welo

Same in Win7, just looks more fancy now

Right click on any column header, than select 'more...'

I really don't have any faith in the sites who do the testing.

Are you talking about sites testing AV products in general, or those sites that I linked to in particular?

If you take the time to read about av-comparatives.org you'll find that their testing methods appear to be well-documented, transparent and professional.

Of course this is no guarantee that test results are really fair and independent (and correct). This is why I would never rely on one testing website alone, hence I referenced three different websites in total.

This is also an interesting read:

http://www.av-comparatives.org/seiten/ergebnisse/AVTW.pdf

Since I understand your doubts and I'm interested in this topic I will try to come up with more references. Btw my goal is not to come up with THE one best antivirus product, but to provide a list of respectable and reliable antivirus products that users can choose from.

But one thing that seems pretty certain to me so far is that AVG is not one of them.

welo

Looking more and more like a blink-of-an-eye compared to half a blink-of-an-eye speed compariso[...] I know it's easy to think that 64 bit [...] should be twice as fast as its 32 bit version, but that linear relationship just ain't there...aint' even close.

Pib, you've been the only person in that thread suggesting that 64bit should be twice as fast as 32bit software

a 10-20% difference in performance is definitely more than a 'blink of an eye', especially when we talk about time-consuming encoding/transcoding jobs and the OP is doing them regularly.

Furthermore, look at the price difference between two Intel CPUs that differ 20% in performance.

welo

Did you connect any USB mass storage device lately? Did you change boot order in the BIOS? Is the Windows partition the active partition?

welo

AVIRA false positives can be reduced by turning off the heuristic malware detection, or reducing its aggressiveness, in the "configuration" section.

I don't recommend to do that. Its heuristic engine is what makes Avira one of the best antivirus products out there. It helps detecting unknown viruses (new ones as well as rare ones that are not - yet - in the virus definition database).

As for paid software there are many good products out there, Kaspersky, Norton, Avira just being three of them (in no particular order).

As far as free antivirus software goes Avira is the clear winner for me at the moment.

The results for ESET's NOD32 are conflicting. av-comparatives.org rates it pretty well whereas it seems to have completely failed on tomshardware (see my previous comment).

I would not choose NOD32 just for the reason that it is so popular in SEAsia. Malware and Viruses produced for the SEAsien 'market' will very likely implement attack or stealth techniques targeted at NOD32. Whereas this doesn't make NOD32 a bad product, it is just reasonable to not go with the crowd when it comes to antivirus software.

AVG seems to be the clear loser at this point, still benefiting from its 'glorious' past but delivering average protection at best (and this already for some time now).

welo

All those results are not written in stone and might

2. make sure you are burning DATA not Audio (this will be asked after inserting a blank CD)

WMP 9 + WMP 10

https://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsme...e/0091.mspx#EYG

WMP11

This screenshot shows where you can switch between Audio CD and Data (=MP3) CD. You want a Data CD!

welo

Remember some years back when Microsoft was The Great Evil (Apple bs to pump themselves by putting the other one down)?

Microsoft never was 'The Great Evil' to me, but since we talk about web browsers here, MS criticism can hardly be dismissed as 'Apple bs':

"Microsoft ends 10-year fight with Europe on browsers" (BBC News Dec 2009)

<h1></h1>"The First browser war" (wikipedia)

welo (not a MS basher)

The data are not the same.

Sure, I was referring not to the absolute results but to the comparison 32bit vs 64bit. Interestingly this time (at least with winRAR) 64bit performed as expected (slight advantage). Because to me the big question is still why in your first test 32-bit Windows 7 outperformed 64-bit Windows 7 that much (~20%).

So if your say that this time the benchmark is more CPU centric, than for me this still means something is slowing down your 64bit Windows 7. At least in that specific test you originally posted.

welo

Isn't the the new result different from the one original posted?

test run 1

WinRAR 32 bit 6:34

WinRAR 64 bit 7:56

64bit 20% slower than 32bit

test run 2 (test results from RAM disk with HT on)

WinRAR 32bit 2:24

WinRAR 64bit 2:14

64bit 7% faster than 32bit

The new WinRAR results make more sense to me. However, I still cannot really tell what should be expected since I don't have any in-depth know how of what algorithms file compressors use, and if and how they should benefit from 64bit (compare Longbottom's integer and floating point benchmarks).

Didn't find anything specific on WinRARs 64bit performance and used instruction sets (SSE2 etc) - still think this is mainly compiler work.

About Sony Vegas: Still googling around to find benchmark comparisons between 32bit and 64bit. Didn't find anything so far. One forum post mentioned something about the problem of plugins not supporting 64bit.

welo

The good people at spywarevoid.com were kind enough to provide a button to remove the infected program. And they were very nice in that they plunked KMusic onto the hard drive in place of the tool. KMusic is benign in its normal form, but loaded with tons of malware.

