Where Y'all Been?

Ouch! I just looked at my blog, and see that I haven't been here in almost a year. Bad Dale!

Where to begin? I've moved (still in Clearwater, just living solo for a change), changed phone numbers, and taken on a couple of new roles.

I can now be reached at 727-687-0842. I generally answer the phone between 10A and 10P, but the answering machine works 24/7, so call any time of the day or night.

I took on the editor/writer/web-poster job for Bits 'n' Bytes, the online newsletter of the Tampa Bay Computer Society last August. I've seen much better sites, but for a solo job it ain't bad.

The SIG leader for TBCS' Novice SIG (Tuesdays, 1P - 3P) is a 'snowbird', so I'm filling in for him this summer, probably till some time in October. Being the lazy sort, I don't prepare any sort of presentation or class agenda --- it's essentially a live and in-person version of my "free-computer-advice-via-email" service. If you're in the Clearwater area, come on out and join us at 1510 Barry Road.

Since I last posted, the Conflicker non-event came and went; did you panic like most folks did? If you were running avast! 4.8, AVG 8.5, avira, MalwareBytes, or any of a number of free anti-virus programs, you needn't have worried.

The number one problem I've seen in the last year is 'rogue' anti-virus programs: pop-up warnings from a program you don't already have installed, claiming that you're infected, and offering to fix the problem for a reasonable fee. ANY TIME you get a pop-up from a program you haven't already installed, X out of it; don't click on No, or Ignore, or any other button in the pop-up --- for all you know, all the buttons point to the same "Yes" command in the calling program. The X in the upper right-hand corner of the window is part of Windows, not the pop-up, and should exit cleanly and gracefully. ...And now go check your pop-up blocker settings, and see how come you got the warning in the first place.

I still answer any and all computer-related questions for free. To send me a comment or question, please click on this link: Feedback Form

Thanks.

Later,

DaLe

Everybody Makes Mistakes

So, yesterday I got several messages from the Tampa Bay Computer Society concerning the complete loss of Internet access by a large number of people. Seems a recent Microsoft update (KB951748) caused Windows XP/2000users who use ZoneAlarm to lose their Internet access if their ZA security level was set higher than Medium. Windows Vista users weren't affected, nor were those folks still limping along on Windows 98 and ME.

Also unaffected was everyone who had previously taken my advice and uninstalled ZoneAlarm. If you're running Windows 2000 and need a firewall, or you're running Windows XP, and want more firewall than the built-in model, you should be running PCTools Firewall Plus. It's a tenth the size of the latest ZA bloatware, and in software terms, smaller almost always translates as faster.

If you absolutely MUST stay with ZoneAlarm (maybe you lost a bet or something), click the link below to see what to do about the latest problem. It's my understanding that they've already released a fix, or a new repaired version, or whatever; to be truthful, I don't care enough to go see which is the case. I'm using PCTools Firewall Plus, and having no connection problems at all, thank you very much. [recent addendum: I've removed PCTools Firewall - it starting blocking access to sites and services I wanted, and I couldn't seem to correct it from within the program. Now using just the Windows SP2 firewall. 6-13-09] ZoneAlarm SNAFU Correction

So, who do you blame when Microsoft releases an update that breaks a third-party program? Depends... but I tend to blame Redmond for most if not all of my computing woes. It's so seldom that it's not actually their fault, it just isn't worth the time trying to give them the 'benefit of the doubt', so to speak.

Case in point: Windows XP Service Pack 3. Have you loaded it yet? DON'T! I let it load on my laptop during a recent visit to the WindowsUpdate site. Bootup time increased to about 4 minutes. But that ain't the worst of it! Each time I tried to open Internet Explorer 7, it took 4 to 4 1/2 minutes for the first web page to open. After I had a page on-screen, I could click on links to my heart's content, and each popped dutifully open within seconds. It was only opening the application and rendering the first page that was excruciatingly SLOOOOW. Of course, Firefox had no such problem, so I used it for a few days while I tried to fix the problem with IE.

