Heal and Inoculate Your PC

Remember the excitement you felt when you bought your first car? Before the dealer even handed you the keys, you made a vow to keep your new set of wheels in tip-top shape, to lovingly wash it, change the oil every 3,000 miles, and even maintain the proper tire pressure. You wanted to keep your new car looking and running its very best. You understood that the consequence of not doing this would be costly repair bills at best, and at worst, a car that no longer ran as it should.

Owning and maintaining a PC really isn’t so different than owning a car. Only with a PC, there’s no maintenance schedule outlined in your user’s manual, leaving it up to you to keep your smoking-fast rig from turning into a stuttering compilation of unresponsive parts. And worse yet, now more than ever PCs are highly susceptible to all kinds of nasties, from keylogging viruses to performance-hampering spyware to everything in between. Even simply surfing the web can be enough to turn your dream machine into a nightmare experience if you don’t take proper precautions.

But fear not, because we’re going to show you how to set up safeguards to keep your rig humming along as fast as it was on the day you built it. Not only that, but we’ll also walk you through the steps of fixing a system that’s already suffering from neglect, so the next time you hear cries of frustration emanating from your neighbor’s apartment, you can swoop in and save the day, Maximum PC style!

Looking to clog up your browser and infect your system? Install toolbars and desktop buddies to do both in one fell swoop!

Heal Your PC

Sometimes a PC becomes so badly infected that nuking your Windows install and starting fresh seems like the only viable option. Or maybe your computer hasn’t yet reached a state of virtual undeath but has been running sluggishly, betraying the high-end components inside. No matter which scenario you find yourself in, there is hope. Put away that towel—we won’t be throwing it in quite yet.

Five-Minute Fixes

Whether your PC’s performance problems are severe or just mildly annoying, a simple series of fixes could have it running like new.

1: Blast the Bloatware

Just as the name implies, spyware is a malicious program designed to mine personal data from your machine and spy on your computing habits. The information collected is then used to harass you with ads in the form of pop-ups, redirected web searches, a browser homepage you can’t change, and other annoyances. And here’s the kicker: You could have installed the offending programs yourself! But don’t feel bad if you’ve been bamboozled; spyware often masks itself behind seemingly legitimate software, most often browser toolbars and desktop buddies. Rid your system of these bloated add-ons and watch your PC’s performance improve right away.

Close any open browser windows; then open up your Control Panel and navigate to Add or Remove Programs. Scroll down the list and uninstall any browser toolbar, desktop buddy, or search helper.

We love small critters, just not those of the virtual variety. Rid your system of deskmates and consider buying a real pet instead.

2: Get Widgety with It!

Now that you’ve uninstalled all the honest, easy-to-uninstall bloatware, it’s time to hit the local watering hole and call it a day, right? If only it were that easy! Once installed, some spyware detaches from the host program it shipped with, and other programs simply reinstall themselves, continuing to load every time you boot into Windows. To put the kibosh on these persistent pests, we’re going to tell Windows to skip over them when loading startup programs, and we’re going to do it with the help of Microsoft.

You'll want some programs to load with Windows, so choose only the items you want to rid from your system.

If you’re running Vista, you already own Windows Defender, and XP owners can download the free scanner from Microsoft here. Once installed, click the Tools tab and then select Software Explorer. This handy widget lists all the startup programs that load with Windows, along with a wealth of potentially incriminating information, such as the date a program installed, file location, file type, and whether or not it shipped with your OS. In the left-hand pane, highlight any dubious entries and click the Remove button. After you’ve cleared all of the startup scourge, reboot your system to a clean start!

3: Scan for Scoundrels

Windows Defender isn’t good at just customizing startup programs; it’s also a very capable spyware scanner. On the main screen, you can choose between a full scan, which looks in all files and currently running programs, or a quick search that uncovers vermin in their most common hiding spots. Run the full scan for a thorough scrub, and then let Defender remove any infections it finds.

4: Get a Second and Third) Opinion

New variants of spyware are released into the wild at an alarming rate, and it’s impossible for any single program to keep up with them all. For this reason, we run at least two different scanners on an infected system, or more if the infection is especially bad. Other programs we’ve had success with in the Maximum PC Lab include A-Squared (free, http://tinyurl.com/2gb93), Spybot S&D (free, www.safer-networking.org), Ad-Aware (free, www.lavasoftusa.com), AVG Anti-Spyware (free, http://free.grisoft.com), and Spy Sweeper ($30, www.webroot.com). Regardless of the tool you use, double-check the URL for typos and be sure you’re downloading directly from the source (rogue sites often try to pass off infected software as authentic spyware scanners). Above all else, always update your spyware definitions to detect the
latest threats.

