Confessions of a Microsoft Consultant : XP

Anti-Virus Software, That's Free!

Daniel Oxley — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 10:27:00 GMT

I am probably the last Microsoft blogger to actually get round to writing something about this… but hey, I have been busy!

Microsoft recently released to the public their free anti-virus solution, Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE). I had been trialling the beta versions for a few months on a Windows 7 computer and I was really pleased with it, so the fact that it has now been released as a final product is great! Bizarrely, it even got the stamp of approval from my Anti-MS brother who told me that it consumes much less CPU and memory on his computer, and he has now gotten rid of his McAfee software completely (even though his paid for subscription has not expired). Of course, then he finished the sentence with the usual “but it is from Microsoft so is bound to be full of security holes” nonsense he actually believes.

The virus signature updates are automatically downloaded via the Windows Update service, so it is important that you have this feature enabled. MSE is available in 32 or 64 bit and will run on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7, so go get it now! There really is no excuse not to run an antivirus product on all your computers, especially because it is completely free – you just need to have a genuine license of Windows in order to be able to install it… :-)

The download and more information is available here: http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/

Benchmarking Windows 7

Daniel Oxley — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:36:20 GMT

A very common request that clients make when starting a Windows deployment project is that we must reliably and accurately demonstrate that Windows Vista or Windows 7 is worth upgrading to from Windows XP, especially if the purchase of new hardware is not part of the project; often, and logically, clients will try to re-use their existing hardware platform whenever possible in order to save money. Consequently, I am regularly asked to prove that the newer version of Windows will run equally as well as Windows XP on the same hardware. Their reasoning being is that they won’t upgrade the operating system on the existing hardware if the end-user experience is worse in terms of performance – regardless of how good the new features of the operating system are. The problem with this is two-fold, one is a technical issue and the other is pure fantasy...

Attempting to benchmark and compare two different operating systems (yes, I know that each version of Windows is an evolution of the previous one, but it is still complicated) and providing accurate results is an extremely complicated task. Unless done right, the results can be often speculative and can be turned upside down purely on your point of view. It is also dodgy territory to get into because of the sheer number of factors that need to be taken into account in order for the test to be of any value, and then trying to explain the results to a lay person can be even more tricky. This is because benchmarking a computer is not simply about measuring the raw speed of the CPU, in the same way that the horsepower alone of a car cannot be used to gauge if one car is quicker than another – you need to consider other factors such as the weight, ratios of the gearbox and torque.

There are plenty of free tools that you can find on the Internet that will measure your computers speed, but more than a few are totally useless because they are simply measuring individual parameters such as CPU speed and RAM read/writes. To benchmark a computer properly you need something that will measure hundreds of different aspects of the computer’s hardware and the operating system installed onto it, in order to produce an reliable result; even things such as the BIOS software can have a profound effect on the results from the benchmarking tests.

Because this is such a hot topic, and given that Windows 7 is around the corner, Microsoft published some benchmarking guides so that you can start measuring right now the performance of your systems with Windows 7. I have included the link for the Windows 7 guide below, along with the (now defunct) Windows XP guide. The Windows XP guide is there because, after all, the only real way to gauge the performance of your system is when you compare it to a different operating system running on the exact same hardware.

Benchmarking on Windows XP: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/benchmark.mspx

Performance Testing Guide for Windows: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/sysperf/Win7Perf.mspx

Oh, and the “pure fantasy” I mentioned earlier... Well, Windows Vista has had a somewhat “turbulent” life in terms of public perception. I have always honestly told clients that my personal experiences with Windows Vista have been excellent, and it has always been fast for me. Likewise, when I have worked on Windows Vista deployment projects this has also always been the case, the deployed computers always performed better than clients expectations. However, often when clients talked about benchmarking Windows Vista they were very dubious of the results and tended to disregard them purely because they had it in their head that Windows Vista was/is a terribly slow beast. Overcoming their personal views was actually extremely hard to do, regardless of how well benchmarking facts and statistics actually were.

Doesn't this thing go any faster?

Daniel Oxley — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 10:41:16 GMT

A Knowledge Base (KB) article and related software update was released on the May 20th 2008 that seems to have gone fairly unnoticed by quite a few people. The article (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/952830) is rather vaguely titled "Description of Windows Script 5.7 for Windows XP" and it details the updated version of the Windows Scripting Host for Windows XP, along with a brief summary of the files that it contains. The reason I think that it has gone fairly unnoticed is because all the useful information for this update is contained in the release notes (which you have to download manually and extract from the compressed file) rather than on the KB page where it should be. This makes it pretty unlikely that anyone will know what changes have been made and what improvements the update offers.