For the record:

1. Service Pack 3 would not uninstall from the Add/Remove Programs module in Control Panel, though it had promised beforehand that it would.

2. System Restore failed every time I tried to revert to the day before SP 3 loaded. Don't know why, it had worked every time I had needed it before.

3. Re-installing Internet Explorer now that SP 3 was installed didn't help.

4. Re-installing SP 2 seemed to complete successfully, despite SP 3 already being installed, but the problem with IE 7 persisted, and now I know I'm not comfortable with how messed up my system files must be. So...

I dumped all my personal files to a 4 GB thumb drive, booted from my Windows XP CD, formatted the hard drive, and reloaded Windows. I made nearly a dozen trips to the WindowsUpdate site, AGAIN! , until Service Pack 3 was the only update listed that I hadn't installed. I dumped the thumb drive back to the hard drive, and all was finally well. No more than 10 or 12 hours of my time wasted.

My recommendation:
Open Control Panel » Automatic Updates.
Click the radio button next to Notify Me But Don't Autmatically Download or Install Them » click OK.
Now, anytime there are critical updates available, a yellow shield will appear in your System Tray. Click it, then click on Custom. Look down the list of available updates; if one of them says Windows XP Service Pack 3 (may be abbreviated to SP3), remove its check mark before clicking on Download.
You'll get asked again once the updates have finished downloading. At this point, since you already excluded SP3 from the download, don't bother llooking down the list --- just allow all downloaded updates to install.

Hope I've helped, or at least not caused any damage.

DaLe

And Yet Another GoodBye

Y'all,

Grisoft has released AVG Free 8.0, and it's pretty. All users of AVG Free 7.5 have till May 31st to download and install the new version --- there will be no more virus definition file updates for v. 7.5 after that. And the only bad news is, users of Win 98 and Win Me can't run the new version. So Win 9x users will essentially be left without virus protection at the end of this month.

But all is not lost. I've been meaning to try avast!, the other big free European anti-virus suite. Since several of my clients stilll use Win 9x, and so do the four old Toshiba laptops I bought at the Hospice Thrift Store, this seemed as good a time as any.

And I like it! It loads easily, it runs quietly in the background, and it's easy to turn off the 'providers' I don't need: Peer2Peer and IM, two things I don't do, so there's no need to protect myself from their vulnerabilities.

Click this link to download the installation file; choose Save, point to your desktop, and click Save again.

Disconnect from the Internet, turn off WinPatrol, and uninstall AVG before double-clicking the downloaded file. (did you notice it was only 20 MB? Cool! The new version of AVG is 45 MB.)

avast! protects from 'rootkit' infections, so it has to reboot the computer to take effect. Connect to the Internet and register the software --- they'll send you a product key and easy instructions on how to apply it, via email. Turn WinPatrol back on.

A couple of things I like about avast!:
1. You can schedule a virus scan to run at reboot, before all the Windows files are loaded --- allows for a more thorough scan of the system.
2. When you receive an updated virus definition file, a voice tells you so. If you find this annoying, turn it off:
Start » (All) Programs » avast! AntiVirus » avast! AntiVirus »Settings » Settings » Sounds » Disable Avast Sounds » OK.

If you're running Win 2000 with Service Pack 4 Rollup, or XP, or Vista, you can go ahead and move up to AVG Free 8.0, if you prefer. As stated above, it's a 45.5 MB download.
Click here to download AVG Free 8.0. It now includes anti-spyware protection, so if it was me, I'd uninstall Spybot S & D. But keep WinPatrol.

Space on my free Utilities CD is at a premium, and I'm trying to keep from making it a 2-CD set. So, I'll be removing AVG from the CD ASAP. I'll probably leave a link to it on my website for a while, subject to change without notice. When I find a utility that covers lots of Windows versions, and a similar program that only works with a sub-set thereof, I tend to favor the program that helps more people. And it doesn't hurt that, in this case, the more broadly useful program is the (much) smaller of the two --- did I mention that I'm out of space on my CD?

