WindowsNotes.com

Welcome to WindowsNotes.com. Why not subscribe to our full text RSS feed, or subscribe via email? By the way, you'll only see this message the first two times you visit the site, and then you'll never see it again. Thanks again for visiting.

Okay, the other day I posted a schedule for SP3 for Windows XP, with the promise that I was going to spend the weekend finding out what all was going into SP3.  As it turns out, SP3 is not going to be as dramatic a shift as SP2 was a couple of years ago.

Once again I turned to Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows for the details on what was going to be included in SP3.  Here’s essentially what it comes down to.

The first thing that SP3 is going to do is make your system as current as it can be, patch-wise, including everything that was in both SP1 and SP2.  Microsoft does require, however, that SP1 already be installed on your PC prior to adding the new service pack.  They also recommend, but not require, that SP2 also be installed prior to the upgrade.

There’s also four new minor features that Microsoft has included in SP3 that they’ve effectively drawn from Windows Vista, although these aren’t really ‘user end’ features.  In other words, they won’t affect your experience of using XP in any really noticeable ways.  They include:

1. Network Access Protection compatibility: allows Windows XP computers to interact with the NAP features built into Windows Server 2008.
2. No need to enter a Windows product key during setup.
3. Kernel Mode Cryptographics Module: this module will “encapsulate several different cryptographic algorithms”.  According to Microsoft.
4. Black Hole router detection: if your router drops certain types of networking packets, XP will now ignore it.  Not generally something you’ll need to worry about, though.

And that’s it.  Have I lost anyone yet?  Admittedly, there’s nothing particularly sexy about SP3, but if for no other reason than it’ll patch your machine to a state that’s as current as can be, get the update when it becomes available.  It’ll help deal with some of the XP issues you might be having.

At least according to this post on Ars Technica, which got its information from Neowin.  Apparently, this is the timetable that Microsoft is working on:

• April 14: Support is available for SP3
• April 21: OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturers), Volume License customers, MSDN and Microsoft TechNet subscribers get access to SP3
• April 29: SP3 becomes available on Windows Update
• June 10: Automatic updates

So, by June 15 or so, unless you’ve got automatic updates turned off, you’ll soon be running Service Pack 3 for Windows XP.

I’m going to be doing a fair bit of digging this weekend to see what I can come up with regarding the upgrade and will have a post on Monday morning with the details of what I’ve found.

When used in conjunction with Spybot Search & Destroy, Ad-Aware can be one of the very best things that you can run on your machine to keep it working optimally.

Adware is any application that downloads or displays ads on your PC while you are using an application or viewing a website. It can even be used to override the advertising that’s already configured to display on a website. The other thing that Ad-Aware is top-notch at removing is any tracking cookie that a website may have placed on your PC. While cookies are generally harmless, some people feel better if they wipe them off the machine each time they run the application. Whatever suits you is fine.

As with Spybot, the first thing you need to do is click the Update button and let it grab the latest definitions from the website. After that’s completed, click on Scan Now, and select your level of paranoia. I personally just go with the default setting (Smart Scan), which scans the areas of your drive that are most likely to be affected by adware.

After the scan is complete, it’ll show three tabs, as below, with the various severity levels indicated.

The three tabs are headed Critical, Tracking Cookies, and Logfile. If there’s anything under the Critical tab, let Ad-Aware deal with it. The other two are personal choices. I don’t worry a whole lot about the tracking cookies myself, but if you’d feel better deleting them, by all means do so.

 

Ad-Aware does feature a few other tools to help keep your PC running its best. Ad-Watch monitors your system in real time to protect the most commonly attacked areas of your operating system, including the Registry and all running processes. It’ll also clear all cookies every time you close your browser if you wish, and even delete cookies on the fly if it deems them to be malicious.

Regardless of how you look at it, though, both Ad-Aware and Spybot make for an excellent defense against the malicious software that tries to get on to your PC on a daily basis.

Download Ad-Aware from LavaSoft, and then please have a look at the Spybot tutorial.

Like it or not, running security applications to keep your Windows machine running properly is just something that you’re going to have get used to doing. Once you get into the habit of doing it, it’s really not all that difficult - usually you can schedule it to run in the middle of the night if you’re one of those people who leaves their PC on 24 hours per day, or maybe you could just leave it running overnight once a week and let it clean itself up on that night.

