Tag Archives: software

Cisco VPN Client and Windows 8

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I upgraded to Windows 8 (from Windows 7) several months ago and one of the things that stopped working is the Cisco VPN client. As of this writing, the most recent version is 5.0.07.0440. This build installs properly but fails when you try to establish a connection. I found a solution wanted to share it since it’s been working great for over 3 months without an issue.

1) Close the VPN client, make sure it’s not running.
2) Open up regedit and navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\CVirtA
3) Make a backup of this, just in case. Right click the CVirtA key in the explorer and export the settings for this key as a reg file.
4) Edit the DisplayName value, stripping off the characters until “%;”. For example…
For x64 you can change the value from something like “@oem8.inf,%CVirtA_Desc%;Cisco Systems VPN Adapter for 64-bit Windows” to “Cisco Systems VPN Adapter for 64-bit Windows”. For x86, you’ll change the value from something like “@oem8.inf,%CVirtA_Desc%;Cisco Systems VPN Adapter” to “Cisco Systems VPN Adapter”.
5) Open the VPN client and try connecting again
6) If this doesn’t work, restore your original settings by double clicking the reg file you saved in step 3.

Special thanks to Raman-MSFT from this MSDN post for this solution!

Samsung PM830 SSD not recognized by SSD Magician

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I bought a Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook in March with a 256GB SSD drive and I love this machine. The drive inside is a Samsung PM830 and it boots Windows 8 from scratch in less than 7 seconds (cold boot, this is not resuming sleep).

As a techie, I like maintaining my system and keeping it in order. Part of that involves making sure your disk performance is good. Everybody knows you aren’t supposed to defrag SSDs because it eats into the limited number of writes an SSD can make and also it won’t increase performance. SSDs don’t have moving parts; having the file operations sequential doesn’t seem to make a difference. I talked with my friend Bill and he mentioned a command called TRIM and recommended looking at the Samsung SSD utility which is called Samsung SSD Magician.

First thing I did was pull up a command prompt and see if I have TRIM enabled (starting with Windows 7, it should be enabled by default if you’re using an SSD). Here’s how you can check (NOTE: you’ll need to open the command line with admin privileges for these to work).
fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify

Here’s how to interpret what that command outputs (taken from the fsutil documentation):

DisableDeleteNotify = 0 means Windows WILL send the TRIM command to the SSD when a file is deleted.
DisableDeleteNotify = 1 means Windows WILL NOT send the TRIM command to the SSD when a file is deleted.

On my machine, TRIM is enabled which is great. If it wasn’t and I wanted to enable it, here’s how you’d do that:
fsutil behavior set disabledeletenotify 0

NOTE: If you wanted to disable it, you’d provide a 1 instead of a 0. I’d like credit this information to a post I found on the Corsair Product Forums.

From what I understand, TRIM increases write performance by enabling notifications (sent by the OS) that occur when files get deleted. Click here to read more about TRIM. Next, I went to the Samsung website and tried to download their utility. The website makes you provide a model number before you can download anything. I have no idea how to find this number; I’m guessing you’d have to physically look at the drive. After some searching, my best guess at the model number is MZ-7PC256B.

I downloaded and installed the SSD Magician program, which wouldn’t install properly in Windows 8. Not a problem- you can use compatibility mode and run it as Windows 7. That will let you complete the install and get the program up and running. When I launched the program up, it started to scan the drives. All of the sudden, I get a message box:
“No Samsung Brand SSD found in the system”

The utility still spits out a lot of information about the drive, it just won’t let you do anything (like performance optimizations, etc). Using the tool, I was able to find the firmware version for the drive (which surprised me, since I hadn’t thought about drives having firmware). The firmware version I have installed is:
CXM12D1Q

After some research, I’ve come to the conclusion that you can’t use this tool on an SSD that came pre-installed on a Dell. Other people investigating have hinted at Samsung providing a very similar version of the drive with a custom firmware, so that Dell can control upgrades to it’s firmware. Unfortunately by doing that, they also made the SSD Magician tool not recognize the drive. At that point, I gave up and uninstalled it.

Click here for information I’d recommend reading through if you’re frustrated like me (NOTE: the link is to a conversation that is several pages long, be sure to read through it all). In this post, somebody may have an inside connection to Dell and provides a link to a new version of firmware. This will let you flash from CXM12D1Q to CXM03D1T. The other users (rightly so) are skeptical about it, but the person does claim it increases performance slightly. I’d personally recommend NOT doing this upgrade, but feel free to roll the dice and try it out.

