From http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=622101

“We pulled a bad drive apart at work this afternoon. It had a nasty rattle to it before we opened it, but we didn’t expect this:”

If you want to install Windows XP on your Gateway MT3418 laptop instead of Vista, you can use the drivers from the Gateway MX3417 laptop.  They’re the same machines, only the MT3418 came with Vista and the MX3714 came with XP.   I successfully installed the MX3417 drivers on my MT3418, and XP is running smoothly.

Here’s a link to the driver page on Gateway’s site.

I just found this link to control web cams in a couple of parks in Eugene, OR.  Geek factor = 9.8.  Check it out.

So I was messing around with the partitions on my laptop the other day trying to install the new version of Ubuntu (7.10, which for some reason refused to run on my laptop) and managed to break whatever it is that tells XP to boot. I kept getting the error “Invalid Device Requested” when selecting XP in Grub. I checked the Grub entry in menu.lst, and checked the partition that XP was installed on, and it looked fine.

Then I realized that I had deleted the first partition on my HD to put the new Ubuntu on…and that partition, while not my Windows XP partition, was an NTFS partition that was some kind of backup/restore partition that Gateway had on there. I think it must have had all the Windows XP boot files on it, because when I looked that my XP partition, it was missing boot.ini, ntldr, ntdetect, etc. That would explain why Grub was not seeing it as a bootable disk.

So I read a bit on the intarweb, and saw that a few people were saying that XP’s boot files need to be on the first partition of the disk. I’m not entirely sure that this is true, but to be safe I moved my XP partition to be the first on the disk.  EDIT: I’m not sure if XP has to be the first partition, and if someone else is having this same problem, try sticking the partition number with XP on it into the boot.ini file where it says “partition(1)”. Might save you some time.

I then made a new boot.ini with the following entries (pretty much default):

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Professional” /fastdetect

I then copied the AUTOEXEC.bat, CONFIG.sys, IO.sys, MSDOS.sys, NTDETECT.com, and ntldr from another XP machine to the root of my laptop’s XP partition. I rebooted, and voila! XP booted right up from Grub. (You can also get these files off of the XP CD in the i386 folder.) EDIT: After doing some research, all you *should* need to fix this is NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM, and a BOOT.ini file.

Post a comment if this works for you.

This is for all you Wordpress people who use the WP-Shortstat plug-in to monitor your visitor stats.

Yesterday I got fed up with seeing all the search engine crawler/bot traffic on my stats page, so I fiddled around with the WP-ShortStat plugin and modified the SQL scripts to filter out search engine crawlers and bots.  The data will still be logged in the SQL table, but it just won’t show up on the stats page.

You can download my modified version here: wp-shortstat-modified.zip

It’s been nearly half a year since I installed Ubuntu, and my experience with it thus far has been interesting. There are some things I don’t like about, and there are some that I love. I’m going to go over a few of the highlights of my post-install experience.

Gripes

I really despise kernel updates. There are two reasons. The first is that every time I install a kernel update, GRUB gets overwritten and I have to remake my menu.lst to be able to boot to Windows XP. I’ve since gotten wise and backed it up, but still an annoyance. The other thing is that ALSA does not yet officially support my sound card, so I have to use the nightly builds of ALSA for my sound to work. When I install an update, I have to rebuild the drivers and install them again. It’s a bit of a pain.

For some reason, Ubuntu wants to run a disk check on one of my partitions every other time I start the computer. Not a big deal, but it’s annoying.

Sometimes Ubuntu seems to get stuck when I boot because it’s waiting for the wireless connection to establish. I believe what happens is that occasionally the access point doesn’t want to give my laptop an IP and it just takes forever to boot.

For some reason that I have not been able to figure out, Firefox freezes up after I watch a flash movie.  A bit of googling shows that this is a common problem that MIGHT have something to do with Nvidia’s video drivers.  Also, Firefox seems to stall/freeze for no reason sometimes.

Sometimes the Screenlets program decides that it wants to keep all of its windows on top of everything else, despite being set to be kept below. I have to go through and uncheck/recheck the keep below option on each open Screenlet.

Occasionally my machine will not power down completely. It acts like it’s turned off, but the power light stays on. It didn’t do that when I had Vista on it.

