hendrikch.com – Hendrik Christian Blog on Daily Life

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.

It’s unavoidable, as I am using my computer, the more I use it, the more stuffs gets installed to it, and continuing from the list of applications I installed last month, there are few more applications that found it’s way to my computer in the last month or so. Some are essential that I missed out, some are not-so-essential, and here they are in order of installation date.

• .Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 – free
  I installed, trialled, and uninstalled lots of software, but I want my current Windows Vista to be as clean as possible, meaning no crapware is allowed to get installed into my Windows. The more software I get installed and uninstalled on my machine, the more unstable my Windows is, not to mention it’ll get slower by the weeks and months, so I installed free Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, and installed a copy of Windows XP inside. Whenever I feel like trying out new software, or simply comparing few applications to see which one is better to be installed on my Windows, I’ll just use this Virtual PC to try out. Only good stuffs gets into my Windows Vista install
• .Sony USB Driver – free
  I need to connect a Sony miniDV handycam to my Windows Vista for video capture. My family got tons of miniDV cassettes (50 is my last count), and as my family self-declared IT guy, as my home project, I need to convert all these cassettes into DVDs that my dad, my mom, or my grandma can play on their DVD player.
• ..WinAVI Video Capture 2.0 – free FULL version for limited time
  This usually $29.95 software is currently free (go get it while it’s still free!!), used to capture video played from my Sony handycam into an MPEG-2 movie. After all these videos have been captured, I can simply use built-in Windows DVD Maker (only available in Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows Vista Ultimate) to convert all those MPEG files into DVDs that can be played in normal DVD players.
• .Acronis TrueImage Home – $49.99
  The best backup and imaging software. In-line with my current plan of having routine backup of my computer, I have to find a great software to do the job, and Acronis TrueImage does just that. I have been using Acronis TrueImage since version 8, and now it’s at version 10, it’s certified for Windows Vista.
  I have been looking at the built-in Backup and Restore Center in Windows Vista, it only can do backup of whole drive. I can’t select which folders that I want to backup.
• .avast! Antivirus v4 Home Edition – free
  There are two free antivirus that community seems to recommend to be used in Windows Vista, AVG Anti-Virus Free v7.5 or avast! Antivirus v4 Home Edition which is free for home use. I chose the latter because it seems like more people recommend avast to AVG. Also, according to Antivirus review, avast caught more virus compared to AVG.
• .Raxco PerfectDisk for Home – $39.99
  After usage of computer, harddrive gets fragmented, and as a result, computer gets slower. Windows all-along has built-in disk defragmenter that does a basic job, but PerfectDisk does a much better job in improving the performance of your hard drive. Here’s the comparison between PerfectDisk and Windows Defragmenter.
• .Switcher – free
  Mac OS X has Expose. Switcher brings this feature to Windows Vista. Press F9, and all open windows are scaled small enough such that ALL windows fits in your screen, make it easier to find a window you want in the stack of opened windows.

Start with filling in the following on what you have:

1. Mac or PC?
2. How big is your total hard drive space, excluding external drives? e.g. 80GB.
3. How much of those are used? e.g. ~50GB out of 80GB.
4. Do you have backup of what you have?

Recently, a friend had just lost his seven years worth of stuffs stored in his computer after his hard drive died on him. That got me thinking on my own computer backup. I have lots of stuffs in my home PC, 30GB of pictures, 13GB of musics, personal files, financial information, and other stuffs that will be very difficult, if not impossible, to restore should I lose it. Backing up 250GB hard drive to 4GB-each DVDs will require enormous amount of blank DVDs (Vista Backup and Restore Center says I need 40 blank DVDs!!!), not to mention that the time required to back those up, as well as my due diligence to remember to backup stuffs now and then. It’s a chore, so that’s out.

There are many alternatives that I am currently exploring, from RAID, External and Internal Hard Drive with their own pros, cons, and associated cost, but before plunging myself into one method, I would like to first survey and get some feedback from all of you for some ideas. I am looking into backing up my WHOLE computer periodicaly, so preferably, it should be cheap, reliable, easy, and doesn’t require my intervention as much as possible (did i miss anything? :p) Backing up to DVDs is certainly out, so if you have backup routine for your computer, share on what you use, the hardware, as well as what software you use?

Over the weekend, I finally removed the final piece of Windows XP installation remaining on my machine. I wiped out Windows XP partition, then booted using a Windows Vista Bootable DVD. Enter my product key for Windows Vista Ultimate Edition, select which partition to install to, and that’s it. Two TV advertisements break later (about thirty minutes), the installation is done. Enter your user name, password, select wallpaper, time zone, and that’s more or less about it. Done. Can’t get simpler than that.

The first thing I checked was if all my hardware are installed correctly. All drivers, except two, are installed correctly. The two are my Linksys USB Wireless adapter (detected as Unknown Device) and Realtek built-in sound card in my motherboard (detected as Multimedia Sound Device). Since my wireless network couldn’t work, I plugged in my machine using LAN cable directly to my router, ran Windows Update, a total of 13 updates were found, including drivers for those two missing, along with some updated drivers for my video card and the latest Windows Mobile Device Center (ActiveSync replacement).

Done with that, the next destination is the Control Panel. I changed just a couple of things here:

• Indexing Options, change Selected Locations to include all drives I have.
• Keyboard properties, change repeat delay to the shortest. I like fast stuff
• Folder options, uncheck Hide extensions for known file types and check Use check boxes to select items (So I can use checkboxes instead of Ctrl+click click click to select multiple items in Explorer)

Soon after, it’s the installation time. Here are the stuffs I always install for my new machine.

• Adobe Flash Player 9 (no Flash, no YouTube :p)
• Windows Live Messenger 8.1
• Messenger Plus Live (must have add-on for Windows Live Messenger)
• IE7Pro (if you use IE7 in either XP/2003/Vista, this is a recommended add-on to have crash recovery, mouse gesture, undo close tab, etc. features, generally the features in Firefox that I miss in IE7. With this, I find myself use IE7 so much more than Firefox now)
• Flickr Uploadr (to upload photos to Flickr)
• Daemon Tools (to mount ISO files)
• Mozilla Firefox (even I use it much less now, but it’s still a must-have)
• MozBackup (restore my Firefox profile backup with ease. When it’s done, it gets uninstalled :p)
• Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 (custom install to choose only Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and OneNote)
• Winzip 11
• Adobe Reader 8
• Java SE Runtime Environment 6 – so I can use Internet Banking
• ATI Radeon Catalyst 7.1 Display Driver for Windows Vista
• K-Lite Mega Codec Pack v1.64
• Microsoft Money 2007 Home Edition
• BlogJet for blogging purposes
• ACDSee 9 Photo Manager, which took more than an hour to catalogue my 22,336 photos.
• Yahoo Messenger 8.1
• floAt’s Mobile Agent 2.1 (a must-have for Sony Ericsson’s phone user)

With these, my machine is now highly usable already

Update: Windows Vista install part 2 tells more application that I installed after this.