Finding out what a Pentium 2 300MHz can do

In this ongoing section I will be putting myself to the test, when I have time, to find out what an old probably would have been thrown away by now computer can do. I will be fixing up a Pentium 2 300MHz, getting the most out of a severely old machine.

My first step was installing Linux, which failed the video adaptor is too old or is unsupported, the PCI video card was a S3 Trio64, looks to be prehistoric. I replaced it with some old, but not-as-old Matrox PCI card I found and all seems to be well. I loaded fedora 9 live CD, a fully featured opterating system with tons of apps on a single CD.

Ozone, EcoButton, and a new AMD Box for a nudist housewife aficionado

So a client of mine has an older (insert name of popular-mass-market consumer grade PC here) which unbenounced to his wife, he uses late at night to surf various online dating sites, coarse women to send him pictures in various stages of grotesqueness, and in turn get his jollies.
....Don't ask me how I know...
But pose as a nudist housewife on a certain personals site and your likely to get shaken down for some hot pix...

So I get a call from him complaining of smelling "OZONE" and not being able to start his computer he said: " I went to start my computer and I heard a pop and the thing smoked and I could smell OZONE!! So i turned it off but the power button didn't work." When I got there he asked me why there were two buttons on his machine, and I explained what a restart button does. Well to his dismay his power supply just happened to take a smoke-fuming pop of a dump and in a last-ditch effort to say "screw you cruel world", took the motherboard with it. Now I am building him a new PC and I thought I would take a moment to show you some interesting things I found.
The first point of interest is that AMD, the world's second biggest consumer-targeting company for Computer Processors, now gives you a free "ecobutton™" with certain processor models. So what the heck is an ecobutton™ you ask? Well this is straight from the souce, http://www.eco-button.com/usa :
"The ecobutton™ acts as a strong visual reminder and prompt for you to save electricity each time your computer is going to be left idle.

The ecobutton™ is illuminated and sits on your table/desk top next to your keyboard. It connects to your computer via a USB cable.

Each time you take a short or long break, a phone call, go for a meeting etc. you simply press the ecobutton™ and your computer is put into energy saving 'ecomode' which ensures that both your computer and monitor draw only the same nominal power as when they are shut down!"

So basically its a button that hooks up to the USB port and when you want to go into power-save mode you tap it. This is interesting, but only interesting its me in the way that I want this freebie to do something other than its intended to do.... I want to hack this. More to come on what I find out.

The Second interesting item of the day is when I purchased Memory for the PC I'm building, its a little different that the normal DDR2 DIMMs I've seen in the past. The RAM sticks are physically shorter, half the height of normal DIMMs check out he picture below:

It's interesting how everything keeps getting smaller, there are very few reasons to make the RAM smaller like this, Maybe to save on raw materials like the PCB board the chips are on or something. The only downside I can think of is maybe this will alter the heat dissipation since the chips are packed in closer, but for a consumer machine I doubt It will cause an issue. The model of this memory is Kingston valueRAM KVR800D2N6/1G
DDR2 800mhz PC2-6400 1GB
Kingston has a Lifetime Warrantee on all Memory.

Anyway Heres the setup for the computer:
Motherboard: Biostar K8M800 Micro AM2
CPU socket AM2, 2 Slots for DDR2 memory, Built-on LAN, Audio, Video. This is a really basic motherboard but from my experience Biostar despite the funny name makes really solid reliable motherboards.

Processor: AMD Athlon X2 2.5GHz Dual Core. This processor is cheap and really fast, while only sipping 65W and being really easy on the heat.

Memory: 2gb Kingston DDR2

Optical Drive: Samsung DVD burner

Hard Drive: 500GB western digital

Case: Cheapo

Power Supply: Coolmax 500W

This is a pretty solid setup for under $300 is you build it yourself, and shop the online stores for the parts.

More about Rouge Anti-Malware like XP Antivirus 2008

So there's a new threat in town plaguing the already helpless, downtrodden, and for the most part hopeless windows installations out there. Its fake anti virus software, tricking the ever-so gullible average Joe windows user, also lovingly refereed to as the sheep. You know the misguided who bought vista and has 4gb of ram yet still cant run more than IE and solitaire. The misinformed who clicks every single ad they see, and has so many toolbars in his or her Internet Explorer 6 that the browsing area is only usable for sites designed for mobile phones. The type that wonders if he really could benefit from a 3 more inches of manhood, and thinks someone named Chancellor Mobequo could legitimately be trying to retrieve his fathers trust fund. Yes those users...

