Ramblings of a Prophet

In 2007 Microsoft released Windows Vista, and as people installed it on computers designed to run XP, they were starting to find out that it takes up an incredible amount of system resources, compared to XP.  The main thing people complained about was the demand from the system memory, which could be as much as 1GB just for the OS, which is massive amount, and when it was released most computers were being released with usually 1-2 GBs of ram.  2 more less significant requirements was the graphics card and processor, if you have the ultimat version, all the fancy shiny things Vista does, the blurred screen, the shrinking boxes, and so on, those all take more graphics power than you might think.  Some people reluctant to buy new hardware would use old, out of date video cards, but now that is basically a moot point because almost every modern card and computer can handle the requirement.  As far as processors go, when vista was released, the mainstream use of duel-core processors wasn’t very common, and Vista, to run smoothly, should have a duel-core, or a higher end single-core processor.

Now, at first glance, Vista looks like a black version of XP, and it is, on the face.  Microsoft has struck a good design of the GUI (graphic user interface), or the clicky stuff you see and use. If you dive into the settings of the control panel it will, on the surface, appear to be the same, but once you get to slightly more advanced settings, much of the things have been rearranged, which is irritating to the people  who have used XP extensively.  Vista was designed to be more accessible to the normal user who isn’t supper tech savvy, but also be not too dumped down for the advanced users.  As far as security for Vista, they completely redesigned the security system and protocol, one immediate and semi effective solution is that box that that pops up whenever you try to do anything, which is, to be truthful, annoying, but it is a good idea, perhaps it could have been worked on a little more.

As far as the performance of Vista goes, the fist, and most effective thing I would recommend is to buy more ram if you have less than 2 GBs, as that is the mostly the problem.  There are many different types of RAM, the newest standard is 240 pin DDR2 667 MHz, but what i would recommended is the 800 MHz RAM, you wont notice too much of a difference, but it will improve multi-tasking significantly.  If you are doing high quality photo editing, or video editing, or even 3D modeling, i would recommend 4 or more Gigs of ram, but if you just brows the Internet then 2 should be fine.  As far as processors go, if you are just browning the Internet then a mid-range duel-core should be atiquit, but of you are using it for, again, photo editing, video rendering, or gaming, then a higher end duel-core, or a lower end quad-core.

For those of you who don’t want to shell out some cash for upgrades, there is still hope.  When you get a non-optimized version of Vista it comes with a bunch of random junk you may not need.  First, go through your list of installed programs, if you haven’t used it in more then 3-4 months, you should uninstall it, especially programs that have background “assistants” or other active features.  Also, if you go to control panel, programs and features, and click on turn windows features on and off.  It will take a minuet to load, but it has things like tablet computer drivers, PC to PC sync, and fax components, you can turn these off if you don’t use these features.

For those users who are like me, and have 40+ Internet tabs open, and are surprised that their computer is slow, try closing your browser once a day, and that should improve overall computer performance.

One more thing that plagues many computers is small viruses, so make sure to keep your anti-virus programs up to date.

In this blog I will talk about my opinion and views about viruses, and a brief overview of what to do about them.

There are several types of malware you can get, primarily from the Internet.  The most common type of malware is called a cookie.  A cookie is pretty much harmless, and usually they aren’t even bad.  A website will put a small file on your computer that contains information that the site reads, if you have it set to save your password.  The bad cookies are put onto your computer discreetly, and usually they track your browsing, to give you adds you might be interested in.

The next type of malware is called spyware, this stuff is more dangerous, but usually not fatel for your computer.  Spyware usually contains pop ups and sometimes keyloggers.  Keyloggers are a small program that logs al the keystrokes, which could be a problem if you use your credit card, but keyloggers are usually for advertisements.  Another more rare type of spyware will actually install programs on your computer withought your permission.

Trojan Horses are another common type of malware, it disguises itself as an advertisement and also usually creates minor changes on your computer, or creates pop ups, however they can sometimes be more dangerous.  Some Trojans will try and record your passwords, and sometimes your credit card number.  They can be devastating to you, but usually not your computer.

Spyware is yet another type of malware, but it is usually harmless, it just tracks your browsing, but they can be irritating.

Now to more serous things, worms and viruses, which are almost identicle, but for now, I’m going to treat them as the same.  A Virus/Worm is designed to basically infect and usually obliterate a computer.  Although the majority of viruses just open a door to all types of malware, some viruses will take all system resourses or deleat files.  Viruses often are contained in downloads, often illegal ones, but can come form anywhere.

