Upgrade to Momentus XT hybrid drive

I just upgraded my old Hitachi 5400 RPM 250 GB laptop drive to a Seagate Momentus XT 7200 RPM 500GB "Hybrid" drive. It's got 4GB of build in SSD solid-state NAND gate flash memory that acts as a smart cache with what they call "Adaptive Memory Technology." Supposedly it figures out the files you use the most and drops them on the SSD portion of the disk to speed things up.

First step was to hook up the drive with a SATA-to-USB adapter and connect it to my drive. The I used Clonezilla to clone drive-to-drive and it reproduced my 170 GB partition from the old drive onto the new one as a bit-by-bit copy. Then, simply switch the drives in the PC and everything magically works just like it did before. Easy as pie. (I don't know why people say this. Have you ever baked a pie? It's a PITA.)

It certainly SEEMS faster, even after a few minutes of using it. Rebooting my 64-bit windows 7 laptop is very quick. It boots in less than 30 seconds now to the login screen. It used to be over 40 sec. I ran a benchmark utility (Passmark Performance Test) and it claimed the new drive was 2-4x faster for sequential read-write performance. I'm sold.

I read some reviews and they were generally positive with a people complaining that the drive didn't spin down very often, it was noisy, or it vibrated a lot. I'm not sure, but I think it's a little louder. Considering my laptop sits on a desk and not my lap most of the time, I don't care much.

One suggestion I found was to upgrade from SD23 firmware so SD24. So I went to the page and did it. (http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=215451). The problem is, it got stuck when I downloaded and ran the upgrade.

When I booted the machine, it would give me "Invalid System Disk. Press any key..." After that, it would boot into Windows 7 fine. Rebooting many times and re-running the utility did nothing.

Eventually I figured it out. I hit "F12" during start up to get boot options. Then I simply selected "Boot from internal HDD" and it magically fired up the upgrade utility for the firmware. 30 seconds later, it finished, shut down, restarted and now it works fine. Problem solved.

A little wonky, but it worked. Dunno if it made the drive any better. Time will tell.

Vista screen resolution resets monitor on lock, reboot, etc. for dual display

Vista has this nice feature called "Transient Multi-Monitor" (TMM) service which detects when monitors are added/removed from your laptop. Unfortunately, it has a habit of LOSING ITS MIND and resetting your display resolution at random times. For example, if you connect a new monitor or (lately) if the screen locks. When I unlock the screen, it resets to 800x600 or some other lame resolution.

This is all controlled by the "TMM" which is run by the task scheduler. If you don't have multiple monitors, then you can just disable it in the Task Scheduler and solve the problem. I, however, DO have multiple monitors which I'm often changing. It worked fine for a while, but has degraded to chaos lately.

Here's a good article about resetting it the registry settings so you can start over and see if it fixes your problems:

• Reset TMM (Transitent Multi-Monitor) registry entries 

These are stored in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MobilePC\TMM and you can simply delete the tree and have it start over. You need to logout/in to make it fix itself. There are also a lot of semi-related keys stored here: HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\VIDEO that have similar settings. I don't know what the effect of changing those would be...

Random system utilities I like to use for Windows

Here's just a few of the random utilities I like to use for maintaining and working with my computers:

• Synergy - great for sharing keyboard/mouse and controlling one computer with another. This is great, for example, when you have 2 laptops (or desktops) and you want to be able to work both of them with a single computer.
• JkDefrag - very simplistic but effective disk defragmenter
• PING - Gnu drive imaging software. Seems good for creating a restoreable image of a drive, although I've had some issues restoring it to a slightly different drive configuration (for example backing up /dev/sda then restoring to another computer /dev/hda). Linux based.
• DriveImage XML - Window (free) drive imager. Recommended by a friend.
• Screen Hunter - a simple (free) screen capture utility. I actually prefer the older version (4.x) instead of the new 5.x version. (Wisdom Soft)
  
• SysInternals - great set of windows utilities for looking at what is going on in a PC
  
• Process Explorer - good replacement for task manager that displays a lot more information about the running processes. Shows I/O speed as well.
  
• File Monitor - great utility for monitoring file and registry access, very useful for determining why things are failing at times.
  