The update contains a lot of fixes but there is one fix in particular that is probably going to be useful to many people. It is the following:

Fixed attempting to load nonexistent wshenu.dll which created performance problem in login scripts

What this means is that, if you have a logon script that has been developed in Visual Basic Script (VBS) that seems to execute slower than it should, then by applying this update you could gain performance benefits during the scripts execution. Quite often I have seen VBS logon scripts that seem to take too long to execute with no obvious reason why, well this may be the reason!

Of course, it could be that the reason your script runs slow is because of programming errors or other factors not related to the scripting host, but if you are sure that your script is designed well and contains no errors then perhaps this update can solve your performance problems.

Thanks to a buddy of mine, Mauricio Tamayo, for pointing this out to me!

Trigger happy events

Daniel Oxley — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 23:32:00 GMT

The new Task Scheduler functionality that was introduced with Windows Vista is superb, it knocks spots off what Windows XP ever had; my favourite feature is the ability to fire a task if a certain event is logged in the Windows Eventlog, which is great because it opens up all sorts of possibilities.

A while ago I had a dodgy ADSL router at home which would periodically reset itself but I was never able to understand why. Upon reset, it would refuse to respond to my Windows XP computer until I manually did a "ipconfig /renew" from my computer. Also, an error was logged in the Windows Eventlog when the client computer attempted to use the network but discovers that it had lost network access. While I was at home, this was never an issue but if I was away from home, and I wanted to use RDP to connect to my home computer, then it proved frustrating because I could not get access. As a workaround, I wrote a VB script that periodically pinged the router and if router did not respond it would run the "ipconfig /renew" command itself. Not a very graceful fix but it did the trick.

Now, had I had Windows Vista at the time, then I could have created a task that looked for the Windows event that was caused by the router resetting itself. Then, when the event appears, I could have launched a script that renewed the IP address. That would have been far simpler and it would have used built-in functionality rather than some homegrown solution.

An example of the Windows Vista trigger window is included below. As you can see, you can create a trigger for pretty much any event, in any log.

Anyway, I actually wanted to blog about Windows XP here because with the use of a tool from the resource kit you can create this exact same functionality for Windows XP! If only I had known when I was having the fun and games with my ADSL router...

There is a tool called eventtriggers.exe that allows you to trigger an action when an event is logged (perhaps that is why they called it eventtriggers.exe???) This is useful in plenty of scenarios, not just the one I described earlier. For example, the command below will launch Windows Backup when a low disk space warning is logged. The event will trigger a script to be launched that automatically runs a disk cleanup.

eventtriggers /create /s srvmain /u contoso\jbloggs /p p@ssW23 /tr "Low Disk Space" /eid 4133 /t warning /tk \\server\share\diskcleanup.cmd

Here are full details of all the switches for the command line: http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/e33bcf4c-dece-4b47-9bb7-31ecfcbc76d51033.mspx?mfr=true

And here is some more information about the tool: http://www.microsoft.com/germany/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/reskit/z03c621675.mspx

I want that text, and I want it now!

Daniel Oxley — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 15:06:49 GMT

How often have you had an error pop up in a dialog box full of useful error numbers, filenames, return codes, and plenty of other stuff, only to start cursing because you could not get a hold of the text content of the dialog box? Normally people resort to a screengrab of the error box but the trouble with that is that the text portion of it is not searchable by live.com (or any other Internet search engine) if you have posted to a newsgroup or mailing list. Therefore, you end up typing it all out by hand which can introduce typos and other human errors, just making the problem worse.

Well, type no more! The next time a dialog box is displayed, and you want to get at the text contents, just press CTRL+C when it has focus to capture it. Then, you can paste this text into an notepad, an email, a newsgroup post, a forum message, or anything else that you want to. This is an incredibly useful, and often overlooked, feature that has been around for quite a while but has always been missed by people.

An example of an error that I had yesterday when using Hyper-V Beta:

This is the contents of that error window that was copied to the clipboard when I hit CTRL+C:

[Window Title]
Virtual Machine Connection

[Main Instruction]
Capturing the drive failed.

[Content]
Failed to modify device 'Microsoft Virtual Hard Disk'.