For Firefox users I recommend installing the WOT (web of trust) addon. It will display a website's rating next to the address bar and warn about many (but not all) malicious websites. I know there are other similiar plugins (McAfee SiteAdvisor for instance), this is the one I use.

Furthermore always download unknown tools & software from one of the major download sites like download.com, softpedia.com, filehippo.com, etc., sometimes you will find user reviews there that further help avoiding crippled demo-ware and rogue-ware.

welo

Maybe a good comparison between the Win 7 64 bit and Win 7 32 bit versions is the the 64 bit version does a process in a half of a blink of eye compared to the 32 bit version doing it in a blink of an eye (this assumes your hardware and software is optimized for Win 7 64 bit). Ok, now blink your eyes to test the speed comparison. (grin)

(speechless)

Since we are talking about other kind of media players now - I was pleasently surprised when somebody showed me one of those 2,5" HDD players that are barely bigger than a normal hdd enclosure. I found one for as cheap as 900 THB at Panthip (common advertised price was about 1200) excluding the harddrive.

I guess the electronics inside is similiar to the DVD/DIVX players we discussed here. Difference is that it is connected to a 2,5" (laptop) harddrive (cost about 1800 THB for 320GB at the moment).

The player comes with AV cable to connect to the TV, VGA out, remote control, headphone jacket, external power adapter (alternatively powers via USB from the PC), sd card reader and of course USB connector - the player behaves like an ordinary external harddrive when connected to a PC.

That is the cheap option for sure, no dolby surround outputs, no HDTV support. But it is ultra portable and both storage medium plus media player.

I know this is nothing for cinephiles but might be interesting for those considering a divx player.

Interesting that in this thread there are quite a view people having troubles getting the port forward to work stable on a P-660H-T1 V2 (no wireless). I can't believe that hardware and/or software is so different besides the wireless part.

cykomiko, do you achieve good performance on your setup? What is the maximum number of connections you have configured ('global maximum number of connections' in uTorrent)? Which firmware do you use.

Maybe you can help out the guys on the other thread!?

welo

Is the harddrive performance the same on 32bit and 64bit Windows 7?

welo

That being said, does say in UT setup guide that most routers have UPnP universal plug and play built in, this being checked will allow port forwarding and means you no longer have to set up a manual port...

Does anyone know for sure if this leave you open to Malware, viruses etc...???

Surely UT wouldn't recommend to do this if there were security issues???

It's not the application that makes use of uPnp that is a security issue but the router that has uPnp enabled. In case of any malware that manages to infect a computer on your local network it might use uPnp to reconfigure your router and...

• attack (and infect) other computers on your network
  
• use your router to hide attacks to other computers on the internet
  
• intercept and analyze communication between computers on the local network and the internet
  
• ...
  

Please note that the malware has to infect your computer in the first place by other means than uPnp. The mentioned attack technique using Flash where you just had to visit a malicious website that could incorporate a Flash app/movie to reconfigure your router is no longer working if you use an updated Flash player (fixed as of April 2008).

One might argue that because of the design of uPnp (lack of any form of authentication) and the severity of possible abuse related to routers it is fundamentally flawed and always a security risk, and I cannot completely disagree with that (see my previous, more detailed post to decide on your own).

welo

I'd need more details.

The thing about reconfiguring upnp is that there seems to be no security - no router password required. It's just some http(?) requests sent to 192.168.1.1. And it seems to me that that would be possible any number of ways from a website no? JavaScript? Java? Flash? I guess I need more information on the original attack, and on how UPnP works.

Google is your friend

http://www.gnucitizen.org/blog/flash-upnp-attack-faq/

But basically all you've said is correct:

A flash 'app' was used to send http headers to the local router on the uPnp port and reconfigure it. Depending on the uPnp support of the router you could do a horrible many of things, e.g. configure a port forward accessible from the internet so others could reroute their traffic through your router and attack another website.

This falls under the categroy 'cross-domain' issues: Flash should not allow connections to other domains than the server the app/movie originated from. This was fixed/implemented in Flash Player as of April 2008.

It was not really a uPnp issue, since allowing remote connections to other domains can be used for all kind of attacks. uPnp just caught a lot of attention because the effects are so severe.

UPnp is a HTTP header based protocol (if I remember correctly) and provides NO MEANS OF AUTHENTICATION. I guess the idea was to just make it work without needing any intervention by the user, well, plug and play.

Not sure what was the justification for that, maybe assuming that it is run only within a safe environment/network(?), but implementing a simple authentication mechanism (optional) probably would have avoided many problems.

