Category: Windows

random patching

I spent a bunch of time on Friday night bringing my various home machines up-to-date with patches and software updates. The impetus for that was largely this security hole in Windows, which seems to be the biggest vulnerability that’s cropped up with Windows in quite a while.

I was also interested in updating my VMWare Fusion install to 2.0. Ars Technica has a good review of Fusion 2 up on their site. I did the upgrade, and it was pretty smooth, but I haven’t had time to play around with it enough to tell if it will work any better on my old MacBook than the previous version.

I realized that I hadn’t turned my Dell Vista laptop on in about a month, so there were plenty of patches and updates to run on that. And I hadn’t started the virtual machine I have set up under Fusion in a while either, so there were a bunch of patches to install on that too.

On Saturday, I remotely applied a whole bunch of patches to our servers at work. The main goal was to get that Windows patch on all the servers, but I also had a bunch of other patching to do. I’m embarrassed to say that I’d never updated our main SQL 2005 server to SP2. That had been on my to-do list for about a year. And I had to apply a cumulative post-SP2 patch file to our HR/payroll SQL server, since our HR/payroll software vendor requires that I bring the server up to that level before I can apply their year-end update. It took about three hours to get all that done. Happily, nothing locked up at any point, so I didn’t have to drive into the office just to power cycle a server. (And, yes, I know there are devices that would allow me to power cycle a machine remotely. But we can’t buy any new equipment right now.)

I have one Windows 2000 server that’s hanging up on one of the updates. I’ll probably have to bring that one up to date in safe mode or something. I really don’t know what’s wrong with it, and I’d like to just get everything off it and moved to a WIndows 2003 machine, but I don’t have the time right now.

I got some interesting errors on the two machines to which I applied SQL updates. There’s a long thread on this problem here, at the Microsoft forum site. I haven’t figured out if this error is actually going to be a problem or not. There’s certainly a lot of confusing (and sometimes conflicting) advice out there on it.

I’ve been watching the Jets game today, and enjoying the newest Mac vs PC ads that Apple’s been airing. The theme is basically how Microsoft is spending a bunch of money on advertising instead of fixing Vista. I have to say that I agree with that. This new security hole apparently exists in every version of Windows from Win 2000 to Vista and Win 2008 Server. There’s an interesting blog entry about MS08-067 and the SDL, covering the failure of the SDL (Security Development Lifecycle) to catch this bug. To quote from the article: “I’ll be blunt; our fuzz tests did not catch this and they should have.” I can’t help but think that a little bit of that Seinfeld cash might have caught this one earlier. I’m probably over-simplifying. These things are really complex, and a lot of stuff can go wrong that no pile of cash can fix.

Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to the Giants game this afternoon. It should be a good one. Well, this was a really long (and probably boring) blog entry, but I haven’t written anything in a few weeks, so I was due for a long one. I’ve got a bunch more random thoughts in my head, but I’m going to resist the temptation to make this entry any longer!

Vista – Aero problems?

I’m still trying to get Vista up and running on my desktop PC. I haven’t lost access to the network lately, so that’s a good sign. However, I’m now getting occasional messages saying that the “desktop window manager has stopped working”. This doesn’t cause any serious problems; the screen just blanks for a second, then everything’s fine again. This seems to be happening right after I access my USB Zip drive, which is a little weird. A Google search isn’t turning up much useful. Most reasonable suggestions related to this error point towards the video driver. I’ve got a fairly old, pre-Vista, video card, so maybe I should upgrade to a card that came out post-Vista, and that’s likelier to have good Vista drivers.

Vista – networking, development, etc.

I didn’t touch my home desktop PC at all over the Labor Day weekend, so I didn’t make any more progress on moving to Vista. I’m working on it now, though.

I just installed FolderShare, so I could have access to the shared library that I keep on all my computers. FolderShare works fine under Vista, as far as I can tell.

I’ve been having occasional problems with my network adapter not working under Vista. It started right after I installed Virtual PC. That may have something to do with it, or that may just be a coincidence. If I reboot the machine, that fixes the problem. It’s only happened a couple of times so far, so I’ll have to see if it becomes a real problem or not.