Anyway the software is obtained by the user thinking its perfectly legit to let Windows media player download some random made-up codec to play the latest sketchy-as-all-crap video he found at whatever geocities-based erotic website he found at 3am. But oh no! This isn't a codec, its an executable that installs one of the most nightmarish things I've dealt with.
The program does this:

• Installs its self everywhere aka "shotgun install"

• Creates no less than 3 desktop shortcuts and like 10 systray icons

• Replaces your wallpaper with an image that looks like a window your can close (ever see a cat trying to catch a laser pointer? now imaging that with people trying to close this thing)

• Disables the service for changing wallpapers

• Replaces your screensaver with one that i kid you not looks like your system blue screening, with a new blue screen every time, and an animation of your system rebooting, complete with windows xp loading screen. (ought to win an emmy)

• Disables the service to change your screensaver

• Shows you a fake antivirus window that pretends to scan your hard drive, then finds numerous viruses and trojans you don't actually have and asks you to pay them to "upgrade" and remove the infections (all a scam)

So I bet your wondering how to nuke this creep right? Well its never that easy, every time I've encountered this infection the filenames are different which makes surgical removal impossible unless your use Autoruns to find each part. the other issue is no legit antivirus as of now even sees this thing or prevents it. You best bet is backing up all the settings, documents and anything else important on another computer and wiping the disk, then putting everything back on fresh. Sounds like a lazy way out but my rule is if it takes more than 45 minutes to fix and it has to do with infections that messed up windows system files, then its quicker and for the most-part guaranteed to work, to just restore windows.
Good luck out there.

More info and some tips to tackle this insanity.

Panda antivirus exception for pthreadVC2.dll

Today a client of mine informed me of an issue opening videos from his email, turns out he is recieving .3gp files ( video format used by mobile phones ) and every time he opens one in quicktime on windows xp quicktime gives an error message and he couldn't get it to close.
The error speaks of a missing file "pthreadVC2.dll ," I looked up the file and found very mixed conclusions, it seemed to be part of serveral applications that had to do with video playback, and also used by Apple's Safari browser newly made available for windows.

To make matters worse he had a new cheapo video camcorder (if you can even call it that) known as a Flip . The camcorder stores 30 minutes of video on flash memory and the software to download and edit the video is stored on, and run from the device. I can't say too much bad about this all-in-one device, its not pro-grade or even consumer grade, its low quality, cheap and made so anyone can use it. For people with very minimal computer knowledge this little gizmo is pretty fool-proof.
But Windows environments are all fool, and no proof, as you may come to understand the underlying message of these rants. Apparently the second major issue the client was having was using the flip camera at all, every time he plugged it in Panda antivirus warned him of imminent doom, and proceeded to try to delete the same pthreadVC2.dll as quicktime was missing from the flip video's flash storage. the Flip video's application is write protected so Panda threw a fit and crashed Explorer and also tried to halt the Flip video's applications from loading.

I saw a pattern.

Panda called pthreadVC2.dll, a "Rouge Anti-Malware " application, Rouge Antimalware is bad news, and lately I've delt with this crap every week.

---------The Learning Corner---------

• Malware is a all-encompassing term for any baddies that run on a windows system. Viruses, spyware, adware, toolbars, trojans and worms are all Mal-ware.

• Anti-Malware is what gets rid of the junk, .antivirus software such as Panda, Norton, McAfee, and others are all Anti-malware.

• But then what is Rouge AntiMalware? Its a program that pretends to be antivirus or anti-spyware but its really bad news. The most common Rouge AntiMalware our there is the dreaded "XP Antivirus 2008" this thing is nuts .... more on that later....

I know that Panda is misdiagnosing this issue, this dll file is used by safari, quicktime, and theis flip video camer, its not RougeAntimalware at all it just has the same dll filename as something far worse.
Nice thing about Panda is that exemptions are set-up extremely well and it was fairly easy to disable it from going insane every time this innocent dll tried to do its job.

Next step was to repair Quicktime, easier said that done. the Quicktime uninstaller has a repair feature, ran it and had the same issue. Next I tried uninstalling Quicktime completely using Revo Uninstaller, a great tool i always have on my flash drive.

-----Tech Tip----

• Revo Uninstaller identifies registry entries related to or created by the app your ditching, so you dont have to do the whole f3 - delete - enter dance, a few people might know what I mean... haha.

But anyway completely removing Quicktime and getting the latest installer from Apple's site almost did the trick, I also poped the pthreadVC2.dll in the same directory as quicktime.exe and things worked like a charm. Strange issue but maybe this can help someone else.

