October 2006 Archives

Some days just getting a straight answer is hard enough.  ArsTechnica went to talk to Microsoft about Vista's activation policy and got a slightly different story than the one I reported here before.

A Microsoft spokesperson told Ars Technica that "the hardware tolerance of product activation for Windows Vista has been improved and is more flexible than that for Windows XP," indicating that re-activations caused by minor changes to a PC should be less common.  "We believe these improvements will better accommodate the needs of our PC enthusiast customers," the spokesperson said.

Microsoft told Ars Technica that SPP monitors the system and measures changes against the original hardware configuration of the PC in an attempt to determine if the software has been moved to a new device. SPP uses an undisclosed algorithm to to track changes, and it remains unclear how the algorithm assesses different hardware changes. The spokesperson reiterated the company's view that Vista's hardware tolerance is more flexible than before. As to the issue of multiple re-activations, Microsoft is standing behind the language of its licenses.

... For those reading between the lines, Microsoft's response is telling. The option of seeking remediation through Microsoft support is a good sign that the company has left a giant safety net in place, much as they did with Windows XP.

What's most frustrating is that Microsoft could clear up all of this bewilderment by simply having one of their people step up to the plate and speak out on their own.  I suspect the reason this hasn't happened is because they're trying to see just how well this new policy plays out once it's actually live, instead of making a full commitment to something they can't support.

I suspect the only way we're going to find out what the real deal is is by waiting for the final release to drop, and then torture-testing the thing on our own.  But if they have, indeed, relaxed the activation thresholds enough that people can swap motherboards without being forced to shell out for a whole new license, that's worthwhile.

... similar concerns over hardware upgrades surfaced before Windows XP launched. The reality since that launch has been far less dramatic than many commentators predicted. In our extensive experience with re-activations caused by hardware changes, the outcome experienced most often amounts to this: we had to use Microsoft's automated phone system to retrieve a new activation code. No money changed hands. On average, the calls took less than five minutes.

In the entire time I've been working with XP, I've run afoul of PA exactly twice, and both times it was because I did something unbelievably stupid.  (I know that other people have not had the same track record, but I can only speak for myself -- and some of the things other people do with their PCs are definitely at least as stupid as anything I've done.)

[This spokesperson for Microsoft, by the way, has gone completely unnamed.]

Some possible clarification about the Vista license-activation deal:

A Microsoft spokesman from the Licensing Dept told bit-tech that ... Windows Vista will not require a system re-activation unless the hard drive and one other component is changed. This means that enthusiasts will be able to swap CPUs, memory and graphics cards out without any worry about having to re-activate with MS, either on the internet or by phone.

Should you change the hard drive and another piece of hardware - for example for a major upgrade such as a motherboard change that requires a re-installation - Microsoft will allow you to re-activate up to 10 times. You will not, however, be able to have more than one machine activated concurrently.

I've got no firsthand confirmation directly from MS about any of this, but this actually sounds better than what currently exists with XP.  Anyone who goes over the 10-activation limit (and I don't even see enthusiasts having this problem) can also phone in an activation, which tends to be pretty painless.  (You can bet someone is going to try, just to see what happens.)

(Bear in mind, I'm not positive if what they are talking about is the final, end-user license for Vista or just the licensing that's in place now for RC testers, but the wording sounds a lot like it's for the real deal.)

Also, I am not sure if making a disk image from one drive to another counts as a new hard drive, though.  My experiences has shown that it doesn't.  When I imaged my XP system drive to a new hard drive, I checked the product activation counters with XPInfo and found that the HD counter had not changed.  I suspect the HD counter is derived from the partition serial number and not the drive hardware itself, but I don't know if that's the same in Vista.  (On a whim, I ran XPInfo on Vista RC1 after activating it, and got an error message -- apparently the APIs used to obtain a computer's PA data have changed since XP.)

I've mentioned before that the problem with being Microsoft is that you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't.  They got flack for insecurities in Windows, and when they set to work fixed them, they started getting flack for allegedly locking out security product makers.

