How to roll your own Windows XP Mode and use it on any host OS.

I’ve always been a fan of Macgyver… But for a few reasons (mostly legal), I can’t make a copy of Windows XP out of popsicle sticks and chewing gum and hand it to you, so you will need a copy of Windows XP for this.

I’m not going to ask how you got it, but what I will say is that to keep this legal, I’ll assume you’ve formatted it off of an old computer and intend to reactivate it in the virtual machine.

What you need:

1. A copy of XP Home or Pro, retail only as OEM will refuse to reactivate on anything other than you bought it with.

2. A copy of the freeware Virtual Box from Sun Microsystems.

3. The freeware nLite to cut some crap out and shoot the Search Dog, the freeware RyanVM Integrator and the post-SP3 add on pack to bring everything up to date and integrate IE 8 and Windows Media Player 11.

Now, the IE 8 integration pack is named One Piece, and like IE 8, I assume must have been inspired by the Johnny Cash song, “One Piece At A Time”.

4. I suggest clearing off your desktop and use this as your workspace. (No the twinky wrappers can stay, I mean your Windows desktop!)

——

The objective here is to create a Windows disc without all the stuff that does not apply to us or is just outright stupid (MS Agent, Search Dog), is primarily used by viruses more than real programs (VB Script Engine), or has better replacements out there and really doesn’t affect Windows if you remove it (Outlook Express), to apply the update packs to bring it reasonably up to speed, and to automate most of the installation so you can sip your margarita and not have to read so much spam about why Windows XP is better than God.

———-

FIRST:

Download and install nLite, it may ask for the .Net runtime, try not to throw up and go get it.

Make a folder on your desktop and call it DietXP or something, open nLite and have it clone your XP disc into that folder.

-IF you do not have Service Pack 3 in the disc image- (if you do, skip this)

Download it, and select the ONLY task you want Nlite to do right now is to slipstream it, so just click “Service Pack”, next, then go find a book to read. I suggest War & Peace.

-Then exit nLite-

Open RyanVM Integrator and make it look about like this, click “Optimize System Files” then press the Integrate button and go read another book.

Now install Windows Media Player slipstreamer, and grab Windows Media Player 11 from MS, make it look like this. (That remove WGA bit really takes some hassle out of opening it up for the first time in your new XP install)

Press integrate. Read a book.

Is it soup? Almost.

Now, you can use nLite to integrate drivers, but I don’t recommend this as it bloats the installation if you use that on other computers, so make a folder on your desktop with all the drivers and files you want to have and call it “Goodies” or something. We’ll get back to this.

Also put in:

CCLeaner

JK Defrag

7Zip

And whatever your favorite software is, so long as it can all fit in the free space Windows will leave on the CD. I’d say don’t go over 300 megs.

Open nLite, this time instead of the CD, point it at your DietXP folder and when it’s done, hit next til you get to Task Selection.

Choose:

Components

Options

Bootable ISO

Hit next.

A thing will pop up asking you if you want to protect anything against accidental removal, I choose:

Cameras/Camcorders

DHCP

Fast User Switching

DO NOT choose Internet Explorer, we will be removing a few components it doesn’t need. nLite will freak out though, don’t worry, Windows Update selected protects IE.

Media Center

NT Backup

Prefetch

Printers

Windows Activation

Windows Update

At the components screen, I choose:

Applications:

Accessability

Briefcase

Clipbook Viewer

Defragmenter (we replaced it with JK Defrag)

Drivers:

Display Adapters (old) (pre-2001 hardware)

IBM ThinkPad

IBM PS/2 Trackpoint

ISDN (old pre-DSL high speed internet)

Tape Drives

Hardware Support:

Brother Devices

CPU Transmeta Crusoe

Iomega Zip Disk

Multiport Serial Adapters

Windows CE USB Host

Keyboards:

Click the box to select all of them, then scroll down to the ONE you need. For me it’s USA International, so I would deselect that.

Languages:

Select all, nLite protects the one your disc defaults to.

Multimedia:

AOL Art

Images and Backgrounds (leaves the grean grass and blue sky one, argh)

Intel Indeo Codecs

Mouse cursors

Movie Maker

Music Samples

Speech Support

Tablet PC

Windows Sounds (also gets rid of that FUCKING annoying click sound in IE)

Network:

Client for Netware Networks

Communications Tools (ancient shit like hyperterminal)

Control Test Terminal Program

Frontpage Extensions

H323 MSP

Internet Connection Wizard

Internet Information Services

IP Conferencing

MSN Explorer

Netmeeting

Netshell Cmd-tool

NWLINK IPX/SPX/Netbios Protocol

Outlook Express

Peer To Peer (Microsoft P2P crap that was never used)

Vector Graphics Rendering

Web Folders

Windows Messenger

Operating System Options:

Administrative VB Scripts

Blaster/Nachi Removal Tool

Color Schemes (for the classic theme pfft)

