Willpower PC – Tech Happenings

Reported around 1:30PM on Wednesday April 21, 2010 multiple clients worldwide of the popular McAfee Virus Scan 8.70i suite reported whole networks going into general mayhem with rebooting loops and lack of network access. It seems a glitch in the programs software received an update from McAfee’s central repository that apparently marked a critical system software file as malicious. Little did they know that at the speed of light they would be the most inconvenient glitch anyone has seen in the company’s many years. This glitch has already effected many governments, educational, and private sector companies unseen on Wednesday.

The symptoms related to this glitch are multiple reboots and lack of connectivity. The glitch which effects the “svchost.exe” file , marked the important file as malicious with a Virus pattern and either deleted it or quarantined it. This little file which is critical to being able to support networking features in XP computers everywhere would bring users to a black BIOS screen and nothing more. Globally the ramifications are immense with reports of numerous governments, educational, and private sector companies screeching to a halt having to simply switch back over to paper and pencil. McAfee’s website reports that 0.5 percent of their clientel was effected that number is easily expected to increase as the hours pass. Even as of last night’s meeting with a business partner at University of Oregon Duck Campus every Windows XP machine was simply shutoff or stuck in a BIOS screen not able to find a local hard drive.

The number of companies effected grows as a popular security software manufacturer’s reputation quickly dies in the hand of every IT support professional that is looking at at least 30 mins per terminal in troubleshooting and repair. The problem that effects critical windows files will have tons of remediation efforts in process for weeks or even months to come. They are estimating that each computer that was effected by this glitch may need up to 30 mins or more of IT support to bring the unit back online. Considering that some companies lost 1,100 computers if they have small diminished staff of IT professionals this is a wary task already added to a mostly overworked sector of the workforce.

For enterprise and corporate customers that relied on their service before most are either running to unplug the internet to prevent the spread of this update or simply disabling the auto update feature hopefully before this got to be a problem at their locations. McAfee has already published many fixes on how to either disable this problem or to restore computers that are already downed. This glitch effectively is grounding all Windows XP Security Pack 3 customers running the popular company’s Virus Scan 8.70i  anti-virus product.  The main culprit of this error lies in the “Scan Processes on Enable” feature that scans computer processes when it starts up. To add to the mayhem most computers were rebooted automatically after receiving the DAT file version 5958 which causes a reboot where upon restarting it finds the svchost.exe file and identifies it as the “W32/Wecorl.a” virus and restarts in an endless loop.

We’ve conveniently added links to rectify this problem below. Willpower PC technicians are standing by to assist any clients that have been effected by this global glitch.

McAfee’s Main Website
McAfee’s Security Insights Blog
McAfee’s specific Virus Info Library
McAfee’s Corporate Knowledge Base
McAfee’s Home User Knowledge Base

Hope you have a productive and happy day!!
-The Willpower PC Staff

As if the choices for your browser weren’t enough lately with over 5 choices to surf the internet with Microsoft is releasing soon a new version of their popular browser with an emphasis on speed this time.

Microsoft just posted their browser testing results to highlight their new found compatibility and speed. In the past the two areas that their developments have lagged was speed and support for new tech. Happily these were the foundation of of their newest release that has not been scheduled or even released for Beta Users.

This is a new step for the IE Microsoft team where in the past they didn’t focus on testing and performance for common plugins like Javascript speed or the new HTML5 format that is in the pipeline for the new Internet standard. Of course Firefox and Google Chrome users still claim that their browsers “feel” faster because of previous tests that put these two browsers on top, the willingness for Microsoft to join this race may show that they are taking more of an active presence in the market.

Of course Internet Explorer is still the most popular browser in the pack with almost 60% of the market share, the latest offering from competitors seems to be diminishing that cross section daily. So as far as timing Microsoft seems right on to keep the race on for the fastest, most secure and compatible browser.

After booting up an old Win98 unit the other day making sure I had all my files from college it’s been quite a journey from yesteryear. Let’s just hope they can keep the bugs to a minimum, I’m all out of bug killer for my main systems lately.

There has been tons of hype about Google’s pet project to increase the spotlight on America’s need for faster Internet.

Now even the government  jumping on the bandwagon to setup up the national broadband access speeds nationwide. Now of course that “internet bandwagon has been in motion for many years in other countries. I remember reading an article in in the past that reported that while America’s century old copper and telephone technology was maintaining here telecommunications providers in Japan 2000 had a government sponsored opportunity with subsidies and tax breaks to lay high bandwidth fiber-optic lines to homes nationwide because of a nationwide initiative to double the amount of workers working from home.  Turns out this expansion gave Japan the leap to the tune of 100 Megabit speeds. This is roughly 17 times the average DSL connection here in America. Why you ask? Because the age old telephone companies that are slowly growing outdated are trying to maximize their throughput on old outdated copper lines simply can’t afford to re-tool the whole network with Fiber-Optic.

So what can you do with Fiber-based Gigabit Internet anyway? What is all the hub bub about anyways? Well think of all the advantages of Fiber:

1. Fiber’s 2.5GB + transmission rates Vs Copper’s 1.5MB
2. Fiber can go 124 miles with 2.5GB+ transmission rates where copper you have to be within 1.5 miles of a termination point to max out at 1.5MB.
3. It is less prone to pickup external RF and other EMF sources so it is a “cleaner” conduit for data and telecommunications.
4. Another advantage of fiber optics is its small size and weight. Where traditional copper lines would take up 5x times the  cable, space and power needed.

So when we finally get gigabit speeds for the internet think of the abilities of our current services- Internet voice, video and remote control. We’ll be able to view fully uncompressed high definition video feeds from TV stations, we’ll be able to telecommute to the office meetings with high definition video and audio as if we were right there but not be stuck in traffic. There are multitudes of new applications for it and as a Internet hog already I can’t wait to see what the new wave of speed will bring us. Now I’m not sure that it’s necessary to rename my city to attract Google’s team to install their gigabit project in my city but the high definition Internet lifestyle is kind of attractive though.

-W