Not long ago a security researcher named Joanna Rutkowska demonstrated a kernel-level hack in Vista and allowed arbitrary code execution by injecting data into the pagefile.  Microsoft has apparently addressed the problem by disallowing write access to raw disk sectors for user mode applications, even when they are running in administrative mode.  This means any application that wants to do sector-level disk editing will need its own signed kernel driver (not signed by Microsoft, though, but simply signed by the ISV with a valid certificate) to do so.

There's apparently a fair amount of back-and-forthing going on in the comment sections in the above-linked post, though.  From what I've discerned, it is still possible to do sector writes in post-RC2 -- provided you're doing so on a locked or completely dismounted file system.  But direct writes are not possible on a live file system such as the system partition, and one of the problems Rutkowska flagged with this issue is how it makes things like a secure-delete tool a lot more difficult to implement.  It could still be done with a separate boot-to-CD tool, but a live secure-erase tool would probably be more difficult.

I am not a programmer, but one of the APIs mentioned that allows direct access is FSCTL_LOCK_VOLUME, and according to Microsoft's own documentation, "The NTFS file system treats a locked volume as a dismounted volume."  (This doesn't mean the volume is dismounted and remounted, just that no other disk activity can take place until the lock is released.)  If there are open files on the volume (such as an open application), or a pagefile, the lock will not work.  This has been defended (again, see the comments in the post above) by saying that arbitrary writes to an open file system can destabilize things, so it sounds like a signed kernel driver may be the only way to go.

I'll keep us posted on this.  There's always the chance this is simply a provisional measure until something more elegant is worked out.

The other day someone asked me a question about Vista that I honestly wasn't prepared to answer.  I thought it bears repeating and discussing here, because it cuts to the heart of a lot of what has been surrounding the reasons for upgrading to Vista in the first place:

"If Vista is inherently more secure than older versions of Windows, why do I need to bother with products like Windows Defender -- or for that matter, any third party antivirus or antispyware product?"

I thought about that one for a minute.  The fellow asking was someone I would call a moderately experienced user, someone who doesn't always follow the absolute latest trends in everything, but that made the question all the more intriguing.  Think about Mac OS X, for instance -- viruses and spyware as we know them in Windows are essentially nonexistent in OS X.  So if Windows is (theoretically) headed in the same direction, isn't stuff like Windows Defender -- and, presumably, future iterations of third-party products like that-- a waste?

The one answer I came up with doesn't seem entirely satisfactory.  For one, it's possible to turn off some of Vista's protections against privilege escalation, so someone might want to spend the money (or invest the time) in obtaining something that grants them an extra level of protection in case they make a mistake.  (It's fortunately not a trivial action to turn those things off, nor is it recommended.)  Also, these changes may not protect against things like buffer overflow attacks (which Unix-derived OSes are also vulnerable to).  The sum total of my counter-argument was that it's not possible to always foresee every possible attack.  Vista does a good deal of "minimizing the attack surface" of the OS -- to use a phrase I personally can't stand -- but it can't take everything into account.  I still felt like I was ducking the issue in some way, though -- if only because I was downplaying the importance of personal responsibility.  You cannot make a thoughtless user any less thoughtless by habitually protecting them from the consequences of their ignorance.

This connects with the recent controversies involving Mcafee and Symantec's demands that Vista's innards be opened up to third party security developers in the same way XP was.  The street-level comebacks about this whole row (from places like Digg) are mostly in the vein of snarking at Mcafee and Symantec for writing such lousy programs in the first place: Now that Microsoft is actually making a secure OS, the other guys are whining that they're being put out of a job.  Microsoft's stance is that they bent over backwards to allow third-party developers to write their own security products for Vista, and while I'm curious to see how this plays out I'm tentatively siding with them on this one, as the technical details have been kind of skimpy.

My personal feeling is that good computer practices and safe surfing habits (and a browser that isn't a porous membrane for spyware) will keep you safe from the vast majority of stuff out there.  And a firewall never hurts, either, but personal awareness and responsibility are paramount.

Like many other key functions in Vista, the way users access networking and network resources has also been reworked.  The vast majority of networking functions are now consolidated in one place instead of being spread out over a number of different dialogs.  The new networking interface actually seems patterned after something we've seen in XP Service Packs 1 and 2: the Security Center.

