Aw dawg, this is just my whateva-whateva site.

I was so busy I forgot about my birthday. It was August 3rd.

This comment prompted me to download a program called Uniblue RegistryBooster. Kim Komando said it was good. _^Heh.

c|net has a quote blurb on the Uniblue website that says:

This easy-to-use tool lets you remove faulty Registry entries that slow down your computer.

Removing a kilobyte of cruft should net you what, a gain of 10 nanoseconds for every 15,000 value reads?*
_{*: Actual value may vary**
^{**: Variance not guaranteed}}

I also don't think removing registry keys is the start to solving your Windows problems, but I'm going to run it for science!

As soon as I launched it, it performed its whole system scan.

A total of 311 invalid Registry entries were found on your System. Click on "Repair Registry" to fix all entries.

On the Overview tab, it says my registry health is low. Uh oh, I should be seeing errors and crashing all of the time, then, right?

I don't know if it's a function of not being registered, but since the window cannot be resized (giant skinned window with Vista style minimize and close buttons) and there isn't a horizontal scrollbar in the results area, I can't read the full path to most of the keys so that I can verify the results. Well, you can read the log file though. It opens an HTML log from Uniblue's area of your user profile's Application Data folder in your default web browser and it contains all of the information you need, should you actually know what you're looking at.

It found quite a few missing ActiveX/COM+/DCOM/OLE objects, which is the largest group of "errors" any registry cleaner can find in your system. This is because ActiveX, COM, and OLE (which all store and retrieve information to/from HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT) are so frequently used and are so frequently damaged (in one way or another). This could happen if you move the file to another drive or folder or if a module crashed while trying to register or unregister itself. The majority of what Dial-a-fix does is register ActiveX/COM/OLE objects, such as the components that run Windows Update. (Dial-a-fix tells the modules to self-register, this way, Dial-a-fix does not have to know the exact registry keys and values needed to make a module work again.)

Almost all of the ActiveX/COM errors that registry cleaners find can be ignored. There are a few things registry cleaners can figure out that are harmful to the speed of your system, but they don't occur very frequently. If you had a file type registered to a program that exists on a mapped drive and that network share was down but still listed as a mapped drive, you might get slowdowns as Windows tries to figure out where the share is. Registry cleaners are also able to remove invalid OpenWith entries, which is a good thing to do just to tidy the list of broken icons and to save Windows from having to check for non-existent locations. A lot of keys chosen for removal just contain MRU (most recently used) paths to things I have accessed using whatever program the MRU list is for. Removing these keys isn't really going to "repair" your computer.

Still, for the average user, cleaning this cruft will probably not visibly impact performance to the point that such a program should scan your entire system every startup.

At least RegistryBooster isn't taking up a lot of memory.

Another problem with registry cleaners is that you're at the mercy of the database and program version you have. Compounding this is that each registry cleaner program is third-party, meaning they all can have potentially differing opinions on what constitutes an invalid entry. There is the potential to ruin your computer by removing things that need to stay — many a registry cleaner has had to come out with program fixes and registry patches for things erroneously removed. I would hate to be a tech support person for a registry cleaning program. I'm sure there a lot of irate people who:

• Have had things removed from their system that shouldn't be, and are having new problems because of it
• Have other problems such as hard drive and memory problems and will blame the company for problems with their computer because the last thing they remember using was the registry cleaner program
• Have other problems as mentioned above and corruption occurs after a registry clean because of interference from the faulty hardware
• Have problems that can't be solved by a registry clean (which is to say most problems) and are upset that this program has not improved the performance or stability of their machine

Here's an issue I've found already, and I'm not very far through my results log:
RegistryBooster wants to remove HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows Search\CrawlScopeManager\Windows\SystemIndex\DefaultRules\22 because it says "file:///c:\ " is a bad path. This isn't true – this is the format Windows Search uses for indexing rules. If I remove this stuff, I suspect Windows Search will forget how to search my system, and had I not read through the log, I would later wonder how it disappeared. I might not even connect its destruction with my use of a registry cleaner – another big problem. Obviously something has directed RegistryBooster to look here, yet it does not actually understand what it is seeing and recommending for removal.

