My HP machine running Vista: Can you perform a clean install using “upgrade” licensed media. Yes you can. After backing up my Vista PC, I booted from the Windows7 disk and ran a clean install. The only part that caused me any “problems” was the new Windows 7 version of FDISK. FDISK was the old DOS utility that was using to create and setup partitions to your hard drive. Even Windows XP’s setup routine used many of the same nomenclature used in FDISK. Well, Windows 7 has a new way of expressing this information that was unclear to me. I had a second computer handy to refer to a couple of websites to help me through this. Beyond that, installing Windows 7 was easy and very fast. A few questions about your time zone, username, how your computer is hooked up to a network…and bam, next thing you know you’re looking at a Windows 7 desktop. I was left picking up my jaw as I discovered that I was done. Everything (drivers) on my HP was correctly setup and running. The whole process took less than 30 minutes. (of course installing and setting up your apps is another story). Still, wow.

The other PC I setup with Windows7 was an old Toshiba laptop. This was a hand me down PC that didn’t have the original OS media, so over the years, I couldn’t reinstall the OS even I wanted to. After running the Windows 7 upgrade advisor, I figured I could install Windows 7 (minus Aero support), or go out and find and buy a Windows XP license – I went with Windows 7.

The installation on the laptop went just as smoothly as the desktop. To take a line from Apple – it just worked. Does Windows 7 perform better on this old PC? Hard to say. Compared to what it was (5 minutes to boot!), it was a huge improvement. But maybe a clean install of XP would have yielded even better performance.

To contrast the Windows 7 experience, I recently decided to reinstall Windows XP on one of my work PCs that was kind of dragging. Even with all the factory (Dell) disks, installing a fresh copy of XP is not for the novice to take lightly. Once booted into the clean install of XP, I had to manually identify and install drivers for the network card (yes, no NIC support), video card, sound card, phone modem, USB ports…pretty much everything had to be installed after the OS. If you didn’t know the individual components installed in your PC, good luck hunting down the drivers. Anyway, hats off to Microsoft for making some huge strides with Windows 7’s installation routine and bundled drivers.

So far using Windows 7 has been great. No complaints at all, and lots of pleasant surprises along the way.

My executive summary of my experience for anyone taking the upgrade leap: 1) backup everything, 2) research the upgrade process, 3) document your customizations so you can duplicate them, and 4) don’t start at 1:00 in the morning!

Of those four points, I was careful about the first – I did a full backup of my site AND backend database. I failed on the other three. Result? By 2:00 am I had totally hosed my website. Oh Sh@!%*! But because I had been careful about my backups, by 3:00 I was back to an operating website on Wordpress 2.1.

Where did I go wrong? My primary mistake was not fully preparing for the really minor customizations I had made to the core Wordpress files sooo many years ago. Without making those simple changes in my new install of Wordpress, I had broken the relationship between the software and my database.

After getting handle on these customizations, and tried the upgrade process again and am happy to report that it was pain free. It pays to be prepared. My thoughts on 2.7? From the short time I’ve spent with it so far, it looks like a worthy upgrade…but a full review, well, that’s another story.

First a little of my background. My father brought home our first electronic game back in the 70’s…you know, Pong. Next in my life came the Atari 2600 console, Commodore 64 (remember King’s Quest) and our Apple II. In the late 80’s through the 90’s along came the truly modern game consoles (in addition to good PC games); I had a Nintendo NES, then the SuperNES, Sega Genesis, Sony Playstation 1 (PS1). By the time the PS2 came along, I was already to a point in my life were spending countless hours gaming became counter productive. So after my PS1, the only game system I invested in was my Sony PSP for those long airplane rides.

So here we are in 2006 with work, two young kids and a couple of mortgages. Who’s got time for fun and games? That’s what we thought until we say the first promo for it (pushed to our Tivo box), the Nintendo Wii. My wife and I decided that we had to get one. What sold us was the simplistic G rated game titles (okay for young kids), but mostly the interactive controller…the Wiimote as they like to call it. What struck me right away was the social potential of the Wii – here was a video game that would be great to play with others, and one where you’d have to get your fat ass off the couch. Don’t get me wrong, if money were no object, I am drawn to the technical capabilities of the Xbox and PS3, heck, I would love to play Final Fantasy 68 (or whatever they’re up to now) but now I can’t afford to burn away hours of time playing a game like that. But instead of sitting in a dark room playing video games all by yourself, the Wii is very much a great party tool.

Have you tried to buy a Wii? If so, you know that you just can’t walk into a store and buy one. That damm Wii has proved to be so popular that getting one is harder than playing one. We finally got ours from Toys R Us; we saw the ad in the Sunday paper, then flew down to the store before they opened so we could get a ticket to buy one.

After one month of ownership, the Wii has proved to be a rousing hit in our house. The social aspects of the console can’t be ignored as it brings the whole family together for some good clean fun. Young and old (my 80 year old aunt started to get really competitive in bowling…talking trash and everything!), and people who otherwise were never drawn to video games have fun with this thing. We even plan to have a Wii tournament at my daughter’s first birthday party next month where I’ll hook up the Wii to a video projector so we can play on a BIG screen.

Playing four man tennis, the boys score!

