TruXter Tech News

McAfee sold to Intel for $7.68.
These are two companies I do not like. They are the center of everything bundled with crummy computers. They are the generic item that everyone gets with their new “outa the box” machine. And since so many people have these two, everyone assumes they are the best. ” More people buy Intel than AMD so it must be better” . Well no it’s bundled more often because it’s mass production junk.
Think about it, more people in the world shop at wally mart…………. Why? because it’s there. and convenient.
Mcafee is bundled in everything you buy.
Remember when AOL disks showed up in your mail on a weekly basis? People actually installed it years after broadband became common.
Mcafee calls it’s self an “antivirus” truth is, there is no such thing. There is just software that tell you when you have an active virus on your computer… The virus scanner installs it’s self so deep that you the computer owner can’t unintsall it. So most virus programs are written to attach themselves to the “antivirus program”. This in turn causes the “antivirus” to ignore the virus, because removal of the virus would be suicidal for the antivirus. So let’s just call it a “virus alerter”.

This merger/sell is just a nice way to get all the garbage in one spot.

Now I have to go use a-squared to remove 1829 trojans off of my bosses computer. Neat how symantec 360 has only detected (or notified me of ) one virus while 1728 variations of the virus are directly attached to symantec.

Noticed this at work the other day.

Now if you go to cmd and type in explorer.exe it pops open windows explorer. for ever that has been the trick to get your task bar back. now it does not. It just opens windows explorer. so if you get a crash and lose your taskbar, you must reboot. Or figgure out what in the heck the taskbar is now called.

I assume this is a follow up to removing the progman.exe functionality.

See my trick for ever was to change my start up and replace the registry line from startup/explorer.exe to startup/progman.exe.

This reduced teh amount of resources my machine used, back the day when windows ran like crap and computer parts where crap.

This is teh same on xp sp3 , windows vista, and windows 7

I have no idea when or how this all came about. but i noticed it at work while over a span of 4 days I had different co-workers come to me and say “hey I lost my taskbar” we had to reboot them all one by one to get the task bar back. because typing explorer.ese solved nothing.  it’s like an auto update or a strange mass virus ?  I feel like I am being tamed by m$

Finally enough time to actually do reviews. There is now a tech review section of the site created specifically for budget tech. From imitation components, to budget makes and models.

See it’s as if 99% of review sites out there do the high dollar high interest  stuff. For some of us that means “dream stuff”. well this site has a whole section for the budget shopper.

you will most likely not see reviews of the 9800 video card, but you will see a review of the 9500,9400 and so on. If the best video card costs $400, you will see reviews of the $59 video card, tricks that the High end video cards barely use and how to make your budget card just as good as the $400 video card.

Inexpensive cell phones, old used cell phones found on Ebay and craigs list and so on. I call them “GEMS”. The ones that everyone owned a year ago and hacked and modified so much you could almost not tell it was the same one, The site will show you how.

Do not worry, the news section (this section) will still have tech news. All news here, all budget review and budget tricks will be found on

Budget Tech Reviews and tips

You are all welcome to visit.

Yep this also happened to me. While at work. AT WORK !!! sorry had to say it like it is supposed to be said, yelling.
Now at my job, I am not “The Tech Guy”. I am the drawings and images guy. I mean I know plenty, but they already have a “resident nerd” and well, he is pretty good at it. So by my wandering around on the internet doing things “my way” and stumbling into an ” Oh dang!” moment isn’t the best thing for my career. First warning was ” Microsoft is ready to install Explorer 8″ Yep you guessed it, I installed it . Not thinking one time that I was on Firefox the whole time.
Ok I started with the on board Symantec end point. It caught either 8 viruses , or the same virus kept trying to rescue it’s self. lol I have no idea, I was panicking and hurrying , I saw the word ” Trojan” in the pop up warning from Symantec, and freaked out. I decide I better go check Windows update site and see if I ever downloaded Internet Explorer 8, The page would not load, I run to another computer on the network and all is fine, I head back to mine, still nothing. So I headed to the first place I could think of. Bitdefender’s online malware scan. It never lets me down. Well this time it surely did. I take it up a notch and head to “Malware Bytes” and start doing a search in Google and search the term “windows update takes me to Google” and started reading all the people praying and begging for help. The ever so faithful “tech guy forums” turned up an unanswered request for help, wow that was surprising. After about 45 minutes of reading, I find nothing (well I actually found the right thing but over looked it like 10 times) and malware bytes is done scanning, It found nothing, nothing at all, I try and update it, will not let me, along with anything else I tried to scan with.
So now I break out A-squared, not the worst thing in the line up for sure, but it did not find anything either. Ok now I am feeling like I am losing my mind. Well as this is going on I am still reading threads in forums about the issue. I go back to this thread . The first link in the first and only response, well tried that. Second link I click it it takes me to Super AntiSpyware. First thought is ” Well crap, this place looks like it’s just going to make the issue worse. I figured that it really couldn’t get much worse if I scan the file first. So I wander off to the download area for the free version. All was fine until I get to the point that I actually try and download it. Another dead link.. “hmmm, the link is dead, it is blocked, it must be what I need” is exactly what I thought. Ok also another thing about that name, just kept making me think about power rangers. It really sounded like the slogan from some kid’s show “super anti-spyware free trial go team action go!!!” is what I kept saying and giggling.
I walked over to another one of the computers in the office and download the file and slip it onto an open space on the server.
Walk back to my computer and here comes the I.T. guy, just in time. I let him fumble through it like I did. He made a lot of the assumptions I did at first, I walked away to the store next to the office and get a soda while he does exactly what I did. I get back into the office and there he is, lol just like me.. Reading the forum posts for a second time. We agreed that super action malware scanner was the way to go. Well we install it while Spybot S&D or something was finishing it’s scan.
We reboot to safe mode administration by pressing F8 after the bios scan, just before the windows logo. Yes I was just sitting there hitting the F8 button repeatedly till I got the boot menu.
In administration mode we ran the quick scan. Within seconds it finds 3 Trojans and a dns changer, by the end of the scan Super AntiSpyware found two root-kits and two registry key modifications.
We rebooted after the scan and checked to see if Microsoft Windows Update worked, all was fine but still could not update any of the virus scanners. So we reboot to safe mode administrator, and do the full scan. Nothing came up.