Disk Cleanup (replaced it with CCLeaner)

Document Templates

DR Watson

FAT to NTFS converter

File and Settings Wizard

Help and Support (this jsut removes Windows Help Center, not support for applications help files, up to you, but bagging it saves 23 megs)

IExpress Wizard

MS Agent

MS XML 2.0

Private Character Editor

Remote Installation Services

Search Assistant (The search dog)

Security Center (if you don’t want to be nagged by it)

Service Pack Messages (DONT REMOVE FOR NON-ENGLISH XP)

Symbolic Debugger

Tour (Click here to take a tour after you’ve already used this shit for 8 years plus the Whistler Betas)

Visual Basic Scripting Support (lots of viruses depend on this, and a few shitty applications)

Web View

Zip Folders (replaced with 7Zip)

Services:

Beep Driver

Error Reporting

Messenger (That one that spammers used til MS turned it off in SP2)

Directories:

DOCS, SUPPORT, and VALUEADD

Click Next.

under General:

Change merge to enabled, Clean Mui support languages to enabled,  remove duplicate files to enabled.

Under Patches:

TCP/IP Patch set to 100

USB Port Polling to 250

Unsigned Themes Support Enabled

Click next…

Do you want to start the process?

Yes. Go read a book.

The installation image was reduced by 252.51 megs. Cool.

Click Next. Now’s the time to copy your goodies folder into the dietxp folder.

After copying your goodies into the dietxp folder, click Make ISO, save the ISO to your desktop, then burn the ISO with your favorite disc burning software.

Now you can either install it on real hardware, or boot the ISO in Virtual Box.

Don’t forget to use Tools/Install VirtualBox tools when you’re booted in the VM, this will give you proper video and shared folders and such.

Also check out seamless mode, to run XP programs right on your host desktop.

XP SP3 running on Vista SP2 in VirtualBox

My thoughts on “Virtual XP Mode” nonsense and the future for XP users.

See also: How to roll your own Virtual XP Mode

This is based on a reply of mine to a blog posting by a Microsoft “MVP” regarding Windows XP in a VM under Windows 7 “as a feature”:

Microsoft has obviously utterly failed to get 63% of Windows users (as of April 2009’s stats) to “upgrade to Windows Vista from XP.

It’s kind of easy to see why this is the case when Vista:

Is 9 times bigger.

Has a horrible anti-piracy system that has serveral times gone berserk and shut paying users out of their own machines.

Harasses you with nag screens every time you click on something asking if you really wanted to click on that.

Downgrades the playback of your Blu Ray movies if you’re not using an HDCP connection to the monitor (which also requires a Vista-Certified monitor).

Performs so badly that your 5 year old budget laptop with XP will run rings around your dual core Vista desktop with 4 times the RAM?

(And I’m sure I’ve missed something).

The end result? I decided to go over my Vista Business DVD with Vlite to see how much useless crap I could remove that I never use, here are the results:

Normal Vista Business: Installed size of 17 GB.

VLite cut 6 gigabytes of fluff that I never use out of the DVD, all while leaving components like collaberation, presentation, IE, Media Player, and everything that any business user may really get anything useful from quite intact.

In fact, the voice wreckagnition support files alone were over a gigabyte of the ISO, even if you never use any of them.

When I was done, Vista Business was still 5 times larger than XP Pro (10 gigs installed  vs. 2 gigs for XP Pro SP3, vs. 1.6 gigs for an nLited XP Pro SP 3) (and after VLiting, you can’t install the next Service Pack, so be warned!)

Microsoft’s response to users crying out, wanting an end to the bloat, the draconian DRM, and every other repugnant “feature” of Vista?

Rename Vista, add a few superficial tweaks that change nothing about Vista’s massive underlying, rotten core, and demand hundreds more dollars out of Vista users for a product that at best, addresses a few minor issues.

Quite frankly, Microsoft has released Service Packs with more new functionality than you’re likely to find in Windows 7 from Vista SP2 (XP SP2?).

Microsoft has apparently tweaked with the “Product Activation” DRM to be less accusatory, that is to say, they’ve changed the way they phrase things and how often you see it.

Instead of a Nazi interrogation session where it punches you in the stomach to get you to talk, you get a Soviet re-education camp about “Why piracy is bad, mmmmk?”.

I still fail to see the part about why I should fork over $200 for the upgrade when Microsoft themselves admit that everything of any consequence will be backported to Vista (including DirectX 11), but it’s Microsoft, and so you can expect them to sabotage Vista in subtle ways and whisk away support for extra bells and whistles like they’re doing with XP now. (Think Windows Live Essentials)

Which brings me to the beginning of the end for XP

As you may or may not know, XP went into “extended support” last month, which means that you get no new Windows Media Player, no new IE past version 8, no new Windows Live Suite after they get enough users to defect to Vista or 7, etc. The only thing you’re guaranteed from Microsoft now is security patches. No other bugs will be fixed. As for third party driver support, I’d say you can expect that for a couple years to come as SO MANY PEOPLE use XP.