Write me if you need a copy of my free Utilities CD. I'll deliver a copy or two for free in the Clearwater, FL vicinity, or mail you one for $4 (or two for $7).

Till Next Time...

DaLe aTchiSon

Say Good-Bye to Ad-Aware

Greetings and salutations to all my friends out in cyberspace. Today, I'd like to say a fond farewell to a friend, not exactly an old friend, but a friend I've known and trusted for the past seven or so years. Ad-Aware, the free anti-spyware client from Lavasoft, is no more. They've decided to stop updating the old version, Ad-Aware Personal SE. It will still run if you open it, but will be hopelessly out-of-date within a few weeks.

To replace Ad-Aware Personal SE, Lavasoft has cobbled together a lumbering monstrosity that (I swear) looks like it could have been written by Microsoft! It's huge, nearly twice the size of the previous version. It only runs on Windows 2000 or XP (and it can be made to run under Windows Vista, but what a hassle! ...besides, Windows Defender is already doing most of the same stuff, however poorly). And it runs so terribly slowly that I can't imagine running it at any time other than bedtime.

Here's a very rough comparison: I downloaded and installed the latest versions of Lavasoft Ad-Aware 2007 and Spybot Search & Destroy. Both install in about the same time. Spybot has several separate updates to download, so it takes nearly twice as long to update as Ad-Aware with its one large definition file. Ad-Aware opens in just a few seconds after being called, compared to times between 1 and 2 minutes to get a splash screen from Spybot (I thought for a while that Spybot was broken, but am now convinced it just always opens slowly, on any computer, regardless of age or speed). But then comes the real bottleneck: Spybot says it will scan in around 17 minutes, and actually takes 19 to 21 minutes to scan the entire hard disk, including the registry and all running processes; Ad-Aware doesn't say how long it will take, and I've never managed to wait to see if it would actually finish --- I tend to shut down any program that's still running an hour after I start the scan, and that's the level of performance I've seen from Ad-Aware. Dreadful, if I must say. And I must.

I've been advising all my clients for the past six or seven years to run Ad-Aware, then run Spybot; each would pick up something the other missed. That's no longer the case. I tried switching the order in which the programs were run; Spybot continued to find 1-3 problems that had been missed by Ad-Aware, but I don't remember the last time Ad-Aware caught something Spybot had missed. And with the new shortcomings imposed by the 'upgrade' to AAW 2007, I don't see any reason to continue running both programs.

Please don't get me wrong, here: Ad-Aware 2007 is a much better program than I could have written. I don't code, period. That having been said, I think the authors, or the folks signing their paychecks, made some bad decisions when they were designing the new version --- I'd have stuck with the old version, making minor tweaks as needed, but keeping most of the speed. As stated much earlier in this rant, this software looks like it was coded at Redmond: "Now that most computers have all this extra RAM, let's use every last bit of it, and need even more for minimum performance."

My free Utilities CD no longer contains any version of Ad-Aware. I don't recommend it; in fact, I recommend that anyone already using it should uninstall it, replacing it with Spybot Search & Destroy and WinPatrol.

I'd like to get this posted, so explicit instructions on installing and using Spybot S & D and Winpatrol will have to wait for a (near-) future blog entry. The default settings will do most of what you need, I just like to 'tweak', then share my tweaks.

Please check out my website at www.ComputerRepairShop.biz, and the list of free programs I recommend at www.ComputerRepairShop.biz/download.html. And please write me at DaLe@ComputerRepairShop.biz; I answer all computer-related questions for free, via email.

Thanks,
DaLe

Considering Buying a 19" Flat-Screen Monitor?

Hi again.

Today I will discuss and discourse on the difference between a 19" LCD monitor and a 19" 'widescreen' LCD monitor. You may already know this, but it was new to me.