For some reason, when I try to upgrade to Ubuntu 7.10, my machine won’t boot unless I disable ACPI in GRUB. When I do that, the function keys on my keyboard cease to function. The funny thing then is that my brightness keys DO work in 7.10 with ACPI off, but they don’t in 7.04. Can’t have everything I guess. (I switched back to 7.04)

My brightness keys still don’t work.

The Nvidia control panel is confusing.

Evolution and Thunderbird look like crap compared to MS Outlook.

And my last complaint: a lack of good games. Maybe I’m just picky, but I’d like some good arcade style games…like the kind of stuff Ambrosia Software puts out. Something with decent graphics that also doesn’t need a lot of CPU to run. A Bejeweled clone would be great, too. (I couldn’t get it to run under Wine.)

Glee

Compiz-Fusion RULES! My computing experience feels incomplete without my beloved wobbly, elastic windows. I can’t count the number of times during the day when I’m at work using XP and I try to pull down the corner of the browser window to see the weather screenlet and nothing happens…because Windows XP has no Compiz. It makes me sad.

Bash kicks the crap out of the Windows command line. Then it goes, takes a rest, and comes back and kicks the crap out of the Windows command line some more. It’s actually a lot faster to type “sudo rm -r [protected directory]” in Ubuntu than deleting a protected directory in Vista and having to deal with the UAC prompts. I’ve noticed that I barely use the GUI to browse directories anymore in Ubuntu. The command line is just so much faster.

Speaking of the command line, I love Aptitude. Especially after I found out that you can tab-complete package names. Very handy. Also, it’s SO MUCH FASTER (seems to be a trend when comparing Ubuntu to Windows) at installing and removing programs than the Windows Installer. Sure Apt is text based, but once you get the hang of it you realize how great of a tool it is.

gEdit is a wondrous text editor compared to Notepad.

I have yet to have gotten a virus or piece of ad-ware in Ubuntu. No need for anti-virus software to slow things down.

When I’m using Windows XP on this laptop, the screen goes crazy if I let the machine go into powersaving mode. This does not happen in Ubuntu.

Ubuntu has a great driver for the Synaptics touchpad. It offers a lot more control than the Windows drivers, such as the ability to use two-finger and three-finger clicks. This was something that the MacBooks touted as a feature, but I’m pretty sure that it has more to do with the drivers than some special Apple hardware…since my laptop is able to do the same thing.

It is stable. I’ve had nowhere near the problems with Ubuntu that I had with Vista.

It’s FAST.

Conclusion

Ubuntu has it’s problems, but overall it’s a great operating system for the computer enthusiast who’s looking for something new and fun. I like it, and I look forward to the next release (hopefully it will run on my laptop). And if anyone who reads this has any ideas about any of the problems I mentioned, please leave a comment.

When people hear the words “computer virus”, they get scared and somewhat hysterical. This is understandable, because most people have no idea what a computer virus is, except that it’s bad to have one. The ignorant coverage that virus outbreaks get on the tv news doesn’t help either. Well, knowledge goes a long way toward dispelling fears, so read on to learn about computer viruses.In the simplest terms, a computer virus is a computer program that makes copies of itself and attempts to spread those copies to other computers. A computer that has a virus on it is called “infected”. The process of copying a virus from one computer to another computer is called “infecting” or “spreading”. In the past, viruses would spread via removable disks like floppies. If you put a floppy into an infected computer, the virus would copy itself to that disk, and then when it was inserted into another computer, it would then infect that machine as well. This was an incredibly slow way of doing things, and such infections usually affected a small amount of machines. Today, however, we have the internet, which allows any computer to send and receive data from any other computer that is also connected to the internet. Viruses have taken advantage of this instant sending and receiving of data to spread themselves at a pace much quicker and on a much wider scale than previously possible.

What do viruses do? Well, that depends on the motivation of the virus writer. In the past, notoriety and fame were two of the top goals of virus writers. To achieve those goals, virus writers would write viruses that would be very destructive, very widespread, or both. For example, someone would write a virus that would erase all the data on a hard drive, thus making it very destructive. On the other hand, someone might write a virus that infects a large number of machines, and then on a certain date display a message with the writer’s name. Today, the motives have changed. Destruction and spreading to a lot of machines are no longer the goals. It’s all about money now. Virus writers have turned their focus to stealing information (like credit card info and personal details) and creating “bot-nets”.

