January 2007 Archives

The other day, the first of the Windows Vista Ultimate extras appeared on Microsoft Update.  Among them: the BitLocker Drive Preparation Tool.  This allows you to take an existing Vista system and reconfigure it to use BitLocker; previously, you had to pre-plan a system's partition setup if you wanted to use BitLocker.  This makes it a lot easier to add BitLocker later as an "after-the-fact" change.

I'll probably be writing about this particular tool in depth for TechTarget, so I'll post a link for it here when I'm done.

I attended Microsoft's launch party for Windows Vista ("The Wow Starts Now") and Office 2007 the other day, in New York City (which I live not far from).  Unlike the XP launch, there were no giveaways -- at least none that I knew of -- and there were also, amazingly, no technical glitches.  One of the product managers took the stage and played a session of Uno with his son on the West Coast via XBOX Live, and after a brief delay people in the audience started to nudge each other.  Then the game kicked in, and so did the applause.

And then there was something that floored me in a completely unexpected way.  One of the things they played for the attendees was a clip about how they selected 100 families from around the world to work as beta-testers -- families, so they could get feedback from the families as a whole about how things worked in Vista. When they showed clips from one of the families from Israel, I heard this squee! of glee from behind me.  I turned around and the father and mother being interviewed on the screen were standing ten feet away from me.  Nice.

By default Windows XP comes with virtually nothing to protect the system against malware -- save for the Windows Firewall, which is not really an anti-malware system anyway.  If you want to do something about malware in XP, you'll need to turn to a third-party product.

With Vista, this has changed, although it's still a subject of broad debate if it's changed for the better.  Microsoft's own anti-malware product, Windows Defender, comes installed with Vista and is on by default.  If you want to use it, this guide will walk you through the basics of Defender and how to make it work for you; if you'd rather do without it entirely (and substitute in another, Vista-compatible protection program), I'll of course talk about how to disable it.  (If you want to disable it now, skip ahead to section 2.1.5.)

I missed this one when it first appeared, but the ever-on-target Ed Bott has a nice piece on his ZDNet blog about using flash drives with Vista's ReadyBoost function.  The main caveat is that many flash drives are simply not fast enough to work with ReadyBoost; at least one intrepid soul has begun building a database of devices that pass or fail.

It is possible (at least, it was during beta) to hack the settings that control how fast a drive has to be to be used with RB, but I'd bet you can no longer do this.

The whole "Vista is nothing but XP with a fancy new UI" canard has been provably untrue for a long time, but there hasn't been much literature explaining why -- at least until now.  TechNet Mag has an article by Mark Russinovich (of Winternals and Sony rootkit-busting fame), the first in a series, about what's new in the Vista kernel and why.  It's pretty technical, but Mark breaks down some the more difficult-to-understand stuff for a reasonably sophisticated reader.  I plan on coming back for future installments.

Another of those infamous random freezes killed my computer this morning.  This was after I'd spent all night running Memtest86+ to make sure I wasn't dealing with a rogue bad-memory issue; I got through eight passes with the program (with cache both on and off) and found no problems.

Whenever I've dealt with a problem like this in the past, my usual way of debugging it has been to first remove everything that does not absolutely have to be there, and then cycle out the components that can be changed.  Since I no longer have any expansion cards left in the system, I decided to cycle out the video card (an ATI Radeon 9550) and replace it with an older one that had originally shipped with the PC (an NVIDIA Quadro FX 500).  That meant losing Aero for the time being, but I'm patient and losing Aero for a bit is not going to break me.

I'm now tentatively wondering if the Radeon a) had some kind of "sleeper" issue that was only exposed when Vista started really stressing it a bit, or b) it was already starting to malfunction and it did so coincidentally with my move to Vista.  It's a bit of a parallel with the folks who moved to Vista and then discovered one of the DIMMs in the PC in question was bad -- and that this only surfaced with Vista because of the ASLR (address space layout randomization) system in use.  Likewise, maybe there was a defect with the card that only surfaced in the rarest circumstances before, but is now surfacing more regularly with Vista due to differences in the way the card's being handled.  It's tempting to blame Vista, but off-base; it doesn't solve anything.

If I go for three days without a crash using this older card, I'll swap the other one back in and try it without Aero to see if that makes any difference.  Either way, I think I may be looking at a new video card.