I recently had a bit of trouble getting the icons and screen presentation looking just right on a client's new 19" wide-screen flat-panel monitor. The only resolution we could set it to that left square desktop icons actually looking square was so small that we couldn't read the text under the icons! There just wasn't a resolution setting roughly analogous to 800x600 that allowed for the wider screen aspect ratio.

We finally gave up, left it set as nearly right as his video driver allowed, and I came home to do some math.

Here's the problem: we're all used to having our computer screens displayed like our conventional television sets: an aspect ratio of 4:3, meaning the width is 1/3 greater than the height. Movies (at the theatre, at least) are created with an aspect ratio of 2:1 or 16:9, making them wider than they would be on a TV set. Flat-screen monitors sold primarily as multimedia screens have an aspect ratio of 16:10 --- their width is 1.6 times their height. Older video cards, meaning any card made before the 19" widescreen monitors came out, aren't likely to have a resolution setting intended to work with that aspect ratio. The result: everything on your screen is either too tall or too wide, depending on which compromise setting you choose.

This problem could be alleviated if...
1. the video card manufacturers would release new drivers to accommodate the widescreen format, or
2. the widescreen monitors came with driver disks of their own.

While either or both of these possibilities MAY have occurred in some instances, I haven't been the lucky recipient of either; every widescreen monitor I've been asked to install and set up has been without any hint of a driver CD, and Windows Update hasn't provided any help in the way of updated video drivers. (Manufacturers' sites might have helped in this area, but I just recently figured this all out --- at the time, I didn't think to check the manufacturer sites.)

Here's the results of the crude math I worked out (assuming the bezel doesn't cover any viewing area):

a 17" monitor with a 4:3 aspect ratio:
width = 13.6" height = 10.2" total viewing area = 138.72 sq. in.

a 19" monitor with a 4:3 aspect ratio:
width = 15.2" height = 11.4" total viewing area = 173.28 sq. in.

a 19" widescreen (16:10 aspect ratio):
width = 16.112" height = 10.07" total viewing area = 162.248 sq. in.

So, you can see that in moving from a 17" conventional monitor to a 19" widescreen, you lose height (1.27%), you gain width (18.5%), and you gain 17% total viewing area. If your video card can utilize the new screen dimensions properly, you're ahead of the game. Only you can decide if the gain was worth the cost of the new monitor.

But, if you move to a 19" monitor with a standard 4:3 aspect ratio, you gain 11.765% in both width AND height, and you gain 24.9% total viewing area. And your old drivers continue to work just fine --- they were written for an aspect ratio of 4:3 in the first place! Your icons and 'cells' look like you're used to from your old monitor, only bigger (if you keep your old display settings) or in greater quantity (if you increase your resolution setting).

The 4:3 monitors aren't put on sale at prices quite as low as the widescreen versions, but in my opinion, they're the better buy, and worth the difference they cost. Case in point: today, CompUSA had a 19" Envision multimedia widescreen for $139 after $80 in rebates; a comparable 4:3 monitor from Hyundai was $185, no rebates necessary (don't rush to the site --- this monitor was sold out by the time I finished typing this blog entry).

Having thought it out, I've decided I won't buy a 19" widescreen, no matter how cheap the sale price --- when I can spare the cost of a 4:3 19" flat-panel, I'll finally upgrade.

Hope I've helped. Please email questions to DaLe@ComputerRepairShop.biz.

Later,

DaLe

I'm Back, Did Anyone Miss Me?

Wow, I can't believe it's been seven months since I posted my first blog entry. I meant to either abandon the blog if it didn't get Google to scan my website, or post every week or two to try and get my message out.

The blog worked, just like my friend Doc (Dave Dockery) told me it would. I posted my first enty on my birthday last year, and Google was pointing people to my site the next day --- they hadn't done so in the two months the site had been up and running prior to that.

Enough reminiscing, let's talk about Windows Vista. Or, to be more precise, let's talk mean about Windows Vista. It's not completely terrible, but I don't see what all the fuss was/is about. It does a few new cute visual tricks, but it's slower than Christmas; it needs twice the resources Windows XP needed to run half as fast. If ever there was a time to reconsider trying Linux, this is it.