However, I found a few gotchas that are worth noting -- mostly in the way Vista now handles certain kinds of file and folder sharing.  I'm hoping this is a RC1 issue and not something we see in the finished product.  But let's start with the good stuff, because the good stuff really is very good.

I can't believe I've gone this far without talking about StuffBak.  The idea is surpassingly simple: you go to your local CompUSA and buy a set of stickers with serial numbers etched into them.  You tag your personal electronics or other valuables with them, register the serial numbers at the StuffBak site, and if you lose one of the items, the information on the sticker can allow a Good Samaritan to get in touch with you through StuffBak.  You can even offer a cash reward for returning a given item.  The stickers are made from the same foil as those hard-to-remove asset tags that are used in corporations, and they survive a fair beating.

I could think of at least ten things I wanted to tag with these stickers: my USB flash drive (which has a backup copy of all my current and most irreplaceable work), my laptop, my portable music player, my desktop PC, and so on.  I haven't yet lost anything, thank goodness, but USA Today did their own study and got back something like 75-80% of the stuff they lost.

StuffBak also sells a number of other services aside from the basic stickers, and they have group discounts as well.  Check them out.

Among the many, many changes made to Windows Vista, the one that's drawn the most attention is User Account Control, or UAC for short.  In this article I'm going to talk about UAC as it'll affect someone who's come in from XP, and may be surprised to find that things they did before without consequence are now being interrupted.

PC World has spoken to Microsoft about the whole issue of whether or not it's possible to move a Vista license more than once.  The official word is about what you'd expect.

Some of the things in this article made me flinch.

When Windows Vista is available, consumers will be able to transfer the OS license they purchase to only one machine other than the one for which they originally buy Vista, says Shanen Boettcher, a Windows general manager at Microsoft. He says Microsoft thinks the change makes sense because "lifetimes for PCs are getting longer." Most likely, a user will not need to transfer an OS license to more than one computer during the time that OS is the latest one available, Boettcher says.

"It's a fit for what most customers do," he says. Boettcher adds that XP did not have a specific limit for the number of times the license was transferable, but that Microsoft wanted to be "specific" about transfer rights with Vista.

[Side note: Most of the PCs I own have had a lifespan of about three years, including notebooks.  I don't know if that's reflective of the experiences of most users, though.]

I'm going to drill down as far as I can to the heart of the problem.  The way I see it, there are three issues here:

1. Windows users are upset because they can't simply take a Windows license with them from computer to computer with impugnity; they want to know that they have that measure of freedom to do so if they need to.  [Devil's advocate: Windows is licensed by machine and not by user, and the vast majority of the Windows licenses sold are tied to a specific computer as a pre-load.]
2. People who tinker with their machines and re-image them are going to be punished.  [Devil's advocate: The hardware check thresholds for Vista have apparently been loosened a bit in the light of this new restriction, so people who are legitimately binding Vista to one machine with regular hardware upgrades may not have it any worse than they do now.]
3. This will not inhibit piracy in the slightest, because the pirates who want copies of Windows will get them by any means.  [Devil's advocate: We'll see how the new antipiracy measures play out in the real world -- which, admittedly, includes how broadly those restrictions will inconvenience regular users.]

One comment in the PC Today forums was both funny and telling: "Well, I was considering purchasing a copy of Vista Ultimate when it comes out but since I upgrade components in my PC as often as I change my shorts, I will now have to resort to obtaining a "free" version of the OS since it's not a fit for what I do. What a joke to have to permanently bind my $400 copy of Vista to every 2nd motherboard."

Like I was about Product Activation itself, I'm now of two minds once again.  In principle, I hate this idea.  In practice, it's manageable.  And I suspect it'll drive away another flock of people towards open-source ... although my own dalliances with Linux essentially involved trading the onus of Product Activation and the cost of the OS for a raft of other problems that were about as inhibitory towards my work habits, if not more so.

When the final version drops, I'm going to be in touch with some folks who do regular hardware upgrades, and report back on their experiences with it.  As a side note, I suspect the fellow who swaps motherboards regularly could probably work around the problem with phone activation ... but, again, he really shouldn't have to.  Folks like that may be a minority, but they're a vocal minority, and they have a tendency to get other people to jump ship with them.