Failed to open attachment 'IDE\CDROMCORP_DVD+-RW_TS-L632D_______________DE03____\5&1A4FB3FB30&1.0.0'. Error: 'One or more arguments are invalid'

[Expanded Information]
'SSS-IIS1' failed to modify device 'Microsoft Virtual Hard Disk'. (VMID 187CCF91-A248-4052-BBA0-A19A2F913586)

'SSS-IIS1': Failed to open attachment 'IDE\CDROMCORP_DVD+-RW_TS-L632D_______________DE03____\5&1A4FB3FB30&1.0.0'. Error: 'One or more arguments are invalid' (0x80070057). (VMID 187CCF91-A248-4052-BBA0-A19A2F913586)

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p.s. Yes, I have already upgraded to the Release Candidate version of Hyper-V!

Windows Live Installer - without the installer??!?!?

Daniel Oxley — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 15:18:27 GMT

To install a Windows Live product(s) you need to download and install the WLInstaller.exe file, which is a rolled-up package of all the Windows Live services. You run the installer and then you can choose the components that you want to install from the main screen. This is a great way to distribute the applications as it means that you only need to download one file, from one web page, to install any of the separate programs. However, you might one day want to install one of the components only to find that the installer package gives the following error:

I personally received this message recently when trying to install the excellent Windows Live Writer on my freshly installed Windows Server 2008. The first thought that when through my mind was that, by switching to a server OS as my main desktop OS, I lost the use of programs like Windows Live Messenger, and that I was now forced to blog via the web interface that our blog server has; not good. The reason that this message appears is because, when the programs where rolled up into the installer, the product team decided that it should only install on client OS's as they were the only ones supported. I don't want to get into the "why" and "who decided that" discussion as that is not what I want to focus on with this post.

Well, not to worry, because I can confirm that you can install the Windows Live components on a server OS, indeed, I am writing this blog post via Windows Live Writer so it definitely works! All you need are the separate MSI installer files for each application. With these files you can then just double-click each one to install the application that you want.

There are 2 ways that you can get a hold of the MSI files. Firstly, you could install all the components via the WLInstaller.exe program on a client OS machine, and then copy them out from the following folders:

32-bit Windows - C:\Program Files\Common Files\WindowsLiveInstaller\MsiSources
64-bit Windows - C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\WindowsLiveInstaller\MsiSources

The files you want are called:

Windows Live Sign-In Assistant 4.200.520.1: Install_{AFA4E5FD-ED70-4D92-99D0-162FD56DC986}.msi
Windows Live Messenger 8.5.1302.1018: Install_{508CE775-4BA4-4748-82DF-FE28DA9F03B0}.msi
Windows Live Writer 12.0.1366.1026: Install_{9176251A-4CC1-4DDB-B343-B487195EB397}.msi
Windows Live Mail 12.0.1606.1023: Install_{184E7118-0295-43C4-B72C-1D54AA75AAF7}.msi
Windows Live Toolbar 03.01.0000.0146: Install_{D5A145FC-D00C-4F1A-9119-EB4D9D659750}.msi
Windows Live Photo Gallery 12.0.1308.1023: Install_{257E440F-781F-459B-9A68-A0872B80C1D6}.msi

If you can't use the above method, you can go to the following SkyDrive to access a copy: Live Suite SkyDrive folder.

Out of the 2 methods mentioned above, I strongly recommend the first one for two important reasons. By using WLInstaller.exe you will always have the latest version of the files. Secondly, you know the authenticity of the files as you have downloaded them from live.com rather than the SkyDrive (not that I am saying that the files in the SkyDrive are not safe, which they are, especially as they should carry the digital signature from Microsoft).

Thanks to these guys for the heads-up: http://on10.net/blogs/sarahintampa/20879/Default.aspx

Windows Update - Why 3 am? & Help! I can't update anymore!

Daniel Oxley — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 16:16:00 GMT

By default, Windows XP downloads and installs updates from Windows Update nightly at 3 a.m; why did Microsoft choose 3 a.m.? I mean, the average user does not have their computer on that that time of day so it seems a rather bizarre default setting to to choose to me. The reason I am blogging about this 'issue' is because the other day my brother left his XP computer on overnight because he was converting a 500GB FAT32 drive to NTFS. At 3am, the patches downloaded, installed and then rebooted his computer even though he had a rather important process running; luckily his convert process had finished so his drive was alright. However, it could have been much worse for him had the process been terminated halfway though.