• NetMeter - simple bar graph of network bandwidth upload/download that you are using.
• PuTTY - great SSH/Telnet client with good key handling capabilities. PuTTY Agent is great for caching passwords and keys for login and tunneling.
• XMing - easy to install PC X Window server
• TrueCrypt - encryption utility for creating encrypted drives. Can either be file-based or device-based.
  
• KeyPass - great password database. Available for blackberry as well.
  
• 7Zip - free and generally good ZIP utility that handles most things.
  
• Trillian (Pro) - instant messaging for almost everything. AIM, Yahoo, etc. The Pro version has a Jabber client that works with Google Talk and others.
  
• Windows Powershell - a much better shell program than "CMD." Allows good shell programming as well as direct interface to C# code.
• Console (sourceforge) - a more flexible "shell" window that can start up either CMD or a Cygwin BASH shell (among others)
• Cygwin - unix utilities for PC. Pretty versatile and makes most unix things work.
• TortoiseSVN - a development tool, actually. Excellent Subversion client.
• CutePDF - a free PDF print driver that allows you to print to PDF.
• VMWare Player - allow you to play pre-constructed virtual machines on your computer
• VMWare Converter - allow you to create a virtualized image of a running computer
• VirtualBox - slightly less "full featured" than VMware player, but Free and has versions that run on lots of different platforms. This has been my preferred VM platform on my laptop for quite a while. 
• GPG (Gnu Privacy Guard) - free PGP-compatible encryption and certificate routines
• PS Pad - free text editor that is good at editing most stuff.
• OTHER - Text Pad - another popular (free) editor that people use 
• OTHER - jEdit - yet another popular programmers editor (haven't used it). Recommended because it can do SFTP (ssh) file save/load. (Pure Java, so it works on Unix too). DOG SLOW to start up.
• WinDirStat - good utility for showing disk space usage in graphical and textual form. Figure out what files and directories are taking up all your space.

I'm sure there are others. I'll continue trying to edit and add them over time.

Why can't I standby with a full drive encrypted laptop?

I've got a Dell Latitude e6400. It's got one of those nifty FDE (full drive encryption) hard disks that automatically encrypts everything on it. Every time I power up, I have to enter a username/password to unlock the drive before the computer can read or write anything too it.

The problem is that it seems to have forced me to disable 'standby' mode and always use 'hibernate' mode with Windows. I'm told that this is because the BIOS is only invoked for the FDE password on powerup mode for hibernate or cold boot, not for standby. I know for a fact that my old Dell D620 laptop used a hard drive password and always asked me for it before I resumed from standby, so I'm skeptical as to why the FDE drive requires it.

We use wave.com trusted drive software embedded in the BIOS of the e6400. According to this link:

http://www.wave.com/news/press_archive/08/081110_Seagate.asp

they DO actually support secure Windows Standby mode, but who knows what that actually means or whether it relates to the platforms that we are using. It does mention some comments about 'vulnerability of FDE and exposing encryption keys.' Based on that, I suspect there are issues related to encryption keys staying in memory during standby mode that could theoretically be stolen.

My biggest complaint is always 'security for the sake of security' without really understanding what the threats and/or risks are. Basically: do you know who you are protecting against? FDE and even hard drive passwords protect against removing a drive from one computer and using another computer to read it the data. Assuming standby mode works properly, you should still be able to protect the drive in low-power mode simply by ensuring that the computer comes up locked and requiring a user password when it awakens. I admit the possibility that there are some sophisticated software attacks that can be used against the live machine (assuming it is stolen while in standby mode), but I haven't searched for any. I imagine it's a fairly sophisticated attack and will NOT include the casual thief who steals your laptop and sells the drive ebay to Joe Dumass.

Questions to answer:

• What are the threats against FDE and standby mode?
• What are the threats against standby mode, in general?

HOWTO Ubuntu network configuration in VMware

I've run a couple Ubuntu images on my machine lately and keep forgetting how/where to re-initialize the network settings. The easy answer is:

/etc/network/interfaces

Then rerun the network startup script:

/etc/init.d/networking restart

Bingo. It should reset the networking stuff.

To make this work properly in the VMware image, you need to make sure that "Devices > Network Adapter > Connect has been selected. I typically use "NAT" mode which results in outgoing connections from the VM, incoming traffic from the host OS, but the VM is not reachable by other machines on the network. "Bridged" will allow reachability from the network, but probably requires that you can get multiple DHCP addresses from the same MAC.