Powermac G5 Liquid cooled mini saga of frustration

If you ever encounter a G5 that wont start, I mean no lights no sound, push the button and literally nothing happens, not even the faint whimper os the system trying to gain power, the first step is to try opening it and pressing the pram reset button under the ram, if that doesn't work, the next step is to try a new pram battery, if that doesn't fix it its either the motherboard or the power supply. I have had a few clients with G3, G4,s and even G5s where pressing the PRAM reset fixes weird issues that could easily be mis-diagnosed and cost hundreds more for no reason.

Wiki says :"Non-volatile random access memory (NVRAM) is the general name used to describe any type of random access memory which does not lose its information when power is turned off. This is in contrast to the most common forms of random access memory today, DRAM and SRAM, which both require continual power in order to maintain their data. NVRAM is a subgroup of the more general class of non-volatile memory types, the difference being that NVRAM devices offer random access, like hard disks."

The PRAM or parameter ram is used to store system configurations for macs much like a BIOS does on an x86 machine.

Anyway enought lesson on PRAM. another way to erase, reset or "zap" the PRAM as mac geeks commonly say it is to hold Command-P-R at start-up, the computer needs to boot though, and this G5 was not.

Narrowed it down that the issue was the power supply, now if you fix computers a lot power supplies go out all the time, my most common hardware issue, the second being motherboards. Common reasons for a power supply to go out are dust clogging and slowing down fans causeing overheating, capacitor explosions, power surge, and wear and tear (old age). After doing some research on the model of G5 I was up against I found out it was a Liquid-cooled November 2004 2.5ghz dual-processor G5 model. By using WeLoveMacs.com as a resource I narrowed it down by finding it was the only dual 2.5ghz G5 made in 2004 (the date stamped on the logic board).
Becasue of the nature of macs, the power supply was engineered to be long and flat at the bottom of the case, and because of the design and unique cable pin out the 600watt would-be no hassle to the wallet part costs about $300 after shipping and tax.....

Heres a resource to find dissasimbl directions for the liquid cooled G5's cause it took me about an hour to track down anything decent,

Outlook Express repair

A client of mine was having issues with Outlook Express crashing and there were not any new updates available for the software at the time so I did some searching on Google and found a Micro$oft help document that describes several ways to alleviate common outlook express glitches and what it constantly refers to as "funny" behavior.
Amusing as Microsoft software can be, the client was not having an easy time with her mail client of choice, albeit a terrible one, crashing and loosing responsiveness right and left.
I tried a few of the tips on the guide and things seemed almost 20 times faster after compressing the in boxes.
There were also many run-prompt fixes for refreshing important registry entries, not sure what good that did but it couldn't hurt to repair the install.

Just like every other MS app or OS you have to clean it up , and guide it along like a lost child with his face and eyes covered in a thick honey, and hands firmly glued to to the bottoms of his feet. Or just trip the poor bastard and laugh like your at the Mich Hedbergh show because you have a Mac and despite your job fixing the microsoft mis fortunate, error messages and crashes are a foreign tongue that you'd never care to learn except the few broken phrases required to order some tacos.

Anyway, heres the link
go fix some Outlook express, or better yet just get Thunderbird for windows, or better yet use web-based mail, or better yet....
...use Linux or better yet Buy a Macintosh.
The End.

So one of my customers calls me while I'm going to the bank with my girlfriend. She is an older lady who I've built a PC for and fixed several things for in the past. She is complaining of an issue where her email causes her computers to crash. I figure out from her talking that she is using web-based email, but she seems unsure of what site she even goes to or even what browser she is using. I ask:

"what browser are you using ma'am?"

she replies:

"Well my son uses Google, but I like to use yahoo."

I try to hold it together, and I ask again

" does your window say Firefox, or Internet explorer on the top bar?"

she immediately begins to read off ever word for each button on the what I'm guessing are several tool bars

"google toolbar, Google earth, yahoo games..."

I politely stop her to prevent this from taking all day.

"ma'am can you go down tot he start menu please, and read me the name of the first icon at the top left."

She opens the start menu,

"Okaaay... looks like I have 'connect to the internet'..."

she keeps reading down the list of recent programs and I cant stop her she completes the entire list of all the spy ware games she was recently used. Eventually I just get fed up and ask if its okay if I just make an appointment to come out the next day and switch her favorites over into Firefox so she wont have these problems because as most people know IE sucks.

A couple of my clients have had trouble with Firefox 3.0.3 crashing when they try to print, I haven;t found a solid fix yet but backtracking them to Firefox 2.0 seemed to do the trick. So now I always keep both 2 and 3 installers on my flash drive.

Download Firefox 2 installer
Download Latest Firefox installer