5: Look Closer with HijackThis!

Spyware loves to hide, but HijackThis! makes an even better seeker, uncovering the leftover residue that managed to elude traditional scans.

Even after running several anti-spyware scans, you might still have a lingering infection. HijackThis! (free, http://tinyurl.com/huyrw) takes a fine-tooth comb to your system, targeting methods commonly used by hijackers. Because HijackThis! doesn’t zone in on specific infections, most of the reported entries will be legitimate, and disabling them could do more harm to your system than good. Highlight only entries that you’ve previously tried removing but that keep showing back up. For example, if you’ve uninstalled Bonzi Buddy and removed any related entries from the startup queue, you can safely highlight any references to the program that HijackThis! finds and then click the Fix Selected button. For all other selections, either leave them alone or carefully use the online tutorial (http://tinyurl.com/2et7nb) for detailed steps on discerning between good and bad entries. You can also submit your logs to Help2Go Detective (http://tinyurl.com/etujk) and HijackThis Security (www.hijackthis.de/en) for automated analysis.

6: Vaccinate Your Rig

When you’re sick, you generally make it a point to avoid others, lest you infect them with your ailment. But when your computer contracts a virus, it looks to spread the disease to as many other PCs as it can, turning each one into a remote-controlled zombie. The nefarious do-badder can then wage a DoS (Denial of Service) attack on a website, making thousands of PCs repeatedly request pages, until the site’s server can’t take the load and the site goes down.
But that’s not all viruses are capable of doing. They can record your keystrokes, including passwords and bank account information, and pass the information along to people who are up to no good. Other viruses wreak havoc on your hard drive, erasing data, altering critical system files, and even causing permanent physical damage in the form of bad sectors. Heck, viruses can even be used to install more spyware and viruses.

To rid your system of viruses, you need to perform a sweeping scan. If you don’t have antivirus software installed, we recommend you start with Panda Security’s web-based AV app (free, www.pandasecurity.com/usa) and scan your PC right from within Internet Explorer. It will also detect spyware, rootkits, and dialers, but will only disinfect viruses. Just click the Total Scan button, install the ActiveX control, and let Panda do the rest.

7: Perform a Root(kit) Canal

You’ve rid your system of spyware and nuked any lingering viruses, but your PC isn’t quite yet eligible for a clean bill of health. You need to check for rootkits, a particularly nasty variant of malware that burrows deep within the OS, where it’s difficult to detect with conventional scanners. Signs of infection can be subtle, or even nonexistent, thanks to a rootkit’s ability to integrate with your OS’s kernel. Whether your system displays symptoms or not, if you’ve recently discovered any spyware or viruses, your next step is to initiate a rootkit scan.

Because rootkits are tightly integrated with critical system files, back up any important data right away. Next, head over to F-Secure and download Blacklight (free for now; will be part of a $79 security suite, www.f-secure.com/blacklight). This handy executable needs no installation, just double-click the icon and watch as it probes your system. We also recommend running AVG’s Anti-Rootkit program (free, http://tinyurl.com/2mqb6n) for a second opinion.

Sidebar: Top Five Deadliest Viruses

Viruses have existed for decades and number in the thousands, but these five variants stand out as the nastiest of the bunch.

1. MyDoom One of the fastest-spreading worms of all time, MyDoom, and the variant MyDoom.B, set its sights on SCO and Microsoft, prompting both companies to offer a $250,000 bounty to anyone who identified the people responsible for its creation.

2. Nimda Just days after the September 11 attacks, PCs worldwide were hit by the Nimda virus, prompting speculation among conspiracy theorists that the virus was part of a terrorist attack. No link has ever been made between the two events.

3. CodeRed You’ve heard of the drink, but the CodeRed virus had a thirst for computers running Microsoft’s Internet Information Systems (IIS) web server, attaching the phrase “Hacked By Chinese” to websites. One of the targets included the White House.

4. Slammer Can a worm infect 75,000 PCs within minutes of going live? It can, and it did! Slammer’s small footprint (365 bytes) played a big role in its ability to double its infection rate every 8.5 seconds.

5. ILOVEYOU Love hurts, and in the case of the ILOVEYOU virus, it stung for over $5 billion in damages. Some of those scorned include Ford Motor Co., the Pentagon, and the British Parliament.

11 Games That Will Punish Your PC

Never has there been a better time to be a PC gamer. This year’s crop of games delivers all the pulse-pounding action we’ve come to crave beneath a candy shell of glorious graphics—the likes of which we’ve never seen before. Leading the graphics charge is a bevy of DirectX 10 titles that will stress a system to its limits, and the promises long made by proponents of the Games for Windows initiative are finally starting to show fruit.