One last possibility is that I might be looking at some weird side effect of DEP.  If I continue having problems, I might try turning DEP off (or put the old card back in and try it with DEP off to see if that affects anything).  A shot in the dark, but a shot worth taking.

Remember those random Vista freezes?  One of them struck last night in the middle of work -- in fact, it trashed a document that I was in the middle of working on (thank you, Word Auto-Save), and I had to take a picture of the screen to recover the part of the document that I had been most immediately typing.

So far I'm going with one of a few theories:

1. A driver issue.  I've upgraded all of the drivers I can in this system to their most recent editions.  The one thing that I tried most recently after this last freeze was updating the video driver to ATI's Catalyst-edition drivers (as opposed to the bare drivers I get from Windows Update).  I've heard that the Catalyst software is a little more thorough about spec-ing video card settings that might cause instability, so I'll try it.
2. A memory issue.  All four 512MB DIMMs in this machine are registered ECC, though, and I have memory error correction turned on in BIOS; so I'm not sure how likely this is.
3. An interaction with another component.  The freezes didn't stop when I pulled out the one other expansion card I have in the system -- a fairly generic Belkin PCI USB 2.0 card -- so if it's something else that's in the system it might take a lot more hunt-and-peck to find it.

Also, I managed to trigger Product Activation during this experimenting -- probably when I yanked out one, then the other set of DIMMs to see if that fixed the instability (it didn't).  But I put everything back to the way it was and re-activated.  I wonder if there's a way to back up and restore Product Activation in Vista as there was in XP.

Yes, this is something I've been thinking about again -- the web vs. the desktop, that dichotomy which really isn't one.  In fact, the more I think about it, the less it looks like a dichotomy to me.

I use both desktop and web-based software in my daily routine.  This site's hosted using a blogging system called Movable Type, which runs on my web server.  The content and its design, however, are composed on my desktop -- I use a standalone blogging application, Windows Live Writer, and the odd bit of FrontPage 2003 to do some HTML / CSS work.  And the graphics are done client-side using Photoshop and IRFANVIEW.

In theory, I could do all of this work through a web interface using server-side or web-based software.  But by and large, the "fat client" progams do the same job better -- with a more flexible and responsive UI, with less browser klutziness (for lack of a better term to describe the arbitrary restrictions of using a web browser as an interface for anything), and with that much less hassle.  Sure, it means I have to reinstall these applications if I move to another PC -- but to me that's just the cost of getting back that much more local productivity.  And there are some things that really can't be done through a web browser at all, like capturing local screenshots and editing them quickly.

Here's my take: The two halves are complementary.  They will both evolve enormously, and they will evolve in such a way that they will come to complement each other in ways that we didn't anticipate before.  But to say that web-based technologies will make the desktop irrelevent or obsolete is like saying photography made charcoal sketches irrelevent or obsolete.  Everything's got it's place.

I've already run into my first major Vista problem, and it's apparently hardware-related.  Several times now, my computer has frozen hard -- no reboot, but a complete hardcore freeze -- when either coming up out of or going into sleep mode.

I'm not sure what could be the cause of this, but I suspect a hardware driver for one of the more esoteric components of my AMD motherboard could be it.  They're all generic Microsoft-issued drivers, so maybe there's a chance they're not totally debugged yet.  If AMD issues their own drivers, I'll probably set a System Restore point and try them out.

For now, I've disabled sleep mode.  I also ran a memory test (thinking that maybe Vista's use of ASLR had something to do with it), but it turned up nothing.  As always, I'll keep people posted.

One of the features of Vista that caught my eye fairly early on was the fact that you could install the operating system and run it, fully-featured, for 14 days -- with no license key.  I've even recommended this to people elsewhere (those who have valid access to the installation media, mind you) as a way to test out whether or not a given edition of Vista is right for them.  "Maybe Microsoft'll just make Vista into a free download," I joked.

My joke is reality.  Looks like Microsoft is indeed going to do that with both Vista and Office 2007 -- make them available as trial downloads which will run for a certain length of time, and which can be converted into the full commercial versions via purchasing a license key.  In a way, this isn't too surprising -- they've been doing this with their server products for a while now, so it's about time this would trickle down to the consumer level.

