Eugene's observations

I keep getting a steady trickle of e-mails from well intentioned folk who think they are doing the community a service by forwarding a warning e-mail they received, to all in their address book. The warnings are usually along the lines of a virus is circulating the Internet so whatever you do, avoid opening any mail containing the words xxxxxx and send this on to anyone you know.

If you receive such a warning I suggest you ignore it. If you feel you must, reply to the sender (making sure not to include all in the CC list) informing them that they have probably been caught in a scam or hoax and they should read this blog post.

Let's suppose that I created a bogus story about a virus just released onto the Internet and forwarded it to 100 people in my address book (not an untypical number of contacts to hold), and half of those were suckered into following my desperate plea to thwart the evil doers and forward the warning to 100 people in their address book. Then in just two cycles, 100 + (50 * 100) = 5,100 people would have received the bogus mail.

Two minutes later half of those 5,100 recipients followed instructions and sent to 100 people in their address book. Now 230,100 people have received the junk mail. Next time round 11.5 million addresses have been spammed and already the mail servers are slowing down. It is apparent that within a very short time the Internet is becoming swamped by worthless words, congestion is increasing, disk space is filling, bandwidth is being wasted and everyone's performance is suffering.

Anyone who maintains a current anti-virus product and takes other sensible precautions such as

• installing Windows security updates when they become available and
• using a browser other than Internet Explorer and
• not running programs e-mailed by strangers and
• Following Eugene's housekeeping suggestions

will be protected from 99.9% of viruses already.

If you're tempted to spread the word, please check the bone fides of the story first by visiting sites such as

http://www.symantec.com/business/security_response/threatexplorer/risks/hoaxes.jsp
http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/internet/u/current_netlore.htm
http://tafkac.org/ulz/
http://www.hoax-slayer.com/
http://www.hoaxbuster.net/

Link: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936330

I have just installed Windows Vista SP1 for the first time. It is now available via Windows Update although not automatically installed unless Microsoft determine that all your drivers are in a state that they will not cause you a problem with SP1 installed. I can vouch for the desirability of this as I downloaded anyway and the only change I noticed after it installed was that it had disabled the graphics card. I had to obtain the latest drivers from the manufacturer and install them before I could get a decent looking screen back.

To avoid this type of problem in some situations it may be worth running a program that copies all drivers on your system to a My Drivers folder before you start. Then, if there is a later problem, it is easy to restore from the backup copy you made. The program I used for this - DriverMax, is freely available from
http://www.innovative-sol.com/drivermax/index.htm

Find out what is in SP1 by visiting here.

All of a sudden I now know of three systems that hang (apparently stop doing anything) at powerdown time. Note that this is after the 'Windows is logging off...' and 'Saving your settings...' messages (otherwise it would be a shutdown problem). If you see the 'Windows is shutting down...' message and hear no activity coming form the hard disk drive, and see no flashing LEDs, then you must press the big button on your computer (the one you normally use to switch the PC on) for more than 4 seconds to abruptly shut off the power. Next time you restart the PC be sure to rectify any disk problems by running a 3 phase CHKDSK (in Windows Explorer, right click the drive and select 'properties', tools tab, 'Check now' and select the first checkbox only [Automatically fix file system errors]).

There are countless possible causes of this problem. I wonder if a recent (perhaps automatically applied) Windows or driver patch has caused this. System Restore should be able to help undo this if necessary.

Of the myriad potential causes of this, just one is easily diagnosed. It is a registry setting that sometimes gets corrupted. As the registry is such a dangerous place, the suggested way of making sure that the appropriate setting is correct is to download then merge (by double clicking) the following file:
http://www.1computercare.co.uk/PowerdownAfterShutdown.reg

Another good to do thing would be to investigate the event logs and see if a problem reported there can be located and resolved. Device manager too may provide a pointer.

Also, try looking at log files left as a result of following the advice at http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=837115

Beyond that, there is a (possibly outdated) useful list of suggestions at http://www.aumha.org/win4/a/shutdown.htm

Another approach is to assume that as a common cause is faulty services (often video drivers), a clean boot should be done and each service readded individually. A very time consumning process explained at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929135

I was shocked recently to read just how much running my PC is costing me in electricity bills. It was calculated that for a regular PC comprising a 3.5GHz CPU, 120GB disk, 1GB RAM with common peripherals and programs between £80 and £100 a year was used by running the PC for 8 hours a day.

Windows Vista running on modern hardware, especially when sleeping, is much more efficient than XP on older components, but that still adds up to more than I had expected. So I shall continue to leave the screen saver disabled on new PCs I supply, and continue to set the power adjustments so that the monitor is powered down after a few minutes of inactivity.

Sleeping (where the machine is on reduced power holding the current state of the PC in volatile memory) and hibernating (where the machine is on reduced power having saved the current state of the PC to the disk) remain good to enable automatically after, say, 1 and 2 hours of idleness.

Powering the PC off (shutting down) is the best way to a greener planet.