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Microsoft is offering a free antivirus program called Security Essentials. It includes protection against viruses, spyware and other malware. I’ve just begun testing it in order to see if I would recommend it. The installation was simple, hassle free and it seems like it runs smoother than AVG, especially when opening documents in Microsoft Word (AVG occasionally hangs when working with documents). Security Essentials also has a “very good detection score” of 98.4% according to this article on PC World.

You can download Security Essentials for free from Microsoft here.

I received an email today from the Downloadtube.com Editor Team. They have decided to award neverRun with their Top Software Award. They describe it as a “Simple little tool created to detect and intercept autorun.inf files on usb and network drives.” It was surprising that this was would receive an award, as it was almost not even published. I created it over a weekend, largely to solve an in-house issue where I do not have Administrative Rights outside my immediate network.

When i purchased my aspire one i purchased the Windows XP Version. After using it a bit i decided to download the linpus linux and install it on my laptop. I had the restore discs for my laptop so i figured if I got tired of windows XP then i could just bootstrap the discs onto a usb drive (I don’t own an external CD/DVD) and reinstall. This weekend I found out how bad that assumption was.

I decided to reinstall windows on my machine because I wanted to continue coding when and if i go on a brief trip. My projects are exclusively for windows as they are usually used at work or given to someone else to solve a problem they are having. I enjoy seeing my code used. This isn’t possible with linux. I loved the Linpus distro. It was fast, expandable and uniquely adapted to my little netbook but i couldn’t continue my hobby coding on it so it had to go.

Anyways, to the point. I spent all weekend trying to restore this thing with the restore discs. When I was finally able to bootstrap the Restore CD (a Vista based PRE) it just wouldn’t offer the restore option and only allowed me to exit. At that point I almost broke down and bought an external DVD/RW drive. Instead I stepped back and looked at the imaging technology used by Acer’s eRecovery program… imagex.

Restoring from imagex is a breeze. It is well documented and Acer provides all of the tools you need. get the copy of imagex off of the recovery cd: \PATCH\TOOLS and get your image off of the windows XP CD: \IMAGES *.SWM and you are good to go.

What i did was boot into my acer using ERD Commander from a thumb drive and then opened up the command prompt to build the wim image and then restore that to the built in SSD.

imagex /ref *.swm /export POP01021P2EN3C21.SWM 1 d:\acer.wim "aspire"
imagex /apply e:\acer.wim 1 c:\

of course i had to fix the master boot record with mbrfix (a sweet replacement utility for the recovery console’s fixmbr tool) and then I had to mark the partition as active (using ERD’s disc manager). I can honestly say that I have never been so happy restoring windows. Really.

If you are like most network administrators you have had to deal with USB virii as of late. CERT even issued an advisory about it (CERT Vulnerability Note VU#889747) labeling the autorun functionality a vulnerability. There are several work arounds, none of them useful if you do not have Administrative privileges on the machine in question.

I think for most people this is the reality of the situation. For example, at my work the network I run is only a small part in a larger organization. Unfortunately the guys who run the rest aren’t really up to par when it comes to security and even general maintenance. I do not control all of the machines I come into contact with.

To address the issue with those other machines I have written a small tool called neverRun. This user mode application sit’s in your system tray until a new usb or network drive is connected to your machine. Once this is detected it scans the drive for any autorun.inf file and renames it. It does not clean any virus that might be present but it will stop you from getting infected unless you purposely execute it.

Download the source code and the application here (For Windows XP).

Well, as promised I’m back with some more in-depth technical musings on Windows 7. Now that I’ve had a few days to get acclimated with the new operating system I’d like to share the details with you so that you know what you have to look forward to.

Once your system is loaded you are sure to notice the enhanced taskbar. The new Windows 7 Taskbar features interactive thumbnails and preview windows for minimized applications. Progress is shown directly on the Taskbar so you don’t need to restore the minimized window to see that your application is working. The Taskbar also has a preview feature that allows you to preview the window on the desktop. It has a much smoother almost Mac OS design and feel to it, so it has the cool factor working in its favor also.

Jump Lists are another new feature of the redesigned taskbar. These lists serve as frequently used functions for the program in your task list. For example, if you look at the Jump Lists for your favorite word editor you are likely to see a list of recently opened documents or if you examine explorer’s Jump List you will find a list of frequently opened locations.

Vista users might notice a change in the UAC in Windows 7.  It UAC seems far less annoying and provides more visual clues (it dims your desktop when prompting for your input). Windows also has an improved privilege model. Even if you are a user of the Administrator Group most tasks are run with regular user privileges (even with UAC turned all the way down). The Action Center also helps you maintain performance on your computer by gathering all system notices into one place.

