled or uninstalled prior to applying SP3. (I did have a potentially serious problem with SP3 when a program called Webroot Spysweeper was running. BTW, I do not recommend Webroot Spysweeper.)

I've also seen a serious, but repairable, glitch that occurs when SP3 is applied to virgin SP2 systems, something that won't generally be an issue for existing systems.

My research also shows a very serious problem with SP3 when applied to those HP (and maybe some ASUS) desktops that use the AMD processor: SP3 completely crashes such systems. The AMD related problem isn't a problem with the AMD processor or even SP3, but is a bug in the XP image HP and some others have released for the AMD processor. (Essentially, these vendors incorrectly include Intel driver information for AMD processors, and these drivers get activated when SP3 is installed.) There is also a minor problem when SP3 is applied to Microsoft's XP Media Center Edition 2005.

At any rate, SP3 is a very big and comprehensive update to XP that updates hundreds of operating system files even if all previous updates have been applied, and you might want to have me apply this update for you manually in a controlled environment, rather than waiting for it to come in automatically, and perhaps start installing automatically in a possibly problematic environment.

High Quality CD and DVD Media

If you don't burn your own CDs or DVDs and don't ever plan to, then you'll probably want to skip this article, otherwise, read on.

Fundamentally, most blank CD/DVD media sold in the big box stores is junk, and often produces quite a few problems during the burning process, or degrades in quality and may play poorly or not at all after a few months.

Brand name doesn't help because most media is made by a few manufacturers in China or Taiwan and rebranded under familiar brand names. Many of the familiar (and store brands) sold in big box stores, on Ebay, and cheap Internet media outlets are rebranded products from the worst of the Asian producers, plus these brands frequently change their suppliers. As an example, Memorex is one of the worst of the recognizable brands, and it typically uses one of the worst Asian manufactures, CMC.

Basically, the very best media is made by a Japanese company called Taiyo Yuden (TY), which is the company that originally invented the CD media. Unfortunately, some of what is sold as being TY is actually counterfeit, so it's also important to buy from reputable suppliers. One of the very best suppliers (and the one I use exclusively for CD/DVD media and supplies) is www.supermediastore.com. I've provided links to them at:

Taiyo Yuden DVD Media at supermediastore.com

and

Taiyo Yuden CD Media at supermediastore.com

For more information about CD/DVD media quality look here.

For more information about the many different and confusing DVD formats look here. (The page this link points to also contains a wealth of valuable information under the "Related Articles" list.)

BTW, in researching DVD burners, I decided that, in general, Samsung burners are among the best. These can be purchased from newegg.com at here and here.

Printer Recommendations

I'm often asked to make printer recommendations. This is a somewhat difficult subject as peoples' printing needs are varied, and I can speak from experience based mainly on my own particular needs, which are to print high volumes of black and white pages, and to print low volumes of very high quality color art prints.

In general, I'm not a fan of ink jet printers, since the cartridges are extraordinarily expensive and the print heads tend to clog when the printers are unused for extended periods, often permanently destroying the printer. However, for really high quality color printing, ink jets are the only game in town, and I use Epson's Stylus Photo series printers with the UltraChrome inks, which are pigment-based inks that have good longevity and light-fastness. However, these printers are expensive and are overkill for daily color printing needs.

In general, I'm also not a fan of HP consumer ink jet printers (particularly all-in-ones) as they tend to install a massive amount of completely unnecessary, and often unstable, software, plus they tend to break down relatively quickly, and of course are essentially unrepairable and must be thrown away, and thus are environmentally unfriendly. Also, as these printers break down, people go buy another, newer model, and install another giant, different batch of unnecessary and unstable HP software without uninstalling the first batch of HP software. If you do this enough times, eventually your computer won't run at all. That being said, many people have decent experiences with HP printers. Also, Lexmark ink jet printers, including the Dell ink jet printers which are rebranded Lexmark ink jet printers, are even worse from both a hardware and software perspective.

For B & W printing, I've used the Lexmark E238 laser printer, which is no longer available. The successor models (which I haven't personally used) appear to be the Lexmark E250d and Lexmark E250dn, with the latter model being a networked printer. Networked printers plug right into your network and are directly available to all of your networked computers, though it can be tricky to install the software.

I also use the Brother MFC series all-in-one B & W laser printers, which are laser printers that print, copy, scan, and fax. I use the MFC-7820N, which is a networked model. I really like the Brother MFC all-in-one series as the amount of software that is installed is minimal, and all installed background programs are non-essential and can be disabled. The MFC series is also nice in that it is a family of printers that have the same features and use the same software, but spans a gamut of duty-cycles needs, meaning that you can pay more money to get faster and heavier-duty printers, but they operate the same as their less expensive cousins.

For high-volume color printing, the Brother HL-4040CN color laser printer gets good reviews on newegg.com, though I have no personal experience with this printer. Also, this printer is probably not suitable for photographic-quality printing.

It's doubtful that many of these printers are available in retail big box stores, and therefore must be purchased from reputable online stores such as newegg.com and amazon.com.

Hard Drive Recommendations

I recommend Hitachi hard drives for laptops (2.5" drives) and Seagate hard drives for desktops (3.5" drives).

Regarding external USB backup hard drives, it's easy enough to run down to a big box store and buy a pre-assembled Passport-like external USB drive. However, these devices use Western Digital and even lower-quality drives, and I've seen these devices fail, which sort of negates the whole point of a backup device.