When I chose to "repair" the registry entries, it told me I should make a backup, which is a good idea. The bad thing is that it is only going to delete all of the registry entries, not really "repair" them. What if the file can be found elsewhere on the drive? Should it scan my filesystem and put together the puzzle and point the key at the new location? It's probably difficult to decide when such a scan should be the answer, so instead of opts to delete every error that has been found rather than trying to fix it. Because of the endless possibilities, scanning for files and pointing erroneous keys to the findings is probably just as bad an idea as mass deletion.

I'm barely through the first few lines of the log and I have all of this to say – this should give you a clear indication of my opinion of registry cleaners. I'm giving this one a chance, but it seems like it's just like all the rest and has all of the same pitfalls as anything else.

I can give RegistryBooster one thing: it did find quite a lot of missing TypeLib entries that really are missing, although like I've said before, it's not really going to speed up my computer all that much. This is only a few kilobytes of text in my 35 megabyte registry.

I don't like that there isn't a "jump to value" context menu entry on each item in the results pane – it makes fact-checking take quite a bit longer.

I've also noticed that registry cleaners tend to find Explorer's "auto" file extension creation entries, and RegistryBooster is no exception. There's no point in removing auto entries as they will just come right back as soon as Explorer sees the file extension again.

It feels like it's very limited since I'm only testing the trial version, but I don't think I really need to see any more.

In the end, I can't really recommend this sort of program to anyone (no offense to Uniblue) and I did not end up removing any of the things it said I should. I can't really give it a 1-to-5 stars type rating, so I'll give it a rating of N/A.

There is one decent registry cleaner that I've found that generally does the same thing (finds COM junk and missing font entries, etc) and isn't too aggressive with its scans: CCleaner's Issues scanner. CCleaner's Issues scanner reminds me of one final point: registry cleaners don't take into account the things that they orphan from their first scan. After you remove 300 things from your registry, chances are that there is another 200 things that have become orphaned from the first sweep. If I ever wrote a registry cleaner (which I will not) I would have it check for "dependencies" and list them as sub-items of the main items, so that it basically says "if you choose to remove X, I'm removing Y also because it's orphaned by the removal of X".

*Anti-climactic cliffhanger ending*.

It is my birthday today. Consider sending me some birthday money! :D

I posted before about BenQ's use of the WTC wreckage as a background image, and they have since apologized and "put a process in place to prevent this type of incident from happening again". I never went back to the site so I didn't know they had already changed it.

At the time of writing, they have an apology graphic up at http://www.benq.com.cn/musiq/

http://www.benq.com.cn/musiq/

Compare to:
1
and
2
and
3

I'm going to go with "not good" on this one.

Every second Tuesday of each month an update of the Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool (aka MSRT) is released.

It is a very useful little tool that can detect and remove a growing number of viruses, worms, trojans and rootkits. And the best part of it is that is free. ‘Free?’ I hear you say, ‘from Microsoft?’ And the answer is, perhaps surprisingly, ‘Yes, it is!’

According to Microsoft the tool has been used a staggering 2.7 billion times and in doing so it detected and removed 16 million instances of malware from 5.7 million infected computers. In most cases the Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool removed just one single malware variant from a computer but in some cases it has removed dozens and even hundreds of malware variants from computers. This last number can be easily explained by the fact that a backdoor can download lots of other malicious programs.

How do they know, you wonder? Well, just like the error reports you voluntarily should send to Microsoft when your computer experiences a serious problem and has to shut down, the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool will send a report to Microsoft with just the basic information about the malware it detected and removed. And just like you should never disable the error reporting service, you should never stop this tool from reporting its findings to Microsoft. Both send no identifiable personal info about you or your computer to Microsoft.

Using this information Microsoft recently published a report in which some interesting points are made.

It transpired that instances of an infection dramatically fell after a particular infection was added to the Microsoft Malicious Removal Tool. Some families of malware experienced decreases greater than 75%. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? Because people only use this program if and when their computers were infected.

Microsoft doesn’t make any comments about how it is possible that all that malware wasn’t blocked, detected or removed in the first place by an up-to-date anti-virus and anti-spyware product. Even now, after so much publicity and crashed computers, people are still strangely complacent about their security and privacy.