With those caveats, the XP you see now is how XP will stay til it’s officially unsupported.

Microsoft started sabotaging Windows 2003 and XP X64 last year and what’s the future for Vista Home, and Ultimate users?

My guess is that Microsoft, at some point in 2012 will refuse to activate Windows Vista Home Basic, Premium, and Ultimate, because Windows 7 is what is “supported”

Need to reload that old computer that crashed? Too bad. You need to buy Windows 7, which will also need a newer computer with a faster processor and more memory.

It’s really that reason that stands out as to why so-called product activation is a bad thing, Windows has the ability to shut you down.

 I guessed when Windows XP was released back in 2001 that in “5 or 6 years” they’d do that to XP, but the fact is now that that they would have to just outright piss 63% of Windows users off, and that’s too much of a gamble even for Microsoft.

Instead what they’re doing with XP is subtle, they’re removing support for popular applications one or two at a time by introducing bogus checks into the executable for functionality that the program never even calls, similar to what Microsoft has had EA games do with Windows 2000 (theres patches to get all the latest EA games on Windows 2000, but why would you want them?) .

I don’t expect them to support Windows 2000 forever or even guarantee that the game will run. I do believe that the OS should be allowed to gracefully decay, that is if they really truly need functionality that XP or Vista have that Win2K doesn’t, then by all means. But what they’re doing shows a kind of deliberate sabotage of an otherwise fully functional title on a capable OS, both of which the user has paid for.

I ran into this with Windows Live Essentials on XP X64, it says that “Windows XP X64 and Windows 2003 are not supported, you need XP SP2 or Vista”.Well, I tricked it into installing, so far I’ve ran Live Messenger, Live Mail, and Live Writer, all the latest versions, and I haven’t come across one function that really honestly needs Vista or normal XP.

Why is Microsoft doing this? Simple. XP X64 isn’t used by many people, the ones who do use it all got it OEM or with special (at the time) X64 machines, and most likely depend largely on Microsoft programs. Cutting off Windows Live is like cutting off their oxygen supply, it’s easy to choke this demographic because they will easily go out and pay for Vista just to get something like this back.

What about this Virtual XP Mode in Windows 7?

A few things. 1. It’s a virtual machine, virtual machines are slow. 2. It’s only available on the expensive Business and Ultimate Windows 7. 3. You can do the same thing yourself with the freeware Virutal Box from Sun and a copy of XP, you can even run seamless mode. (XP apps on your host operating system’s desktop.).
XP Mode is quite frankly offensive, not only because a lot of processors just can’t cope with it, or because they rough you up for a more expensive version of Windows to get it, or because it’s got all the problems of running a virtual machine.

If Microsoft wasn’t so damned insistent on this DRM nonsense, then they would have just had a library where they exported XP and WIndows 2000 functions and registry entries, and used a compatibility shim to redirect API calls and registry ops. That would have been less than 1% performance penalty, and they have everything they need to do that with WOW64 anyway.

AGGGGGHH!!!!!

Late night TV spammers Part Deux: Ryan Strikes Back

I got annoyed by those “Finally Fast” Windows crapware spammers again, and so I decided to have some fun, I don’t have a connector for my phone to my PC yet, so I’ll condense the most interesting bits of the 25 minute long conversation here:

FF Rep: “Thank you for calling Finally Fast, my name is Brian, may I have your first name please?”

Me: “My name is Steve.”

Brian: “Hi Steve! And may I ask which of our software you are calling about today?”

Me: “Well, I saw your ad on TV and my computer isn’t real slow, but it couldn’t hurt to make it a bit faster, right?”

Brian: “Of course not, and may I have your last name?”

Me: “Shyster” (I didn’t think this would work and had to bit my tongue afterwards)

Brian: “Thank you mister Shyster…Now Mr. Shyster, you remember when you first got your computer and it was really really fast? It’s probably gotten a lot slower since then, hasn’t it?”

Me: “Oh, not really too much, I don’t think…..but your software will make my computer faster right?”

Brian: “Yes, because it goes through and eliminates registry errors and spyware and the fragmentation thats been happening on your computer”

Me: “I don’t think I have a registry”

Brian: “Well, every PC has a registry, and the registry is where your programs store all their settings and things like that, and over time, it can have thousands of incorrect settings in it, and our software eliminates that, and the spyware and fragmentation.

Me: “What is fragmentation exactly? I’ve heard of that somewhere before.”

Brian: “Fragmentation is what happens when the files stored on your hard disk are broken into pieces, and our patented software eliminates this”

Me: “So I need your software to get rid of these registry errors and fragmentation?”

Brian: “Yes, thats right. You may have some spyware too.”

