Converting a Dell XPS laptop from Vista to XP Pro

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Over the last few months, I’ve had the opportunity to work with about 6 Dell XPS laptops. In each case, we were asked to replace the Vista image with Windows XP Pro. This was for a variety of reasons, such as, compatibility with current domain, user preference, distrust of Vista. For whatever reason, we did this because the customer requested it.

Reviewing Dell’s site, only the XPS M1730 can be purchased with Windows XP Pro (and from what I’ve read, that will cease on June 30th).  Both the M1330 and M1530 come with Vista.

The first conversion I did was an M1330. This little beauty is fast, sleek, and comes with a good set of features. It also came with Vista.  This was before I knew what Dell and BestBuy geeks were telling their customers. Seemed to me that the conversion was straight forward. Only minor problems finding a couple drivers.

My second venture was with two M1330′s purchased at our local BestBuy. With this run, I got a call from the buyer saying, “Are you sure this is going to work? They told me that this can’t be done!”

“Really?” I reassured my customer that we’d done this before. Successfully.

Here too, I was able to convert these two laptops to WinXP Pro. And thanks to Dell, their support site has most of the drivers needed for an XP Pro install. The driver section even has Windows XP Professional in the OS selection drop down menu.

Jump forward. Last night I did an M1530. This machine, purchased directly through Dell, also received the warning that, “you can’t put XP on it…”, “the drivers aren’t available to support it”.  And unlike the M1330, there is no drop down that allows selection of XP. Only Vista and BIOS are listed.

Had I made a huge mistake telling this customer that I could do this? Was the M1530 that different from the M1330 that squirting XP onto it would be an abject failure? I almost got worried.

I must confess. I do have a tool in my arsenal of tech tools that has become invaluable when it comes to determining the chipsets and hardware of a computer: a bootable linux cd. My favorite is SystemRescueCD.

I first booted this black beauty (never did let it boot to Vista) with SystemRescueCD to run a few simple commands. With a thumbdrive in tow, I ran the “lspci” command and redirected it to the directory I created so that I could mount the thumbdrive.

Now I had some very valuable information. Not only did I know the chipset info, I also learned that this laptop used a Marvell Technology Group NIC. Getting network connectivity is always my first driver set as anyone that has loaded any Dell computer knows that the network drivers do not install natively with the OS.

“lspci” does for me what I’ve yet to find in the Windows world: chipset and peripheral info at the hardware level. Utilities like “SIW” give me great info except that the drivers have to be installed! Kind of counter-intuitive, if you know what I mean. Equally challenging is Dell’s own support site where you may encounter 2, 3 or even more “choices” when it comes to driver selection. Let’s try this one! oops… How about this one?

That’s how I want to spend my time…play driver roulette!

lspci takes much of the guess work out of this. With the info gleaned from its output, it’s only a matter of searching for the correct version to install. Sometimes this means a visit to Intel or Marvell, as with the 88E840 Ethernet controller, to get the appropriate drivers. Most of the drivers that I needed, though, came directly from Dell’s site. Many of them were labeled under the Vista OS listing and were entirely compatible with Windows XP.

Maybe the toughest device to figure out was labeled “PCI Device” in Device Manager with the troubled yellow exclamation mark. (I keep my Device Manager window open throughout this process to watch for conflicts, failures and successes…) Knowing that I’d yet to hear sound through all of the reboots, I figured it might be the sound card. Dell likes to use the Intel HD Audio Controller in many of their systems. Try to find these drivers using the lspci listing…doesn’t work too well.

Here’s where saving lspci output from one of the M1330′s came in so very handy. A comparison of listings showed the very same Intel HD Audio Controller listed. And I had those drivers, thank you very much. With the installation of the sound drivers, the reboot sang with success.

I’m not sure why Dell (and other Geeks) insist on a Vista-only configuration for these laptops. Pressure to sell Vista? Maybe. Maybe probably. Microsoft continues to blindly push an OS that requires big RAM and a good processor. Hell, I’ve got customers that have Win2K PC’s on their network…blended in with WinXP. Successfully, too, as long as you’re willing to work around some of the Win2K limitations.

But isn’t that part of it? Limitations? All OS’s have limitations. Vista has proven that. In its case, it’s a matter of customer acceptance. Between the cost and the pain of adoption, moving Vista into the Enterprise will be challenged.

Anti-Virus Solutions

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Seems to me that the chicken and egg theory and the virus and antivirus community share something in common. With the chicken and egg theory, one must decide “which came first“. And though there may be a comparison with virus-antivirus issues, that’s not exactly where I’m going with this blog.

It’s a well known item that once infected by certain exploits, their removal can be daunting. Tools such as HiJackThis and brethren are commonly used to find, isolate and eradicate an exploit that’s already grabbed hold of a machine. It’s an amazing thing that so many of these tools are available for free. And then there’s the multi-billion dollar anti-virus industry whose profits continue to climb on the absolute necessity (IMHO) that computer users have protection, yet sometimes, it seems to me, the cure is almost as bad as the exploit.

Most certainly, AV developers have learned well from the “V” developers. Removing some of the AV solutions requires knowledge, tenacity, persistence, and an understanding of Windows Registry.

My question is: who are they fooling?

Had their product, which includes accurate, timely updates and engines that protect the entire computer, worked in the first place, so, then, should the uninstaller.

Not so. I’ve recently dealt with two computers running two different but well known products that made removal difficult, to say the least. In Case No. 1, the owner of a used laptop he’d recently purchased attempted to uninstall one of the Symantec products for home users. It asked for the “administrators password”, which was not the password of the admin user of the computer. Unfortunately, he didn’t have this, nor did the person he bought the laptop from.

