Report for Previous Meeting
March 2009
The early date of March’s meeting caught a few members by surprise so we had a more intimate meeting than usual and were able to chat more informally about more issues that we mightn’t otherwise discuss. Nevertheless we did conquer some specific questions with live exploration that succumbed to joint efforts from the floor.
The first one was capturing web pages that refused to print exactly as they appeared and that were longer than one screen-full that could otherwise be grabbed by a screen snapshot taker. We loaded CaptureWizPro and put it through its paces in various configurations and soon unearthed its idiosyncrasies. The result was an accurate, long, captured web page.
Ian LeM asked about drivers making security, in the backup sense, a challenge. His updates had brought about one or more ‘Unsigned Driver’ warnings and Bob T explained how that this was the case with many in-the-wild drivers because of the attempts at enforcing stringent compliance by Microsoft. Driver Max was said to be quite an effective tool that interrogates a system and presents a comprehensive suite for installation. Bob suggested that like many thing tools such as this need to be use judiciously because they can easily be over-zealous in their solutions. Another tool Driver Detective was said to be good at its job, but more expensive.
Then came the challenge of excess CPU utilisation in XP with the culprit appearing to be MsMpeng.exe, a part of Windows Defender, the in-house antispyware program. While the machine in question had AVG8 running on it it was said that an antivirus and WDef could co-exist alright. As part of the detective process, however, it was suggested that WD be disabled to see if the CPU behaved better. It was pointed out that Spybot S&D could, by making the hosts file (that inhibited access to certain websites) so large that a machine could fall over itself in its attempts at self-protection. The answer was to run services.msc and disable DNSClient and Distributed Link Tracking services, confirming their current provisos with the Black Viper website that tracks these things. These ideas led to a detailed discussion of svchost that appears in Task Manager or (Microsoft’s Sysinternals’) Process Explorer so you can see what threads are forcing the greatest load on the CPU. A detailed and valuable conversation.
We had lively discussion about irregular pop-ups of email messages and of what notebook should be bought for the Boss, and of backing up device drivers with our friend Driver Max and perhaps Driver Genius. Getting wrongly blocked on a colleague’s Hotmail account was tackled before the break – after which Peter H took us through a number of iterations of Outlook Express, Windows Mail and Live Mail on a set of Windows versions on multiple computers. The idiosyncrasies of each was exhibited together with their interoperabilities – and some conclusions were drawn about where we might be in a few years with the emergence of ‘cloud’ computing where we all expressed the hope that our trust would be more substantial than the medium.
.oOo.