Here's my recommendation: if your Windows XP machine is working well, or could be after you go to my website and run all the cleanup utilities collected there, keep it. Add as much memory as the motherboard will take, maybe even buy a bigger, faster hard drive if you can find one on sale, and stick with the tried and true Windows version you already know how to use. If you absolutley have to buy a new computer, ask Compaq or HP to sell you one with Windows XP Home Edition on it. Again, buy as much RAM as you can afford.

That's the same recommendation I made in 2000 when Windows Millenium Edition came out, and again when the first version of Windows XP came out the next year: if your old hardware is working, stick with the old version of Windows till they fix the bugs in it. And even then, don't consider 'upgrading' your old hardware to the newer operating system --- buy a new computer with the operating system already installed on it. I guarantee you'll be disappointed with any computer you upgrade to a new Windows version without upgrading all the hardware at the same time.

And to the people who followed my advice that long ago, or would have if I'd been blogging then, I say this: if you STILL have that Windows 98 machine running, doing everything you need it to do, keep it. Hopefully by now you've maxed out the RAM and tweaked all the settings so it pretty much flies. Go to http://www.windowsupdate.microsoft.com/ and download all the hardware updates, all the critical updates, and those of the suggested/recommended/optional updates that don't add .Net or foreign language. Then turn off Automatic Updates; Microsoft won't be posting anything new for Win 98, so don't waste your time going looking.

If all you're doing is surfing the Web, checking your email, and playing mp3's, a 500 mHz Win '98 machine with 256 MB or RAM will do that as fast as a 3 gHz XP machine with 2 GB of RAM; both machines described will be waiting on your DSL or cable modem to catch up --- there's no benefit in having more capability than your Internet connection can handle.

Whether you're running Win 98, ME, or XP, go to my website and download/install everything on my Download page. There are links there to AVG, Spybot Search & Destroy, Winpatrol, EasyCleaner, and all of the Steve Gibson free utilities. If you're still running Win 95 or 98, I have the last version of the ZoneAlarm firewall that supported them. And just in case there's any Win 95 users out there who don't already have it, I've posted Internet Explorer version 5.5, Service Pack 2 --- Microsoft doesn't list it any more, so I'll leave it on my site till they ask me to remove it.

Can't say when I'll post here again, but it will probably be soon. I was writing a column for the Tampa Bay Computer Society newsletter, "Bits & Bytes", but they've kinda gone dark, so my free advice emails have just been piling up --- might as well post them here as keep them a secret.

Please write for free email advice on any computer-related subject. If it's a Windows Vista question, first I'll lambast you for abondoning your principles and moving to Vista too soon, then I'll try and find an answer and get back to you with it.

Write me at DaLe@ComputerRepairShop.biz.

Check out my website at http://www.computerrepairshop.biz/.

See what you can do to safeguard your computer and all your sensitive data at my Download page: www.ComputerRepairShop.bix/download.html.

My Inaugural Blog

Okay, here's the first of what may be many entries, or it might be the first and only time I ever post here. Only time will tell...

I'm Dale Atchison, I repair computers in Clearwater, FL and surrounding towns, and I love giving free advice --- it makes me feel like I'm improving the world, one PC at a time. I maintain a website, ComputerRepairShop.biz, where I provide free software that will prevent your computer from ever being infected, compromised, or hijacked again. I didn't write any of the free programs, I just collected them and posted links to them for anyone who would take my advice. The website is simple, even crude by today's standards, but it gets my message out there.

I also answer any and all computer questions put to me via email at DaLe@ComputerRepairShop.biz. I'm not infallible, I freely admit, but so far I have a 100% success rate, meaning I've had no one write back and say they tried my solution and it didn't work. "No news is good news," or so I've heard.

I'll occasionally ramble here about things I've seen or heard, but primarily I've set up this blog just to get people to write me or go visit my website. Wonder if it will work?

Later,
DaLe