Solving Problems

A customer has come unstuck with Windows 10 recently. The Start button/flag and search stopped working after an update. I went around and did various things to try to get Windows to repair itself; finally I tried the Deployment Imaging and Servicing Management (DISM) tool, rebooted, and Start was back.

A few days later there was another Windows update and the same thing happened, so the customer phoned me up to ask me to give her the dism command and entered it herself. It didn't work so she tried it a few more times, with variations, and got very frustrated when the computer started saying it didn't recognise what she was typing in.

Maybe you're familiar enough with computers to see that this approach to problem solving is unlikely to help. But typing stuff is a very recent approach to dealing with problems; in many older contexts trying variations, with some extra welly generated by frustration, works quite well. Consider nuts - of either variety. If you know how to crack a hazelnut and find yourself faced with a Brazil nut then different angles, hitting it with a bigger rock, and/or hitting it harder can all help; scale that up for walnuts and even coconuts. Likewise trying to get a rusted nut off a bolt.

Which brings me to the Anglican Communion and their recent Primates' Meeting. For at least twenty years left and right have been shouting at each other; when that doesn't work they try shouting louder.

This time around the US Episcopalian Church has been suspended from some theological decision making bodies; not directly because of same-sex marriage - although that's the obvious context - but because of making significant changes to their theology and practice without any sort of consensus or agreement across the wider Communion.

Unity is extremely important for the Anglican Church, so the US breaking unity that way is seen as serious, as is the risk of breaking the Anglican Communion up entirely. This slightly odd suspension should, I think, be seen as a way of maintaining unity and giving people a bit more time and space to find ways to work together, especially at the ground roots level where the Anglican Communion is actually mostly based.

Previously the US church has insisted it is being prophetic and 'showing leadership', but the result has been to split the North American Anglican Church and to threaten to split the Anglican Church worldwide. Leadership is only leadership if you take people with you, which the US Episcopalians have previously been incredibly bad at.

Neo-colonialism doesn't help of course.

However, I do see signs of hope in the latest responses from the US. Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of Washington DC was on Radio 4's Sunday programme this morning. Alan Wilson's blog has a transcript.

Two things strike me about this. One is the sheer positivity of the current US leadership over the issue - currently no sign of any tit-for-tat ugliness - whilst holding true to what they believe the Bible to be saying to our 21st-Century societies. The second is the following:

"Our broader concern is for gay and lesbian people and members of churches around the world who are in a much more vulnerable place than any of us can imagine."

Leadership involves bringing people along with you. If the US Episcopalians had shown that sort of leadership twenty years ago maybe things would be less dire for so many people across the central belt of Africa at present.

Anglicanism isn't really about what leaders in big hats do and say; really it is about people worshipping God, in and out of church, all around the world, whilst welcoming, loving and working with one another. Whatever decisions the 'big beasts' come to in their political in-fighting, the scandal of LGBT+ rejection by churchgoers will only come to an end by people getting to know one another and learning to share Christ's welcome in Christ's communion.

Grace and peace for your week ahead.

Defragmenting Windows 7

I'm a big fan of Windows 7, more so than any other version of Windows since Windows 2000, and far more so than Linux and the like. I find the user interface easy to use for everyday computer work, yet flexible and easy to drill down in when there is a problem or I want to do something more complex. However, as Windows 7 gets older it is starting to develop a couple of bad habits.

One problem has been a tendency to corrupt its own user login, leading to the dreaded "User profile cannot be loaded" message when you try to sign into Windows. This is discussed by Microsoft here, although their solutions are somewhat incomplete, I think. I haven't seen this problem recently, so with a bit of luck Microsoft have corrected it in one of the enormous number of recent fixes they have put out.

The other problem is the old bugbear of disk fragmentation. This is where files are held on the disk drive as several different pieces, which Windows then reassembles as it reads them. This can slow things down a lot because it takes several disk accesses to get one file, because it undermines various read-ahead strategies used to speed things up, and because it uses up processor power doing the reassembly.

Important: for SSD drives, disk fragmentation doesn't affect performance as much, but defragmenting an SSD can significantly reduce its life expectancy. Don't do it.

'Defragging' used to be one of those things which 'everybody knew' was needed to speed up your PC, although by Windows XP disk fragmentation was unlikely to be the main cause of slow PC performance. Fragmentation came out of the cold with Vista, where the built-in defragmenter is supposed to run automatically, but often doesn't, and where the interface heavily discourages manual defragging. Windows 7 was supposed to have sorted this, though, by making automatic defragmentation more effective, and by making manual defragmentation at least a little more visible and easy to run. For several years I thought this was working well.

At Christmas I got a copy of the game Dragon Age Inquisition. It is an enormous game, which takes an age to set up, and is very slow to load. Even given the game's size though, I was getting level load times of around two and a half minutes, which is simply ridiculous.