Regardless of when you do it, though, it’s far more important that it gets done. And in this article, I’m going to show you how easy it is to use Spybot Search & Destroy to help get rid of spyware on your PC. The most common definition of spyware is software that gets installed on your PC, usually along with another application, whose sole purpose is to gather information on your browsing habits and send them off ’somewhere’, where the data gets collected and used in one way or another. Regardless, it’s not something you want running on your machine. After finishing this tutorial, please also have a look at the Ad-Aware tutorial which will be posted in a couple of days.

The first thing you need to do after opening Spybot is to update it, using the Update icon in the lefthand sidebar. That way you’ll ensure that you’re using the very latest definitions and increase the application’s chances of finding everything that it should.

After that, let the machine run its scan by hitting the “Check for Problems” button. This can take quite awhile depending on the hardware in your PC, but if you want to go ahead and keep using it while Spybot does its thing, it shouldn’t be a problem. I’ve never had an issue with continuing to work while Spybot was scanning.

Once Spybot is finished scanning your machine, it’ll pop up a list of the stuff that it finds, and ask you what you want to do with it. The safest thing to do is just have it remove all of it (which also happens to the be the default action). This is generally safe to do, which means that in all the time I’ve been using Spybot I’ve never had it delete a critical file from any machine that I’ve run it on. So hopefully you’ll feel the same level of confidence. After that, close the program and in about a week’s time, run it again.

You can certainly run the program less frequently than that if you wish, but anytime you notice your machine acting a little sluggish, it might be an idea to give both Spybot and Ad-Aware a spin. Chances are you’ll be very surprised at just how much stuff it finds in a very short time.

You can download Spybot from Safer-Networking.org.

While it may not garner the attention that spam does, phishing is a much more serious problem than spam will ever be. Spam might be an irritant, but the whole purpose of phishing is out and out theft. When it’s financial information that someone’s after, it can at times be hard to determine whether a phishing scam is legitimate or not. But we’ll go over a few ways you can tell if an email is what it actually claims to be, or whether it’s something you need to avoid.

Okay, So What Is Phishing?

Phishing is an attempt to acquire sensitive information about you or your financial dealings by fraudulent means. While the most common targets seem to be financial institutions such as banks or PayPal, they could take other forms as well. They may be masquerading as charities, for example, or claiming to be from eBay. They may not even be carried out by email or instant messenger, but by telephone. Personally, I’d consider this to be more of a form of social engineering as opposed to phishing, but the result is the same in the end.

Essentially, it comes down to this. You’ll get an email, supposedly from your bank claiming that they’re updating their system, or a fraudulent attempt was made against your account, and that they need to verify your account information or your account will be disabled. They’ll provide a link, where you’ll be asked to provide all of your account information, including username, card number and password. Once you click the submit button on that page, though, it’s too late. Someone, somewhere is now in possession of your information, and probably within 24 hours or so, it’ll wind up being used in ways you never really intended.

What If You Get An Email?

Chances are, you will eventually get an email that turns out to be part of a phishing exercise. There are some obvious ways to tell if something is in fact legitimate or not.

First of all, if you get an email from a bank you’ve never heard of, asking you to verify your account information, that’s a phishing attempt. I’ve gotten emails from the Third First Bank of Phoenix, New York State Bank, and the Bank of America, and I can confirm with certainty that none of those banks have branches here in Canada. If the email is from a bank you’ve never heard of, just delete it.

But what if the email you get is from a bank you have heard of, or worse, if it’s from the bank you deal with? In this scenario, you have two options to safeguard yourself.

First of all, call your branch. Not at the number in the email, but the number listed in the phone book. Or that you call all the time. But an even better option is to print out the email, and drive down to your branch and ask the teller if the bank sent out any such email. Chances are the teller won’t know, however, but will either recognize the email for what it is, or will get someone higher up who will be able to say with certainty that no such email was sent from the bank. Problem solved. Because of this exact situation, please know that almost NO financial institution will send out any such email in this way. And if you do visit your branch and they confirm that, yes, they did send the email, it might be time to look for a new bank.

One thing to remember in a scenario such as this, though is to not panic. It’s VERY unlikely that you were targeted specifically. Phishing attempts are randomly sent, like spam, and if one from your bank happened to get to your inbox, 99 times out of 100 it’s a complete coincidence.

There are a couple of other tips that what you’re reading might not be from where it claims to be. Most phishing scams are originated outside of North America, and usually English is not the first language of the person who wrote the email. If it just doesn’t read the way you think it should, it’s probably a scam.