The monetary benefit of stealing your information seems fairly obvious. Bot-nets, on the other hand, are much more devious. A bot-net is a large network, or group, of computers that can be used to perform tasks that require a lot of computing power. The use of these bot-nets can be rented for a great deal of money to people such as spammers who use the networks to send out massive amounts of spam emails. The bot-nets can also be used to perform “Denial of Service” attacks, which flood targeted websites with more internet traffic than they can handle, effectively shutting them down. The websites can then be extorted into paying the owner of the bot-net to stop the attack.

Now here’s the million dollar question. How do you protect yourself from these computer viruses? To use an old adage, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. The best way to protect yourself is to keep your computer from getting infected to begin with. There are several ways to do this, but the most important part is you, the computer user. Here are some general rules to follow when surfing the internet:

1. Do not open unexpected email attachments. Many viruses spread themselves by attaching an infected file to a legitimate looking email message. When you open the infected attachment, your computer gets infected with the virus. Never open an attachment from someone you don’t know, and verify that attachments from people that you do know are really from them, especially if you aren’t sure why they sent you the email.
2. Be wary of files that you download from the internet. Many sites that offer “free” commercial software, cracks, and serial numbers (used to unlock commercial software for free) contain viruses in the downloads. Also, porn sites are notorious for try to get you to download files that may contain viruses. As a rule of thumb, if you didn’t click a link to start a download, but a download box appears on your screen, don’t download the file.

There are three other things that you can do that will help keep your computer virus free. The first thing is to make sure that you keep your computer’s operating system up to date with program updates and security patches. If you are using Windows XP or Windows 2000, you can check for updates by going to http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com. If you are running Windows Vista, you can check for updates by clicking the Windows Update icon in the programs menu. If you are using an Apple computer, go to the Apple menu and click Software Updates. Make sure you always reboot after installing updates, instead of clicking “Reboot Later”. An update doesn’t help your computer if it doesn’t finish installing.

The second thing is to make sure that you are running a program called a “firewall”. A firewall is a program that blocks incoming connections from the internet, which essentially hides your computer from other computers on the internet. This will prevent infected computers from connecting to your computer and passing the virus on. Fortunately, most of today’s operating systems include decent firewall programs that are already configured. However, if you are running Windows 2000 or an older version of the Mac OS, you will want to look into getting a firewall installed. For you Windows 2000 users, I recommend Comodo Free Firewall.

Your last line of defense is an antivirus program. Antivirus programs monitor every file that is recorded to and read from your hard drive. They compare each file to their “definition set”, which tells the antivirus what the viruses look like. When the antivirus program finds a file that matches a virus described in the definition set, it removes the file and alerts you that a virus was found. Since the antivirus program relies on the definition set to find viruses, it is a good idea to occasionally check your antivirus program to make sure that the definition files are up-to-date. Old definitions cannot protect your from new viruses. Most programs keep themselves updated, but it’s always good to check to make sure everything is working as it should.

I highly advise you to stay away from programs such as Norton Antivirus, Norton Internet Security, McAfee Antivirus, McAfee Security Center, TrendMicro PC-Cillen, and Panda Antivirus. These programs do not work well, and tend to slow the performance of your computer dramatically. They can be costly, as they charge a subscription fee of around $40 a year for definition updates. These programs often come preinstalled on new computers because the antivirus vendors pay the computer manufactures to preload their software. If you computer came preinstalled with one of the antiviruses above, or if one of the hacks at BestBuy conned you into purchasing one, do yourself a favor: uninstall it and install one of the recommended antivirus programs below. Not only will you be getting a better product, your machine will more than likely run faster.

• AVG Antivirus (Free) – It’s free, works well, and doesn’t bog your computer down.
• NOD32
• AntiVir (Free)
  
• Kapersky
• F-Secure

Anyway, that’s all for now. Stay tuned for info on spyware, spotting scams, and avoiding phishers!

I recently purchased a refurbished Microsoft Zune off of Woot.com. It’s the 30 gig, black model. They were selling them for about half of the brand new price, so it was a pretty good deal. I’ve been using it for awhile now, and I’ve decided to write a bit about my impressions of the Zune device itself and the Zune software.

The Good

I love the Zune. Ever since I got it, I’ve been falling more and more in love with it every day. Or something like that. Here are a few things in particular that I find particularly great about it.