Vista isn't much good to anyone without a license key, so it's no real skin off Microsoft's nose to make an .ISO image of the Vista install disc available to anyone who needs it.  Actually, you can run an out-of-activation copy of Vista in Safe Mode, but its functionality is so limited you might as well be running Windows 3.x.  I'm wondering how many people are going to wind up doing exactly that so they can have a copy of Windows as opposed to none -- but, again, it's not like people are going to get anything that way that they might not already have.

The company plans to offer Windows and Office for sale on the Web using technology called digital locker, which can safely store the alphanumeric license "keys" that provide customers with rights to use its products, and resume interrupted downloads.

Not that most PC users are apt to try it. Mannion says downloading Vista and Office '07 will likely appeal primarily to what Microsoft's market researchers call "super-engaged" customers -- the 15% of PC users who think nothing of cracking open the computer case for an upgrade, trying new technology, and then blogging about it or telling friends. Those customers are "very evangelical," he adds.

(...I think he's talking about folks like you 'n me.)

And there's some details about that family-pack licensing deal that's been talked about before:

In addition, Microsoft will allow customers of its most expensive Windows Vista Ultimate product -- which costs $260 for an upgrade version -- buy two copies of Windows Vista Home Premium for other PCs in their house for about $50 each. Microsoft will offer the discount from Home Premium's regular upgrade price of $160 from Jan. 30 to June 30.

(Why only a limited-time offer, though?  Possibly because Microsoft wants to use that as pressure to get people to dive for it quickly, and use that to gauge interest.  But better for a limited time than not at all, right?)

A Vista feature I fell in love with immediately is the Start-menu Search box.  Instead of digging through an insane number of submenus to get to a program, I just need to type a few letters from its name.  For Irfanview, my image editor and viewer of choice (even in Vista!), I just type IRF and press Enter.

However, as I've worked with Vista and added more stuff to my installation, I've found that the way the Start Search box works can be a little deceptive.  If you want a given shortcut to show up at the top of the search list, that shortcut must be in the Start menu's Programs hierarchy.  It won't show up at the top of that list if you have it in Quick Launch -- although the Quick Launch folder is indexed for search.  If you have something in Quick Launch and you do a Start Search for it, it'll show up in the "Files" subdivision of the search results, but not in Programs.

So, to sum up: If you want to have the quickest possible access to a shortcut from Start Search, name it properly and place it somewhere in the All Programs menu hierarchy.

One nice little variation on this tip: if there's a quick two or three-letter code you want to associate with the program so it shows up in Search, you can create a second shortcut and name it that -- or just rename the existing shortcut if you're sure there will be no confusion.

Today I had my first experience with why Vista's User Account Control (UAC) feature is a good thing to leave on, even if you do get the occasional (and I do mean occasional) false alarm with it.

When I sat down today to get to work, I noticed that a UAC prompt wanted my attention so that it could deal with a program called exec.exe.  Since I associated that name with a trojan that I obviously didn't want running, I hit Cancel.  Then it came up again, and again, and I decided I was dealing with something fairly serious.

The program was trying to run from my user profile's temp folder -- even in Vista it's still a dumping ground of digital clutter; be sure to clean it out -- where I could find no evidence of the file.  I started thinking horrors like "rootkit" and "bleeding-edge zero-day Vista attack" until I did a little more search to see if anyone else running Vista had run into this issue.  Someone else had, and as it turned out, it seemed to be related to AOL Instant Messenger.

Then I remembered something else: Whenever you install AOL, you also get an annoying freebie added on with it, the Viewpoint Media Player.  This thing has caused me enough trouble in the past, so every time I've added AIM to a system I've been sure to uninstall it.  However, it had slipped my mind this time -- it was still running.  I snapped open Programs and Features (the new Add/Remove Programs window in Control Panel); there it was.  Thankfully it's not something that takes a lot of work to uninstall.

I haven't been pestered with another UAC warning about exec.exe since this happened.

This, then, is probably why I want to leave UAC turned on: it's an early-warning system that can give you a fair amount of information that you can use before something bad happens, not after it's already struck.  If that means putting up with having to OK a prompt before I can run RegEdit, frankly, I'll live with it.  (It's also a sign that AOL may need to rethink how they implement AIM in Vista to keep UAC from freaking out.)