A google and 30+ minutes of service stopping, registry key deletion, and file dumping finally got the program removed (enough of it, anyway, as it appears there are still some remnants lurking in certain keys).

In Case No. 2, a new laptop had McAfee Security Center installed. The whole nine yards. All of the modular components removed nicely (through Add and Remove Programs in the Windows Control Panel). Not so when it came time to remove the final piece. Here again the user community saved the day as a quick google revealed that all that needed to be done was to remove all files from the directory in the path C:\Program Files\mcafee.com\agent\app. Reboot, Add and Remove Programs, select Security Center and away it went.
These are two cases that keep a number of support sites on-line as both companies change how their products hook into the OS as the versions change. What once worked…oh, now try this!

Gratuitous Commercial Plug time. Lead in: about a year ago, I borrowed a cd from my son, dropped it into my computer tray, and as it began its spin up, a window pops up asking me to install an application required by the cd so that I could listen to the music. Whoa. Stop right there. Eject.

I had heard of the SonyBMG root kit fiasco yet had not encountered it until that day. Because I make it a practice to err on the side of caution, I decided to investigate why a cd would want to or need to install an application so that I could listen to the music. And even though I didn’t install their crapp, I still had to reinstall my cd/dvd drivers so that I could play anything on my laptop in the form of a media disk.

On more than one front, I was very bummed! One, I couldn’t listen to The Kings of Leon cd, like I wanted. Two, I had to repair my drivers. Three, my anti-virus solution totally let me down because as I learned very shortly, had I allowed the cd to install this app, a root kit exploit developed by a company for SonyBMG would have left my computer open to instability and other exploits that could take advantage of a root kit exploited computer. All of this in the name of DRM, or Digital Rights Management.
Here’s what I found out when I reviewed this issue:

  • SonyBMG got sued, and lost
  • Mark Russinovich got the credit for finding the root kit exploit
  • Microsoft sat mute on the subject and has an OS that allows such exploits to occur
  • All of the major AV developers had no protection in place to prevent a root kit exploit
  • All of the major AV developers, except one, sat mute because “it was Sony, a big corporation”, not Joe ScriptKitty running code from his basement
  • The one company that did not sit mute and, in fact, discovered the root kit before Mr. Russinovich’s fine work is F-Secure.

What Mark and F-Secure brought to the light of day all fits neatly into the three bullet points in between, all of which led to the first bullet point: Sony Got Sued. And lost.

Within days, F-Secure had incorporated the proper definitions into its then-new BLACKLIGHT ROOTKIT ELIMINATOR, which is now incorporated into its AV products as part of the solution. A little research by the interested reader will find that the other guys were just a bit behind. Weeks behind. And longer.

With that, I researched F-Secure a bit more. I like a company that’s on the leading edge of the curve and not under it. With that, I’ve now migrated my solution to F-Secure and have recommended and installed their solutions for my Customers, family and friends.

And now, I’m very pleased to announce that my company, DanTech Services, is an F-Secure Reseller.

A bit of a backtrack: Case No. 2 is very current. Today, as a matter of fact. McAfee Security Center had been installed, kept current, and in place since the laptop was purchased. In fact it came bundled. F-Secure Internet Security 2006 has just been installed and a complete scan was run. Result: 2 malware found. Win32.Trojandownloader.Zlob and Trojan-Downloader.Win32.Zlob.aai were found and quarantined or deleted.

If you’re looking for a solution, a real solution, for your antivirus, antispyware, and personal computer firewall needs, I recommend F-Secure. And I wouldn’t recommend it if I didn’t use it.

Enjoy your day.

DNS–The _Man_ behind the curtain Part 1

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DNS, or Domain Name Service, continues to be the “Mystery of Mysteries” in the Internet world. I’ve worked with DNS as an administrator over the last few years and sometimes I actually think that I know how it all works.

Aside from the server-level process, whether you’re running BIND or some other flavor of name server, as long as that server can respond to requests, we’ve got a chance at publishing our records (resource records) to the network. With that, we’re going to make the huge assumption that the name server is running and able to respond to requests (this can be verified by looking at “netstat” in a command line interface; more on this later).

Primer:
DNS allows us to use a naming convention instead of IP addresses to get to a service, such as an email server, a website, a file server or even a name server, by taking that name and, based on our records, converting it into an IP address. Sometimes, as with CNAMES (Canonical Names) or MX (Mail eXchanger) records, it may take a couple steps to get to an IP address yet eventually, this must happen.

TLD:
TLD stands for Top Level Domain. For Internet -routed records, any request must be associated with a registered TLD. Common TLD’s are “.com”, “.net”, “.org”, etcetera. A search for “TLD” will give you an extensive list of Top Level Domains. “IANA”, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, has a list of Generic Top-Level Domains.

In each case, nothing can happen with out the “.” in front of the TLD designator (a little bit of esoteric info: there are actually two “dots”, one on each side of the TLD; the “implied” (unseen) “dot” on the right side points to the “root” servers that direct traffic to the appropriate TLD root servers that handle the basic pointing for that TLD).

My name server knows where to find the TLD name servers with the aid of a “hints” file. On my server, it’s located at /var/named/named.ca and it holds 13 root records. Now that our server knows where to start, we can move on to SLD’s, or Secondary Level Domains.

There are hundreds of sites on the Internet that discuss, teach, preach, and labor on the issue of DNS. We’re just getting started and with any start, feedback is important. Please let me know if there are any points raised here that are unclear or inaccurate. At some point in this discussion, I’ll provide a list of sites that aid in the quest to understand DNS. Some are invaluable tools that give the technician or interested user information that’s useful in sorting out problems.

Should my mission succeed, we will unravel some of the mystery surrounding DNS, tricks that make it more useful, and techniques that help to avoid problems.

Dan
DanTech Services