What’s more, even DirectX 9–level titles are taking advantage of the prodigious power available in today’s high-end graphics cards to deliver experiences that look better than we ever thought DirectX 9 capable of.

So, to all console ever-lovin’ folk who are claiming for the nth time that PC gaming is dead, we say, “Shut your pie holes!” We can’t wait to kick back in our office chair, embrace our mouse and keyboard, and get our game on!

Bioshock

Subaquatic steampunk!

Brilliant game graphics aren’t only about technology, they’re also about artful design. Bioshock serves up a bucketful of both. This first-person role-playing game puts you in the middle of a disaster in an undersea utopia run by—who else?—an out-of-control megalomaniac.

In addition to traditional FPS-style weapons, you’ll also gain the use of special powers, which let you manipulate the elements to freeze or ignite objects (or people), alter the environment in other ways, and even set elaborate Rube Goldberg–style traps.

But the game would be just a fancy sandbox without its cohesive steampunk set design and profoundly disturbing story line. When you factor in support for DirectX 10, Bioshock becomes a must-have title.

World In Conflict

Let's take it nuclear!

Imagine that the Cold War never ended—instead it actually caught fire. That’s the scenario facing you in World in Conflict. Russian tanks are rolling across Europe, and it’s your job to stop them in their tracks.

Instead of utilizing the traditional two-phase combat system—build your base, then attack the bad guys—World in Conflict does away with the first part of the equation and has you jumping straight into blowing up Commies. Unlike most real-time strategy titles, World in Conflict includes some super-high-end graphical effects, including volumetric fog that swirls around your vehicles, destructible buildings and environments, and real-time lighting.

You won’t want to play World in Conflict from a satellite-high perspective, lest you miss any of the game’s glorious detail.

Flagship’s first game is the spiritual successor and follow-up to Blizzard’s seminal Diablo series. It’s not Diablo III, but it’s made by the same folks that made Diablo. Hellgate pits you against demons in near-future London, a setting that won’t just challenge your skills, but also dazzle your eyes.

The game plays very differently depending on the faction you choose. The Cabalist and Templar fill the standard RPG ranged and melee archetypes. But when you play as a Hunter, you’ll play the game from the first person perspective with traditional RPG elements—and utilize your twitch skills.

Naturally, Hellgate will turn on the eye candy too. We know that the game will support DirectX 10, but the graphical wizards at Flagship haven’t announced what they’ll be using it for, yet.

Brothers In Arms: Hell's Highway

Now with bazookas!

Welcome to Operation Market Garden, gentlemen. Our favorite tactical World War II shooter returns with a trip to Monty’s folly powered by a spiffy new version of the Unreal Engine and a cargo plane full of new features.

Hell’s Highway implements a much more realistic cover system. You duck behind an object, pop out to shoot, then duck back down before Jerry draws a bead on you. The only problem with this approach is that the game has a real materials engine, and much of the cover will get chewed up under a constant barrage of fire. Destructible cover sounds like fun, but it’s a double-edged sword—you can tear up the Germans’ cover, but they can do the same to you!

Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat

We were tired of killing Nazis too

Let’s face it, by now most gamers have been fighting World War II longer than the war actually lasted. We’ve killed more virtual Nazis than ever existed. So Infinity Ward’s decision to move beyond WWII is a welcome respite.

Call of Duty 4 is set in a hypothetical conflict in the former Soviet bloc. You can expect a heaping helping of small-squad action across a wide variety of terrain types—we’ve seen missions in burnt-out towns, grassy savannahs, and even forested hillsides.

The amazing thing is that Call of Duty 4 is a DirectX 9 game, eschewing support for DirectX 10’s bells and whistles for higher frame rates and still-unbelievable graphics in the legacy API.

Assassin's Creed

Crowd surfer

You take a contract, find your target, and kill him. It’s that simple. Except it’s not. Instead of another modern-day version of Hitman, Ubisoft: Montreal has created a medieval Agent 47 who makes his way through the sandbox that is Crusades-era Jerusalem.

The catch is that you’re a free-running assassin, and your biggest problem isn’t the mark firing arrows at you or the town constabulary, but rather the thronging crowd filled with beggars, merchants, and other townsfolk. How do you catch your target without drawing too much attention to yourself? Simple, you get off the streets and instead climb walls, swing from scaffolds, and dance across rooftops. Unlike Prince of Persia, in which your wall-walking is limited to specific areas, in Assassin’s Creed, if you can see it, you can climb it.