Like you, I hate spam in all its forms -- email, mainly, but especially comment spam, which I've gotten bombarded with on my own blogs so badly that I've had to moderate all comments by hand.  As it turns out, there is a plugin for Movable Type which can use blacklist lookups to block spambot addresses; I just hadn't been able to find the right RBL to use for it.

The best results so far seem to be from sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org, which tracks a great many IP addresses from known spambots.  After I started using their RBL as my comment spam blacklist, the amount of spam I've been getting has plunged to nearly zero.  Try it.

One of the big bits of noise from CES was word about Microsoft's home server.  If a report by Mary Jo Foley is on the money, Microsoft may be prepared to follow that up with a special edition of Vista Ultimate that includes two Vista Home Premium licenses at a significantly reduced price.

The details are still terribly sketchy, but it sounds incredibly intriguing, and it makes logistical sense.  If you have Mom, Dad and Junior (or Jill), with the kid being the tech maven of the bunch, you could give him the Ultimate license and use the Home Premium licenses for the other two members of the family.

There's other ways you can save money on Windows licenses, but they come with certain strings attached.  For instance, you could buy copies of Vista Home Premium or even Ultimate in an OEM upgrade edition -- but a) you'd need an existing and qualifying copy of Windows to upgrade from (even if it's just the install CD), and b) you wouldn't be able to move that particular install of Windows to another computer, since it's OEM.  It would also be possible to buy an MSDN subscription, but $700 is a lot of money to drop at any one time.  This sort of packaging deal, if it's for real, would make for a very nice middle ground.

One of the big reasons I wanted to try using Vista on my desktop was because of the systemwide indexing feature. I'd loved it in beta testing and on my notebook, and now I wanted to actually try using it on my main system.

Today I noticed that despite having everything configured correctly, email in Outlook 2007 was not being indexed at all.  I tried deleting and rebuilding the index several times, even relocating it to another drive (which I had wanted to do anyway for the sake of greater parallelism).  No such luck.

I went digging and found this very curious entry in the system logs:

The content source <mapi://{s-1-5-21-869182674-3149738675-1434642837-1000}/> cannot be accessed.

Context: Windows Application, SystemIndex Catalog

Details: The specified address was excluded from the index. The site path rules may have to be modified to include this address. (0x80040d07)

A Google search turned up little useful information -- only that a number of other people have encountered the same problem in RTM Vista and RTM Office 2007.

Was it a permissions issue?  I know that sometimes I've had problems accessing a file in a drive migrated from another installation of Windows, but the permissions on the .PST file (which was newly created) didn't seem to be amiss.

Was it a service permissions issue?  I tried changing the permissions on the Search service, but that didn't seem to help (in fact, it wouldn't even start when I did that).

I finally did some more digging and tried a few things.  In Outlook, I went to Tools | Trust Center | Add-Ins and checked to make sure the Windows Search Email Indexer plugin for Outlook 2007 was installed correctly.  It seemed to be, but just to be on the safe side I disabled Macro Security and set the option "Apply macro security settings to installed add-ins" to make sure that the plugin itself wasn't being disabled.

I then deleted the entire index, removed all of the indexed locations from it, and rebuilt it so that it was basically an empty index.  Then I re-added Outlook as one of the indexable locations.  Lo and behold, it started to rebuild everything again.

A little more experimentation turned up something interesting.  When I turned Macro Security back on and reloaded Outlook 2007, I got a number of warnings about the add-ins.  One of them was the SearchIndexing plugin.  When I went back to the Trust Center and tried to re-enable it, I found this dialog:

You see that warning "Certificate of signed and load at startup COM Add-in is not in trusted source list"?  That sounds to me like there's a problem with the certificate for the Search Indexing add-on, which wasn't caught before this thing was shipped out -- that or some oddity in my setup caused this problem to arise in the first place.

I turned everything back on as it was before (add-in settings, macro security, etc.), and the indexer still seems to be working correctly whenever new items arrive in Outlook.  So I suspect there was some problem with the way the add-on was being initialized with the system at large as a search extender.

If anyone else has any perspective on this problem, please let me know -- I have the bad feeling I've stumbled across something that has slipped through the cracks.

After a great deal of preparation and work, I've finally taken the plunge and migrated to Windows Vista on my desktop machine.  I'm still getting many of my common applications set up, but it's been a lot less painful than I thought it would be.