Microsoft has caved on other things before.  Maybe if we put enough pressure on them and insist that the transfer option be limited to OEM copies of Vista only (i.e., preloads, not OTC editions), it would make sense.  But as it stands, this rule is making too many enemies.

[Postscript: Koroush Ghazi of www.tweakguides.com has a very nice discussion of the subject over at Paul Thurrott's SuperSite -- it's in essence a rebuttal to Paul's own piece on the issue.]

If there's one thing I've consistently hated about Windows, it's the lack of a good backup and restore solution.  Sure, there's the NTBACKUP tool, but it doesn't let you create a full-system backup you can restore to "bare metal": you have to have a working Windows installation to use it, which kind of obviates the point if your system's toast.

Someone at Microsoft was thinking, though, and one of the Vista features that has gladdened my heart to see is the ability to not just back up files and folders, but to back up and restore a whole system from scratch.  XP users who have had to rely on copying files by hand, struggling with NTBACKUP, working with freeware that doesn't cover all the bases or shelling out cash for an actual third-party backup solution are going to love this.  I know I do.

Incidentally, our old friend System Restore is still here, and in much the same condition, but for the time being I'll talk in detail about the new backup/restore functions; a discussion of System Restore can wait for another article.

Or: The First Step Off The Deep End

Well, last night I went and did it.  I installed Windows Vista RC1, Build 5600, on my notebook computer -- after making a full partition image, just to be safe.  The whole install process -- which I did from a clean boot, no upgrade -- took about an hour, and when it was done I sat down and got my first close look at the way Vista works.  I know there have been some changes since RC1 was released (most notably to the annoying black of the Taskbar), but I figured enough has been nailed down that I can at least try to start using the OS provisionally.

What I'd like to do is publish a series of articles that talk about some of the new things in Vista, but from the point of view of an existing Windows user.  A lot of other people have talked about Aero Glass and the security features, but I'd like to tackle this from the perspective of someone who has been using XP for a long time and is now, suddenly, a Vista user.  What do they see, and what will they do?  I figured I'd be as good a guinea pig as most people.

A couple of days ago I posted a link to Ed Bott's blog in which he pointed a finger at a very worrisome aspect of Windows Vista's licensing that had a lot of people in a tizzy.  It seemed to imply that you couldn't move a copy of Vista more than once from a given machine.  I didn't like the sound of that, but at the same time I could see how it was a misreading of a statement that wasn't very well-worded to begin with.  I slept on it, re-read it, and saw all the more how it could have been misread.

Now Paul Thurott has attempted to explain everything.  He claims the the contractual conditions in the new EULA are really no different from what they were in XP -- and that, in XP, we didn't really have the freedom to move licenses as freely as we thought we did.  Well, did we?  His claim is that the vast majority of XP licenses are not over-the-counter boxed editions, but preinstalls tied to a given machine.  The people who do have a machine failure and need to move to a whole new machine have always had the option of activating by phone (which I've done myself as a pre-emptive measure at one point).

His defense of this whole matter boils down to two things:

1) Most people who get Vista will get it with a new computer, which cannot be transferred anyway.

2) If you buy Vista over-the-counter and need to move it more than once, you do what you did with XP: call support.

(For the record, I have one friend who did exactly that and claims he was treated with great hostility and suspicion, but I wonder how much of that may simply have been that they were simply asking him what had happened, and he felt like he had to provide them with every last detail, which is generally not the case.  My point being that few people are inclined to phone tech support to do something they feel should be a hands-off circumstance.)

However, let me play devil's advocate for the moment.  The number of times I have had to move a given copy of Windows to a completely different computer I could probably count on one hand.  Notice I said move and not reinstall; the two are not handled the same way.  If you reinstall Windows on a piece of hardware that it was already activated on (including incremental changes, remember the 120-day device-change threshold?), that's not moving anything.

So how does this affect the hardcore PC geeks who tear down and rebuild constantly?  Thurrott further claims the algorithm in Vista that determines the number of hardware changes to watch for to consider the machine different has actually been relaxed a bit.  I don't have details on how it's been relaxed; I'd like to scare those up as soon as possible and see for my self what they are.

