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Windows Vista come with a wonderful feature called “Previous Versions” that does a periodic backup of all your files. For as long as I’ve used Windows Vista, I never managed to get “Previous Versions” to work. Now, before I start, one of the first few things after I installed Windows (98, XP, Vista, whatever) is to optimise them. One of the many ways to optimise a Windows is to turn off services that I thought unnecessary, and this case is one of example when I turned off services that was necessary for certain feature to work, but which I thought unnecessary. To figure it out, I read lots of forums, I even emailed some representatives from Microsoft to no avail. Finally, today I really put myself into the mood to solve this issue. After much trial and error, restarting my machine countless times, I finally found out two things.

First, it needs Server service to display Previous Versions UI, go figure. Server service supports file, print, and named-pipe sharing over the network for this computer. When I read that, I thought “I don’t need any sharing as I’m at home. Fine, I can turn that off.” Wrong. With Server service turned off, this is what you’ll get when you navigate to Previous Versions tab.

Fine, after I figured that out, I turned on Server service, I got the UI working now, but still it said that there are no previous versions available. This can’t be right.

I modified Documents folder virtually every single day, so there has to be backups. As it turns out, in order to be able to find Previous Versions backup, Vista needs TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper service. This service description says “Provides support for the NetBIOS over TCP/IP (NetBT) service and NetBIOS name resolution for clients on the network, therefore enabling users to share files, print, and log on to the network” I don’t use sharing, I don’t use NetBIOS. Fine, I’ll turned it off. It was one of the many services that I thought unnecessary, thus turned off. Unknowingly to me, this is the services that allows Previous Versions backups to be found.

When I turned on TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper service, immediately my backups are there. Gosh !! What does sharing and network level service has to do with backups? Anyway, managed to resolve it, and now I could see that I have TONS of backups of my files, some as old as September 2007, which is good to know.

Browsing old copies of files is easy. Click on the date that you want, and Open it.

There, you’ll see all your files as it was on that day. Now, Mac fans will say that the feature is there in Leopard in the form of Time Machine. Yeah, it’s the same concept. And don’t start on who-copy-who, shall we?

If you happen to own Windows Vista Business or Ultimate on your machine, Previous Versions feature should have been enabled by default. It’s a priceless feature, one that you think you’ll never need but you’ll be grateful it’s there when you accidentally deleted or replaced important files in your machine, or when virus strikes. Of course, as the backups are local, it doesn’t help in the event of disaster or hard-drive crash. To do that, I highly recommend you get an external hard drive, which are cheap now.

If you have used or are using Windows Vista, you will likely to bump into these two creatures in Windows Vista, Windows Modules Installer that appear as TrustedInstaller.exe in Task Manager, and Windows Search that appear as SearchIndexer.exe. They work great, really, in the background. The former is used by Windows Update, and silently in the background installs and keeps your computer safe and secure and updated. That’s good. The latter is a search for my PC, I can search any file within my hundreds of thousands of files in seconds. This is also good.

What’s not good is that these two background processes in particular have no respect for its users. What I mean is these processes kicks in at the most inappropriate time, taking 50%, sometimes 100% of my 3GHz CPU, and LOTS of disk activities. It’s fine, you can suck up 50% of my CPU to do your wonderful stuff in the background when I’m checking my email, I won’t notice it. But, not when I’m playing games, when I’m watching high-definition movie, when I’m doing something CPU-intensive or hard-drive-intensive. Stop it, or just be patient and wait for your turn when I’m finished playing my games. So many times I have noticed my hard drive LED is blinking hard when I’m playing games. Actually, even by noticing that my games suddenly started lagging and dropped a lot of frames, I knew something in the background has kicked in, and I hate it.

What’s driving me even more crazy is that their behaviour is undeterminable. It can come in at any time, kicks in for 5-10 minutes, and go away. It’s just that it seem to have a bad behaviour of appearing at the wrong time. If you search these two names in Google, you’ll see that so many people have also experienced the same symptoms, so it’s not just me. So many times, before my games, I had to turn all of them off first before I started playing. I’m frustrated to say the least. Windows Vista Service Pack 1 coming early 2008 better fix all these.

There have been lots of discussions and opinions that Mac OS X is more secure than Windows by far, that Windows is a sinking ship with too many holes. Well, the truth is out, for the first six months Windows Vista is in the market, it is proven that it is more secure than any other major OS out there.

Operating System Vulnerabilities - First 6 months Full packages

High severity vulnerabilities - first 6 months - all packages

Let me skip all those Linux distros, but concentrate on just Windows and Mac OS X.
From the graph, we can see that although Windows XP has less vulnerabilities compared to Mac OS X, but out of all those vulnerabilities, Windows XP has more that are categorized as High Severity, like those that can allow hackers outside to gain control of your machine without you knowing or do anything.

