We had a visitor to our youtube channel send us a message that they installed a hard drive alongside the drive that is already in the machine and now it will not boot up.  Instead it gives the error “BOOTMGR missing”.

This is a pretty common error and is relatively simple to fix but it can be pretty confusing the first time you see it.  In your computer’s bios it keeps a boot device order.  Most of you will know the boot order from needing to set it to boot from cd to use your diagnostic cd or load a new Operating System.  However some computers also keep another order that is called “hard drive boot priority” and it decides which storage device boots first when you are booting from a hard drive.

If you hooked up a hard drive to “device 2″ on your motherboard when you first installed it and come along and plug in a drive to a higher port (0 or 1) the bios with automatically default to booting from the newly installed drive.  Since this drive is meant for data storage and has no OS on it you get a BOOTMGR or boot manager missing error.  Going into the bios and setting your hard drive priority to the correct drive should correct this issue.  If you have multiple drives that are the same model (they will show up as the same thing) then just try them in a few different configurations until you find one that works.

A processor upgrade can be a massive performance boost to any system.  Like other complex systems it will be held back by its slowest component.  Even given that restriction a processor upgrade can be a worthy venture.

The first step is to identify your own motherboard.  You can use software tools like CPUID to identify your board, or you can open up the case and note the numbering on the board itself.  Typically found between the expansion slots but sometimes elsewhere, you can then run these numbers through a search engine and figure out what you have.  Make sure that you bios is up to date as well.  After you do this you need to check for compatible processors.  Most motherboard manufacturers will have CPU support lists for their motherboards available on their websites.  If it is a manufacturer’s pc like an HP or Gateway you may need to dig a little harder.

As a rule, processors of the same family will work in the same motherboard.  Core 2 6300 and a Core 2 6600 should literally be a plug and play upgrade.  When you go to other families or different configurations, like a core 2 7300 or a core 2 quad 6600 you might run into more problems.  You need to be wary of the heat output and make sure your heat sink can handle the new processor as well as the motherboard.

If you are using a retail PC you might get to the point where you can’t find a support list for pc’s and you are looking at not being able to upgrade.  At this point, check and see if other version of that chipset in an aftermarket board like a Gigabyte or an Asus can support that processor.  If they can, go on Google and search for other models of your pc and upgrades with the processor you are after.  If you can find other people who have successfully upgraded to that processor odds are you won’t have any problem with it as long as you are running the same bios and version of the board.

If you cannot find anyone I would most likely decide not to try the upgrade, but that is your decision.  Be aware that most retailers won’t take cpu’s back once they have been opened.  This leaves EBay for you to try to make some of your investment back if you decide to purchase and it does not work.

We all know that security on the internet is a major topic nowadays.  Even after you install your brand new web browser and you install your brand new antivirus, you are still vulnerable.  Why is that?  A large part of internet security “holes” or places you are most likely to receive and attack from are actually the things you installed yourself.

XSS is an abbreviation for Cross-Site Scripting, what this used to refer to when it was first discovered was when a third party website used your credentials to log into another website or to steal your information directly through another website.  It has since expanded into covering many more injection style attacks that target client side scripts.

Client side scripting is mainly referring to JavaScript although other ones do exist.  Server side scripting uses languages like PHP and Perl.  Client side scripts are how websites and your computer tie together to execute code on your computer.  These scripts have access to cookies as a means of storing and retrieving data.  Probably the most important cookie from this context is the Session Cookie,  websites use session cookies to log you in and keep you logged in as long as you are at the site or for a certain length of time until the cookie expires.  If another site is injecting code into your scripts or entire scripts into your web browser what is keeping them from simply looking at your session cookies and copying your credentials.  Congratulations, you’ve now experienced one of the most common forms of identity theft on the internet.

Web browsers have done their best to take up the task of blocking XSS attacks from occurring.  Many of today’s browsers support an attribute called HTTP only for their cookies which blocks scripts from accessing them.  This however does not solve all the problems XSS presents.  Script blocking, either in the browser or by using a third party add-on like No Script for Firefox which provides Domain level blocking(it blocks it by the name of the website)  are some more ways to help control the problem.  By blocking most of everything and only allowing the scripts you want to run you can protect yourself from a vast majority of XSS attacks.  Some people consider No Script to be too much of a burden though as it can break the functionality of many websites until properly set up.

So with all of these companies focusing on fixing XSS and preventing this problem why is it still so prevalent?  For the most part, Flash.  Adobe’s Flash player isn’t just a client side codebase, it’s practically an entire platform for running rich media content on a remote pc.  Not only it used to provide videos and music players, interactive game platforms and user interaction, but it can be used for advertising too, XSS opportunities crop up like weeds when flash ad’s get loaded.

That being said it’s not entirely Adobe’s fault.  Sloppy coding practices, non sanitized inputs, and vulnerabilities in other software itself contribute to the problem as well.  Be wary of your scripts and who sends them to you.  If you are browsing unknown websites tools like No Script can be a lifesaver.

When someone says that their computer is slow, it isn’t actually the speed they are complaining about.  They say the computer is slow because it is unresponsive.  The PC may be fast enough speed wise to compute all of their needs in a timely fashion, however when they try to go open another program, they find themselves waiting.  The same concept applies to network latency.

The speed rating of your internet connection is based on its maximum throughput under ideal conditions.  As much as I dislike using pipe analogies when talking about network connections; it really is the most ideal in this situation.  If you think about a pipe with water flowing in it with a valve in the middle, the amount of water flowing when the valve is open is the bandwidth.  Now, let’s say the valve opens and closes a lot, because it is dispensing very specific amounts of water.

When you click on a link, the valve opens, but the amount of time your message to open the valve takes to get to the valve is called your Latency.  The time it takes to get to the valve and the water to start coming to you is called the ping time, or round trip latency.

How this impacts bandwidth is a little devious, as well as potentially crippling.  Bandwidth is measured as “data measurement / time measurement” in this case its Mb/s.  Latency increases the amount of time it is taking to get the data from the server to you.  If you had a 1.5Mb satellite connection, its average round trip latency is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1000ms-1500ms.  You add this to the bandwidth equation to get what the connection really feels like in terms of speed.

Taking 1.5Mb or 1536kb and dividing it by 2 seconds instead of 1, (1000ms = 1 s) gives us an average bandwidth of 768Kb/s.  Dividing it by 2500ms (initial 1 second measurement + latency) gives us a speed of 614Kb/s.  Of course that is also on a single load, if you are using a website that uses multiple loads when you make selections in drop down lists this penalty is applied every time the page loads.  To give a real world example, my parent’s satellite internet was 768k and had an average latency of 1800ms.  768/2.8 = 274Kb/s, and it felt like it.

Now sure, if you are downloading large files that don’t change often, the speed picks up.  If it was only 274k a download would top out around 35KB/s.(Kb/8 = KB) Theirs topped out around 100KB/s but the actual experience of using it was abysmal.  You were lucky if you could even get to a YouTube video, much less watch it.  Everything nowadays has been organized into small “web ready” packets for easy streaming.  This approach cripples a high latency connection.

This wasn’t meant as a knock on satellite internet.  It serves an important niche where the only other choice may be dial up.  Just remember though, speed is not always speed, and responsiveness is one of the most underrated metrics in the world.

Windows 7 makes it easy to find out what time it is around the world with an additional clock feature that can be convenient if you are in different time zones, or you know someone else who is. Adding additional clocks is quick and easy.

Adding Another Clock to Windows 7