Pretty much the first thing I checked was disk fragmentation: the Windows defragmenter had run a few days before and reported a fragmentation level of zero. So I checked various other things, to no effect, then went online to see if anyone else had this problem. A few people did, and it was clear that my load times for changing level/area were way over the top. One common factor in other people's problems seemed to be disk fragmentation.

The Windows 7 defragmenter doesn't show the pretty picture of where everything is on the disk, colour coded according to how fragmented files are in each disk area. Defraggler does, so I downloaded it and had a look.

According to Defraggler, the disk defragmentation level was something like 33%, most of the occupied drive showed up red, and when I looked at individual files there was a whole stack of Dragon Age files all with multiple fragments. It seems that the Windows 7 defragmenter has a different definition of fragmentation from Defraggler (and from me).

So I ran a Quick Defrag from Defraggler - it made no difference. Then I tried a Full Defrag - it took forever and made little difference. It looks as though the built in Windows defragmenter doesn't report fragmentation which can't easily be dealt with.

When I looked at the details of what was fragmented, it turned out to be mostly System Restore files. Windows 7 has massively increased the amount of stuff it puts into system restore: it uses it for file level 'old versions' as well, so that is probably why fragmentation is suddenly becoming important again.

On another PC I have looked at, with Norton 360 on, there was also a pile of hard-to-defrag Norton files, and Norton's own defragmenter also failed to either defrag or report on fragmentation it couldn't fix.

Defraggler lets me defrag individual files, so I manually defragged everything I could. Then I went to 'Disk Cleanup' and chose 'Clean up system files' when it came up. As well as (partially) emptying temporary files, this also gives the option (on the 'More Options' tab) of removing all but the lastest System Restore files. NB: this should not be done lightly. I made sure my backups were good before I did this.

For the computer with Norton 360 I then went to Safe mode and manually defragged the Norton files in Defraggler.

Then the full defragment worked a lot better, as there were fewer immovable files present.

Then I created a fresh set of System Restore files, in the less-fragmented space now available, and went around the cycle of cleaning up old System Restore files and defragmenting again. Finally I had fragmentation on that disk down to about 2%, which is good.

After all of this Dragon Age Inquisition loads levels/areas in just under a minute, typically. Since I am playing it a lot, and moving between areas is a big part of the game, I consider all of the effort spent defragging well worth it (especially since I was able to apply the knowledge gained to massively improve the responsiveness of a customer's PC shortly afterwards).

Don't Panic But ...

They really are out to get you. Malware producers, that is ('malware' = viruses, trojans, rootkits, adware, spyware, junkware, spam-bots, etc, etc). And they're probably winning.

There was a time when the vast majority of infected PCs I saw had no antivirus and were used by teenagers who regularly downloaded 'free' pirated music. There was one parent who I was seeing about every six months until I pointed out how much cheaper it would be to use a legal paid-for service to download his son's music, rather than paying me to keep cleaning the PC up.

Nowadays most PCs have some sort of antivirus, and most people have at least some degree of wariness about the internet, yet the proportion of infected PCs continues to rise.

On Tuesday I came across my first infected broadband router. It had been reprogrammed so that all internet access using it went via a rogue website first. Fortunately it had been crudely done and the user was sensible enough to notice that something was wrong and call me in. Also fortunately she was still using Windows XP, which made it easier for me to see the fingerprint of the router infection; neither her Norton nor my anti-malware tools could see anything amiss.

If you are interested you can see a description of the way the router had been hijacked on Jakob Lell's blog (subtitled "Technology changes ... insecurity remains", which could be an alternative title for this post).

Most users just seem to accept that their PC does strange things that they don't understand, and that it runs frustratingly slowly. If they do notice the latter then they see an online ad saying something like "Speed up your PC" and casually download it, clogging their PC up with even more junkware (at best) and making it go even slower.

Governments don't help to clean things up, instead they just add to the mess. China has long been known to use malware to steal advanced technology, spreading viruses far and wide in the process. Israel and USA cooperate to create malware to attack Israel's neighbours, incidentally catching the rest of the world in the crossfire. Now we learn that the US's NSA and our very own GCHQ are busy creating ever more sophisticated malware in their quest to spy on all of the people all of the time.

It's like the wild west out there, but with the marshals leading the worst criminal gangs.