Me: “Spyware? I’m not following you…”

Brian: “Bad software that breaks into your computer and steals your private information”

Me: “Like my social security number and tax return information?”

Brian: “Yes, do you have any antivirus software?”

Me: “No, I’ve never really needed any”

Brian: “Hmmm, you probably have some spyware problems then…”

Me: “I’ve never seen any”

Brian: “Well, that doesn’t mean it isn’t there…I think I’ve determined the software you need from us, we’ve got a great deal on [product] for only $29.99 with a year of support, and we’ve seen that make internet connections 300% faster, and for $19.99 you can get [product] which will eliminate spyware, and for another $19.99, you can get [product] which will defragment your hard disk and clean up junk files….how will you be paying for this?”

Me: “Well, I have some licensing questions…”

Brian: “Of course”

Me: “I have a number of PC’s I’m interested in using your software on, and I really wouldn’t want to copy and use them again without your permission….so my question being..How many computers am I licensed to run this software on?”

Brian: “Well, we do offer all the software on CD ROM for an extra $12.95 each”

Me: “That sounds good.”

Brian: “So may I have your credit card information? I’ll make sure this gets right out to you.”

Me: “I just a couple more questions, I’m sorry to impose…”

Brian: “Alright…”

Me: “Is your software compatible with Wine?”

Brian: “What is Wine? I have no idea what that is”

Me: “It emulates the Windows API, I run all my Windows software through it”

Brian: “Oh well, yes, our software is compatible with all versions of Windows”

Me: “So running it in Wine on Linux would be ok then?” (I thought he’d catch on here)

Brian: “Yes, it should support the Linux editions of Microsoft Windows” (punching myself on the forehead and grinding my teeth)

Me: “Oh, good! I was hoping you would say that”

Brian: “So are you ready to place your order?”

Me: “Sure.”

Brian: “Is it a credit card, debit, check by phone?” (Like hell)

Me: “A credit card”

Brian: “Can you give me the 16 digit number?”

Me: “Sure, but I just thought of one more question”

Brian: “Yes?”

Me: “How do you spell SUCKER, sucker”…….rick roll till the line goes dead (starting from “Never gonna give you up”)

If you want to Rick Roll them by phone:

http://prankdialer.com/rickroll.php

Or there’s the Captain Picard song:

http://prankdialer.com/dr.php

Or “You Spin Me Right Round”

http://prankdialer.com/spin.php

Phone Number:

1800-384-1179

I looked at the domain registry and found an Adam Schran, who is the CEO of the company, and left a few rickrolls in his voicemail by playing them into the phone, Schran is at:

215-320-6000 Ext. 111

Finally, E-Commerce Guide mentioned Schran and his “company” back in 2001:

“The company’s CEO is 25-year-old Adam Schran, who told me that Ascentive’s first two software programs, webROCKET and winROCKET, were developed by his brother Andrew, 14, who began writing the code when he was 11.

Andrew is “now serving in an advisory role,” Schran said. “We have software developers on staff and they have engineered all of our other house-developed software (BeAware, ActiveTime, ActivePrivacy, RAMrocket).”

http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/news/trends/article.php/884011

Iran’s 8 million PC’s to be converted from Windows to Linux, because Linux is more secure.

My name is Tux, I don't approve of hardline regimes, but anyone is free to use Linux.

OK, Linux probably could have went forever…..

Without an endorsement from a terrorist/religious fascist state.

But there is a good deal of truth in their statements as to why they want to ditch Microsoft Windows, aside from the fact that they’re twitchy about running all their stuff on pirated software from their enemies, the United States.

The rationale:

Windows is outrageously overpriced.

Iran wants in on the World Trade Organization which means they’ll have to respect copyrights, even as they murder men, women, and children for liberties we as Americans take for granted, apparently the WTO isn’t worried about that since respecting life isn’t profitable business.

Aside from that, this means converting 8 million PC’s running unlicensed Windows over to licensed Windows, at hundreds of dollars a pop, or settling for crippled “Starter” editions, neither of which is really much of an option if Linux is free of charge and licensed to anyone in the world who wants it.

Windows is insecure and has Microsoft implanted backdoors.

Mohammad Sephery-Rad, IT director for Iran’s government says:

“Microsoft software has a lot of backdoors and security weaknesses that are always being patched, so it is not secure. We are also under US sanctions. All this makes us think we need an alternative operating system.”

“Microsoft is a national security concern. Security in an operating system is an important issue, and when it is on a computer in the government it is of even greater importance”

Well, yes, it’s obvious to anyone who uses Windows that it gets patched constantly, the threat of backdoors is also quite possible, as Microsoft won’t let people see their code, you have no idea what’s really being ran by your computer if you’re on Windows.

Of course, the US does things like warrantless wiretapping, and has given snitch ISP’s safe harbor for giving the government information they casually request about you, so the backdoors would only let them snoop around on data that went over the network strongly encrypted, or ended up on the hard drive by other means.