The 20 Most Important Moments in Mobile Phone History

Our lives are increasingly mobile and our cell phones are not only a way to contact anyone, anytime, anywhere but also our calendars, cameras, photo albums, inboxes, maps, weather reports, dictionaries, and entertainment. Payphones are disappearing as business users edit documents on their Blackberries, kids text each other furiously in class instead of passing notes and celebrities partner with handset manufacturers. We take our cell phones for granted now but it wasn't that long ago that a cell phone was much like a snow leopard - rare, expensive and exotic. So what happened? What were the technologies that really changed the playing field for mobile? How have our systems of communication changed over the past three decades?

Let us take you on a tour of the most noteworthy mobile moments - from telecomm inventions to handset debuts to appearances in popular culture, we've found the top 20 Moments in Mobile Phone History. From must-have handsets to advancements that moved mobile forward, we're hightlighting watershed occassions, developments and adaptations that made mobile phones an indispensible addition to our lives.

In Search of the Sub-30 Second Boot

PIQOO | www.piqoo.blogspot.com


Can we use Windows 7's new fast-boot capability and BIOS optimizations to get to the desktop in less than 30 seconds?

If you’re the kind of person who fumes at the microwave because it takes so long to nuke popcorn, you probably can’t stand the plodding boot of your PC, either.

And who can blame you? Time spent waiting for first the BIOS and then Windows to come to life is time that could have been spent working, gaming, or surfing the web.

Microsoft’s claim that Windows 7 could boot (from the BIOS) in 11 seconds first gave us the hope that such idle time might be lessened dramatically, but being Maximum PC we wanted to take the idea even further. We sought to not only replicate Microsoft’s claim, but to see how much time we could shave prior to the OS loading, with a combination of hardware and BIOS tweaks. Our ultimate goal: to have a machine up and running within 30 seconds of hitting the power switch.

So if your attention deficit disorder hasn’t already caused you to click to the next story, find out how we were able to achieve the shortest boot possible.

Timing is Everything

How we systematically shaved precious seconds off our reference rig's boot time

How fast can Windows 7 boot? In 11 seconds, Microsoft claims. And to prove it, the company even demonstrated the feat to a room full of technical press. But even if you take MS at its word, that’s really only half the story. Microsoft’s demo proved how fast a Win7 PC could boot once the hardware handed off the booting process to the operating system.

For our challenge, we included the BIOS, as well.

Obviously, the most important factor there is the motherboard. For our platform, we decided to go with Intel’s everyman socket: the LGA1156. In choosing the board, we considered four possibilities—two different Asus boards, an Intel, and a Gigabyte—before settling on Gigabyte’s GA-P55-UD6, primarily for its Quick Boot feature (more on that later).

Gigabyte's GA-P55-UD6 proved to be the fastest-booting P55-based board we could find.

For storage, we decided that an SSD with its ultra-fast random-access time was the only way to go. Furthermore, that’s what Microsoft used in its own boot demo. We auditioned three different drives—one using SLC NAND, another using the highly regarded Indilix controller, and the third being Intel’s second-generation 34nm 160GB X25-M drive. All three had similar boot times but we opted for the X25-M 160GB because it was the only one that supported the TRIM command at the time. Windows 7 natively supports TRIM, which can greatly increase SSD performance when writing to sectors that have been previously used and then erased.

Other hardware in our rig included 4GB of DDR3/1333 (going with 8GB added an additional 1.5 seconds to our boot), a SATA optical drive, and an EVGA GeForce GTX 280 card. Initially, we thought a GPU with a fat 1GB frame buffer might impact the POST (that’s a lot of RAM to initialize), so we also tried a low-end GPU with a 256MB frame buffer, but saw no change in boot times. Our OS choice: Windows 7 Ultimate.

The start-to-finish boot of our reference rig: 45 seconds.

Improving POST Performance

For the record, Microsoft used a reference board design for Intel’s Capella mobile platform for its boot demo, along with a 1.7GHz Core i7 mobile processor and an older 80GB Intel SSD drive without TRIM. We should note that mobile platforms are inherently faster at booting because they are complete optimized systems with far fewer parts to power on and inventory. A typical laptop will get through POST in less than 10 seconds, with some taking as little as five. BIOS maker Phoenix has even demonstrated a notebook PC using UEFI that can POST in one second. Desktop boards, however, with their infinite hardware variability, POST far slower. One of the appealing features in Gigabyte boards is the Quick Boot setting in the BIOS that lets the board POST faster if the hardware has not changed. With the Quick Boot setting enabled, we saw the POST time go from 28 seconds to 17 seconds. We then shut off extraneous hardware such as the floppy port and serial port, made the hard drive the first boot device, and disabled other boot devices, as well. By doing this, we shaved another two seconds off the boot time. Disabling the unused FireWire port and SATA ports that were not in use didn’t decrease the POST time, but we saw Windows 7’s boot drop by a second or two.