The last tip, although this one isn’t 100% fool-proof, is to hover your mouse over the link in the email, and look at the address in the bottom left hand corner of your browser. Does it point to something other than your bank? Is the address banking.ru (for example) rather than royalbank.ca? Or is it just a series of numbers, like 12.36.221.45? That’s also a clue.

If It Feels Suspicious, Go With That Feeling

In the end, if you get an email from a bank you’ve never heard of asking you to confirm your login information, just delete it. If it’s from your bank, check with them in person. But unfortunately there’s not much else to do other than to be aware that phishing is very active online.

Why do people do it? Simple. Because it works. The hit rate doesn’t need to be very high to make it potentially a very lucrative activity. The payoff is probably higher than it is for spam, and spam exists, because enough people respond to it and purchase stuff from it to make it worth doing. Phishing is the same way.

But now that you’ve been enlightened about some of the things to look for, you’re way ahead in the game. Please don’t be a victim of phishing.

Do you have an 802.11b wireless router in the house to allow you to work from anywhere on your laptop? I’d be willing to bet that if you’ve gone looking for a new wireless router, or were just talking with the local computer geek that he claimed that moving to 802.11g or 802.11n would make things *SO* much faster for you. But if you’ve got the option to pick up an 802.11b router, save your money (if it’s cheaper) because the extra bucks you’d spend for a ‘G’ router are probably just being wasted.

Unless you’re one of those very lucky people who have an extremely fast internet connection, here’s what’s going to happen. You’ll send your data from your laptop wirlessly to your router, and then the data will hit your cable or DSL modem, and slow right down to the usual 768Kbps or 1.5Mbps that you’re paying for from your ISP. So you got a blindingly fast 54Mbps for the first 30 feet of your transmission, and then your data slams right into the bottleneck that is your internet connection.

Don’t believe me? Try this: go to http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest and select the server closest to you to run a throughput test. If the resulting download test shows more than 2000 Kbps, then you’ve got a very fast connection for a residential customer. Now, if you’re paying for a 5Mbps connection, I’d be willing to bet that it’s nowhere near that fast. And it definitely won’t be showing 54000 Kbps. So you paid good money for something that you aren’t getting any benefit from.

Check that. The only time a 54Mbps wireless connection provides an advantage is if you’re moving files wirelessly around the house from computer to computer. As long as data never leaves your local wireless network, it’s very fast. But the second it hits the outside world, it hits the brakes. Hard. Bet your computer guy didn’t tell you that, did he?

Here’s what you’re supposed to get: 802.11b - 11Mbps. 802.11g - 54Mbps. 802.11n - 248Mbps. Note that these are theoretical only. Your mileage WILL vary. Here’s what’s more typical: 802.11b - 4.3Mbps. 802.11g - 19Mbps. 802.11n - 74Mbps. (Source: Wikipedia)

One day you’re going to open up your email and find what appears to be a warning about a dire new virus that has the power to wipe out all your files and destroy your hard drive. The person who sent you the email will quote a bunch of seemingly credible sources, such as Microsoft and AOL. About how it was all over CNN. You’ll read about how there’s no method for stopping this virus because Norton, Symantec and McAfee haven’t ever seen anything like this before. About how you need to forward this warning on to everyone you know in order to get the word out.

When you get one of these emails - and you will get them - the best thing you can do with it is to delete it. And then send an email to the person who sent it to you (and ONLY the person who sent it to you) telling them that they just fell for a hoax. Because that’s exactly what it was.

So how exactly can you tell if it’s a hoax? Let’s look at the examples above, which are usually pretty close to what you’ll see. There’s several clues that point to a hoax warning:

• “Microsoft and AOL claim this is the worst virus ever” - this can subsitute a few different companies, such as IBM to make it seem more legitimate, but you need to keep a couple of things in mind: Microsoft, AOL, IBM, etc. are not companies who do virus research. They DO NOT issue virus warnings. Ever.
• “As was reported on CNN” - this one’s easy. Just go to CNN.com and search for ‘virus’. I’m willing to bet that the results you get will be of a medical nature. If you watch CNN with any regularity and haven’t seen anything about a virus, there’s another clue.
• “Norton, et all have no cure for this virus” - while they may not have a cure for such a virus right away, rest assured that if you download new virus definitions for your AV software and it’s able to detect such a virus, it can remove it. Usually within hours of a virus being found “in the wild”, there’s a way to remove it. This is why you need to regularly update your definitions. Weekly at the least, but daily would be better.
• “Pass this information on to everyone in your address book”. This is what actually spreads like a virus. Bogus warnings such as this can generate a huge amount of email traffic from people who just have to let everyone they’ve ever had contact with know about this virus. Please don’t.