You can roll your own high-quality backup device with either a 2.5" Hitachi drive or a 3.5" Seagate drive and the appropriate Vantec external enclosure (2.5" Vantec enclosure or 3.5" Vantec enclosure). The main drawback with building your own is that once assembled (which is easy enough to do), the disk must be initialized and then formatted. Initializing is easy as the operating system will prompt you to do this when you first plug your device into your computer, but it is less obvious how to format the device.

Whether you buy or build your external backup device, none of these devices are really appropriate to leave plugged into your computer permanently, as disk drives generate a lot of heat, and these enclosures can not sufficiently dissipate this heat, and therefore, these devices should be attached to the computer only while backing-up, restoring, and transferring data.

Using RoboForm to Remember Loginids and Passwords

If you have to keep track of numerous login ids and passwords for numerous Internet sites that you buy things from, or otherwise have to login to, then read on about a nice piece of software that keeps track of all of this for you. If keeping track of this kind of information isn't a problem for you, then you'll probably want to skip this article.

I almost never recommend a paid software product because there is so much free quality software available. But there isn't a good piece of free software that does what a program called RoboForm does, namely remembers your login ids and passwords for each web site you visit, and then lets you fill these in with the click of a button. Furthermore, RoboForm can be configured with all the information needed for filling in the billing and address information fields when you buy something from an Internet store, greatly speeding the process and eliminating the chance of error. RoboForm also uses the same database for Internet Explorer and Firefox, maintaining consistency of information regardless of which browser is being used.

RoboForm can be downloaded, installed, and used for free as long as you need to utilize loginids/passwords for no more than 10 web sites. If you need more than 10, you can fully activate the product for $29.95.

Basil Irwin

reliancepc.com

303-774-1526

From Reliance PC: Vista is still awful, but XP is still available despite what you may have heard

2008-06-19T18:28:41Z

My opinion of Windows Vista has not improved from when I first sent out a message about how awful Vista was in March 2007. I used Vista for several months after that to learn how to support it, but I finally couldn't stand it any more and switched back to XP Pro.

In the mean time, most of the rest of the world has come to the same conclusion as myself about Vista: it's pretty horrible when compared to XP. The enterprise/corporate world has not adopted Vista and is not going to. The corporate world is going to stick with XP until Microsoft releases a product that is superior to XP and provides a compelling reason to upgrade.

Therefore, my advice regarding XP vs. Vista stands: avoid Vista like the plague.

In the mean time, you may have heard that XP will no longer be available after June 30th. Like most misinformation about Vista being disseminated from Microsoft and their cohorts, this isn't true. Because the corporate world won't buy Vista, Microsoft had to come up with some kind of plan to save face, yet keep world commerce from grinding to a halt. Though Microsoft will now be forcing everyone to buy Vista, the Vista Business version includes the right to "downgrade" to XP Pro. As a consequence, vendors can still preload XP Pro on new computers, though both the vendor and Microsoft record a sale for Vista Business.

I checked on the Dell "Small & Medium Business" online product sales channel, and sure enough, Dell optionally offers XP Pro preloaded on all of their business class machines, except the XPS series, which is a consumer model anyway. This means XP Pro can still be purchased from Dell on all Vostro, Optiplex, and Precision desktops, and all Vostro, Latitude, and Precision laptops.

Showing its usual total disdain for its consumer customers, Dell offers only Vista on it computers in its "Home and Home Office" sales channel.

Likewise, HP optionally offers XP Pro preloaded on all of their business computers ("Small & Medium Business" channel) and none of their consumer computers ("Home & Home Office" channel).

My advice has always been to shop for computers on the "Small & Medium Business" channels anyway. The business computers don't cost any more than the "consumer" models, they don't come preloaded with a crippling amount of garbageware, they are more durable, and have better vendor support. Actually, I recommend that people purchase refurbished Dell computers via the Dell Outlet for the "Small & Medium Business" channel. Dell refurbished computers are all but "new", have the exact same warranty as their "new" counterparts, are substantially less expensive than their "new" equivalents, and ship much faster as they are already built.

One final note: starting July 7th, Dell will be charging an extra $99.00 to preload XP Pro, even though XP Pro is included for free with the Vista Business version! This is an amazingly greedy move on Dell's part, since the buyer is already being forced to buy Vista Business, which Microsoft charges more for than they use to charge for XP Pro.

Basil Irwin

reliancepc.com

New Avira AntiVir Nag Screen Disabler from Reliance PC

2008-06-05T08:39:34Z

Well, my first attempt at disabling the Avira AntiVir nags screens failed with the latest updates from Avira on 5/30/08. Like myself, I'm sure everyone else who has now installed Avira AntiVir is seeing these darn nag screens pop up when the virus definitions update.

Unfortunately, I had only a few days of experience with AntiVir when I came up with the first disabling method, and had no way to see how it was going to hold up over the long term in the face of updates from Avira.

I've taken another stab at resolving this issue now that I have a bit more experience with AntiVir.

I've developed a new program that hopefully resolves this issue. It can be downloaded from:

Avira AntiVir Nag Screen Disabler

Just click on the above link and then click on the "Run" button when the "File Download" windows pops up (and click "Run" again when the next window pops up.) Then follow subsequent instructions from the program. Note that in some cases your email reader may not present a "Run" option when you click on the link, in which case you'll have to save the file to your desktop, and then double-click the resulting desktop icon.

I've tested this program on XP Pro, XP Home, and Vista Business.

(BTW, I've incorporated the new disabling method in my AntiVir installer that can be downloaded from my web site, so any subsequent AntiVir installs on new systems will use the new disabling method. So if you haven't installed Avira AntiVir, you can uninstall the old AVG, and then obtain the new installer from:

Avira AntiVir Installer

Basil Irwin