Anyway, without forewarning, the Microsoft people who look after our update servers decided to (*internally* only) redirect my Windows Update for Windows Vista search to our internal servers. So, when I press the button "Check for updates" from Control Panel the program goes to an internal server rather than the public ones. I have no problem with that, in fact, I have even implemented the configuration in some client sites myself so I understand the reason behind it. However, because we were not told about this change, I started to receive the following error when trying to update my work computer:

It took me a while to realise why, and then a little bit longer to work out what to do. So, if your admin has implemented this change, you can click on the following link in the Windows Update window in order to force Windows Update to use the public servers to check for updates one time only:

Why am I posting this? Well, as a consultant, I am almost never ever in the office. Consequently, Windows Update ceased functioning for me because it never found the Microsoft internal servers from my house. Being a good employee, I like to keep my computer patched so it worried me somewhat that Windows Update had ceased functioning (or perhaps I could say that it was 'off the twig! Kicked the bucket, shuffled off his mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!!' in true Monty Python style :-) ). I am sure that I am not alone in this situation, therefore, if this happens to you, here is how to keep your computer updated!

Switching Windows Components on and off

Daniel Oxley — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 17:38:00 GMT

Ever wanted to install/uninstall/enable/disable various Windows components automatically during installation or deployment? I have compiled this list from various sources which lets you easily do just that! You simply add the whole list to either your unattend.txt file or your sysprep.inf file and change the "On" or "Off" values accordingly. This is a list for Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 so some items will not work depending on the Operating System you are installing (for example 'pinball' does not exist on Windows 2003 server). Don't worry as it won't generate an error for you, if the item enabled does not exist then it is just ignored.

Each one should be pretty self explanatory as to what it refers to.

[Components]
   accessopt=Off
   calc=On
   certsrv=Off
   certsrv_client=Off
   certsrv_server=Off
   charmap=On
   chat=Off
   deskpaper=Off
   dialer=Off
   fax=Off
   fp_extensions=Off
   fp_vdir_deploy=Off
   freecell=Off
   hearts=Off
   hypertrm=Off
   IEAccess=Off
   iis_common=Off
   iis_ftp=Off
   iis_htmla=Off
   iis_inetmgr=Off
   iis_nntp=Off
   iis_nntp_docs=Off
   iis_pwmgr=Off
   iis_smtp=Off
   iis_smtp_docs=Off
   iis_www=Off
   iis_www_vdir_printers=Off
   iis_www_vdir_terminalservices=Off
   iisdbg=Off
   indexsrv_system=Off
   licenseserver=Off
   media_clips=Off
   media_utopia=Off
   minesweeper=Off
   mousepoint=Off
   mplay=Off
   msmq_ADIntegrated=Off
   msmq_Core=Off
   msmq_HTTPSupport=Off
   msmq_LocalStorage=Off
   msmq_MQDSService=Off
   msmq_RoutingSupport=Off
   msmq_TriggersService=Off
   msmsgs=Off
   msnexplr=Off
   mswordpad=On
   netcis=Off
   netoc=Off
   objectpkg=Off
   OEAccess=Off
   paint=Off
   pinball=Off
   rec=Off
   reminst=Off
   rstorage=Off
   solitaire=Off
   spider=Off
   templates=Off
   TerminalServer=Off
   TSClients=Off
   TSWebClient=Off
   vol=On
   WMAccess=Off
   WMPOCM=Off
   wms=Off
   wms_admin_asp=Off
   wms_admin_mmc=Off
   wms_server=Off
   zonegames=Off

BTW, this is by no means the full list of components so if you have one that I am missing then feel free to let me know and I will update this list.

Junction points with network drives

Daniel Oxley — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 11:01:00 GMT

Ever wanted to create a 'junction point' style pointer but using a network drive as the source? Now you can!

With Windows XP you can create junction points on your disks but the prerequisite is that the source point is on your local disk. This is no good if you need to create the junction point that refers the user from a point that is anywhere else, for example a network drive. This is actually very simple to do and has existed in Windows since Windows 98 (I think, but don't quote me on that...). All you need to do is to create a desktop.ini file and a target.lnk file and you are all done. The contents of the desktop.ini file should be:

[.ShellClassInfo]")
CLSID2={0AFACED1-E828-11D1-9187-B532F1E9575D}

The target.lnk file you can either create manually or use the following VBS script:

Set oWS = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
sLinkFile = MYPATHFORFILE & "\target.lnk"
Set oLink = oWS.CreateShortcut(sLinkFile)
oLink.TargetPath = SOURCEPATHTOBEREDIRECTED
oLink.WorkingDirectory = DESTINATION
oLink.Save

The only downside is that this solution also has a prerequisite. The application that you want to follow the redirection must use Shell32.dll for it's file handling. Seeing as most applications now do this should not be too great a problem for you.