So far not all of the issues are resolved, I will go through my “hosts” file and see if there are any changes there. Probably not but hopefully there are. I know how to change that. and I will add the link that I got the file from in the first place to the list of blocked sites. I may even email a heads up to the guys from mvp’s hosts file website (google it).
This is the help I have for you. I hope it works for you. Heck I’m going to run that goofy named program on my home pc now and see what it finds. http://www.superantispyware.com/
Hope it helps you get un-hijacked. I promise that program actually works, just the name is stupid and their web designer is cheesy.

Also that “Google” page I kept getting redirected to was not regular google. it was an affiliate page. Google English. So the freak was making money off of each search we did while we tried to resolve the issue.  Google needs to ban that account.

Ok for starts,

I did do a big full test of windows seven at work on a machine and threw everything at it that makes vista and xp crash. the version we used for that test is windows 7 32 bit, here is  Windows & in Workplace Environment.

I have to say that anyone who preaches on about 7 being better than windows Vista, You really did not even try both with an open mind. I like vista, Seven is not impressing me at all. All the stuff about vista I heard everyone complain about but never noticed myself, I am seeing it in Windows 7. I think by now it’s just common enough to blame everything on George Bush and Windows vista, it’s the first two things out someone’s mouth. But ok here is what I get in the trial at home on  windows 7 64bit.

Well I am on day two of windows 7. The default drivers it installed, amazed me, almost as much as windows vista did. Video card drivers, not so much. I am forced to use almost one year old nvidia drivers. Fine.
For the record, my machine is a mid way between work horse and light gaming machine, nothing to brag about in either direction.
Specs are
AMD 5600+ 2.9g dc
3 gigs pc6400 800mhz
Nvidia / evga 9500 gt 512 mb
some ecs motherboard
air cooled.

Well the video drivers have been iffy on me and would not let me use the manufacturers drivers. This has always been my special sweet spot, using EVGA drivers instead of nvidia drivers has always givin me a cooled advantage. but no, win 7 rc is forcing me to use the ones they have from the update service at Microsoft, if I install anything else I look at 8 bit graphics at best.

Well I tend to do my benchmarking at pc pitstop.com (full test) . to say the least, my scores drop dramatically over my vista scores. I usually use the old test , it’s hard to find but it’s there it’s a link in the description kinda hidden there. my scores have been i the 3000′s for about a year now. With windows seven they dropped to 1500. strangely it shows my 2d fps increased by nearly 100 fps. Well that’s cool…..
So I turn to my faithful typical benchmarking methods of real testing. :-)
I crack open every version of Grand Theft Auto and install them all.
On gtaiii I get the same hesitation I used to get about 6 years ago. While passing under bridges and through tree covered areas there is a lag that comes in spurts. with vice city, the yellow almost takes over the screen and the cut scenes are jittery just like it was the day the game came out and I was on out dated hardware. San Andreas, well not much better.
GTAIV For me to achieve the 23 FPS at best in game I had to turn everything off or all the way down. When I was on Vista I was seeing 35+ FPS with some things turned to medium. Yes I know my video card is not the best in the world, but it was the same one I was using on windows Vista and it makes a great “before and after” comparison.

Now for the lock out issues everyone complains about with windows Vista.
I head to MVPS Hosts site to update my hosts file to block bad sites and advertisements. Nothing fricken happened. Wouldn’t block anything, So I head to the ETC folder to modify the file by hand. HA! No administrator rights to modify that file. Meanwhile in the background I am playing myspace mobsters. I refresh a page and bam new advertisement, all my browsers drop and fricken notice comes up telling me my computer might be compromised, and it offers this virus scan. then it scans my computer anyway and says I have a virus then tells me to update. I freak out and try and close the page and notice, it’s not windows explorer, it’s Mozilla. it’s a fricken spam scam. See if I could have changed my hosts file, that never would have happened. so I head to bit defender to scan my disk onlline. would not allow me!!!!!! WTF!!!!!
So I head to emsi and get a-squared and do a scan, sure enough… I am infected with 4 types of Trojans. I am upset now.

