The motherboard was, as its name suggest, a premium motherboard, with 2 slots for PCI Express graphic cards, 10 ports USB 2.0, two Gigabit LAN, three Fireweire IEEE 1394, and two eSATA ports. It has every ports known to mankind, and for $50, I couldn’t resist a cheap upgrade to give my desktop PC a whole new guts inside.

For graphic card, I got myself Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5750 512MB GDDR5 that should be powerful enough for games in the next 3-5 years.

The end result? Here are the Geekbench scores of my desktop before and after the upgrade.

Before upgrade

After upgrade

Based on these scores alone, with $80, my desktop PC is now twice as powerful as it was, and it should prolong its life for the next 3-4 years. Good stuff eh?

It’s still not as powerful as my Macbook, but for that price, I can’t complain.

Macbook score

The result according to Windows Experience Index shows the score is up there now. It was previously 3.1. before upgrade. Yay !!!

Windows Experience Index

For the first time in a month, the icon in my taskbar gets SO full that it overflows to the second row. I actually don’t feel that I have installed A LOT of stuffs to my machine, let’s see from left-to-right: Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari (just to try out, to be removed soon), Windows Explorer, Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Writer, Windows Media Player, Windows Live Messenger, Word, Excel, Skype, Calculator, Notepad, Mozy, TweetDeck, Windows Mobile Device Center, Services.

With the exception of Word and Excel, all of the software I have in my machines are freeware. And they’re pretty common too. I wonder how many icons can a 12” or 15” laptop fit when my 17” monitor can only fit so few (17 to be precise)? To Microsoft credit, they’re changing the space between icons in a more recent build to fit 20 icons in my 1280×1024 screen resolution.

http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2009/01/12/the-bumper-list-of-windows-7-secrets.aspx

The installation itself felt faster than SP1 did last year, it rebooted once and it’s done. All seems to still work without any issue. I kinda felt my machine is a little faster compared to before I applied SP2, but it’s probably just perceived rather than the truth, not sure.

The main changes in this SP2 don’t really affect me. I don’t have Bluetooth 2.1 devices, or 64-bit CPUs, or Blu-Ray yet, so Vista SP2 support for them are kinda moot for me, for now.

With that said, I’m still looking forward to Windows 7 beta 1 in January 2009, then I can hosed my Vista installation

http://www.offensive-security.com/movies/vistahack/vistahack.html

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.

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.

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