HB blog

My PC is HP/Compaq Presario 1950NX and it come with integrated Video Card (Nvidia 6150) and 1G RAM.

Even it has good CPU (Athlon XP 3800) lack of memory and slow video card did not allow me to use high detail settings even on older games.

To improve the performance of the system I’ve added 1G of RAM (~$50) for total of 2G (4×512M).

And added PCI expressx16 video card from DiamondMultimedia Viper HD 2600 XT 512M (~$65).

As usual the upgrade was not flawless.

I’ve disabled the driver of NVIDIA card as noted in installation document that come with the card (always read those documents they contain important instructions) and set from BIOS PCI express as primary video controller.

After that I’ve installed the card and then the drivers from the CD.

Up to here no problems…

But after I started video player I noticed that simply there is no sound. As usual I verified the cables - so many times I simply did not plug them, but everything was OK.

Then I opened control panel -> sound and audio devices to see for my surprise that the sound card was set to none.

Next step was to check Device manager - only one adapter was listed - ATI Function Driver for High Definition Audio…

After seing this It light up - The Video card has HDMI output and is capable to transmit audio via that connection. This was counted as sound device and since in BIOS onboard audio was set to AUTO it was disabled.

Simply setting it to Enabled bring back my sound.

It was a while I did not check the status of the project, but after I opened my application it detected new version and prompted me do I want to update.

So now I have version 0.9.3. Here are the changes made from my last update:

0.9.3 (2008-10-07):

• fix an issue with opening non-ascii files
• updated Japanese and Brazilian translation

0.9.2 (2008-10-06):

• ability to disable auto-update check
• improved text rendering - should fix problems with overlapping text
• improved font substitution for fonts not present in PDF file
• can now open PDF files with non-ASCII names
• improvements to DDE (contributed by Danilo Roascio)
• SyncTex improvements
• improve persistence of state (contributed by Robert Liu)
• fix crash when pressing ‘Cancel’ when entering a password updated translations

As usual latest version can be downloaded from official web site.

After I finished my browser tests (see previous post for details)  I started removing the browsers I do not use or the ones in beta phase.

For my “surprise” only componet that stated on my system and there was no obvious way to remove was as all of oyu already  guessed - googleupdate.exe

Even I removed the chrome browser this application was not removed and in top of it still active and connectiong to google servers for report.

After seraching internet I found instructions on how to remove it.

To Uninstall GoogleUpdate.exe:

1. Stop GoogleUpdate.exe in Windows Task Manager
2. Run msconfig and disable GoogleUpdate.exe under StartUp (no need to restart)
3. Delete GoogleUpdate task in C:\WINDOWS\Tasks
4. Delete “Update” folder under your C:\Documents and Settings\Your name\Local Settings\Application Data\Google
5. Clean up any term with “GoogleUpdate” in the registry file via regedit (Warning!). If you’re not sure about doing this, then just use CCleaner to clean up the registry.

Finally gone.

Here is the next tests I’ve made on the same machine with same browsers as in the trevious tests. This test is benchmarking java script performance. And here is source of the test. Relusts are:

Opera

• Array object 391
• Date object 63
• Error handling 46
• Math object 63
• RegEx object 219
• String object 234
• DOM 172
• Ajax declarations 156
• Total Duration 1344

Firefox

• Array object  66
• Date object  42
• Error handling  89
• Math object  58
• RegEx object 191
• String object 726
• DOM  269
• Ajax declarations 378
• Total Duration  1819

Chrome

• Array object 273
• Date object 213
• Error handling 8
• Math object 17
• RegEx object 67
• String object 39
• DOM 55
• Ajax declarations 413
• Total Duration 1085

IE

• Array object 250
• Date object 79
• Error handling 187
• Math object 203
• RegEx object 531
• String object 110
• DOM 328
• Ajax declarations 703
• Total Duration 2391

Safari

• Array object 47
• Date object 78
• Error handling 219
• Math object 172
• RegEx object 125
• String object 31
• DOM 47
• Ajax declarations 156
• Total Duration 875

And the verdioct is:

Safari is the fastest in this test, followed by Chrome, Opera, Firefox and as usual IE is last one.