I’m trying to get started porting my Delphi comic book database application to C#. I mentioned this in a previous post. The Delphi app requires BDE, which I’m not keen on trying to install under Vista, though apparently, it’s possible. I’m thinking about using SQL Server Compact for my database. I don’t need anything fancy for this, nor do I need multi-user access to the data. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with SQL Express either.

Vista: almost done

I’m nearly done moving all my stuff over to the Vista install on my desktop machine. I de-authorized iTunes under XP, so I can use it under Vista. I moved my OneNote files over. Almost all of my key programs are installed and working now.

I’m installing Visual Studio 2008 right now. I haven’t used VS 2008 before, so hopefully I can spend some time playing around with it now. I don’t think I’m going to bother installing any older versions of VS. I don’t really have any independent projects in .Net 1.1 or 2.0 that I need to worry about supporting.

I have Delphi 4 on my XP drive, and I have one fairly important program written in it: the database program that I use to manage my comic book collection. This is a program that I first wrote in BASIC on the Commodore 64, and have ported (or rewritten) several times. It’s probably time to rewrite it again, this time as a Windows Forms app in C#, maybe. I’ll have to see if I can even get the existing Delphi program running under Vista. I never really made an installer for it, and I think I may have used a weird library or two.

I think rewriting an old Delphi app in C# is particularly apropos, since I’ll basically be following Anders Hejlsberg from Borland to Microsoft. I considered upgrading the project from Delphi 4 to the newest version of Delphi, but I don’t see much point in spending time on that right now, since Delphi programming doesn’t seem to be a marketable skill anymore. And the new version of Delphi costs a minimum of $400, whereas I got a free copy of VS 2008 from Microsoft when I went to the launch event a few months back.

Vista: point of no return

I think I’ve hit the point of no return on my desktop Vista install now. I’ve moved over my Quicken data file. It’s working OK, so I guess I’m going to start moving over other key stuff, like my Outlook data file, and my OneNote files.

I’m experimenting right now with mapping a drive to my MobileMe iDisk, and backing up my Quicken files to it. It works, but it’s pretty slow. Under XP, I’d been backing up Quicken to a Zip disk, which just seems so out of date now. There’s really nothing wrong with doing that, but I’m probably the last guy on earth still using Zip disks. Given how slow the iDisk backup is, though, maybe I’ll stick with the Zip disks for a while.

Vista progress

As I mentioned about a week back, one of the two drives in my home desktop machine died recently. Luckily, it wasn’t my main drive. I have now removed the dead drive, added a new 500 GB SATA drive, and installed Vista on it. So, now I have my old XP install on my old 250 GB drive, and the new Vista install on the 500 GB drive. I’m gradually migrating my apps and data over to the Vista install. When I’m done, I plan to wipe out the XP install and use the 250 GB drive for backups.

So far, it’s working well. I’ve got a fair number of key apps installed and working. Vista actually seems to be snappier than XP at this point. That may just be because I haven’t installed a few key apps that are probably going to bog the system down a bit. Well, hopefully, it’ll remain usable, regardless.

new machine

At work, I generally get a new desktop machine every two years. We lease computers from Dell, so it doesn’t really cost anything to return my machine at the end of each two-year lease and trade it in for a new one. My lease is up at the end of this month, so I just got a new machine in. Usually, when I get a new machine, there are a few big differences from the last one. This time, not so much. I’ve got more hard drive space, but that’s really the only major difference. The processor is about the same speed. I’ve got twice the RAM (from 2GB to 4GB), but I don’t think the difference there will be especially noticeable. And I’m sticking with Windows XP, so there’s no OS update to worry about and/or enjoy. When I configured this machine at Dell’s site, Windows XP was still the default OS choice in the drop-down. The machine does ship with Vista Business on a DVD in the box, but it’s got XP installed. I’m not sticking with XP purely out of laziness or anything like that. We’re using a number of applications that aren’t supported under Vista. And I just can’t see any real advantage to moving over to Vista yet.

