Automatically Delete Local Shared Objects

Also called "flash cookies," Local Shared Objects" (LSO's) can be used by any web site to store information about your web browsing.  Web developers explain that this capability is used "to enhance your web-browsing experience," but skeptics (like me) know that it can also be used to track a user's browsing in detail and even to share that information with unsavory sites.  LSO's may or may not be cleared when you attempt to clear your browser's cookies.

LSO's may be important to some applications.  Games, for example, may save the current state of the game in LSO's, so that the game can be stopped and then resumed.  However, in my computer usage I do not know of any such beneficial application of LSO's and I prefer to delete them.

Third parties have created extensions for some of the browsers which will delete LSO's automatically.  However, this script will also do it, without installing an extension:

    TITLE "Delete Local Shared Objects"
    SETLOCAL

:: Delete Local Shared Objects in a very heavy-handed way:

    SET SYSPATH="%APPDATA%\Macromedia\Flash Player\macromedia.com\support\flashplayer\sys"
    SET IE2LSO="%APPDATA%\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects"
    SET GOOPATH="%LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Pepper Data\Shockwave Flash\WritableRoot\macromedia.com\support\flashplayer\sys"
    SET GOOGLSO="%LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Pepper Data\Shockwave Flash\WritableRoot\#SharedObjects"
    
:: Delete LSO's for IE and FireFox, preserving the flash settings:

    XCOPY /y /q /h /r %SYSPATH%\settings.sol %TEMP%\*
    RMDIR /s /q %SYSPATH%
    RMDIR /s /q %IE2LSO%
    XCOPY /y /q /h /r %TEMP%\settings.sol %SYSPATH%\*
    DEL /f /q %TEMP%\settings.sol

:: Delete LSO's for Chrome, nevermind the flash settings (use defaults):

    RMDIR /s /q %GOOPATH%
    RMDIR /s /q %GOOGLSO%

:: Optionally start one of the browsers.  Also possible to specify a "home" URL here:

    START "" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe"
::  START "" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe"
::  START "" "C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe"

::  PAUSE
    ENDLOCAL
    EXIT

Put this code in a script file with a .CMD extension, e.g. DELETELSO.CMD.  Then create a shortcut to that script and set Properties/Shortcut/Run to Minimized.  Put the shortcut on your desktop, or Quick Launch bar, or wherever you want it.  Use it any time you want to clear the LSO's.  It can also be used to start the browser of your choice after it clears the LSO's, see the code.  That's how I use it.  If you have trouble copying the code from this screen, try this instead, making your screen wide.

Note:  This is a VERY HEAVY-HANDED way to approach the problem and could produce unanticipated and hard-to-diagnose results.  Please check for problems with your favorite web-based applications before you forget that you did this and start looking for problems in the wrong places.  This script comes with no warranty, and you can only sue me for the amount that you paid for it.

The above script has been tested and is in use on Vista and Windows 7.  It has not been tested on Windows 8, and it will not work without modification on Windows XP.

I've had this in place for several months now, using it to start Chrome any time I want a browser, and have not identified any problems in my use of the Chrome browser.

Comments, complaints?

Iomega Professional 2 TB External Drive Review

It works! With eSATA and USB 2.0 ports, this drive connected easily to six different computers ranging from 7 years old to less than a month, and running operating systems from Windows XP up to Windows 7, some 32 bit and some 64 bit. Every computer saw it as an external hard drive and was able to use it.

I have other ways of doing day-to-day backup, but was about to send a computer in to HP for repair and bought this drive (from TigerDirect, $130) to make an image backup first. That went so well that I started on the other computers, backing them up with Microsoft's image writer, Windows Complete PC Backup (WCPCB) where it was available (Win 7 and Vista Ultimate only). I also used Macrium Reflect Free Edition on all six computers, with success on all but one, and tried Paragon Backup & Recovery Free 2010 on that one, with uncertain success.

Hardware & Performance:

• Iomega Professional Hard Drive 2 terabytes (2,000 GB), P/N 31853000, Model LDHD-UPS, eSATA and USB 2.0.
• Capacity as displayed on a Windows Vista system: 1.81 TB, or 2,000,396,288,000 bytes.
• Maximum transfer rates (advertised): eSATA 3,000 megabits/second (Mb/s), USB 2.0 480 Mb/s. Those are peak rates, not achievable in large transfers.
• Actual average data transfer rates for complete image backup: As high as 475 megabits/second (Mb/s) writing through the eSATA port from a new computer, and as low as 93 Mb/s writing through USB 2.0 from a 4-year-old Toshiba laptop running Windows XP (a 7-year-old Gateway laptop with XP did better than that lame Toshiba!).
• In its search for image backup devices, WCPCB did not "find" the drive on a Vista Ultimate system when the drive was connected by USB 2.0, though it was mounted as a "local disk" and files were visible. Therefore, the drive was not usable for WCPCB backup via USB. It did find the drive when connected by eSATA.
• On Windows 7 computers, WCPCB did find the drive when connected either by USB or by eSATA.
• Macrium always found the drive and was able to write to it. Unfortunately, though, I was unable to boot their linux rescue CD on one of the Windows 7 systems. They claim to have a fix if you buy the "full" edition, $40 per computer. I may blog about Macrium Reflect later - I do like their software best, except for this problem.
• The Iomega Professional Hard Drive box indicates compatibility with Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 (32-bit). Does anyone even make a 32-bit Windows 7 system? I suppose, but anyway the drive seems to work just fine on two different 64-bit Windows 7 HP laptops, using either the eSATA or the USB connection and the drivers already in Windows 7.
• The drive is very quiet, and I'm fussy about noise. It's quiet.
• In Device Manager: The drive is listed as a "Samsung HD204UI USB Device", or just a "Samsung HD204UI" when connected by eSATA.
• According to the box label, the drive was assembled in Korea, Sept 20, 2010. I wonder if the entire system is made for Iomega in Korea by Samsung. That's OK.