NOTE: Do not redistribute TheNotifier. It is for personal testing only.

Download: TheNotifier v0.0.0.26 (~198KB, *.exe)

As explained previously, this is a prototype app I'm working on which will help me (and eventually you) fight certain malware attacks. At the moment, it just allows you look at what's going on.

As always, comment here, or post at the "Lunarsoft.net DjLizard.net software support forum" (preferred).

Changelog:

* Moved to tabbed interface
* Added more specific filtering functions (None, known, or Microsoft)
* Added AppInit_DLLs tab with basic support (very alpha) – more to come
* 'Jump to key' when on the AppInit_DLLs tab will take you to the 'Windows' key (where AppInit_DLLs is)
* Added the following known-good Notify entries: avldr, Caveo, ckpNotify, Command AntiVirus Download, ComPlusSetup, CwWLEvent, dimsntfy, DPWLN, FolderGuard, GoToMyPC, loginkey, MetaFrame, nwprovau, OPXGina, PCANotify, PFW, ppeclt, PRISMAPI.DLL, PRISMGNA.DLL, psfus, QConGina, RAinit, RegCompact, SABWinLogon, SDNotify, Sebring, T3Notify, TabBtnWL, Timbuktu Pro, tpfnf2, tpgwlnotify, tphotkey, VESWinlogon, WB, WBSrv, Zboard, zsnotify

I have a list of many known-good AppInit_DLLs so you don't have to let me know about those yet.

Also, I have a lot of work left on DAF before I can release another update, so don't worry.

It's patch tuesday – a bunch of fixes came out. Visit Windows Update to get them, or wait for them to be downloaded with idle network bandwidth, by BITS.

I haven't been paying attention lately (I've been quite busy) but a new version of MSHTML.DLL is out – 6.00.2900.2912. It can't be registered (at all), thankfully. The previous version, .2838, was not supposed to be registerable either, but Microsoft broke it. This time, it spits out an error code (specifically, hex 0x80029c4a / decimal -2147312566: TYPE_E_CANTLOADLIBRARY). Dial-a-fix v0.58 (which is pretty close to being v0.60) recognizes certain versions of files now, and ignores the ones it knows it can't register. I'll have a new public beta soon, I think. I've got to do some more private testing first (I've made a truckload of changes since the last public beta).

edit: Wait, the one on my dev machine is 6.0.2900.2912, and it DOES register. Something's not right here!

edit 2: Ok, I found out what the problem is. A rogue program removed mshtml.tlb because it thought it was no longer being used. WTF! Ugh, 3rd party software. This post has been rendered invalid. At least I have something to check for with Dial-a-fix now…

I work for Digital Doctors. The tech manager and I just converted our website from a static Dreamweaver HTML-uncompliant mess to a brand spankin' new WordPress site, and the result is outstanding. The look is finally consistent, it's easy to edit, it's 100 times faster than the old site, standards compliant, dynamic, and easy for search engines to spider. I will also be writing articles for it for our current and future customers — so they will not be as technical as the articles I post here.

Anyway, if you live in Bradenton, Sarasota (or anywhere else in Manatee/Sarasota county) Florida, you can bring your computer to our shop and I will work on it! If you live in Tampa/St. Petersburg/Clearwater, you can call and one of our skilled technicians can come to you.

Our labor rates are not the highest, and not the lowest, but there's no other computer repair facility in a 50 mile radius that can do what we do – we are the best, most fair shop at which I've ever had the pleasure of working. Most repairs are 1 to 1½ hours, but we have a max labor rate of 2 hours — no matter how many things we do, the most you will ever be charged for is 2 hours of labor (plus parts, if applicable). We're also able to work on smaller things in quarter-hour increments. Give us a call for current labor rates.

Digital Doctors
7333 52nd Place East,
Bradenton, FL 34203
1-941-747-9477 Sarasota/Manatee (ask for Mike if you want to talk to me!)
1-727-541-4410 Pinellas
1-813-932-4500 Tampa

Here's a Yahoo! map of our location.

Fred pointed out this nice guide to Google's advanced operators. I knew less than half of the operators. (I only knew about several of the [all/]in* ones).