This is an article in favor of uPnp.

http://networking.nitecruzr.net/2006/01/na...ty-risk-or.html

From what I know all web technologies implement cross-domain policies now, meaning you can connect to the originating server only where the script was loaded from. A similiar attack heavily used in the early days of web 2.0 was using Javascript to manipulate and/or steal contents from other browser windows. This has been fixed long since.

Of course all those sandbox techniques made life not especially easier for web developers

I don't worry to much about uPnp on my home network for the same reasons you stated. In consider a malware infection as exceptional anyway, no matter if the malware tries to manipulate my router, steal my passwords or just sits and wait.

As I said before, even without uPnp malware can 'call home' and send stolen data (e.g. passwords).

However, what has to be considered is that uPnp allows malware to not only affect the computer it has infected but easily attack the entire local network. Imagine the malware reroutes all traffic through the attacker's computer on the internet, allowing all traffic to be analyzed and logged, and even manipulated...

So in any network with computers not fully under my control I would have strongly want to disable uPnp on the router. Well, just thinking now what I will do the next time a friend stops by and connects his computer to my network LOL

welo

welo

I don't recommend downloading a tool from spywarevoid.com.

Based on the negative WOT rating the chances are high that you get yet another problem that way.

read here:

http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/spywarevoid.com

I didn't check whether this specific tool is rogue- or malware though.

welo

I bought a Zyxel wireless router (P-320Wv2) about a year ago at Panthip (1700 THB) and would not recommend it. The firewall software has nifty features but fails at delivering performance when there are many concurrent connections (mainly important for torrents).

I'm running it in Access Point Mode only (router part deactivated) and it works fine.

I can talk only for this one model though.

welo

I've been doing more reading on the topic (well, just the last 45 minutes) and found some interesting readings:

http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/vista64.htm#anchorFP

Roy Longbottom's extensive benchmark website. He writes at a level that makes it hard for me to follow, since I'm application programmer and never did any scientific or caluclation intensive programming.

From what I understand the topic 32bit vs 64bit is much more complex than I thought when it comes to floating point arithmetics. dave_boo, you mentioned before that Intel's CPUs are not strong on floating point calculations, and this is repeated by Longbottom (64 bit compilations 'slow on Core 2 Duo').

It seems there are different aspects that will affect floating point performance in a specific benchmark/program, the main difference being which instruction set is being used (SSE vs SSE2 vs classic x86 FPU). Intel seemed to have had a major weakness on 64bit SSE2, which can be avoided by special compiler adjustments (?). Longbottom added an update to his benchmarks just this September eliminating Intel's major floating point bottleneck on 64bit.

Linpack Benchmark

The major surprise was that Core 2 Duo demonstrated particularly slow performance on some 64 bit compilations that produce SSE2 instructions, where the Athlon 64 could be up to twice as fast. These slow results were from the original 2006 versions but these were corrected using a later compiler in 2009. Below are results for the Linpack and Livermore Loops benchmarks

 <pre><b>Linpack Benchmark - Results in MFLOPS

							  64 Bit	   32 Bit	  Original</b>

  Core 2 Duo 2400 MHz, Vista	   823		 1480		 1315
  Core 2 Duo 2009 compilation	 1602

  Athlon 64 2210 MHz, XP x64	  1044		 1014		  838
  Athlon 64 2009 compilation	  1091
</pre>

SSE3DNow and MemSpeed

A later search found Intel Documentation, confirming that there are complications concerning use of the same register following movlpd, which can cause pipeline stalls. This was also corrected in the 2009 recompilation using the movsdx instruction.

<pre><b>Maximum Speeds in MFLOPS

			   Core 2 Duo 2400 MHz, Vista		Athlon 64 2210 MHz, XP x64

			 s=s+x[m]*y[m]   x[m]=x[m]+y[m]	 s=s+x[m]*y[m]   x[m]=x[m]+y[m] 
			   Dble   Sngl	 Dble   Sngl		Dble   Sngl	 Dble   Sngl
</b>
 <b>Assembled SIMD</b>   3166   6347	 2340   4692		1999   3998	 1011   2140

 <b>32 bit SISD</b>	  1053   1059	 1173   1147		 673	727	  970	878

 <b>64 bit SISD</b>	   761   1275	  398	943		 891	918	  808	735
 <b>2009 compile</b>	 1260   1270	 1172   1188		 976	978	  976	979

 <b>x87 FPU</b>		  1591   1593	 1180   1177		1047   1100	  853   1085</pre>

But Longbottom also states:

Other benchmarks using floating point generally show superior Core 2 Duo performance

Based on those findings I see two explanations for Beggar's benchmark results:

• A major software issue on his 64bit Windows setup (drivers)
  
• The tested 64bit applications rely on SSE2 instructions and don't incorporate a workaround for Intel's 64bit weakness
  

If I only had the equipment to re-run Beggar's benchmarks then we could eliminate the first point, but unfortunately it's difficult to setup something similiar on my Laptop.

welo

Hello,ok ive installed the identifier sofware on laptop by downloading off of another computer with memory stick,& then onto laptop ,& i got the following;

Ethernet controller (unknown device)

Chip:broadcom bcm5705ma2 netextreme gigabit ethernet

pnpid:ven-14e4&dev_16se&subsys_0890103c&rev_03

Base system device (unknown device)

Chip:02 micro 0271 mx memory cardbus accelerator.

