OpenDNS

Use OpenDNS

As I was viewing one of the many blogs I read, I noticed a button on the right-hand side about this thing called OpenDNS. OpenDNS? What is that? I clicked the link to find out and found it was a group who sets up public DNS server that people can use. They claim that they respond much faster than the standard ISP’s DNS servers respond and therefore decrease the loading time of pages (and especially for pages that refer to many different domain names).

I decided to check it out and setup my router to point to the two DNS servers the site gave me. After rebooting the router, I browsed around a bit and the browsing was noticeably faster, namely in the lag time from when I type in an address and when the page begins to render. Another cool feature they offer is typo correcting and phishing protection. This means that they help protect you from phishing sites no matter what program you are using, as they protect you at the DNS level, so the site can never reach you.

Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 Experience

Yesterday I downloaded the newly released Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, installed it, and then went on to install Windows Vista Home Premium on the virtual machine (and contrary to some beliefs, the license for Home Premium does not say that you cannot install it in a virtual machine, but say that you cannot have it installed as the host and then use the same key for the virtual machine).

The host machine has an AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1.4 GHz) processor with 1 GB DDR RAM. Now this is an old processor with 3D Now! and SSE instructions, none of the newer instructions and none of the hardware virtualization features. Now, with that out of the way, I have to say that installing Windows Vista was the longest, slowest process I’ve ever had in a virtual machine. In contrast to this, installing Windows Vista on the free VMWare Server was very fast and easy.

NVIDIA Drivers Woes

Once upon a time NVIDIA was the de facto graphics platform; their Unified Driver Architecture made installing drivers a breeze. Now, their drivers have created many woes for many people, with their drivers not being well written and riddled with bugs. It is so bad that if something is broken, the actual solution is to actually downgrade the drivers, which is most certainly the opposite of what the solution should be.

I bring this up because I have been playing around with my NVIDIA drivers for the past month, trying to find one that works across the board without having a driver that is too old for my liking. My system is an nForce 2 motherboard with an AMD Athlon XP processor and an eVGA GeForce 6200 (AGP) graphics card. I have found that using any ForceWare (NVIDIA’s graphics drivers) version 9x.xx will cause any MPEG-4 video to either freeze the computer or blue screen.

Now, all the drivers less than version 90.00 work fine for everything so far, except for some DirectX 8.1 compatibility issues I’ve been having with Command & Conquer Generals. NVIDIA needs to put some serious work into its drivers.

Netgear WGT624 v3 initial setup

For those of you who happen to acquire a Netgear WGT624 v3 router and use Norton, don’t be surprised if you can’t access your router to configure it. The default settings on the Netgear router have a Trend Micro security feature enabled that will send special packets to the computers on the network. Some programs such as Norton will then block the router’s IP address making you unable to access the router to turn this off.

The solution that I used was to look for a live Linux CD, such as Knoppix and then just set it up there, or at least turn off Trend Micro.