Welcome to Brendon Davis

What Bitlocker on VISTA doesn’t do

Autor brendon | 06.02.2007 | Category TechStuff, VISTA

After reading an article on TheRegister I think some people have misunderstood the purpose for BitLocker. It is a ‘full drive encryption’ product. In most cases, the keys are stored on the hardware or on a removable USB drive.

Assuming your laptop with Bitlocker is stolen, the person can still turn the computer on and boot into windows. They can’t log on because they don’t know your password, and of course you use a complex password…. If they take the drive out of the laptop and try to read it on another computer or boot off an external drive in your computer. Your system partition will have an invalid file system, so they can’t access your data.

If they try to reset your SAM password using a Linux boot utility, it won’t work because the SAM is encrypted on the drive.

Further to this, BitLocker only works on the SYSTEM partition (not active partition). So any other volume’s on your PC will need to be encrypted using EFS. This is still secure because the encryption keys for the EFS files are stored on the system drive and are encrypted therefore unavailable.

BitLocker will NOT stop a person from gaining access to your data if you have weak passwords or they obtain the USB key.
It will NOT stop a forensic analysis from taking a copy of the encrypted drive.

It WILL stop someone copying your documents/ emails/ etc. off your stolen device.

Weekly configurations for MCE Guide download are a hassle

Autor brendon | 05.02.2007 | Category MediaCenter, TechStuff, VISTA

I have noticed on my VISTA MCE at home that I need to reconfigure the guide details every week. After the third week of my EPG not updating I did some research. I found this link from mediacenter.com.au which fixed half the problem; and this link from mediacenter.com.au explains how to fix the other half.

Basically, Microsoft in their infinite wisdom setup their EPG settings so that each time Windows Update runs it checks the value of the registry key and will reset it to the default. This way if Microsoft decide to change their epg update URL, they can. Only problem is that it breaks all the other EPG programs.

It has now been 2 weeks with no EPG download problems. Read on for a step by step guide to how I fixed it.

Clean Install with VISTA upgrade

Autor brendon | 05.02.2007 | Category TechStuff, VISTA

Now I’m a big fan of doing clean installs when putting a new operating system (and even some service packs) on your computer. Over time your computer builds up a mountain of temp files, logs and other un-necessary information.  A clean install is a good way to remove all of this and generally speed up the responsiveness of your system.

DailyTech is running an article on how to perform a clean install when using the VISTA upgrade DVD. With the cost of Vista I see most families will need to buy upgrade licences just so that they can afford the software. I don’t however envy the poor uncle/ cousin/ family friend that have to help with a re-install of VISTA 12 months down the track. Images of my own experiences looking for that old copy of windows 3.11 Setup Disk 1 or Windows 95 CD still haunt me to this day.

While the method proposed by DailyTech is a bit ‘fiddley’ it will definitely be easier and more stable than doing an upgrade from XP. The other benefit is that once your VISTA upgrade key is activated you don’t need to go searching for your old CD keys again. :-)

The basic steps for doing the clean install are:

This guy must own a Bot-Net

Autor brendon | 11.01.2007 | Category TechStuff, VISTA

Alex St. John in his infinite wisdom has proclaimed that Windows Vista will see the Windows online gaming market end in an apocalyptic end. Citing Microsoft’s Evil UAC & the new Game Explorer as the main culprit in an article “Vista Casts A Pall On PC Gaming“.

Alex, if you ever end up reading this I suggest that you actually use a copy of VISTA before posting any more propaganda about it. For years software developers have been lazy; writing programs that create errors when they are not run as an Administrator. I suggest you being one of them, have a good look at SysInternals, they provide a large number of free tools that let you view access to windows and debug why your applications do not work properly.