Tag: Computing

I’ve spent each weekend for a couple of weeks now trying to get my new Samsung RF711 laptop set up to use a solid-state drive (SSD).  It has been an experience of unmitigated pain.  Today is gone, and nothing to show for it.

Not that this is the fault of Samsung.  Their kit works well, and the easily accessible hard disk bays are wonderful.  It’s quite simply that setting up any hard disk to work with Windows and boot the Samsung Recovery Solution from the F4 menu is strictly for people with plenty of time.  Which is not me.  It’s strictly for people with day after day on their hands.

I’ve found a link here and here which helped.  The problem is getting the wretched Samsung recovery partition created correctly. 

My current approach has required a lot of disk swapping.  You also need to create an admin USB  key drive.  Unless yours is 32GB, tho, it won’t be big enough.

The best way to do this is to start with the original hard disk in its original bay, and the SSD in the spare bay.  If Paragon will create your recovery partition (it did the first time I used it, not today) then all you need to do is to remove the hard disk, restart with a USB stick and use it to fix the MBR on the SSD so that the recovery solution will run from your new recovery partition.  Restart and you are done.

What I had to do was create a partition at the end of the drive using normal tools, and format it and assign it a letter (G:).  Then boot from the stick, and copy the Z: drive using robocopy to the G: drive in the DOS box under the hidden menu.  Then reboot from the stick, and use the new menu to fix the MBR.  Then boot and check F4 takes you into the recovery; and then you can delete the other partitions (not your G: drive!) and do a complete restore, and reboot, and … you’re done.  Phew.

It’s brain-teasing stuff the first time you see it, really it is.

What I have decided to do is keep the original HDD in a bag somewhere, and instead just fit a new HDD as my data store.  So I can always go back to factory settings that way.

Mind you, having Windows on an SSD does mean that it boots incredibly fast.  Booting from the HDD was utterly turgid.

Manufacturers need to stop supplying HDD for Windows, and supply an SSD main drive with ancillary hard drive.

Well, it seems that I spoke too soon.  Once I started to fiddle with the disk drives, everything stopped working!  And you can’t get it back very easily either.

Several hours of reinstalling and rebuilding now …

A week ago I accidentally installed what I believe to be malware on my main PC, a Sony Laptop.  I uninstalled it at once, and scanned for malware using Kaspersky, but the damage was done.  Kaspersky could find no indication of malware.  But there is no reason why anyone would camouflage an installer as a PDF inside a self-extracting zip, other than to install something malicious.  So I must presume that the machine is tainted.  I use this machine for my online banking, so I don’t dare connect it to the web.  Since I don’t know what has been done to it, I can’t trust it.   It’s cheaper to buy a new machine, than to risk identity theft.  And I had noticed that the disks on the old machine tended to squeal a bit after the machine got hot, which I didn’t like.

So last week I purchased a new Samsung RF711 laptop.  Yesterday I unpacked this and began the process of setting it up.

I also bought a 256 Gb Samsung solid-state drive.  These are much faster than hard disks, and, if you use one of these as your primary drive, and put Windows on it, Windows loads very much faster, as this page informed me.  The Samsung came with an empty hard drive bay and a fitting kit.  Time was, when fiddling with hard disks could destroy your laptop.  But clearly Samsung expect you to.

Here’s what I did.

1. I started the machine as per instructions, and ran through the Windows 7 start up.
2. I shut down the machine, removed the battery and power cable.
3. I took the SSD out of its package (it comes with instructions), and opened the fitting kit from the laptop.  The latter consisted of a bracket, a cable, and some screws.  There were two sizes of screw: 4 short ones, to hold the drive into the bracket; and 4 long ones, to hold the bracket to the laptop.
4. I screwed the drive into the bracket.  Then I fitted the cable onto the drive (it can only go in one way) and the other end onto the laptop (which could go two ways, so be a bit careful – the correct way is the same way up as the other drive).
5. Then I screwed the drive into position, thankfully without losing any screws.
6. I refitted the battery and power, and fired it up.  The PC started normally, but I couldn’t see the new drive in Windows explorer.
7. Then I bought and downloaded a copy of Paragon Migrate OS to SSD 2.0 ($19.95), installed it and ran it.  This was very simple, could see the new drive, and just copied the C: drive to it (including the recovery partition, I later discovered).
8. I then shut the machine down completely, and restarted.  The Samsung comes up with a logo and a menu at the bottom, F2 for BIOS, F4 for recovery.  In the Bios I changed the boot order, so that it booted from my new drive.
9. Save, exit, restart and … Windows 7 started, and was completely booted in 9 seconds.  Wow!

One problem that I have found is that the drive letters get a bit messed up.  However you can correct this, I believe (haven’t done it yet).

At the moment I am engaged in copying all my backed up files to a new external hard drive (I always have two), and getting the machine set up the way that I want it.  Tedious, but inevitable.

The backup is about a week out of date.  So I will need to look at the tainted machine, work out what I did, and repeat that on the new machine.

The Samsung did not come with oceans of rubbish pre-installed, which was welcome.  It’s very generic; not nearly as nice as the Sony was; but the internal 1Tb drive will be very welcome!

UPDATE: It all went rather horribly wrong later, tho — see subsequent posts.

I’ve found a number of articles online which seem to contain useful security advice.

• How Not to Become Mat Honan: A Short Primer on Online Security
• How to secure your Wifi while travelling
• Traverse corporate firewalls

All tedious stuff that I’d better read carefully.

I’ve managed to install some malware.  Oh bother.