On another front, I tried installing Lotus Notes 8 on the new machine. It worked, but it was pretty slow. It’s got a few interesting new features, and I’d really love to be able to move everyone from Notes 7 to 8, but if I can’t get it running well on a machine with 4 GB of RAM, it’s going to be intolerable on some of our lower-end machines. I uninstalled it and went back to Notes 7.

The point of this story is basically that I’m somewhat disappointed with the progress we’ve made in the computer industry over the last couple of years. Major new software releases, such as Vista, Notes 8, Office 2007, and so on, are interesting but not compelling. And they’re usually bloated and slow on even high-end hardware. And the hardware itself doesn’t seem to have progressed much, expect in a few areas. Processor technology in particular doesn’t seem to have changed much over the last two years.

Well, that’s my two cents. I’m still glad I’m getting a new machine!

dead drive

I’ve got two hard drives in my main desktop computer: a 250 GB drive that I’ve got all my stuff on, and an old 100 GB drive that I occasionally use for backups, or experimenting with Linux, or what have you. I turned the computer on last night, and heard an ominous clicking sound coming from one of the drives. Luckily, it was the 100 GB drive, which didn’t currently contain anything important. I could really just throw that drive away and be done with it, but I decided that this was a good opportunity to do some upgrading. I just bought a new 500 GB drive from Newegg for $70. I’m going to use that as my main drive, move the 250 GB drive over to secondary use, and toss the bad 100 GB drive.

I think I’ll probably use this opportunity to do a fresh Vista install on the new drive, and just reinstall all my apps. I’m still running XP on the machine, largely because I’ve been afraid to try an in-place upgrade to Vista, and there was no obvious quick and safe way to do a clean install without having another big drive handy.

I’m still a little worried about putting Vista on this machine. The Vista upgrade advisor indicates that it’ll be OK, and I actually did a test install of Vista on the 100 GB drive a while back, and it did work. My motherboard and video card predate Vista, though, and there were a couple of slightly questionable things that came up when I did that test install. I really don’t want to go out and buy a new mobo and processor right now, if I can avoid it. I might upgrade the RAM in the machine from 2GB to 3GB, though. And a newer video card wouldn’t be out of the question, though I’m not sure that would help much.

Microsoft stuff

I went to a Microsoft Heroes Happen Here event today in Edison. I had registered for the NYC event that happened about a month ago, but things came up at work, and I couldn’t make it. Stuff came up at work today too, so I had to skip the developer stuff in the afternoon. The morning track basically covered Windows 2008. It was pretty interesting, and I did learn some new stuff. They gave out a software bundle that included Vista Ultimate, VS.NET 2008, and a few other things. Honestly, the bundle o’ stuff is one of the main reasons I went to this event.

I’ve put off installing Vista on my main desktop machine at home, for a variety of reasons. Now that I have a free copy of Vista Ultimate with SP1, though, I decided to give it a shot. I’m not doing an upgrade install, though. I’m still afraid to try that. Instead, I’m wiping out my Ubuntu install, and putting Vista on my second drive. I’ll have XP on my 250 GB main drive, and Vista on my 100 GB secondary drive. I’m hoping that dual-boot between XP and Vista works out OK. I’m running the install right now; it’s been going for about 20 minutes. I think it’s almost done.

I also registered for the ASP.NET MVC Firestarter event in NYC that’s coming up this weekend. It’s always a little hard to talk myself into spending a whole day indoors on a sunny Saturday, in a Microsoft office, but I really need to keep up with some of this stuff. And I think it’ll be kind of fun.

XP SP 3 – remote admin changes

Here’s an article that talks about Changes to Remote Administration in Windows Server 2008. It turns out that XP SP 3 moves you to RDC 6.1, so the /console switch to mstsc.exe doesn’t work anymore. You need to use /admin. And the “remote desktops” tool in the Windows Server 2003 Administration Tools Pack hasn’t been updated for this. So, the tool I’ve been using to remote into all my servers doesn’t work right anymore! I’ve worked around this by creating individual .rdp files for each of my servers, and putting them in one directory, but that was a bit of a pain. There’s been some talk about this issue here, since it affects the freeware Terminals tool also. I’m just posting about this, as it’s something to watch out for if you’re applying SP3 to a machine.