Well, okay -- the experience was a bit rocky at first.  I tried the 64-bit edition of Vista and after discovering that my printer and my scanner were totally unsupported, I groaned and fell back to the 32-bit edition, where everything worked perfectly.  Since I only have 2GB of memory in this computer anyway, and no 32-bit apps that exist in 64-bit incarnations, the advantages aren't really that obvious.  I suspect my next PC will be 64-bit from "stem to stern", including the OS -- and maybe by that time I'll have devices that will have proper driver support.

There's three basic ways you can install Vista on a new PC.

1. Clean install.  Format the partition and start over with Vista.  Probably the best option, but also the one that requires the most work.
2. Upgrade an existing XP installation, apps and all.  This is my least favorite option, because there's just so much that can go wrong with an upgrade, even though the installer will flag possible compatibility issues.
3. Install Vista to an existing Windows partition without upgrading or formatting.  This moves your old Windows files to a directory called Windows.old, along with the Documents and Settings directories from the old installation.  You'll need plenty of disk space to get away with this particular option, but I had the space, so I decided to go for it and found that it worked out really well.

I'll be posting more installments to the XP User's Guide to Vista as time presents itself.

Now that CES has more or less wrapped, and I've sifted through a good deal of the reporting therein, I thought I'd share some of the things that have jumped out at me.

1. News about the iPhone is impossible not to come by, and after Apple's stock leaped (full disclosure: I own some myself), people started to question the logic of the device: Why Cingular?  Why no third-party software on the phone?  Why such a high pricetag for a device that is essentially being sold into a commodity market?  Even asking for 1% of a market that is saturated with cheap hardware -- and one where, in a way, the hardware isn't even really the issue anymore; it's the quality of the networks and the service offered across it -- seems like they're asking too much.  But I suspect this is simply a loss-leader, foot-in-the-door measure by a company that wants to break into a new space -- the way Microsoft lost money upfront with the first iteration of the XBOX but are now very solid players in a space where they were initially seen as being wholly unwelcome and unwanted.  Now if they can just resolve the nasty lawsuit over the name....
2. The HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc camps are getting all the more entrenched:
   
   a) Warner Brothers' hybrid HD/BR disc.  Apparently many of their HD titles will be in this format only, as a way of consolidating SKUs and saving on manufacturing costs.  I'm still a touch leery of the idea if only because of the way Sony tried similar tactics with HDCD (blech), but the two situations really aren't as analogous as it might seem.
   
   b) Triple-layer HD-DVD and beyond.  Toshiba claims they can push the capacity of an existing HD-DVD to 50GB+, which would kind of negate any immediate advantages afforded by Blu-ray.  What's not clear is how feasible this is with the players that have already been put onto the market -- would they be able to accomodate such discs with nothing more than a firmware upgrade?
   
   c) The porn factor.  In my opinion the idea that the porn industry could decide which format is the victor is so myopic it isn't even funny; it's just wishful thinking based on a loose analogy about Beta vs. VHS.  One joke I heard before sums this aspect up nicely: In what format do people want their porn? Any dang way they can get it.
3. Microsoft's "home server", which sounds a bit like Windows Media Center Plus.  One of the things I have always been annoyed about is Microsoft's lack of a server product that was intended for home or even home office environments, and that didn't cost a ton of money.  Among the ideas being tossed around for what this thing is for: network-wide automated incremental backup, central data repository, media streaming, and most likely firewall/network filtering too.  It's also clear that it won't be a standalone software product (unless you're a system builder), but a bunch of hardware boxes offered by different manufacturers loaded with a custom version of Windows Server 2003.  RTM for the software is scheduled for June 22, so I'm guessing we'll see the hardware itself in the fall.  Hewlett-Packard is going to be one of the first manufacturers to offer such a device.  But, again, at what price?  (The fact that the system is supposed to ship without and run without a display or a keyboard -- it's a "headless / lights-out" configuration, in other words -- will cut some dollars off by default.  My guess is that it won't appear for less than $500, which is a lot more than what you could pay for a simple desktop machine with no display ... but then you'd have to configure it all yourself.  And that's presumably what people are shelling out for -- the luxury of not having to do that.)