1. The casing. At first glance, the casing seems a bit cheap. They really didn’t try at all to hide the seam lines between the front casing and the rear casing. I didn’t like it at first. However, after a few days of use, I noticed that the device really has a solid feel to it. The plastic feels like that really strong laptop plastic that the old IBM’s or business model Dells are made out of. The buttons feel solid too; there’s nothing flimsy about the Zune at all. It also has a matte finish that does not show fingerprints or smudges at all, unlike Apple’s iPod. I absolutely love this, because with the glossier finishes, fingerprints and smudges really show up, and you spend a good portion of your time rubbing the thing off on your shirt trying to buff it back to shininess. Not an issue with the Zune.

2. The screen. The screen is large and bright, and I have no trouble at all watching my podcasts on it. For a hand held device, the resolution is decent too.

3. Updates. Unlike Apple, Microsoft is not forcing you to buy a new mp3 player to get new features. Coinciding with the recent release of the new Zune2 was a firmware update for the original Zune 30. The update added the new interface as well as the new features from the Zune2. Two of the biggest feature additions were “Wireless Sync” and Podcasts (the original Zune software did not have an easy way to find/add podcasts.) Wireless Sync allows you to connect your Zune to your PC using WiFi. (No, it doesn’t work over the internet. Local area only for now.) This comes in handy for times when you are just too lazy to get up off the couch to plug in the USB, but you want that new episode of Ask a Ninja synced over.

4. Zune software works well. The software that comes with the Zune is decent. While it’s not going to make the avid computer user too happy with it’s lack of controls (ID3 tag editing in particular), it is great for the everyday user. Everything is laid out in a fairly logical position, and the interface looks good. The Zune Marketplace has plenty of music to choose from, as well as a decent directory of podcasts to subscribe to. Overall, I’d say Microsoft did a decent job on the most recent release.

5. The Zune interface. Using the Zune is easy. The text size on the screen is large enough to easily read from a distance. All of the options are where you would expect them to be, and the buttons do what you would expect them to do. It performs operations smoothly, and it doesn’t have the sluggish feeling of some other players.

The Bad

1. It could be thinner. The Zune does feel a bit bulky compared to a device like the iPod. The recently released Zune2, however, seems to be quite a bit thinner, so this is not an issue in the new Zune2.

2. No easy way to sync with Linux. For now there doesn’t seem to be a way to run the Zune software under Linux, even with WINE. In some of the forums I’ve read a few people have been using a Windows XP virtual machine to run the Zune software. However, this solution lacks elegance in my opinion. Why would I want to install a VM to run WINDOWS on my Linux computer? That’s not a solution, that’s just a lazy work around. Until someone comes out with a program to sync the Zune in Linux, I’m stuck with using my Vista box to do it.

3. No podcast support. This actually was fixed in the latest version of the Zune software/firmware. Now you can subscribe to podcasts just like with iTunes.

4. Cannot be used as portable storage. I don’t know what Microsoft was thinking. For some reason, the Zune does not show up as a removable disk unless you implement a small registry hack (who wants to do that on every computer they use?). It seems obvious that a person would want the ability to use the Zune as storage, considering it’s relatively small size and large 30 gig storage capacity, or 80 gigs on the new Zune2.

Conclusion

Overall, the Zune is a worthy mp3 player that actually may give the iPod some competition. The Zune 80 (2nd generation Zune) will give you 80gb of storage with a nice 3.2 inch screen, as well as a touch pad for navigation (similar to a track pad on a laptop). The iPod for the same price will give you the same storage, but only a 2.5 inch screen. Here’s a side-by-side of the Zune 80 and the iPod Classic.

Apple also has their new iPod Touch, but really there isn’t much of a comparison between an iPod Touch and a Zune. The Touch is more of a PDA, while the Zune is just an mp3 player.

I’ve heard a lot of talking about how the Zune was a disaster, but I’ve been using mine for a few weeks and I just l0ve it. IMHO, it looks nice, is designed well, and does exactly what I want it to. Good job Microsoft (for a change).