It’s something any of us might do.  I was accessing a site which was offering the download of a book.  The link took me to a site called “blitzdownload.com”, which downloaded an exe called “<book title>.exe”.  Naturally I presumed that the thing was an executable zip. 

So I double-clicked on it, and up popped a message asking if it was OK to allow the programme to modify my computer.   Of course a zip wouldn’t do this; but I was tired, and I see that message far too often.  So I said yes.

And gradually I realised that the thing was trying to install this, and that, and the other.  I cancelled out.  But the Windows Start Menu still showed something — some sort of downloader — had been installed.

So I deinstalled it.  But of course, who knows what else it might have done. 

I started Kaspersky and checked for boot-sector viruses, and it showed nothing.  But … if it’s really a trojan — and it clearly is bogus in some way, because why else would it hide its nature? — then it may have interfered with Kaspersky.

OK, well let’s just go back to the previous system restore point.  I fire this up, make the request and … after lots of churning, it gives an error.  I try the previous restore point — same problem.

But when I restart I find that the rollback has at least partially taken effect.  The main effect is that my Kaspersky now won’t start properly.  Nor will it fix itself.  When I try a reinstall it warns I may have a virus. 

And so on it goes.  I will spare you a blow-by-blow account.  Yet here we are, hours and hours lost, struggling, while tired, just to make sure my PC isn’t about to email my bank details to fraudsters.  I don’t dare NOT do so… and yet the recovery process is so very, very fraught.

No wonder so many PC’s are infected.  Trying to make sure that yours is not, after something commonplace like this, exhausts the soul.

Wish me luck!

Most web space these days comes with the PHP language, usually running on the Apache webserver, with the MySql database.  When developing scripts of one’s own, ideally one replicates this on the PC.  But frankly, installing all this stuff is a faff.

This week I came across the Wampserver package.  This allows you to install all three items in one go, and has a single menu to start (and stop) the lot.  It doesn’t install a load of things that you then have to manually disable, and it just works out of the box fine.

I’ve used Notepad++ for most such scripting, but this is rather underpowered.  Instead I have been using lately Eclipse for PHP, the PDP development tools (PDT) version.  This likewise works well.  If you are a Java developer, with an Eclipse setup, you can relax — it unzips to a different directory, and doesn’t interfere at all.  You can run, thus, two different versions of Eclipse quite happily.

For unit testing I’ve been using SimpleTest.  You get the software and unzip to a directory on your C: drive.  There is an obsolete eclipse plugin for this — which no longer works and ought to be updated.  But you can run SimpleTest just fine in eclipse anyway, using the following instructions:

1. download and install SimpleTest.
2. put a require_once('autorun.php'); at the top of the test file.

   note: this requires the SimpleTest directory containing autorun.php to be in your include_path. alternatively, you can include autorun.php by full path, like require_once('C:/full/path/to/your/Simpletest/autorun.php');. it might even be possible not having to change the test file by including autorun.php via auto_prepend_file.

3. run the test by right clicking on the test file and select “Run As PHP Script”
4. the output from the testing shows up in the eclipse console

Although in my case it doesn’t show up in the console, but as a web page, so long as Wamp has been started.

Microsoft do make some rubbish software, don’t they!

This evening I sat down to work with the new Mithras pages that I am working on.  This involves running a little web server on my PC, so that I can run some PHP scripts.

Last weekend I installed (with some difficulty) IIS, FastCGI and PHP on my Windows7 box.  This evening I fired it up again … and it didn’t work.  Permissions problems, you see.

You do not have permission to view this directory or page because of the access control list (ACL) configuration or encryption settings for this resource on the Web server

What?

Now this is me, on my personal PC.  I trust me.  I am happy with anything I want to do.  I am administrator, even.  So … permissions problems?  And why now?  Why is this a new problem?

The error message gives me no idea what the problem is, and less what to do about it.  I open the management console for IIS, and am presented with a baffling array of options.

After half an hour and much Google searching, I stumble across this, which gives the answer.  I change the permissions on the home directory, add a user IUSR (why doesn’t IIS do this?) and another Everyone (ditto) and give both full control, and everything suddenly works.  But I am now too frazzled to do what I originally had in mind.

A web server is the simplest of objects.  All it does is listen on a port, and, when you ask for a .htm file, send it down the pipe.  That’s it.  That is the function that it performs 90% of the time. 

All the rest is minority activity.  We call these “edge cases”, in computing speak.  90% of the user cases is “copy file to port”.  The rest is used much less.

Yet Microsoft have produced a piece of software that fought for half an hour with a highly technical user who simply want to serve up pages to himself on his own PC.  WHY??? 

Of course the reason is obvious.  The developers have added functionality, and added it, and added it and added it until the thing has become a monster.  You could probably connect my PC to the web and run a full-fledged server on it now.  But … I don’t want or need any of that.  I just want to display some html and run some PHP scripts.  Like most people do, most of the time, who start up a web server on their own PC.

Microsoft are very prone to this problem; to lose the main user case in catering to edge cases. 

Idiots.

I’ve spent some time messing around with perl yesterday and today.  I’ve been trying to find a way that I can edit a page using FrontPage — my usual HTML editor — and do footnotes inline, using <ref>…</ref> tags, just as if I were in Wikipedia.  A perl script then reads the file, strips out the references, inserts a [1], [2], and dumps all the footnotes at the end. 

It’s sort of working.  It’s not that complex a script, although if I didn’t hate perl so much it would probably be done by now.  The language always fights you, unless you immerse yourself in it, which of course occasional users like myself never do.

It still needs a bit of work, tho.