If nothing else, the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2007 has proven that there's no end in sight to the Clash of the HD-DVD / Blu-ray Disc Titans.  Here's just a few of the goodies that were unveiled at the show:

• Toshiba's 51GB triple-layer HD-DVD disc.  It's yet to be approved by the DVD Forum, but they're confident it'll be a standard-issue item.  I suspect existing players will need a firmware upgrade before they can recognize this thing, though.
• But the Blu-ray Disc people aren't about to be one-upped: they unveiled a quad-layer, 100GB Blu-ray disc as well, and claim that they can cram as much as 200 GB on a single disc (possibly by double-siding two 100GB discs).
• There's Toshiba's TWIN Format Disc, with HD-DVD on one side and regular DVD on the other -- although these "combi" format discs have never really sold all that well no matter what the format.
• And then there's LG's combination HD-DVD / Blu-ray Disc player, which will eventually also be released as a PC standalone drive.  If nothing else, I might as well start saving my pennies for that baby -- it sounds like the only logical way out of this mess.

(Oh yeah, and there was this company called Banana or something like that, they released this phone...)

One of the little white lies about Windows is that it's "self-updating" -- whenever there are new drivers or systtem components available, Windows will download and install them automatically from Microsoft Update.  That's only provided the manufacturer has ever bothered to make them available through Microsoft Update in the first place.

It's some kind of bizarre irony that several of the most critical drivers for my computer happen to be not available through Microsoft Update.

A little background: I'm running an Alienware dual-processor AMD Opteron system, with a Tyan motherboard.  As it turns out, AMD provides a set of drivers for the chipset used by the motherboard that are not the stock drivers you'd get in a Windows installation.  Windows will install and run without them, but not well, so it's somewhat in your best interest to stay up to date with such things ... provided you remember to do so.  These drivers aren't offered through Microsoft Update and have to be added or updated manually.  How I came to be reminded of all this is half the adventure.

After working with Office 2007 for a month or two (I love it), I noticed something odd: whenever I scrolled through a document in Word with my mousewheel, I'd get a weird visual artifact where the top or bottom few lines of the document onscreen would be repainted ad infinitum up and down the length of the window.  I poked around a bit and found that it was probably a video driver problem, and since I hadn't thought to try and update my video driver in months, I went ahead and did that.

The video driver (which was for an ATI Radeon 9550) came with a set of utilities to configure the video card as well.  Out of curiosity I opened them up and started checking the settings, only to find that the card's diagnostic tool was reporting that I had a "0X Speed" AGP bus.  Whaaaa?  Another round of poking around online revealed that this often happened if your AGP controller driver was out of date.

The date on the AMD AGP controller driver was 4/1/2002. Several of the other AMD-specific drivers were also hopelessly out of date.  They had never been updated since the last time the system image was prepared.

I went "argh" and "aieee" and snagged the appropriate driver packs from AMD's site.  One -- ahem, two reboots later, the system was not only free of Word weirdness but was running much faster overall.  (To top it off, I also snagged an updated driver for the disk controller, which was also a year behind the curve.)

Moral of the story: Updated does not always mean updated.

I guess this also means I need to update the system image I built....

Happy New Year, everyone.  I'm back at work and busy grinding out the next installment of the XP User's Guide to Vista, which covers Windows Defender, so you should be seeing that in about a week or so.

Just to run things down real quick, here's a list of all the stuff I'll be covering regularly.

• Vista, of course, both in the ongoing feature guide and in a more detailed fashion when I switch to it as my fulltime operating system.
• HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc.  I do plan to get hardware for both media, if possible.  (I'm still edging towards Blu-ray as being the more technologically adept successor, but leave it to Sony to be inept enough to not be able to market eterrnal youth.)
• Digital media in general (music, downloadable movies, etc.)
• Utilities, although normally I wrote about this topic for the TechTarget.com family of sites, and I don't want to duplicate material with them whenever I can help it.
• Anything else that crosses my desk and looks interesting.

As a side note, I've been running the Firefox 3.0 pre-alpha release -- charmingly codenamed "Minefield" -- and it hasn't crashed or given up the ghost once yet.  I'm still waiting for them to make the major under-the-hood changes that have been promised, though.  One very nice feature: the pre-alpha updates itself whenever there's a new nightly build of the program.  Give it a shot if you're adventurous.  I use FF by and large, although I run IE 7 in parallel with it about as much now.