Software that I like

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As a programmer, I’m pretty picky about what software I use. Why? Because I’m on a computer for most of the day. If I still worked in a factory and I only had to use a computer for watching silly YouTube videos of people getting in accidents, life would be a lot different.

I wanted to compile a list of my favorite programs and try to explain why I like them. You can click the title of each program below to visit the home page where you’ll get more information / screenshots.

Microsoft Visual Studio
I love Visual Studio. You can get the express editions of the software (which are fully featured) for free.

I remember learning how to write C++ on Mac OS 7 using a pirated copy of CodeWarrior 5 because I was a teenager and I couldn’t afford a legit copy. When I started college in 1999, I had already switched to PC and used my academic discount and bought Visual Studio 6 for about $150, which I thought was a bargain at the time. Now it’s free which is amazing.

To help put things in perspective, I created this website and every piece of software on the “Projects” tab of my web site using Visual Studio. If you want to learn programming on Windows, go download it.

Google Chrome
I seriously hate FireFox. It takes like 30 seconds to start up, it has horrible memory leaks, and it crashes a lot. Those reasons aside, I think the name is just plain stupid. The only thing I did like about FireFox (being a web developer) is the Firebug extension.

I was a hardcore IE user for years until Chrome came out. I even used IE on Macintosh up until version 4 (about when I switched to PC). With Google behind it, I figured I’d give Chrome a try and ended up loving it. I like how unobtrusive the browser is; it has a minimalistic feel to it. I’ve never had it crash. I keep my browser instances and tabs open for days, sometimes weeks.

(Linux people, feel free to insert a joke here about how Windows can’t go that long without a reboot)

I’ll be honest, I don’t really care about a browser’s rendering engine or which has a “better” implementation of CSS. I like using software that works. Period. Any web developer knows that you’re going to have to test your work on every browser anyways; you don’t have to pick the most standards compliant one as your favorite. Chrome uses the WebKit engine which is essentially the same as what’s in Safari. I still have to go back and use IE sometimes for sites that won’t work in Chrome but that doesn’t happen often.

FileZilla
As far as FTP clients go on Windows, this is about the best you’re going to find. There’s not much more to say other than it’s free and it works great. Before I found this in 2002, I used a piece of crap FTP program some of you might remember called LeechFTP.

mIRC
I’ve spent a lot more of my time on IRC than I’d like to admit. I first got involved with IRC on Macintosh in 1994. I used a complete garbage client called Ircle. None of my real life friends were interested in computer programming so I turned to the internet to meet people that were into C++. I learned most of what I know about programming by hanging around for years in #C and #C++ on EFNET.

mIRC is hands down the best client out there. I wrote my own client at one point using MASM (as a learning exercise) and although it worked, it sucked. I got sick of seeing the authors face pop up so I actually paid the shareware fee. It’s been worth every cent, although I don’t go on IRC as much anymore.

KeePass
It’s getting to the point where everything has a password. Want to post a comment on someone’s blog or forum? You’ll probably need to sign up and have another user/password that you’ll almost guaranteed forget as soon as you click the submit button.

I started using this program to keep track of all my passwords because it seriously got out of control. I have the program open now and there are over 80 passwords entered in here that I actively use. I like to think I’m a smart guy but because the password rules are different on every website you can’t use the same password on everything (and even if you could, it’s a horrible idea from a security perspective).

An 8-12 character password with 3 uppercase letters, 2 symbols, and that isn’t close to my last 9 passwords? I have a hard enough time remembering what I ate for lunch yesterday.

Bugzilla Install Guide for Windows

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In December I installed Bugzilla on my file server to help track bugs and enhancements for all of my personal projects. Bugzilla is a pleasure to use, especially after years of using Mercury Quality Center at work. In my opinion it doesn’t have any bloat and is easy to modify to your needs. The developers did a great job.
http://www.bugzilla.org/

Installing the program was not easy. But after an hour or so of beating my head on the desk I found an excellent Windows install guide by Byron Jones. The install guide gives an overview of locating and configuring Bugzilla, Perl, Apache, and MySQL.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bugzilla:Win32Install