HL2: Episode Two

So that's it. I've finished it. Half Life 2: Episode Two. Not bad for a Christmas present from my son. Nine months to the day to complete the journey to White Forest base. And I still didn't want it to end. Hopefully Episode Three will come out soon.

No more Combine to kill. No more vast landscape vistas to admire and wonder at. No more heart pumping moments. Admittedly I got stuck a few times and left it for a while, only to be drawn back to see if I could go a little further. My all time favourite game has been completed again. The final battle with the Striders was awesome, but would obviously lead to the end of this episode.

There were so many places that required a little extra thought or strategy to proceed and then a little bit of luck just to go a bit further. Sections where nothing challenging was happening but were part of the plot to be led into a trap that was sprung and had to be conquered and then an escape onwards to new discoveries.

I've enjoyed Team Fortress 2 as well and will start Portal now.

Adobe Reader Lite

I've just downloaded another piece of bloatware. The latest version 9 of Adobe Reader is over 200Mb installed (up from 85Mb) and it includes something called Adobe AIR which I didn't ask for.

Ever noticed that when you click on a PDF link, your browser now freezes? Takes no notice of mouse, button or keyboard. Sits there for a while, completely comatose, until it finally gives you the first half of the front page of the PDF document and then freezes again. This is the user experience of Adobe Reader.

There is a really good alternative called Foxit PDF Reader. Freely downloadable, takes less than 2 minutes, installs immediately and works just as well. Get it from www.foxitsoftware.com

Configuring updates:

After a busy couple of weeks followed by my summer holiday, it is back to writing my blog. This time Windows Update is the subject of my wrath. When Microsoft released the concept of Automatic Windows Updates it all made good sense, but now I'm not so sure! With Windows Vista these updates are always applied both before a shutdown and after a reboot, making the restart process a lot longer. And they always seem to need a reboot which nags away at you until you feel forced to go away and have at least one cup of coffee.

Over the last few months this seems to be the normal mode of operation now. I timed a mid-specced, modern PC with this month's updates and it took 6¼ minutes to shutdown and 3¼ minutes to reboot making a total on almost 10 minutes. And as I type this, it is nagging away again saying that it needs to reboot again. I find this obtrusive and takes the control of the tool away from the user. And it is not just Windows but every application you have and some you don't want, are all asking to be updated.

I'm an engineer who believes that 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' so why should I continually be changing a proven software configuration with some updates that could cause the thing to fail? Security I hear you say. Are we really sure that leaving an unpatched computer on the Internet with a good a security suite on it will really fall victim to a piece of malware? I see many computers that never install updates and aren't completely ridden with viruses, worms, etc.

I upgraded the memory in the PC and I have to wait many minutes while the thing shuts down and restarts and no option to avoid it. I'm seriously considering turning off Automatic Updates and relying on a three or six month 'grab 'em all and install once' option.

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.