Is there anything you can do? Up to a point:-

1. Make sure you have a decent antivirus running, and that it is this year's version. My list of 'decent' antiviruses includes Norton, Kaspersky, F-Secure and AVG. I do not consider McAfee or Microsoft Essentials to be effective. Most antivirus programs include a year number as part of their title; Norton doesn't but has a 'New Version Check' in its Support menu. Unless you really think the extras are useful, I would recommend sticking with the basic 'antivirus' versions of these products - they are a fair bit cheaper and do the important job.
2. Apply Windows updates and Adobe updates religiously. Unless you are really sure that you need it, uninstall all versions of Java. When downloading Adobe updates make sure you untick their 'optional offer'.
3. Run a 'full scan' with your antivirus at least monthly. If you can't remember when you last did a complete virus scan then do it now: don't read the rest of the points, just do 1) and 2) above then run that full scan. It will take a while, but there are millions of infected PCs out there whose users just don't know it: make sure yours isn't one of them.
4. Don't install registry cleaners or other 'go faster' tools. If you have any already installed I would recommend removing them. CCleaner (free) is an exception: it is a decent disk cleanup tool but don't use its registry cleaner unless you are really, really sure you know what it is doing.
5. Similarly don't install multiple toolbars. Google or Bing or the BT one can be useful, but not the gimmicky 'something for nothing' ones.
6. Avoid free downloaders - they are hardly ever useful with modern broadband and several add extra nasties to the downloaded programs.
7. If you are still using Windows XP, double check your Windows Updates are installed and download and use Firefox or Google Chrome for your internet - the XP version of Internet Explorer (the big blue 'e' symbol) is far too vulnerable. This also applies, with slightly less urgency, to those using Vista.
8. Keep backups of anything important to you, especially digital photos. Not only do computer drives fail sometimes, but there are now viruses known as 'ransomware' which encrypt all of your files and charge you hundreds of pounds for the key to decrypt them again (which they may or may not then provide).
9. If you have a management program for your broadband router then use it to change the access password (and don't save the password in your browser when it asks) and, if you can find the option, don't allow access to the router from the internet (or the WAN as the option may put it).

You probably don't want to go paying a tech support person for every little oddity or slowdown on your PC, but do ask around to find a reputable PC support person in your area so there is someone you can call out when needed (it's the same general theory as plumbers - you don't want to wait until there's an emergency before trying to find one you can trust). If your PC is more than a couple of years old, you might find it useful to have it serviced - even without malware in all its guises, Windows itself tends to accumulate crud and slow down over time.

I think that PCs are wonderful things, which can open an amazing window onto the world - especially for older or less mobile users. It is a crying shame when unnecessary problems and malicious garbage prevent people from enjoying the benefits.

Trusteer Rapport Problems

Over the past month or so I have had half-a-dozen PCs in with serious problems which turned out to be caused by Trusteer Rapport. Now, fixing PCs is what I do for a living so I guess I shouldn't complain that all the online banks who promote Rapport are generating work for me. Nevertheless, it just seems wrong that a product which is supposed to protect people ends up stopping them using their computers. Anyway, a lot of my customers I have known for years and I hate to see their time and money wasted.

Half of the crippled PCs simply wouldn't start at all: windows was just giving a BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) and promptly rebooting. The other half started okay but Internet Explorer wouldn't run. These are, of course, typical virus symptoms, so I wasted time (and money) running thorough virus checks.

The BSOD machines would start in Safe Mode so, once viruses were ruled out, I was able to load a tool I use which tells me which drivers have crashed the system. Once I had identified that the drivers causing problems had names like 'rapportxx' I was able to rename all Rapport drivers and so start Windows properly. After that I restored the driver names and (without rebooting) uninstalled Rapport. Problem solved, and I simply added a note to the invoice to tell the customer what the problem was and suggesting that, if they believe Rapport to be useful protection, they should talk to their bank to download a fresh copy from scratch.

In the cases where Internet Explorer wouldn't run, once I had eliminated the thousand and one other causes of IE problems, I was able to find a FAQ entry on the Trusteer website telling me what to do in that situation - quite how anyone is meant to find that FAQ when their internet browser isn't working is another matter. The FAQ tells us to start Rapport Console (a program in the Start/All Programs list), to burrow deep into its settings to find the one which is about protecting Rapport from tampering, and to turn it off. Hey presto, the internet is back. The fact that there is a FAQ entry there implies that this is not an uncommon problem; the fact that Rapport fails to give any error messages as it disables Internet Explorer implies that people are unlikely to look at the Trusteer website for their FAQ because they wouldn't know they need to.

If Rapport was just another piece of Internet Security software, chosen and installed by the users themselves, these problems wouldn't be so bad - all software has its issues and antivirus programs in particular are inclined to go wrong, because they are always on the frontline of the battle against the bad guys trying to use our PCs to steal money. But Trusteer Rapport is not just another security program: it is very heavily pushed by the internet banks onto users who are not technologically savvy and who believe what their banks tell them. Those banks should not be promoting software which doesn't have the quality control in place to avoid breaking users' PCs and/or disabling their internet access, particularly when it does not even give clues that it is Rapport doing the breaking.

The first couple of Trusteer Rapport problems I encountered, I just assumed that they had released a duff update and it was a one-off. Now I am suggesting to customers that they might want to have a word with their bank to find out just why they are promoting software which is costing said customers time and money by breaking their computers.