System Restore fails

I had a interesting challenge today with a very slow laptop. I did all the usual things, deleted unnecessary programs, cleaned up the startup list, removed Norton Internet Security, deleted all temporary files and folders, etc. And then came to the cleanup of System Restore which was using over 7Gb of disk space. But there was no System Restore tab in the System Properties!

First, I checked the services and sure enough System Restore service was set to Automatic but was stopped. Tried to start it and got 'Code 5: Access is denied'. Did a search on Google and there was some information about clearing registry entries that disabled it, but all to no avail. Then I ran a virus and spyware check but nothing was found.

Finally started thinking about repair installing Windows and I thought about just reinstalling only System Restore. I did a little bit of investigation about this and found that right clicking and selecting Install on C:\WINDOWS\inf\sr.inf started this off. Give it the latest Service Pack files in C:\WINDOWS\ServicePackFiles and then reboot. System Restore is restored and the restore point storage area is cleaned out as well. Worth knowing.

The fake Antivirus scam

I've recently come across a number of PCs infected with the Vista Antivirus 2009 (even Windows XP systems!) and the Antivirus 2009 spyware variants. Other Antivirus 2009 aliases that have recently appeared on the Internet are: XP Antivirus 2008, Ultimate Antivirus 2008 and System Antivirus 2008. These trick the users by appearing to be genuine Microsoft Windows warnings and products but are in fact scams that require a credit card for US$30 to be entered to remove the apparent detected viruses and spyware. Obviously if you pay up nothing happens.

Initially these appear difficult to remove but I've succeeded by:
- downloading, updating and running Spyware Doctor from Google Pack
- using msconfig to remove any suspicious Startup entries
- resetting Internet Explorer to remove any pervasive Browser Help Objects

A cleanup of an infected machine takes about two hours including any Windows and IE7 updates, plus general maintenance work. Additional work could include restoring Windows Update functionality, allowing Task Manager, removing desktop icons, program entries and Control Panel applets.

WHS Power Pack

I've just installed the recently released Windows Home Server Power Pack update. This should fix the data corruption that occurred when editing files in the Shared Folders. The rest of the new features don't really interest me, but it is a pity that they dropped the backup to external hard disk. This would have been really useful as an extra level of data security. I hope it will be in the next release and that we don't have to pay for it. Come on Microsoft make this useful piece of software really something!

The DELL from Hell

A customer asked me to look at a DELL computer that he had recently acquired that had a booting problem. It was a large, heavy DELL XPS Generation 5 with twin RAID hard disks. The previous owner appeared to have wiped them. An easy job thought I to reinstall Windows XP from the supplied DELL Operating CD.

It stalled after 'Press a key to boot from the CD...'. I tried everything to get it past this point. Reset the BIOS, disabled RAID, swapped every component and cable apart from the motherboard and 3.4GHz Pentium 4 CPU. All to no avail. This thing would just not boot. After spending many frustrating hours on this piece of junk, I called the new owner to tell him the bad news. Fine says he, just scrap it. It seems crazy to scrap a powerful, two year old brand name computer, but that is exactly what I did. I'm building another one with some of the reclaimed components for the owner.

More screen real estate

I decided to purchase a new monitor to go with my new graphics card (see last month's post). My DELL 19" standard aspect screen was nice, but with the prices of the 22" widescreen models dropping to the £150 mark, it was too tempting. The reviews (Pcpro and online) indicated that the DELL 22" E228WFP Widescreen LCD Black Flat Panel Monitor was a wise choice even when priced much higher.

Anyway it arrived yesterday and a small monitor shuffle took place and the loser was an old DELL 15" LCD that I used of my test system (already sold for £50). The new monitor is impressive and I don't notice any decrease in frame rates when playing games even though it must me moving more pixels around. The big difference is the increase in screen real estate! The Windows Sidebar is now really off to the side and my two columns of desktop items seem almost lost on the left hand side. Great display too,

Measuring responsiveness 2

Two things reminded me about computer responsiveness recently, one from a long time ago and the other just today. Over 30 years ago, I used to program real-time flight simulators being responsible for fuel, electrical and hydraulics systems. There was no operating system to speak of, just an ‘executive’ program that controlled the time-slices in milliseconds that each program had to compute its results within. If you didn’t finish within your allocated time-slice too bad; you were just cut off. So if your fuel calculation wasn’t completed and the fuel gauges weren’t updated, the engines never ran out of fuel and the aircraft weight remained constant. Ultimate responsiveness, you moved the flight control and the aircraft moved precisely as it should in the real world without any hesitation. No mice to click on, or cursors to watch, it just happened!

I had to edit a home video today. I chose my powerful gaming computer but quickly realised that for all its powerful processor, great memory capacity and cavernous hard disk the editing session was stuttering and painful. Something was going wrong here, but I couldn’t be bothered to find out what it was. I suspected the video card drivers, but they worked well with the 3D games I played, so I was reluctant to change them. I moved the video clips to the small HP server (see previous blogs) and sure enough every thing worked quickly and responsive. Even though the system specification was below the gaming system, apart from the striped RAID hard disks.

In both these examples it was the environment and the task that determined the responsiveness of the system, not the performance and capabilities. So why are some systems so much more responsive if raw performance and resources have nothing to do with it? And how can you measure this?

Measuring responsiveness 1

I'm interested in trying to measure the responsiveness of computer systems. This was because I'm amazed at the apparent quickness of my old DELL Dimension 4550 (2.53GHz Pentium 4, 1Gb DDR memory with Windows XP SP2)which I use for email, web browsing, Word, Excel, Sage bookkeeping, web designing and other administrative tasks. Yes, I know it is over five years old and needs replacing but it still works well and seems reallyresponsive often with many windows open and applications running.

I install quite a few new DELL systems with various configurations and you have to beef them up a bit with the faster Core 2 Duo processors and at least 2Gb of memory before they appear to be just as responsive as my old DELL. So I started to research how to measure responsiveness and discovered very little in the way of research or benchmarks. The closest is Futuremark's PCmark which at least simulates normal use of a computer and times the various operations. However, it still seems very CPU oriented.

Thirteen years ago I had an Intergraph TD-3 workstation with two Intel Pentium 90MHz processors and a SCSI disk drive running Windows NT. That was a very responsive system. You could even continue to work on it while it was printing or formatting a floppy disk. Today multi-core processors seem essentially linked to fast response. This means that when you double click a desktop icon the first time a window opens immediately with the respective application's menu structure and your document or data displayed within it, ready for your attention. A slow response gives three blank windows (because you ended up hitting the icon three times), the hard disk light comes on continually and the system grinds away trying to fill in the boxes.