Sir Binbag Arises - Part Two

Into The Labyrinth

I had thrown a lot at this Dell Dimension 2350 and it had reaped rewards. Spybot had been a star and I was surprised to read some reports that it wasn't what it used to be - it performed excellently straight from a USB stick. Although a lot of things brought improvement to its diseased body there were one or two things that made a radical difference - I think possibly that a defrag had also brought about a radical change but at some point a reboot brought a performance and display that excited me and I was soon on the home run.

This left me with a highly usable system but an underlying doubt that something nasty might be under the hood.

I was also confused about the "Genuine Windows" status of the OS. Updates were set to automatic by the previous owners. When I went to Windows updates I couldn't find anything in the update history to show the the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) update had been applied - when scanning updates Windows told me it was missing update.

From the earliest time of looking at the files on the machine I saw the notes of a visit by a team called Geek Squad - there was a networking problem apparently, a lot of high falluting language in the report to impress the customer and the most bog standard solution of all - a clean reinstall. Could they have used the wrong media for that reinstall of the Operating System? Apparently PC repair men are roaming around with "generic" copies of XP and this can lead problems with the Windows Genuine Advantage validation process. Could a step in the validation process have been missed out by the all-singing all-dancing boys from Geek Squad? It certainly had some of the hallmarks of an invalid install - Windows Media Player(WMP) and Internet Explorer (IE) where not updated to versions 11 and 8 respectively and the WGA update was not on the PC.

It could be a computer savvy owner had made informed choices about this -updating to WMP11 and IE8 required positive choice I think and the one to IE8 had had some bad reports. But the owner deliberately avoiding WGA on purpose seemed improbable given the appalling malware-ridden condition he had left it in.

The mind-bending world of Microsoft licensing opened up before me*. I almost went certifiable over my Certificates of Authority (COA), my "full retails" and "wrong OEM re-installs"**. (One quick example - the COA on the side of the machine. Did it look genuine according to Windows online checker - well no, where was the hologram? And the number on the sticker didn't match the product key that Belarc Advisor was giving me. I emailed a friend asking him to photo his COA on an old Dell he had so I could compare -I guess he thought I was going to multiply his product key and ship it around the world as I didn't hear back from him. (The discrepancy with the Belarc reading of the product key and the one on the COA had an innocent explanation. Manufacturers get get bulk keys - they are different to the ones on the COAs - you use the one on the COA if you need to validate when reinstalling. The bulk key enables the manufacturers to validate loads of machines in one go).

You can read here about about the Dantesque torments of people who have purchased PCs from legimate vendors and have still ended up with the dreaded little pop-up telling you "Your copy of Windows is not genuine". This is the unchallengeable advantage Linux and other open source operating systems have over Microsoft (and I guess Apple too).

The simplest thing of course should be to go to the WGA program and install the update and then you would know where you stand - a related tool,the MGAdiag.exe tool, said it was a kosher set up anyway so why not dive in? But a part of me would want it to fail. If it failed I could purchase a Windows Genuine Advantage kit . I could then do a clean install without paying top dollar for a full licence (WGA offers cheaper licences) and any deeply hidden bogeymen would be wiped out. On the other hand was this machine worth any investment in software subsidised or not? I could end up with that awful nagulator - you can run XP ok but you get this little window that is truly irksome to someone like me who no longer wants to run anything but legit software. And if it didn't fail what then? Would I seriously pay for a new full licence for a machine that was already "genuine" just to ensure a theoretical piece of malware could be wiped out?

The 19in LCD I had bought for my little ASUS EEEPC when it was doubling as the living room pc had now become Binbags Display. And it was looking really nice - it was performing better than the "main computer" thanks to its betetr processor. And it was an Operating System that my partner R wasn't resistant to. Only my paranoia was spoiling the experience. My paranoia could only be dealt with by installing something from scratch - a KDE based Linux distro might be tolerated by R. I have a transferable (or at least I think it is - nothing is straightforward with MS licensing) copy of XP on the main machine perhaps I could use that and let Sanctum, my main pc, become fully Linux? Would I really want that - I've always had XP just one reboot away?

I had options but I was constrained by an unwillingness to spend money. Neither did I want to take risks with what was quite a convenient setup. I was in a bit of jam.

And then something occured to me....something that might just ease my thinking out of that jam. What it was would require Sir Binbag to get some new pieces of kit. It was to be a double-barrelled approach.

Join me as Sir Binbag rides forth.

* One licensing issue - you can transfer your licence to some one else - that is you can sell your machine or give it away to someone and the licence will go with the machine according to the licence info on the Dell Machine. Does finding it in a dump constitute a legitimate transfer? Also at other points it is argued that software has to be accompanied by the appropriate installation media - so is it or isn't it?

**this web page puts some of these issues a bit more succintly than me- I also got the COA image from the same site.

windows+seven dell xp recycling linux dimension+2350 licensing coa
spybot

Sir Binbag Arises Part One

Out of the Darkness

A good few months ago R was picking her way through some rubbish tips and returned home with the base unit of a Dell Dimension 2350. I didn't know it was a 2350 and I hadn't named it as Binbag at that time.

There was some life in it but not much - it took a zillion years to boot and seemed unable to sustain its graphical interface for long. I was able to tell quite quickly that

1) It was running XP Home
2)Had multiple users
3)Had all those multiple users data
4)Was badly damaged in some way - either software or hardware or both.

After a few of these painful boots I thought that I would try and boot into a live Linux environment so I could root around the files. I inclined more to thinking it was malware related. Even when I couldn't open the CD Drive I thought it was malware (the previous owners were a family with a lot of teenage children - possibly a foster family). The bios was such that it couldn't boot from a USB drive either so I shelved the project hoping to salvage a few spare parts maybe when I had time.

I popped into Maplins and purchased their summer catalogue which inspired me to have another go at fixing Binbag. At the very least I could use the box and PSU and so on and build a new system up from there, motherboard and all.

I managed to boot into a reasonably usable Safe Mode after a few attempts as Administrator and ran dir/s/b in the command interface (cmd.exe). This listed every file on the C:\ Drive -there was a lot of music files in there. I was able to see that the C:\ drive was absolutely packed to the rim and maybe this was what was causing the problems. You're supposed to leave 20% free. After contemplating copying all this music I soon decided just to delete most of it all- there wasn't one artist I had heard off. I used cmd.exe again several times using del /s/b *.mp3 and del /s/b *.aac and all the other audio extensions I could think off. This deleted all the mp3s, aacs and so on. Cmd.exe is a very blunt but very powerful instrument.

It gave me a slight improvement in performance which allowed me to attach a flashdrive with HijackThis and Spybot. I was not knowledgeable enough to benefit from the HijackThis log but I could see problem areas. However Spybot performed admirably flagging up and fixing a whole bunch of scary looking Trojans. A much bigger improvement followed so I set about this anti-malware routine. I also went through Add/Remove Programs looking for anything that might have carried the malware (or be the malware). I cleansed the Temple.

One thing I grew to hate and one thing I liked - Macfee Security Suite (or don't know its proper name) I hated. It 's so vast and so all-consuming. It seemed hellbent on preventing me fixing the thing, for example sending me misleading messages when I used msconfig to remove unwanted startup programs. I wiped it out and installed Sunbelt Personal Firewall and AntiVir Anti-virus. Life got better.

Progress had been made. I will post my further struggles in due course including Microsoft licensing hell and its consequences.

windows+seven dell xp recycling linux dimension+2350 licensing coa