There’s no shortage of sites that can help you find out if a virus warning is legitimate or not. In fact, it doesn’t even have to be a virus warning. Ever gotten an email from someplace a long way from where you live about a missing child? These can sometimes be hoaxes as well. The best sites for debunking information are Snopes.com, Vmyths.com, and Don’t Spread That Hoax!

The most important thing to remember about these, is that 9 times out of 10 there isn’t really a virus, but the fact that it causes people to email “everyone they know” makes the email itself spread like a virus, and while a simple email may not be as destructive as a virus, it generates traffic on the net, as well as being another distraction that you have to deal with.

So, if it sounds suspicious, rather than forwarding a virus on, please just do a little Google searching, and save yourself the stress.

You may have heard the term “Patch Tuesday” discussed online, and wondered just what it was. Or, if you’re the type of person who leaves their PC on 24 x 7, you know that usually about once a month, you’re going to sit down at your PC and find that it rebooted itself overnight for some reason. Why?

Blame it on Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday, which is the second Tuesday of each month.

Patch Tuesday is when Microsoft rolls out all the upgrades and security patches to its various operating systems for those who have Automatic Updates enabled. Even if you don’t, though, there can be the odd time when you’ll find that Microsoft has *forced* an update onto your PC and rebooted it. Generally, though, if Microsoft considers a security issue serious enough to override your settings for updates, it’s probably going to be an update that you really should have.

If you don’t have automatic updates enabled, this is when you should be hitting Windows Update, to try and get the latest updates and patches for your OS. Sometimes it can be better to wait a day or two, though, simply due to the fact that there’s going to be a *lot* of other people trying to do the exact same thing that you are. If you’ve got the time, go for it. If not, waiting a day or two probably won’t kill your machine.

Patch Tuesday Schedule

The remaining Patch Tuesday events for 2008 are:

• Tuesday, April 8th
• Tuesday, May 12th
• Tuesday, June 9th
• Tuesday, July 8th
• Tuesday, August 11th
• Tuesday, September 8th
• Tuesday, October 14th
• Tuesday, November 11th
• Tuesday, December 9th

One of the very best sites for picking up information on the world of Microsoft is Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows. Paul recently posted a list of frequently asked questions (FAQ) and I decided to go through it and summarize a few of the things that you should know about SP1.

Essentially, SP1 is a collection of previously release fixes, security patches and updates to Windows Vista. If you’re diligent about keeping your machine up-to-date, you should already have most of these updates already installed.

Microsoft made a change to the Kernel Patch protection that ensures that security companies won’t be able to integrate as tightly with the OS as was possible in previous versions. If you think this a bad thing, then you’ve never tried to remove Norton Anti-Virus or McAfee. Dynamite and exorcism is usually required. This won’t be the case with Vista.

When Vista was released in early 2007, it sported device compatibility with about 40,000 devices. After the release of SP1, that number has jumped to almost 80,000. So if your device wasn’t supported previously under Vista, it may be now.

Ever tried to copy a few files around on a Vista machine? At times it could be painful. Or you’d see Microsoft’s estimate of time remaining for the copy to be somewhere around 15,000 days. That’s now fixed, and I can confirm that myself, as I don’t see numbers like that anymore.

If you already have Vista installed on your machine, and would like to upgrade it to SP1, you *may* be in luck now. As of mid-March, it was available through Windows Update, or if you have Automatic Updates enabled. However, Microsoft discovered some issues with some hardware configurations and has delayed release of SP1 for those machines until mid-April. Microsoft is also not releasing information on which configurations are affected by this either, so if you don’t get the option to upgrade to SP1 until later int the spring, you can probably safely assume that something in your machine was delaying the upgrade.

If you have any further questions about Vista or SP1 that you’d like to see answered here, please leave a comment.

These days there’s no shortage of applications - and people - trying to get information and data out of your PC. I’m going to cover the basics of what you need to use to keep your machine running as well as it can, and what you can do to harden it against attacks from the outside world.