Is that what i needed?

Thanks.

so my guess was correct and your 'wired' network card is the broadcom netextreme.

Download the driver 'Broadcom: Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet Driver 1.00 C 2 Feb 2005' from the driver page I linked in a previous post and you'll have a working network (this is for the cable connection, not the wireless).

Can you list the entire output of the tool then I can probably identify the drivers you'll need and you don't need to use trial and error, especially for the wireless LAN module.

What is your current status concerning SP3, antivirus etc.

I'll be offline until tomorrow morning, so no response from me until then

welo

You could get one of those little (and cheap) USB speakers that install a sound driver on your system. Keep your main speakers as default sound device and configure skype to ring on the USB speakers.

welo

Sysinspector of ESET is a freeware and very useful to find unusual startup and running processes, as well as details of network connections being used by the comp:

http://www.eset.com/download/sysinspector.php

Thanks, nifty tool! Takes a snapshot of current TCP connections only though. Windows Sysinternals' TCPView is less nifty but has live view. However, I like ESET's tool for its 'niftyness'

welo

Please enlighten us what is up with that oksele site.WEnt on there and they sell this plasma,Samsung PN63B590 63-Inch 1080p Plasma HDTVwhich is priced at about 200.000 baht in thailand,at 720 euro or 34.920 Baht.

Hurry, hurry before they run out of stock or notice their mistake!!!

This with CPU cache etc. what you dave_boo said makes sense to me.

Indeed, I thought the same. However, isn't that what a special 64bit version of a program should account for, optimize data chunks and algorithms to not have such effects on a 64bit system? For sure there a several layers of optimization, but if WinRAR performs THAT bad on 64bit compared to 32bit in general the programmers didn't do a good job. (Or the compiler, since I guess most of those optimizations are done automatically by the compiler).

I am still trying to find benchmarks and articles on the web to compare your results to.

But one thing does not get out of my head. The CPU cores never ran with 100 percent during my tests. There must be a bottleneck in my system. So I am thinking if I should change my 2 disk RAID 0 setup at least to a 3 disk RAID 0 setup. But I am not sure if this is the real problem. I have no empty disk to check and 3 TB in RAID would be too much anyway. What do you think where the problem could be?

From what I remember a process usually runs on one core only, and needs optimization to run on multiple cores. The speed increase on multiple core systems comes from distributing (different) processes on available cores. E.g. running system processes on one, and user applications on another, hence the performance increase.

A single process will therefore never have 100% CPU usage. I am not completely sure on this and a bit lazy to google about it Maybe dave_boo knows more on that topic?

However, there should not be a difference in regard to core management in Windows 7 between 32bit and 64bit.

My guess is still that your 64bit system is somehow crippled. And the best explanation I can find is that some essential component driver is causing the significantly worse results.

You could run any system benchmark suite on both Windows 7 versions and compare the result. Maybe this could give you a hint on what is the bottleneck.

I didn't use any benchmark suites since my teenager days when I overclocker my celeron 300Mhz to 450Mhz (yeah, I'm getting old ), but I'm sure there should be a free one out there. And you could start with the Windows 7 builtin performance test just to get an idea.

welo

Is there a cheap dvd player out there with a USB drive that plays .avi files because i cannot find one. i need one for a friend so i can him a usb flash drive full of downloaded avi files without the need to convert them to mpg. he doesn't want to pay for something like a wd tv hdplayer.

Brand and model number from where would be good.

thanks

DiStar DA-9200

USB with support for 8GB thumb drives

divx and xvid support

supports DVD-RW

JPEG and MP3 support

Stereo and Dolby Surround output

Bought about a month ago at BigC for 690 THB. 1 year warranty.

Personal comments:

only tested with 2GB thumb drive, behavior is the same as running from CD/DVD

reading and initializing a DVD/thumb-drive takes a couple of seconds, but no stuttering or delay when playing the movie

subtitles from srt file work but are pretty small

tested 1 MP4 file which didn't work, no problems at all with any xvid/divx file yet (tested about 20 movies)

quality of the player enclosure (buttons, slot) is mediocre

dolby outputs not tested

Saw more or less the same models at Tesco too. There were a couple of other models with higher version numbers which to me seemed to have only different enclosures.

welo