You can save a few microseconds (or more, depending on your board) by booting all your drives off the native south bridge instead of any discrete controllers. If you have just two hard drives and a SATA optical, it’s more time-efficient to have all three connected to the chipset’s native controller instead of a third-party controller. Some BIOSes may also enable spinup timers for hard drives by default. This gives mechanical drives time to spool up before the board tries to boot to those. Lowering these timers can save you seconds.

Improving Windows 7 Performance

Microsoft is obviously pleased with itself for making Windows 7 boot lickity-split, but we were convinced we could shave even more time by optimizing the OS. We disabled Aero, turned off system restore, disabled services, turned off the boot splash screen, and even tried enabling ReadyBoot. ReadyBoot is supposed to help a machine boot faster but is disabled by default if an SSD is the primary boot device. Sadly, none of this made a difference.

We even tried the old Internet lark of “enabling” more cores for booting using the Boot Advanced Options tab in msconfig. This tip has been kicking around since the days of Windows Vista. While some people claim it works, we saw no difference, and during one run, we saw boot times get significantly worse, requiring us to reinstall the OS to correct it. Though tempting, the setting is for debugging purposes, and as far as we could find, has no practical impact on boot performance.

Internet rumor site Snopes.com should have an entry for this one: By setting your OS to use all four cores during boot, you can shave a ton of time off your boot time. Unfortunately, it's not true.

Finally, we repeatedly rebooted the machine. Windows 7 (and Vista) includes a self-tuning routine to decrease boot times. We booted the OS, let it sit for a few minutes, and then repeated the task 25 times—although 10 times is reportedly sufficient. (To do this automatically, use PassMark.com’s free Rebooter app).

The Result

Did we get our rig to boot in less than 30 seconds? No, but we hit 30 seconds exactly—a 33 percent improvement over our original boot time. With our BIOS tweaks, we managed to get our P55 board to seemingly hand over control to the OS in 15 seconds. However, Windows 7’s built-in performance-measurement tool then repeatedly told us our machine was up and running in 11 seconds, while our stopwatch told us the machine was booting to a usable state in 15 seconds. Which is right? That likely depends on where exactly you start the clock for the OS booting. There is a gray area during the BIOS hand-off to the OS that is apparently not counted in Microsoft’s measurement tool. In the end, we’ll accept that we did technically achieve the 11-second boot of the OS, but we would have preferred to shave those last four seconds from the stopwatch, too.

But is all this effort for a faster boot even necessary? Frankly, with Windows’ Hybrid Sleep feature, boot times are of much less significance. A combination of standby and hibernate, the feature lets your machine assume a fully responsive state in less than three seconds with the click of the mouse. Since the machine is in a suspend-to-RAM state, there’s no POST to go through, and no initializing of hardware by Windows, either.

BEFORE

BIOS = 28 seconds
OS = 17 seconds
Total = 45 seconds

AFTER

BIOS = 15 seconds
OS = 15 seconds
Total = 30 seconds

How Does a Hard Drive Impact Boot Performance?

Besides having no moving parts that can break and blazing throughput speeds, SSDs also have incredibly low access times. How low? In our tests, the hella-fast 10,000rpm 300GB Western Digital VelociRaptor had a random-access time of 7.24ms, while the original Intel X25-M SSD had an access time of 0.12ms. A typical 1.5TB 7,200rpm drive sits at 15ms. Since booting Windows doesn’t involve reading one fat contiguous file on the disk, but rather picking out thousands of small files, random access is assumed to be key for booting an OS.

To see how much of a difference an SSD makes over an HDD, we replaced the 160GB Intel X25-M SSD in our test platform with a Seagate 1.5TB 7200.11 Barracuda HDD, installed Windows 7 Ultimate, installed the same drivers, and configured the machine exactly as we had previously. The Intel SSD hits in excess of 210MB/s reads, while the 7200.11 tops out at 100MB/s over the entire platter but reaches into the 130MB/s range for the first 200GB or so.

While our SSD-based install took 15 seconds once the board handed off control, the hard drive took 30 seconds. That’s a 100 percent improvement with the SSD. But is it worth the price premium? To many folks, probably not. Keep in mind, however, that the SSD not only improves boot time, it will give you optimum overall system responsiveness and performance throughout its capacity. Mechanical drives decline in performance as they get full and fragmented. On the other hand, a 1.5TB drive offers almost 10 times the storage of a 160GB SSD.