Aside from games, you really need to hook up your Wii to your wireless network to take full advantage of what it can do. With the Wii’s built in WiFi, I was able to get it on my wireless router within seconds. Once online, you can get weather, news, shop the Wii online store (where you can buy and download many of the old NES, Sega and SuperNES games) and participate in a cute online polling tool. There is also a web browser built in to surf web pages although it’s really hard to enter text into the thing. Looking ahead, I hope Nintendo plans to extend the online capabilities of the Wii to extend into the games themselves like with the Xbox or PS3.

As a parent, I’m not totally thrilled with my kids staring at the TV for too long. I would be happier to see them play outside or read books. But come on, I know we’re not living in the stone age. So if they’re going to play games, I’d rather see them get up and move around. Even my nearly 4 year old son can play competitively in some of the sports games…heck he can even sometimes beat me outright in bowling and tennis. Even better, he actually works up a good sweat playing the Wii because you really do have to stand up and be active. The more you emulate the actual motions of what you’re playing (think about how you play tennis), the better you will play. But as a parent, I will say that we no longer allow our son to play the Wii before bed as it gets him too amped to sleep.

One parents verdict: Get a Wii, if you can find one. Remember to let you kids play too, just limit their playing time to something age appropriate.

Because this issue has been close to me, I have revisited Google several times over the past several days searching on “bravesentry” to see if more information has been uncovered. Taking Google searches as the “pulse” of the Internet, I also became interested in HOW this story has evolved by noting the changes in the Google search results.

The first report of Bravesentry as a rouge anti-spyware software was published on March 8, 2006 by SunbeltBlog. When I ran my first Google search on the subject (probably on March 9), Sunbelt was one of the two sites that Google returned. Slowly but surely, I’ve noticed the body of information about Bravesentry building in Google’s indexes. On March 10, there was 4 results, on March 11, there were 12 results in the morning and 18 later that day. On March 12, I see 24 references in Google and noticed that five advertisers have also bought “bravesentry” as an adword. The free market hard a work here.

Examining the Google search results also highlighted one more interesting point for me - namely, that my own site did not show up in Google’s search results for “Bravesentry” even though I have posted a fairly complete account of my experience with the software. As my Netsato blog is new, only about a month old, and as my site’s Google pagerank is a whopping 0/10, this clearly shows the importance of pagerank in determining search result indexing. I suppose you can call it “paying your dues.” I bet there’s a bunch of “0″ pagerank sites out there that contain some really good information, but we just don’t find them.

Who cares? Probably nobody but me and about 5 other people in the world…but hey it’s my blog and I can write what I want.

I am certainly no PC security expert, but I thought that before restoring my sandbox computer to a backup image, I would try my best to document how Bravesentry has gained control over the computer. I don’t know exactly how Bravesentry got into my PC (but I have some theories), and I don’t know exactly how or if it may harm you – I’ll leave that up to the security experts to solve. But it is my hope that my notes here might help someone investigate Bravesentry in greater detail.

Executive Summary: Bravesentry is a malicious anti-spyware software that entered my computer via Trojan horse applications manifested in the files “t.inx” and/or “kernels8.exe”. My theory is that i.inx was passed to my computer by visiting a rouge website designed to exploit a pre service pack 2 Windows XP computer. Once inside, my software firewall detected t.inx was requesting access to the Internet which I promptly attempted to block. Apparently to no avail, “kernels8.exe” somehow slipped in to the computer which I also tried to block via my software firewall. After running a full virus scan (which found nothing), I rebooted the computer to be greeted by Bravesentry upon start up notifying me that my computer is infected by spyware and that it will proceed to scan my computer. Needless to say, Bravesentry was uninvited, and also not easy to uninstall. Rather than trying to “fix” this computer, I decided to document the problem as best as I could, and to simply wipe out the hard drive and rebuild the computer.

Click here to see more details and screenshots from my Bravesentry infected PC? –>

I’ve been interested in Spam services for some time now and have looked at many. There are lot of good ones, but they tend to be geared for enterprises and not individuals (read, they are expensive). But I found one that looks pretty good, so I signed up myself and found that it just works. Perfect? No, but pretty damm good for a good price.

Check this out:

The client said “can you fix it?”

“Well, I may spend 3 hours trying to figure out why this isn’t working, and I may not even be able to solve it. Or I can just rebuild your computer from scratch.”

We rebuilt it from scratch. Re-loading Windows is like the ultimate spring cleaning. After a couple of years of using your PC, even the  most conservative user will have made many changes over time that drag down your overall performance. Re-loading Windows from scratch is like a breath of fresh air. While clean installing a PC is not as hard as it used to be, it’s still not for the causal user. Seek someone’s assistance before you do anything foolish.

BUT, there are somethings that only the user can do to prepare for such a major undertaking – namely back up your data. Here are some things to consider:

1) back up your My Documents folder to CDR (recordable CD), or to a second hard drive.

2) back up your browser’s “Favorites”.

3) back up your email and address book.

4) back up your palm pilot or other PDA device.

5) back up any Quicken files (which have the stupid habit of NOT residing in your My Docs folder like everything else).

6) back up your Desktop.

Your PC repair dude won’t be able to know what data is important and what isn’t…only you know that. So the back ups are best performed by you. Later, I’ll document more about where to find each of these important data files.