I should also note that the people who object to all of this on principle -- I was and to a degree still am one of them myself -- are simply not going to be most of the people using Windows, and are not going to use Windows in the ways that most other folks are.  I think we forget this a little too easily, and while it's good to remain vigilant of changes like this, it's not good to lose perspective.  We don't like restrictive licensing agreements because many of us have tasted life on the other side of the Windows fence, but unless someone can go and prove in court that EULAs like this are not legal, or constitute an abuse of monopoly, we either use Windows as it is or not at all.

My complaint is this: If the XP EULA didn't allow moving from more than one machine, why didn't it say that in the first place?  Perhaps I'm griping needlessly at this point, but I'm finding I miss the days of Borland's old-school software licenses (the kind that came with products like Turbo Pascal), which were spelled out in the clearest and most unambiguous language possible and came with plenty of examples.  I'm frankly more worried about WGA being an inhibitor to Vista's usefulness than the EULA, but this is certainly not helping matters any.

I'll see how much of an obstacle Product Activation and WGA are with my own hardware.  I would like to think it won't be any worse than it is now, but ... I worry.  A bit.

I slept on last night's Windows licensing issue, and when I woke up in the morning, I went back and re-read the licensing terms with a clear(er) head.  I have the suspicion that what's going on here is another case of a badly-worded EULA, rather than Microsoft being deadly greedly.

Let's look at that wording again. 

The first user of the software may reassign the license to another device one time. If you reassign the license, that other device becomes the “licensed device.”

I am beginning to suspect what they mean is not that you can only move the license to one other machine, but that you can only move it once from the original machine.  In other words, you can only move it to one other machine from that machine, not five others, with a similar condition imposed on each successive machine.  In short, this is ostensibly no different from the way XP works now; the wording just seems to be a little more prone to misinterpretation.  So maybe this is a tempest in a thermos, to coin a phrase.

What I find amazing is how a company of Microsoft's size and relative wealth can write an EULA that's this fuzzy.  Those who are of a more paranoid stripe would probably be inclined to say that it's on purpose, but I'm starting to learn my lesson about assuming the worst each time.  (There are other elements in the licensing agreement that had people in a tizzy, like a clause which was horribly misquoted and which people believed to mean that you couldn't use an .ISO disc image in anything other than Windows Vista Ultimate Edition.)

I am, however, still going to wait for some official clarification on this issue.

Ed Bott (who brought attention to this the first time) has also chimed in about something else that's actually a giant boon: If you have a copy of Vista, you can run the same copy of Vista within it as a VM with no licensing penalty.  This is a great idea.  For a guy like me, who's constantly using VMs to do testing-and-teardown work, it means one less thing to worry about.  Microsoft actually has done some very good things with the way they've handled licensing for VMs, so it's nice to see them continue to do so on the desktop.

The problem with Vista is ... well, there's about 200 ways that sentence could be completed, now, couldn't there?  Let's add another one to the mix.

Ed Bott of ZDNet is reporting that one of the new licensing stipulations with Windows Vista is that you are no longer allowed to move an individual copy of Vista from one machine to another indefinitely.  At least, that's what the wording in the new EULA would have us believe:

15. REASSIGN TO ANOTHER DEVICE.

a. Software Other than Windows Anytime Upgrade. The first user of the software may reassign the license to another device one time. If you reassign the license, that other device becomes the “licensed device.”

b. Windows Anytime Upgrade Software. The first user of the software may reassign the license to another device one time, but only if the license terms of the software you upgraded from allows reassignment.

Similar rules are in section 16 of the EULA, regarding transfer to a third party.

Now maybe this is just very bad wording.  Perhaps all they are implying is that you only have the right to move a given copy to one other machine, and then you can only move that one copy to one other machine, and so on.  In other words, you can't move it to five other machines.

But somehow I doubt that.  And what's most worrisome about this particular stipulation is how it would affect people who are constantly tearing down and rebuilding; they wouldn't be able to use Vista reliably at all.  Also, what about folks who upgrade continuously and don't stay with one hardware profile for any given time?