Earlier this year I purchased a Gateway laptop (Gateway MT3418) with Windows Vista on it. It was not long before I realized that my laptop was just not powerful enough to run an OS as bloated as Vista. Everything opened slow and ran slow, and the glitzy Aero window decorator simply was more than the laptop could handle. Aside from performance, Vista also was extremely buggy. Coming out of Hibernation and Sleep would cause my laptop to bluescreen. Copying files over the network from my desktop computer took forever, and the speed seemed to max out at 600Kb/s (over a 54mb connection). File operations like Copy and Move also took forever, and Vista often got stuck on “Calculating” during the process. It wasn’t long before I decided to do away with Vista.

Rather than purchase a copy of Windows XP, I decided to remove Vista and put a Linux distribution on my laptop (you can’t argue with the price…free!). I had tried several before, and I had the best experience with Ubuntu Linux. So I went and got the latest ISO, burned it to a CD, put it in my laptop, and booted up. The first thing I liked was that the install process was much better than anything I had experienced with Windows. When you boot from a Ubuntu install disk, it takes you straight to the desktop as though you had booted from a fresh installed of Ubuntu. From there, you can install Ubuntu to your hard drive. You can also, if you’re network card is detected correctly, surf the internet with Firefox WHILE the system is installing. That concept just about blew my mind. As for the installation process itself, it went very smoothly, and unlike Windows, there was no annoying license key to type in.

The install took about 10 minutes, after which I took the cd out and rebooted. After a fairly quick boot-up sequence, I was on my desktop. Everything looked pretty good. Ubuntu had chosen the correct video driver and screen resolution, which can occasionally be a problem with Linux distributions. The default installation had just about everything I would need to get going. There was a full office suite (OpenOffice), the Firefox web browser, Evolution email (similar to MS Outlook), and quite a few other applications that you would expect to find in a desktop operating system.

There were two major problems, however, that I noticed right away. First off, I had no sound. It took a little bit of research to discover that the sound chipset that my laptop used was not supported yet. However, after about three days of searching on Google, I found a patch for ALSA that had been posted on a bug report that fixed the issue.  (EDIT:  The card is now supported in the current release of ALSA.) Second, my wireless connection was not working. Ubuntu did not have drivers for the wireless card, which was a “RealTek 8185 Extensible Wireless Device”. I had heard about a program called NdisWrapper that would allow one to use Windows XP drivers for Linux. In my case, all I had was Windows Vista drivers, which supposedly were not supported yet. I figured I had nothing to lose by trying, so I installed NdisWrapper and used the RealTek drivers from Vista. Wondrously, it worked! So, after a few days of tinkering around, I had a fully functional laptop running Ubuntu Linux. (Well, there is one more problem, but it’s rather minor. More on that later.)

Given the fact that it took me three days to actually get some of the more important devices on my laptop to work, I could easily see how a more novice computer user could get frustrated rather quickly with a Linux installation, especially on a machine with newer hardware. A lot of the older and more popular hardware works well, but the support for newer and less widespread hardware is not. This isn’t necessarily a problem with Ubuntu or the open source community that codes for it, so much as it is a problem that hardware vendors do not (yet) see the need to make drivers for an operating system that has a limited user base. Of course, this creates a catch 22 of sorts. Hardware manufactures don’t create drivers for Ubuntu/Linux due to the small number of users, and Ubuntu has difficulty drawing new users due to lack of hardware support.

Back to my Ubuntu experience. After getting everything working properly, I turned to one of the more unique aspects of Ubuntu: user interface customization. When it comes to being able to customize the look and feel of your computer, Ubuntu (and Linux and general) is king. The Mac OS and Microsoft Windows simply cannot compare. Quite literally, any aspect of your desktop can be modified and customized in Ubuntu. Also, the look and feel of windows, buttons and menus can be changed as well. Also, there have been some advances with “3D Desktops” and Desktop Effects in Ubuntu, mainly through programs called “Compiz” and “Beryl”. For a sample of what these two programs can do, see this video:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=_ImW0-MgR8I

I was blow away the first time I tried Beryl on my laptop. It was simply amazing the amount of animation and effects that my machine was rendering without any sort or slowdown or lag. It was even more amazing, because the Aero effects in Windows Vista had brought my laptop to it’s knees. Which was rather sad, because all that Aero did was add transparency to title bars and drop shadows behind windows and menus…nothing that should have taken a lot of processing power. Ubuntu with Beryl accomplished this and much more.

If I get the time later, I may post some screen shots.