Some of you may be thinking, oh man, is there anything we can do about this, in fact, there is.  There are many many anti-virus and anti-spyware programs out there, some are good, and some suck, and some are fake.  Im going to talk about my 2 favorite, Spybot, and Avast Anti-virus (take note, those are both free, but aren’t necessarily the best, but my favorites).  First I will talk about Spybot, it is a free to download program that will scan your computer for spyware, cookies, Trojans, and several other types.  Spybot also has a resident protection, which runs in the background, and will alert you whenever a program tries to modify the registry, which is a handy feature for more advanced users.  The two most important things to remember when using spybot is that you HAVE to keep it updated, otherwise it wont be looking for current malware, and the other is that it isnt a anti-virus program, so you shouldn’t rely solely on that for your computer.  One more very important thing, you are looking for Spybot, NOT spyware bot, spyware bot is a fake program that actually infects your computer!!!  I have found spybot to work quite well in most cases, but in a few instances it has been unable to remove a certain program, but overall Spybot is a really good program to have, and hey, its free.

next i’m going to talk about Avast, Avast is an anit-virus program, they have many versions, but i use the home edition, a free edition, and free is always good.  Avast has a feature called a virus chest, which is a secure file that can contain viruses.  the reason for the virus chest is that some viruses will self duplicate when deleted, so when they are moved the piece of code that executes when it is deleted, doesn’t execute.  Avast has 2 components, resident protection, and a scan.  The scan can be set to 3 different settings, a quick scan, a normal scan and a thorough scan, if you have more than 200-250 Gbs of data then doing a thorough scan will take quite some time.  It is important that you don’t just turn it on and leave it, because when it finds something it will pop up a window asking you what to do, if you pick move to chest it will pop up another window asking you some more stuff.  Here you have the option to move/rename all, if you click that you can now walk away from your computer.  I have some say that Avast works wonderfully for them, but a few people say avast didn’t not find files, but it is up to you to decide.

one last thing is having a firewall, even just the windows firewall works, it will thwart most attempts to direct connect to your computer, but that is a very rare occurrence, due to the number of computers in the world.

Always remember, KEEP ANY PROTECTION PROGRAM YOU HAVE UP TO DATE!!!

www.spybot.com/  -  spybot

www.avast.com    -  Avast

http://www.safer-networking.org/index2.html   -  the spybot parent site

One last note, this blog is not intended to be an instruction manual, or promotional, but it is just one mans opinion, trying to help reduce the number of computer related headachs.

Today I was reading tech news and i came across an interesting article, Scotch tape peeled off in a vacuum will emit large amounts of X-rays.  Some scientist in UCLA came across that discovery but i know not how they did, but actually they weren’t the first, more than 50 years ago a group of Russian scientists found evidence of X-rays being emitted when sticky tape was peeled off a glass surface.  The X-rays are emitted approximately 2 thousandths of an inch from where the tape was being peeled off, and it came in rapid pulses of about a billionth of a second long.  The actual X-rays were produced by electrons flowing from the roll and  flying to the sticky side of the tape, and when they hit the tape, they slowed down and emitted the X-rays in massive portions (you do not have to worry about getting any exposure in the air, but try and avoid peeling tape in a vacuum chamber whilst unprotected).  The scientists believe that small, cheep X-ray devices could potentially be made for paramedics, or  for areas where electricity and money is scarce.  Those scientists have put in for a patient on devises like that.

I think that if this technology could be implemented cheaply it could potentially help MANNY fields, for example, combat medics, paramedics, medical aid  technicians, peace core volunteers, and small hospitals in 3rd world countries.  The lack of a need of lots of electricity and complex machines and clean rooms would make taking X-rays cheep, quick, and portable, opening many medical possibilities  that weren’t open before.

Well that’s it for my ramblings this week

So a wise man estimated that every 18 months, computing power in micro-devices doubles, which has turned out to be almost dead on.  This is illustrated by the current technology community, almost every 3 months the two main graphics companies, Nvidia and ATI (part of AMD), come out with the “latest and greatest” graphics card, almost without fail.

For a long while graphics cards by both companies were very similar, both in form and function.  Until recently where they could print the silicon even smaller, the cores of the cards were very similar, and consumed minuscule amounts of power, requiring small and low profile heat sinks, but now days the cores are printed even smaller, and consume obscene amounts of power, so they require large, and often elaborate, heat sinks. On older cards they would have one core per card, and usually have a small amount of ram on-board and would share some of the system ram, but the modern cards can have two cores per card and another micro processor on there to divi up the tasks, if you will, and the modern cards can support much more ram on-board, sometimes as much as the system ram.

Some theorists believe we have almost reach the maximum processing power for silicon chips, but i don’t think so, the current big-and-bad chip has near 1 billion individual transistors, whereas the chips of the last decade hadn’t even reached 50 million.  As far as speed goes we are bumping up against the speed limitations of silicon based transistors due to physical limitations, without being actually chilled, the maximum speed is approximately 4.5-5 GHz depending on the manufacturing process of the chip (i.e. 95nm, 65nm, 45nm, ect…).  In theory the actual transistors could switch up to about 100 GHz, but without being chilled, the heat generated by the chip would fry the chip before it even traveled the distance to the heat sink, all of maybe 1mm.  with those in mind you would think, oh, to get more power lets just stick a chiller on each chip and run them really fast, but at that point every little microscopic impurity in the silicon could potentially ruin the chip, one molecule of dirt could potentially ruin an entire chip, and also above 5GHz silicon changes its properties slightly and becomes unpredictable.  Yet another thing working against it is the trace lengths, even a 1mm long wire could potentially have an effect, despite the fact that electricity travels about half the speed of light in wire, at the speeds the chip would be running that could potentially have a huge effect.  So designers can’t go too much faster with the chips, so they compensate by adding millions of transistors.