Of course Iran’s networked computers may be less spied upon as the US has no jurisdiction there, and state secret stuff may still end up being on networked computers that are otherwise vulnerable to attack, running Windows.

Continuing on, Sephery-Rad says:

“[Linux] is very promising. Students and universities are showing great enthusiasm, but for older people it is difficult,” he explained, adding that graphical environments such as KDE or Gnome were getting close to matching the task manipulation that a Windows-based PC provides.

“It is not as easy as we thought. We will have to get people used to changing over. People are used to using Microsoft, so we’ll need courses and seminars.”

Sephery-Rad expects Linux to take off in 2-3 years now that a Farsi translation of a Linux LiveCD is now in circulation, and that they will join countries in Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and Oceania in officially ditching Microsoft at the government level.

As for migrating to Linux on the personal level:

I think Americans have probably gotten too dependent on Microsoft, Vista is definitely the easiest way to go if you have the money for it, have expensive Vista-certified hardware, don’t mind security problems and performance issues, and don’t want to learn much.

The reason we’re seeing entire governments roll out Linux boils down to security and money, even the US military runs Linux extensively, I’ve also seen some local government roll outs at schools and libraries, but I think Microsoft is stronger here because they are based here, we don’t view them as a foreign company taking our money and sending it out of the country, we feel safer because it’s not some foreign company under the jurisdiction of a foreign government that we have to entrust all our data to.

Of course a lot of that, especially in the light of things like FISA Act and Patriot Act is a pipe dream.

At the risk of abusing a horrible cliche..."I can only offer you the truth."

The one click snake oil PC optimizers are on late night TV now.

I was watching TV and saw a commercial for some more bullshit one-click “optimizers” that don’t really do anything, so I got on Youtube and apparently I’m not the only one that was annoyed by Ascentive’s hokey ad:

Wow, where do I start?

I ended up downloading their software and trying to run it in Wine, some of it worked, most of it crashed, the parts that did work took you to web pages on Ascentive’s website where they try to make more bogus claims about their product, where they say things like “275% faster!!!” in red size 27 font.

Another hallmark of a scam artist is to pull out a war chest of “endorsements” as “proof” that their crap will work, one of the supposed “endorsers” is TechTV, the outfit that used to employ famed internet whore Chris Pirillo.

This is the same kind of snake oil that Pirillo would peddle.

Anyway, I filed a bug in Wine:

Bug#: 14872 PC Optimizer spyware cannot run in Wine.

I had it installed into a Prefix so that it couldn’t damage my Wine installation, but I noticed a few things that it would do to a Windows user, including modification of the registry so that it will run on startup and pelt you with more ads to buy their crap, and when you uninstall it, it has a checkbox (unchecked by default) “Do not automatically install again later”, it’s unbelievable that a company would have to resort to this.

Their behavior borders on the kind of stuff you see with rogue antivirus.

I just can’t believe this crapware is on TV now, yuck.

One more reason I won’t run Windows on anything I have to depend on, most scams thrive on something real, and Windows is so error prone and difficult to fix, that fly by nights like this can exploit the ignorance of many computer users.

If you want a faster computer, you need to buy faster hardware, more RAM, better processor, new video card.

I don’t know exactly what these con artists are charging, but you could probably buy double your RAM, or maybe even a video card, for whatever their One Click Crapfest costs.

If you’re real hard up, a $40 dual core Celeron makes a good upgrade from a Pentium 4. ;)

Even back 10 years ago, I remember seeing Ascentive conning people, so this tells us that there are obviously enough Windows users that are stupid enough to keep this company running.

The difference is that with Windows 98, the utilities might have done something, they were still snake oil, but there were a bazillion tweaks you could make that caused a night-and-day difference in how Windows performed (Like ConservativeSwapFileUsage=1 or adjusting the Vcache settings), this is no longer really true with XP and Vista.

And the registry, while horrible, and a mess, will not cause any noticable degradation in the computer’s performance.

Looking around online, I see that a lot of people that were conned into installing Ascentive software say that it actually messes things up when you uninstall it. Nothing like ransomware, huh?

Just for the hell of it, here are actual testimonials: (emphasis is mine)

“Oh my goodness, what a difference!…My Internet speed has been incredible, even with my dial-up modem and a very modest connection rate with AOL at 26,000 bps. I will recommend ActiveSpeed to everyone I know!”

“I could never figure out why my computer was running so slowly. PC SpeedScan found and removed my computer errors and now my computer runs like brand new.”

“I have had many virus and spyware attacks. Spyware Striker Pro software has saved me more times then I can count.”

—and the kicker—

“ I was hoping to get rid of a few particular, very persistent pop-ups. As it turns out, they were either Trojans or so deeply hidden that I just couldn’t find them no matter what software program I used. When I reloaded my Windows XP and then loaded up your software, I haven’t had a reoccurrence of those particular, very persistent, pop-ups.”