As I noted in my previous post, you will experience better performance over all with Windows 7. One of the reasons for this is that the Service Control Manager can now start and stop services based on specific system events or triggers. Now, when you are not using a service, it won’t take up resources. This helps speed up load time as the SCM has less to start up when your system loads. 

Improved graphics are another reason for better performance. Aside from the introduction of WARP10 they’ve also increased the video pipeline, introduced better DirectX / GDI Functionality and added new DVXA Video Processing capabilities (for HD Video Formats). Videos look crisper in Windows Media Player when compared to other media players that I’ve used on the platform (VLC).

As Windows 7 have been built for the immediate future we see that Microsoft is on the way toward dropping the mouse and keyboard as the primary input method in favor of multi-touch devices. This isn’t suprising given the success of the iptouch and this new direction and shift is one of the reasons I think for the immediacy of the Windows 7 release. Microsoft must launch a system geared toward multi-touch and Windows 7 is it. Even without this capability you will see the effects of this new direction. Bring a window to the top of the screen and it maximizes, bring it to the side of the screen and it prepares it for side-by-side comparison. I find the prospect of having a multi-touch computing in the immediate future is really exciting.

That about rounds up the features I’ve noticed on Windows 7. Here are some other things to look forward to as it continues to develop and come out of beta.

• Focus on devices (the Device Experience Platform).
• Focus on distributed computing (Federated Search and Windows Web Services).
• Support for Open Packaging conventions (Office Open XML File Formats).
• Gadgets on the desktop (the Sidebar is gone but Gadgets remain).
• Powershell 2 by default.

If you’re interested in a more in depth look at the operating system, check out this interview with Mark Russinovich ‘Inside Windows 7′ on Channel9.

Well, I downloaded Windows 7 ealier today just to give it a test run and I must say that I am impressed so far. Setup was remarkably smooth and I’ve not had any issues. It also comes off as a little more perky when compared to Vista or even XP; reminiscent of Windows 2000. My test box (which I also development on) is a Dual Core 3.4GHz P4 with 1.5 GB of RAM so I deserve some if this perkiness. As with most programs I’ve tried, Chromium (Version 1.0.156.0) runs just fine.

I’ll be posting some more in-depth technical musings on Windows 7 in the future i’m sure but for now I can only say that I like it. I also think if you haven’t upgraded to Vista yet I would wait until you can upgrade to Windows 7. Treat Vista like most treated ME and pretend it didn’t exist.

You can download Windows 7 Beta here.

back in 2006 i wrote about a quick fix for a stupid problem. That problem was renaming a whole bunch of files that i downloaded because i did not like the naming convention the packer used. you can check it out here.

Now instead of writing something like that i just use powershell.

ls *.mp3 | ren -newname { $_.Name -replace "bad", "" }

that’s a real scripting language and one crazy line.

the vulnerability behind MS08-067 has been generating alot of noise on the wire lately. This vulnerability could allow remote code execution through RPC and does not require authentication. One thing that many people are not mentioning is that a default XP/SP2 install is not vulnerable because the service is protected by the firewall. The attack vector just isn’t available thanks to that one improvement Microsoft made many years ago. Here is the Vulnerable Function, the POC and the Security Bulletin.

A new version of Pelles C was released on April 15. Among the new obviously cool features are its support for C99 complex math, more error codes in errno.h, and a new code signing utility.

Check out the changlog here.

I recently upgraded to Office 07 at work. The headache was a hassel only because microsoft decided to try to correct the Microsoft Access security model. In previous versions you would run the Work Group Administrator to join a workgroup by selecting the workgroup information file. This worked just fine for me as a regular user did not have enough permissions to join another workgroup. I embed the following VB Code in the openning switchboard to make sure that have the access client set up to launch a switchboard form on startup and make use some embedded VB Code

 ' Verify the current user is not Admin
 If CurrentUser = "Admin" Then
    Msg = "Network or Workgroup error."
    MsgBox Prompt:=Msg
    CloseCurrentDatabase
 End If

Anyways, now there is no shortcut to the Workgroup Administrator. It isn’t even anywhere on the system menu! The only way i’ve found to get to it is to call it through visual basic (as noted KB Article 888734).

1. In Access 2007, open a trusted database, or enable macros in the existing database.
2. Press CTRL+G to open the Immediate window.
3. Type the following line of code, and then press ENTER.
   DoCmd.RunCommand acCmdWorkgroupAdministrator
4. In the Workgroup Administrator dialog box, click Join, and then click Browse.
5. Locate and then click the following file, and then click Open:
   C:Program FilesCommon FilessystemSystem.mdw
6. In the Workgroup Administrator dialog box, click OK, and then click Exit.

they have needlessly complicated something that was working just fine.

if (NewVersion > OldVersion)
    needlessComplication++ ;