Unless Microsoft comes out and clarifies this particular issue a little more aggressively, I'm going to have a real hard time seeing this as being anything other than disgustingly unfair.  Maybe it's fine for people whose copy of the OS is tied to the machine they bought it on and replace both PC and OS at the same time, but those of us who don't fit that profile are going to be -- and already are -- spitting mad.

I'll keep you all posted with any developments on this issue, but I suspect it's going to be a real deal-breaker for me.

Okay, so the title's a rather lame attempt at humor.  But within the same week I've done a double upgrade -- Firefox (now at version 2.0) and Internet Explorer 7.

I've been sold on Firefox for some time now, if only because of little things.  The RSS feed system, for instance, or the fact that its CSS and JavaScript implementations are a little less ... well ... quirky than IE's.  And I know that's a matter of debate and opinion, but after doing a good deal of programming on a website that used a fair amount of both I quickly came to resent the way I had to make special cases for IE too much of the time.

So far IE7 has been impressive -- a little crowded in the UI at the top bar for my tastes, but I think that's more due to me not having tweaked the browser as thoroughly as I've tweaked FF.  (The same crowded-UI complaint seems to be endemic with Vista's version of Explorer, and maybe for the same reasons: perhaps you just need to turn some stuff off.)  The new FF has a number of incremental changes -- nothing really revolutionary unless you count built-in in-line spell checking as revolutionary -- but does load and render pages noticeably faster than its predecessor.

For a long time I was actually not using the generic-vanilla Firefox, but a custom build called "stipespeed", compiled from the Firefox source and optimized specifically for my processor set.  I loved it, and it looks like Stipe will be creating a custom build of FF 2.0 in a bit as well; I want to see how much faster that flies compared to the native build.

And as you can guess, I'm not planning to give up FF for IE anytime soon, if only out of habit.  I am more or less forced to run both of them anyway, to see how well the web designs I create render on the 99% or so of browsers in use out there.  (For the sake of fairness, I have tried Opera, and eventually went back to Firefox after growing disenchanted with its own frustrating batch of quirks.  I'll try the newer versions, but again, I can't promise anything.)

My colleague Scot Finnie has been giving Windows Vista a very detailed and extremely critical (as in, he's found fault with things) shakedown ever since the first builds appeared for public consumption.  With the final release candidate looming, it's about time I got my hands on it, turned it upside down and emptied its pockets to see what falls out.  The only reason I haven't done this sooner is resources: I don't have a spare machine to do testing on (yet), and I really wanted to not run the risk of trashing my production system on something that has been explicitly branded a beta.

I've gathered advice about the installation process from other folks who have suffered through it, though, and here are a few things I plan to take to heart:

1. Don't upgrade.  Meaning, don't upgrade an existing installation of Windows.  Install clean.  You will drastically minimize the number of variables involved, and you'll be able to systematically determine what works in a clean install vs. what doesn't.  Yes, this means more headache spread out over more time, but it also means a clearer picture of why things might work or not work.
2. Don't install with anything that doesn't absolutely have to be there.  Unplug everything you don't need to get Windows running before the install; you'll save a lot of time on the hardware detection process, and you'll be able to add hardware progressively and see what works and what doesn't.  Hardware drivers are still a big missing piece of the Vista puzzle, and from what I can tell there will be many things that will simply not work, period.  My scanner, for instance (a Canon consumer-level item) isn't going to be supported at all, so I either have to plug it into an existing XP system or buy a whole new one.  The former is workable; the latter is absolutely not happening right now.
3. Don't install on a drive with an existing Windows installation.  Even if you're doing a parallel install, don't do this.  I have a separate drive that I've reserved for Vista, which I will boot to entirely apart from XP.  (At this point I'm even leery of having Vista examine my existing non-boot drives until I can determine that it doesn't create incompatibilities with earlier versions of Windows in NTFS.  Yes, I'm probably being paranoid, but You Never Know...)
4. Don't trust production work to it for the time being.  I'm even leery of doing so after the initial gold release, if only because I need to keep my main system an XP system for the time being, just for the sake of my work.  Maybe after the first 6-8 months I'll be dual-booting consistently (or using Virtual PC for backwards compatibility, etc.), but I don't plan on going whole-hog anytime soon.