The good thing is, with Windows Vista, the outlook is so much brighter. It has less vulnerabilities, even for High Severity levels. Coupled that, if you agree, with the fact that Windows gets more security scrutiny than any other OS, makes the result even more impressive.

Now, why do we “feel” that Windows is more insecure? The answer lies not in the operating system, but with the users. yeah, you and me. We, humans, are the curious bunch of creatures that will click on anything that comes our way, right right? including fishy message like: “Click here to know who blocks your MSN”, or “Download latest <whatever> here”, or “Screensaver with Jessica Alba photos”, or “Watch dancing baby” etc. You get the idea. We click on those links, we download attachments from people we don’t know, and with that, we infected our own machine, and we blame our system for it. The system is responsible for it, but we have to at least share the responsibility as well. The answer to security lies in user education. Just DON’T click on “funny” links and you’ll be safe. Just DON’T.

The full research article can be read from http://blogs.csoonline.com/windows_vista_6_month_vulnerability_report

My sister and brother-in-law just arrived to Singapore to run some errands. They brought me our family Canon camcorder. I have been wanting it for a while now. I brought TONS of miniDV cassettes that was used to record our big family lives so far, be it our family travel, videos of my niece growing up, virtually every thing that my dad, my mom, my sis, my bro-in-law, and myself took over the years since we bought the Canon camcorder a couple of years back. I brought those cassettes when I went back from Chinese New Year holiday early this year together with another Sony camcorder that we have. This Sony camcorder is of newer model, provides driver for Windows when plugged into USB, so I thought this should do the job of converting those cassettes into MPG or WMV and eventually into DVDs. The goal is simple: convert all those miniDV cassettes into DVDs. The journey of converting them was much more challenging than I thought.

So, I brought back the Sony camcorder along with me back to Singapore. The first two cassettes were played and converted fine using WinAVI Video Capture (simply because Windows Vista Movie Maker could not recognize Sony camcorder that was plugged in). The next 47 cassettes, that was recorded using Canon camcorder, somehow when played in Sony camcorder, the video was jerky with visible boxy pattern on the side. Later I found out, the reverse is true, play cassettes that was recorded in Sony camcorder in Canon ones, the effect showed up as well. So, my home project of converting all those videos were stopped at that point.

Now, I have the Canon camcorder, I found out that the USB port provided by the camcorder only connect the SD card that was in it, but not the video. Later, I found out that, for Canon camcorder, you must use its Firewire/IEEE1394 port for videos.

Okay, that was a very long introduction to the background of this post hehe…  Since my home desktop didn’t have any Firewire port, I went to Simlim and buy a PCI-card add-on. It costs $19 for a PCI card that has three Firewire ports. I plugged in the Canon camcorder, Vista installed the necessary drivers (amazingly the camcorder was recognized) and this dialog popped up.

Windows Import Video
Windows Import Video? hmmm…. that’s new, I thought . Apparently it is part of Windows Movie Maker. I launched it, and I can tell you, this is one of the easiest application I have ever used to convert videos. Here are what you need to do and click to get those cassettes into digital format.

Select the name and where you want to save the file. Also, the file format. Only WMV and AVI are offered here. I chooses WMV for the obvious reason, size (2GB for WMV vs 12GB for AVI)

To convert the entire videotape, select the first option, click Next.


It’ll rewind the cassette to the beginning automatically, then start recording. It’ll stop recording when the cassettes has reached its end.

That’s my niece doing her usual stuffs, opening drawers and cupboard, and took out everything that’s in it, very cute. The time taken will exactly be the same as the length of your cassette. For mine, it is 60-mins cassette, so the recording took exactly 60 mins. Note that during this process, it is recommended NOT to do heavy task on your machine, or it’ll affect the resulting video, like dropped frames. It IS a processor-intensive process. My processor is peaked at 100% all the time for the whole capture and processing.

Processing time of 60 mins cassette took ~50 mins on my computer with Pentium 4 - 2.8GHz. It should be faster if you have the newer Core 2 Duo processors.

When it’s done, you have a WMV video, ready to be burned into DVD. It’s so easy it’s unbelievable. I never knew converting videos can be so easy. Now, I’m at my seventh cassettes out of 50 I have. For 60-mins cassettes, I need 60 minutes of capturing, ~50 minutes of processing time, and 2GB of hard drive space. At the current rate, I’ll probably need another three-four months to complete all these.