Scam artists often rely on tons of emphatic and fake testimonials that they have made up themselves.

The scary thing is that somewhere out there, there is a woman in menopause, living in a trailer with 300 cats, that bought her eMachine with her alimony check and proceeded to load AOL on it, but couldn’t afford all 56,600 baud.

The people that buy this shit are blissfully unaware that the only computer error that needs removed is them.

The third dude is an obvious porn addict that doesn’t know that if a porn site requires anything more than the plugins you already have, or Adobe Flash, you probably should leave NOW.

The fourth one is just funny, “So deeply rooted that NOTHING else could find it”, he sounds like he couldn’t find his ass with both hands and a bloodhound.

I also have a confession to make…….

Send me money, bitches!

The XBOX 360, not just for Vista.

I’ve been meaning to write something about this since Saturday:

My XBOX 360, which was a Epic Failure buying decision (see Ten Reasons The XBOX 360 Can Suck It), has been used as a media center once, five dead consoles ago, that was with XP Media Center Edition, I was seriously unimpressed with it back then, because it heavily emphasizes Microsoft formats.

Bad video games are the main reason the console has been collecting dust for about a year now, fighting Microsoft to get five dead units replaced while they were still saying there was a small failure rate (before retailers admitted that over a third were dying, and Microsoft admitted serious defects) was the other.

My main reason for having the system on at all lately were some used original XBOX games I got on the cheap, and Vista had a dialog that popped in every time I started the console….I figured I’d configure it and see what I ran into.

Vista ended up compelling me to set up media sharing, this was easy enough to set up through Windows Media Player, but I ended up hand editing the iptables firewall on my router before it would allow anything to go through, other than that it works well.

Up to recently I hadn’t even wondered about doing this is Linux:

Looking around, the XBOX 360 isn’t a standard UPNP device, Microsoft did this because it would make things harder on Mac and Linux users, and perhaps very telling of the horrible political stance of the Free Software Foundation, their Gmediaserver software had some patches submitted a few years ago to enable it to communicate with the XBOX 360, but they were not accepted into the main development branch, it seems the Free Software Foundation doesn’t want anyone buying an XBOX 360, so they’d rather piss everyone off that likes and uses this feature into buying Windows instead, the FSF is as radical as Microsoft, just on the other end of the spectrum.

So this issue is just as much Microsoft’s fault for not using standards as it is the FSF’s for refusing trivial patches for their software.

Luckily, I found a post on the Ubuntu Forums from last month, detailing how to use a patched version of Ushare to use with your XBOX 360.

The patches will eventually be in the official version of Ushare, so if this was one of the reasons keeping you on Windows, you can scratch it off the list and enjoy your porn home movies and bootlegged Metallica Creative Commons licensed music.

You will need to grab Mencode and transcode everything to Mpeg 2 or WMV for video, or MP3 or WMA for audio.

Naturally I recommend getting a standards compliant console like the Playstation next time, I mainly posted this for existing XBOX torture victims.

Day 4: Providing technical support for Vista.

A fragmentation grenade? Thats not dangerous, because there are nuclear bombs out there!

So I’ve been getting a little bit of hate mail from Microsoft fanboys and probably employees too:

So I decided to write day 4’s entry on day 3, and explain my interactions providing end user support for Windows XP and Vista as an assistant manager at a rental store for a couple of years.

In the rental business you get many different types of customers, and almost without exception, they all hated Vista.

Our store had Dell, HP, and Sony computers there when I started, it was just before Vista shipped, so they all had XP SP2 as their default setup, business customers had no complaints, home customers usually either paid off the full cost and owned the computer, or at least pretended not to be at home when I came calling for their 2-3 weeks of back rental payments.

Aside from having 60-80 computers on loan at any given time, and dealing with cleaning up the occasional virus problem that Windows is famous for, life was pretty good, as a note, when Windows gets one piece of malware, the next 50 pieces are not far behind, so cleaning up Windows is usually a format and reinstall.

Even when I didn’t have to do it, I usually convinced the customer I did because it would take an hour to recover it or an indefinite amount of time to root around in the registry, the several startup areas, the “backup” processes that malware typically spawns to guard it, and of course this all assumes that it’s not some kind of a rootkit.

There was one customer that had even gotten so tired of the mess that inevitably makes it’s way in with typical adware that the customer installs looking for some free porn or some ill gotten MP3’s, that he punched the side of an HP Pavilion and left a grapefruit size dent, telling me “Take your fucking shit back!”, we did, and we prosecuted. (OK, he was obviously stupid too, but oh well, it’s funny)

I have a few XP stories, but nothing had me prepared for Vista:

So, after taking calls asking when Vista would be in, and after having ordered new model PC’s or express upgrade discs, getting Vista on the systems one way or the other, as the customers were requesting, we started renting them out like this.