Old habits are hard to break, and I hope the best thing about Vista is that it gives me a bunch of solid, compelling reasons to leave XP behind.  Maybe not immediately, but in time.  And I'm patient.

Anyone who's read this blog for more than a week knows I'm a movie lover, and that I've been keeping an eye on the HD-DVD / Blu-ray format struggle (I'm not sure if it's a war; it seems more like one of those gaudy pro-wrestling matches where you shake your head at both sides).  Out of curiosity, I did some digging to find out what I'd need to play HD content on my PC, in either format.  What I found was not heartening.

1. A Blu-ray or HD-DVD drive.  This is the obvious part.  Both types of drives are still new in the market, and still terribly expensive.  Sony's first-out-the-gate Blu-ray burner/reader was about $750 at CompUSA last I checked.
2. Blu-ray / HD-DVD titles.  Well, I have one of each at this point, thanks to the good graces of some folks who helped me write an article on the format.
3. A PCI Express graphics card with an HDCP-capable GPU, secure HDPC CryptoROM, and at least 256MB graphics memory.  Now we're already in trouble.  My PC supports AGP only -- it's a dual-AMD 64 model that was made before there was a PCI Express chipset to support that configuration.  So unless someone out there has made an AGP edition of such cards (which so far I don't believe to be the case), I'm looking at a motherboard upgrade.
4. Playback software that supports hardware decoding and acceleration, such as PowerDVD (my current favorite).
5. A dual-core CPU with 1GB of RAM or better.  Well, I already have that, but it looks like it's not going to be of much use without the GPU to go with it.

(Source)

I'm not mad enough to eat nails or anything like that over this, but it is terribly irritating.  The idea of the general-use PC as being perpetually upgradeable hasn't been true for some time -- you're always going to run into some kind of wall when components reach the end of their lifetime -- but I had no idea it was going to happen this quickly.  Maybe late next year I can look at upgrading ... maybe.

For now, there's always plain old DVD.  Which, from what I can tell, isn't going anywhere for a long time either.

I recently upgraded to a 320GB hard drive for my main OS partition, as I was starting to run very tight on room with the old 160.  I've got a lot of stuff on there; there's really no way around it.  To get everything over to the new disk I used BootIt Next Generation, a program I've used for similar hard drive upgrades that is at least as good as anything available for twice the price.  And when I booted to the new drive, I saw a marked performance increase -- I went from 45 seconds in the boot logo to about 10 seconds, tops.  The performance in the rest of the system, though, seems to be about the same.

How to explain this?  I think the copy process helped defragment some of the file-system structures that otherwise hadn't been compacted, which might speed boot time.  But the rest of the system still seems to be at about the same plateau of speed.  Not long ago while doing research for a series of articles on defragmentation (which I'll link here when they're all up), I was told that while hard drives have on the whole gotten faster, the disparity of speed between the hard drive and the rest of the computer has increased.  I think I'm experiencing some examples of that firsthand.

But there's no question that having that much more free space -- and a drive which is incrementally faster than the last one -- has paid off.  In the same articles, I argued that having more free space on any drive always helps cut down (although not eliminate) the detrimental effects of fragmentation; if you have more than 75% space full on a given drive, you either need to clear it off or upgrade, or you're going to be fighting a performance drain that you can't win by simply defragging.  And the vast majority of the time when you buy a bigger drive, you get one that runs quieter, has a bigger onboard cache, and may even support slightly faster throughput to begin with.

As an aside, I've also started running the newest version of a progressive defragmenter called Buzzsaw, which runs silently in the background and defragments individual files when hard drive activity drops be low a certain level.  It seems to work well with servers, too, although at a bit of a CPU cost -- it seems to need a lot of processing power when the number of fragments is quite high.  But I've recommended it before, and I'm doing so again now.

Finally, I'm laying tentative plans to move the Newsletter off Blogger competely and onto my own personal pages.  When this happens I'll try to also migrate the old posts with it, and there may also be a name change to go with it.  But the old blog will redirect to the new one for quite some time to come.

Welcome to the new home of the Windows [2000] Power Users Newsletter, now Windows Insight. Excuse the dust on the floor -- we're still remodeling!