It’s not hard, and I’m going to show you how you can do it all for the lowest price possible - free. Just because you pay money for something doesn’t mean its necessarily better than something that was free.

What this IS going to take on your part, though, is a little due dilligence. You’re going to need to make the effort to keep your anti-virus definitions up to date, and to backup on a regular schedule. Because if you don’t do the basics, eventually you’re going to run into problems of one sort or another. Sure, you might have the same issues even if you do all of what I suggest here, but your chances will be greatly reduced if you just take some simple steps.

Hard Drive Maintenance: Backup

Here’s a rule that you’re going to have to learn when it comes to PCs. Hard drives fail. Yours will too, if you run it long enough. It’s not a matter of if, but rather when. You only need to go through a catastrophic data loss once to get religion on backing up. Why not save yourself the stress and just get on board before your drive dies?

I recently came across a simple backup application called SyncBack, produced by a company called 2BrightSparks when I was trolling through Lifehacker.com. There are both paid and free versions of the software available, and the Lifehacker article explained in simple detail how to run nightly, weekly and monthly backups of whatever data you need on your PC. An external hard drive would be the preferred method, simply due to the fact that backing up 30GB of photos onto 4.7GB DVDs is going to be a pain, so you’ll be more likely to just skip it. Please don’t. Go read the Lifehacker article. Please.

Backups should be run nightly, once per week, and once per month, with each backup covering different folders on your PC based on the importance of the data.

Security: Anti-Virus

I’m not naiive enough to think that I’ll never get a virus on my PC. I have gotten them. Two, actually. Since 1992. I know others who spend big bucks on protecting themselves from the latest viruses and they still get infected three or four times per year, most commonly through email attachments. We’ll get into the whole email thing later, but for now, one of the best things that you can do for your PC’s security is to go and download the free version of AVG from Grisoft. Install it, upgrade everything that it suggests that you upgrade, and then in the Scheduler, set it to update daily at 2 AM, and scan at 4 AM. Obviously this works better if you’re accustomed to leaving your PC on all night, but even if you’re not, run the manual update and scan as often as you think about it. Having it run automatically means you won’t forget to do it, but, to each his own.

This should be run on a daily basis, both the update and the scan.

Maintenance: Defrag

As you use your computer each day, saving data all over the place, the hard drive doesn’t store that data sequentially on the disk, but rather wherever it can find space to put chunks of it, it will. After awhile things start to slow down as the drive has to search its disk to find the various pieces that make up your data. But if you run the Defrag tool (click on My Computer and right click on your hard drive and go down to Tools), this will help ‘realign’ the data on your drive making it more contiguous and improving the read time across the disk.

When you do run the tool, be prepared for a wait. It’s not a quick process, but it is a necesary process. To speed it up, turn off your screen saver and turn off the power saving that spins your disk down after a period of inactivity. In fact, just leave your computer alone while you run the defragmentation or it’ll just keep restarting itself and never finish.

I read somewhere that defragging a Vista machine isn’t necessary, but at the same time, Microsoft included the tool with Vista as well, so you might as well use it. It certainly can’t hurt your computer.

This process should probably be run once every week or two.

Security: Spybot and Ad-Aware

Over the course of time, your PC is probably going to pick up some spyware or adware. According to Wikipedia, spyware is defined as “…computer software that is installed surreptitiously on a personal computer to intercept or take partial control over the user’s interaction with the computer, without the user’s informed consent.”

Adware is “any software package which automatically plays, displays, or downloads advertising material to a computer after the software is installed on it or while the application is being used. Some types of adware are also spyware and can be classified as privacy-invasive software.” Slightly different, but still not something you want on your PC.

Thankfully, though, there are a couple of free applications that you can use to help get this stuff off of your computer. Spybot Search and Destroy (spyware) and Ad-Aware (adware) are two of the best known utilities in the personal security niche, and every tech that I’ve met uses at least one of these, if not both.

For now, you just need to know that they exist, but once you get them downloaded and installed, I’ll be posting a couple of tutorials on using Spybot and Ad-Aware.

Security: Firewall

Some people will tell you that you don’t need an external firewall because your router has one built in, or that Windows already has one. It’s true that your router might have one, but you shouldn’t assume that it does. And yes, the Windows Firewall is better than it was in the past, but would it really kill you to go out and download the free ZoneAlarm firewall? I didn’t think so.