I figured Vista wouldn’t be worse than XP, and if anything, this new “security” model may make my job easier by blocking the more obvious spyware.

But no sooner than I started renting them out like that, my support calls went through the roof, sometimes quadrupling the daily average that I had under XP, if I had to put it from most calls to least, it would probably look like.

1. Viruses and spyware (about the same as XP)

2. Peripherals not working (Printers, webcams, gamepads, TV Tuners that I couldn’t have checked and had no Vista drivers, and more

3. Software not working (Biggest complaints were non-Microsoft office programs, video games, and iTunes, I even had complaints from several businesses that their company-specific software wouldn’t run)

Note: iTunes was fixed after about 6 months I think, it would tell you that none of your purchased music was “authorized”.

4. Bad performance (Most of which appears to have lived on past SP1)

So what did I end up doing?

I ended up giving them rental credits at the store’s expense, over bad things that Vista was doing, I ended up downgrading everything to XP, and putting Vista on “by request”.

This was per the store manager, now she knew very little about computers or operating systems, but even she recognized a lot of angry customers when she saw them, so she told me to “downgrade” it all back to XP, thankfully we already had recovery discs for some models from when she was angry about a few customers and a business formatting Windows off in favor of Linux (taking the recovery partition off in the process.)

The best thing Vista did for our business?

You remember those customers that pretended not to be home and made the repossession part of my job hell?

Well, I didn’t have many of those with Vista machines, because they were calling me to come take it.

Total estimate of lost profit due to Vista:

I can’t give specifics due to some NDA’s, but lost payroll, licensing fees to get the OEM upgrades and downgrades,  and the month long Vista disaster probably bled the store for a little over $12,000, and an immeasureable amount of damaged reputation with the customers we were dealing with, again without going into specifics that could identify that employer, if every store had similar Vista problems (and several I talked to had), Vista probably cost the company in the ballpark of $15-30 million dollars.

Two years later, pretty much everything in the store of course has Vista once again, I no longer have to deal with any of it thank god (I left the job a while back), the store manager doesn’t deal with businesses that put Linux on their laptops to replace Vista Business, so I know for a fact that most of them are getting Suse or Red Hat Desktop straight from companies like HP and Dell. (They don’t like having tons of their own laptops laying around, but they’ll deal with it in order to avoid Vista)

The funny thing was that all of our point of sale system was based on Linux and VXWorks.

The company tried to roll out Vista Business and Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PC’s, but it was a migraine, the entire point of sale system would just die (drop off the network) at random, and the test stores eventually went back to Linux and VXWorks.

Theres a good reason I like Red Hat’s Linux offerings so much, it is rock solid, and I’d rather be at the bar at 11 PM on Saturday night, than in the office, trying to figure out why our network isn’t working, on the phone with Microsoft in one ear, and the corporate office in the other ear.

Unrelated to that, the copy of Vista I have is botched by Microsoft on purpose:

32-bit Vista is limited to 2.8-3.2 GB of RAM, depending on factors such as how much your BIOS reserves and how much your sound card or video card have, now most processors since the original Pentium support 36-bit memory addressing, meaning they can address 64 GB of RAM, so long as the OS supports PAE (Physical Address Extension), Vista has it, but only to support DEP (NX-bit security feature), it is still hard coded to not accept more than 2.8-3.2 GB.

The 64-bit edition can do this, but you have to send off for the DVD, which costs like $10, which is nothing to throw a fit about, except that Microsoft doesn’t let OEM users do this, so you need to buy a full retail copy of Vista, THEN spend the $10, so since most customers have OEM Windows, this is essentiall a scam that Microsoft operates in order to sell users two copies of Vista (The OEM + The retail).

So when I have my desktop booted into Vista, it can only use 3.2 GB of RAM, when I have it in my 64-bit Linux, it uses all 8 GB. (Yay for not getting cheated!)

Moral of the story is, Vista is extremely risky business.

Windows Vista’s new DRM, driver incompetence!

So welcome back, this is 2 hours 11 minutes into day 3 of the Vista challenge:

Why am I on here so early in the morning? I’ll tell you why!

Vista cannot cope with my Lite-On DVD/CD RW +/- Geewhizbangomgwtfbbq drive in the default BIOS configuration.

I went to copy a 4 GB file off the disc and Vista went to it at a mind numbing 1-2 MB a second, it made it to about 1.5 GB and then froze, I gave it a couple minutes to respond, before forcing the system to eject the disc, which immediately caused a Blue Screen of Death.

I poked around for an hour trying to find out why, smaller transactions wouldn’t hurt anything other than being slow, but this was unacceptable, finally I found out that disabling S.M.A.R.T. in the BIOS setup fixes this, and I know it wasn’t just my system, because I got the advice from a guy on IRC, anyway, my transfers are up to 5 MB/sec now and no crashes.