The hardest thing for me to find, I still have not found it yet, is how in the blue hell do you turn it so that you can see your file extensions? Have they disabled so much user ability that they have turned that off? I feel as if I am being dumbed down and pacified with big shiny buttons.
You can like windows seven all you want, but I really have this whole thing figured out.
Either it’s going to turn out to be Mojave, or windows ME 2.0

still the same issue with Windows Seven that bothered me most with Windows Vista , No Ftp. You have to download Fire FTP for firefox and use that . You no longer have direct access with windows Explorer.  I find this unacceptable. It really feels like we are being dumbed down.

After some help, someone linked me to how to use notepad as administrator to modify files such as the hosts file
Here

Well the big Selling point of Bing is that you can ask direct questions.

So i had my very first question to ask bing.

We got a file today, labeled with a .mso extension. Email opens it fine, but once out of email I have no idea hat to open it with, so i turned to bing with a question. “what is .mso” . Number one answer is “Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra”.

Didn’t like that answer at all lol. So I look deeper. Nothing identifies the use of the period/point mark showing that was not an abbreviation, but it was a file extension. Nothing for pages. So I tried a few simple ones. Sure that was fine and dandy, but why show me the simple ones but not the hard ones??

so I did the same search in google. Top answer was the same but in like the 8th  spot, there it was.

Sure it’s more difficult to locate things in Google sometimes, unless you know the tricks for locating specific details. like plus minus quote and so on.

My opinion, Bing is still being developed into a blue version of yahoo search and is not ready yet for competing with anyone other than old msn search.

The whole pop up description thing is anoying

Bing= but it’s not google!!!???….(with a sad face)

Ok the simple skinny break down.

China decides that it will crank down harder on it’s people’s internet usage by mandating an installed software  that allows the government to snoop and monitor people’s usage.

Looks like everyone is hard at proving that the software can be reverse engineered and then software can be created to manipulate the usage of said software for malicious use, or theft. Yes the software is meant for a filtering system , to reduce the people of china from seeing specific things, but it also is set for checking and double checking for modifications.  Let’s call this a true

Zero Day Notification.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8094026.stm

Day 2
Auto desk did not install directly, had to do sp2 update for autodesk/ autocad 2007
video card is an 5200 pci-e Nvidia bfg.
Scrolling within Autocad is smooth, no hesitation as my dell computer with 8500 pci video card seems to lag and work in spurts.

Printing with Autocad to the Ricoh Aficio m wp2400, came out very well.
line weights  fine, antialliasing is fine and smooth

directory mapping via cross network is the same.

switching through desktops and backgrounds, umm.. these people.. um to be nice and prevent my sponsors from dropping me
let’s say the people who made the themes, lived in the sixties, and chewed on small peices of paper, and or plants that
grew on cow dung.. these desk tops are weird!!

ESC 9  installed fine, no patches needed, no updates needed.
Peach Tree 2010 install.
Error notice was “there was an error”  gives a phone number.
We continued install anyway.
Got notice “change firewall” and “change virus scan”
We just selected “um Ok”
Setup status is fine. looks like 30-45 minutes.

install of peachtree 2010 on windows 7 is faster than peachtree 2009 on xp.

Had error with “Crystal reports” failed to execute the install/setup  file.

Peach Tree installed, but when we started to run it, and sign in to the peachtree server, it said “not compatible with current version of esc” well that blew all the earlier great goings. Now we are updating Esc. For now there is no update for ESC9  to comply with Peach Tree 10

Windows 7, Day one of the workplace testing.

Day 4 Testing Windows 7 at work

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=2727

rumor is July. Also to ship is server 2008 R2.
Counting on the update.

Let’s hope it handles network printers a bit better.

It’s official, Comcast is crippling us in a crippling time.
During a time when we all need something to stay the same, Comcast is deciding to come up with a way to charge us more for stuff we are into. I mean, get addicted to smoking, they tax you, get addicted to internet activity, comcast buys out all providers and then sets a limit and charges for excess.
Ok enough with the rant before I let my real emotions loose.
Has anyone considered what this would do to cloud computing? we are considering CC here at the office I work at. We have well over 500 gb of important every day files that we access. even if we only touch about 4 gb of actual files a day, you have to picture 30 of us checking updates and status of each file. first we transfer to our pc so we can look t it, make changes as we need and re-upload it.
That 4 gigs of file getting transferred probably about 50 times a day, we would break our cap within a week.
I know , “Cloud Computing in an office ?” but you have to see that we have grown large and do not want to mess with our servers and do not want to have to worry about who is going to myspace or facebook while at work, we don’t want people’s computers getting a virus anymore. We wanna pay someone else to worry about all the tiny tweaks and just let us do our jobs.
Looks like comcast is making that a harder idea to see.

Dsl does not go that fast. There really is no option .