Side note: In the tests I’ve remarked that only opera and IE correctly(retained the formatting) copied the data in clipboard.

After first comparison let’s compare how fast browsers render CSS. We used following file running from local computer:

css-rendering-benchmark-2500-positioned-divs

File found here.

Here are the results:

• IE - 937ms
• Opera - 422ms
• Firefox - 730 ms
• Chrome - 337ms
• Safari - 141ms

The last two varied a lot in the measurements and the value is the one most frequently appeared.

Comments

As you can see results are similar to the previous tests. from bottom to top. IE, FF, Opera, Chrome and Safari wins.

Other tests will follow so subscribe to RSS feed .

Recently Google announced their own browser called Chrome. It seems pretty fast and promising, but still do you want to give all your information to Google…

But this post is not privacy related. After having so many browsers on the market probably you wonder which one is the best. Lets do some tests.

Test

One of the tests available is ACID available at http://www.acidtests.org/.

Latest version of the test is ACID3.

So lets started.

Participants

• IE 7
• FF 3.0.1
• Safari 3.1.2
• Opera 9.52
• Chrome Beta 0.2.149.29

What will be the testbed?

All tests are executed on Windows XP SP3

Results

Here is the showcase:

As you can see IE had real problems.
How the others will do?

Firefox is doing OK

Safari is doing really good….

For now Opera has highest score…

How Google browser will score?

Conclusion

As you can see none of the browsers did not pass ACID3 test. Chrome as Beta is better than FF and Safari, but still behind Opera. As for the other participant IE this was the only browser who did not pass even ACID2 test.

Today I was hit with a 0-day virus - ZBot/Backdoor.Paproxy or whatever antivirus companies call it.

It came as E-mail claiming to be from UPS (You guess now why UPS virus is in quotes) and was a zip file with executable inside. UPS_INVOICE_978172.zip to be exact, but there are several variants.

Usually the common is that they contain as subject line:”[RE] UPS Tracking Number” followed by random number.

Most of the e-mails were detected (as spam) by the antivirus scanner on mail gateway, but some reached end users.

To be honest this one was really good in attracting them (the users) to open it and some did….

This was no pleasant experience. Right away PC rebooted and trojan was installed.

Other problem was that there was only 2 companies who were able to detect it this morning (the number increased to 13 afternoon).

After updated virus definitions from Symantec were installed Backdoor was detected and removed.

Lesson learned: NEVER open executable from attachment.

Here you ca see if your antivirus is up to date with that particular virus.

Another  version…

UPDATE: There are new versions not recognized by Symantec yet. So follow above lesson.

Lenovo is shipping new ThinkPads preinstalled with huge amount of software you do not really need.

This slows the boot process to the levels new computer should not be.

Here is the list of software I removed from T61:

• All MS Office related (trial) - Later I’ll install the products we have license for
• SQL server (yes it is installed) related
• Windows Live toolbar
• Norton Internet Security - Will replace it with Norton Endpoint Protection

Other option is to reinstall the system from scratch.

Excellent tutorial on how to do it

Tip: Do not connect the system to internet until you are ready to. It starts right away to download and install windows updates and will slow down the machine.

Recently after installing Office 2007 using default installation options I saw unusual entry in my task manager processes.

GrooveMonitor.exe

It took almost 8M of my memory so I started search on what it is.

Quickly I discovered that  it is part of MS Office 2007 and is used to share files and work on projects with other Microsoft Office Groove users.

It sounds nice, but I do not use it at all so I start searshing the ways to remove it from the system.

After looking to standard kill process and erase the  startup entry process I tried add/remove program–>Office 2007 –> change and for my surprise I saw Groove entry.

So I unchecked it and that removed it. Strange, but it worked.

Credits

Microsoft release candidate for Windows XP service pack 3 is available for download.