Mister Vista sums my experience up:

Other than this, not really much else going on at the moment, except for Halo: Combat Evolved needs to be set to elevate or else connecting to multiplayer doesn’t work at all, so if there’s a security vulnerability in Halo, Vista will be running it as Administrator.

Don’t you feel all warm and fuzzy? BTW, if you’re ever on Halo and “killed by Gonorrhea”, yeah, totally wasn’t me. (Gonorrhea has killed Rambo, Gonorrhea has killed ChuckNorris, Gonorrhea will kill again)

Cancel or Allow? The Vista Migration on day 2!

If I ever see the UAC box again, I will scream:

So, I know you can turn it off, but I’m assuming you all saw the Mac ad spoofing this…

If there’s anything I disagree with the Mac ads on, is they label it PC or Mac, PC is not the problem, Windows is. (This goes 500x for security)

Anyway, I’ve counted 54 UAC warning dialogs just setting up my codecs, drivers, and “anti-virus” software, grabbing Windows updates from Microsoft (Jesus!!!), and so on, and I have one question for Microsoft…

“You say you reduced UAC warnings since Vista beta? What was the beta? A giant UAC box where Windows would occasionally pop up and let you do something?”

Anyway, one other amusing thing to report…

I got my Dell all-in-one printer working with Vista!

I cheated though and ended up having to hook it up to one of my Linux boxes and network sharing it through Samba, so now getting Vista to print is as simple as having a Linux computer available to compensate for the fact that Vista can’t print!

I used my own variations on this guide.

Yay for CUPS! (I need to post a vid of this and call it 2printers1cups)

I got 14 more UAC warnings for this operation.

To sync my iPod, I plugged it in with iTunes loaded, and Vista core dumped (Thats a BSOD to Windows users), I ended up having to reboot, and got another core dump, the third time, things worked for some reason, but iTunes tried to format all of my mp3’s off the hard disk saying something about that database being corrupted (bullshit), and so I ended up removing iTunes and installing Winamp, which does a fairly decent job of syncing my iPod without complaints.

UAC warning installing iTunes, UAC warning for Quicktime, UAC warning to update them, UAC warning times two to remove them, and a UAC warning to install Winamp.

Six UAC’s to get my iPod working.

I made a partition bringing one of my desktops in on the fun:

Installing my video game collection tried to install a rootkit called SecuROM which Linux is not vulnerable to, I ended up denying the operation, not because UAC warned me about the one thing I wanted warned about so far (Bringing it’s success rate up to 1%), but because Spybot S&D noticed the thing trying to fuck make sweet gentle love to my Windows settings.

UAC ignores rootkit viruses from copy restriction malware, but pops up if you want to install Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, perfect.

Another 14 UAC pop ups that miss the actual attack, and my games run, and over 50 more to bring my desktop in on the fun.

Rick Astley….Allow or Allow? (Never gonna give you up!) ;)

Take the Vista Challenge, I dare you.

OK, so I have bitched about Vista enough, it’s been about 5-6 months since I’ve used it….

So I feel I need a new lesson in pain, just for laughs…I managed to get Hewlett Packard to send me a Vista premium disc a year or so ago that I haven’t activated yet. (It’s nice to have an unactivated Windows in case I decide to use it on anything, doubtfull though since I don’t even really like XP all that much)

So I will install it on my laptop, and chronicle what I have to do in order to get things done, with a check in every 2-3 days with a progress report.

The machine in question:

Compaq Presario V2608

AMD Sempron 3000+

1 GB of RAM (came with 512 megs)

80 GB hard disk

ATI Radeon Xpress 200m

Vista Capable (HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!)

The rules are as follows:

1. I will force myself to use Vista Home Premium and to hold back the vomiting urge, for everything I normally use my laptop for, from day 1-30, excluding games, which I use my Linux-based desktop for, including Wine for Windows games (It runs Halo and Oblivion almost flawlessly even), the Linux box is my gaming rig, and it will stay that way, Vista does not run my games as well as Wine+Linux.

2. I will use the utilities that come with Vista whenever possible, during the many times where Vista will prove inadequete (will be many), or I need to do things that Vista is incapable of by itself (including Office suite stuff), I will documentwhat I had to do to fix it, and what (if any) Microsoft alternative there would be if I wanted to pony up the cash.

3. I will leave Vista’s annoying security software enabled, and Avast antivirus on and updated, at the end of the month, I will download good antivirus software in trial mode, scan, and list all of the malware it finds.

4. I will install commonly used add-ons, even if they are adware, because they are popular with Windows users, whenever one gives me the choice to install spyware or not, I will use whatever the default setting is and let it continue, like most Windows users.

5. The experiment starts Monday, August 11.

6. For reference, Ubuntu runs like a champ on this system, even with Compiz Fusion running, I wonder how Vista and Aero will hold up…..(freeze, stutter, stutter, hard rest)

Think of this as an anti-Mojave Experiment, I already know Vista is bullshit, and I will merely confirm the facts.