Software:

I would expect any external drive to come with software for backing up the computer, both for drive-image backups and for incremental backups. Indeed, the box containing this drive touts their "Iomega NeverDown Software," which, unfortunately, was not in the box and is not to be found anywhere on the Iomega web site. Apparently, it has been discontinued. The box does contain a brief manual, in seven different languages, telling how to get started with NeverDown, but alas, no software (oops). They do offer the downloadable "Iomega Protection Suite," including:

• Iomega's v.Clone, which allows you to run YOUR OWN computer on anyone else's hardware. It's a "virtual image" - is that an image backup? Their own user manual advises that v.Clone is not backup software.
• Roxio Retrospect Express, which appears to protect exactly one computer on one external drive, no more. I'm not interested - my 2TB Iomega drive now has ten compressed system images on it from six fully-competent computers, and is barely half full.
• Hence, Iomega apparently does not offer an image backup solution. Ouch.

Happily, though, many other companies do offer image backup software, some for free, such as Macrium and Paragon.

A caution: I have not yet attempted to restore an image to any computer's hard drive. That's a risk I won't take unless I have to, and the repaired computer came back from HP with the internal drive intact. Where possible I do make at least two different images, one by WCPCB and one by Macrium or Paragon or both, in the hope that one will work if the other fails.

For your consideration: Universal Serial Bus. USB 2.0 followed USB 1.0, and has been around for at least seven years now. USB 3.0 is a recently-approved standard, and manufacturers are working hard to implement it in new computers and drives. It is about 10 times as fast as USB 2.0, a little faster even than eSATA, so computers with USB 3.0 may no longer need an an eSATA port. Therefore, future computers might have to talk to this particular drive using only USB 2.0.

That's not too bad, though - Macrium backed up a complete Windows 7 computer in 32 minutes via eSATA and 59 minutes via USB 2.0. In both cases, 105 GB "used" space on the computer's drive was compressed to one 78 GB file on the Iomega drive. Actual average data transfer rates, therefore, were 349 Mb/s and 189 Mb/s respectively, so the eSATA image backup was not even twice as fast as the USB 2.0 backup even though burst speed is six times higher.

Copyright (c) 2010

Please add your comments or questions.

PC Phone Home (Do It Yourself)

Some time ago I downloaded an evaluation copy of the for-sale PC Phone Home, and reviewed it here and here. I did not recommend PCPhoneHome in that review, and some of the comments left by readers are quite interesting too. Bottom line - at that time it seemed to be mostly a scam, because even if it did work there was no way to get a response from the company if your computer was stolen. Your results may vary.

I had never done anything with Windows scripts, but I studied up a little, and it turns out that you can fairly easily create a pc-phone-home batch file to be executed by the Task Scheduler at system startup. This batch file can automatically send you an email describing the computer, time of day, IP address, and whatever else you wish to add. No changes to the registry (except those made by the Task Scheduler), no secret code, no risk of a trojan in the system, everything is done with standard Windows command-line commands plus one well-proven, free, open-source SMTP mail sending program called BLAT. The same batch file runs on Windows Vista Ultimate, Vista Home Premium, XP Professional, and XP Home Edition, probably all Vista and XP systems, and even Windows 7, though testing is not complete on Win 7. It will not work on earlier Windows systems, and has only been tested on XP and Vista systems that are fully up to date, SP3 and SP2 respectively.

On my computer, the batch file is called BootMail.cmd. Its weakness is that it may be easier for a thief to find and uninstall BootMail than PCPhoneHome. But that would require a knowledgable computer thief, which may be an oxymoron. And there are things that you can do, like hiding the BootMail.cmd file somewhere in the operating system and renaming it something innocuous like GoogleHelper.cmd. In addition, if there is no network found at bootup, it will not lurk in the background waiting for one to show up. I may add that someday.

Previous experience with Windows scripts and with the Task Scheduler might be helpful to a person installing this software, but they are probably not required. I got by somehow, and you may be able to make some simple modofications and otherwise use the example code exactly as is.

BootMail is designed to phone home at system start, but it could easily be modified to run on different triggers, such as the network coming back up, or a disk error, or any other event that is logged by Windows. There are lots of those, especially in Vista and Windows 7. Of course a user knowledgable in windows commands can also modify the information that it displays. Click here for an example of the email message that it sends.

To make it work:

• Copy the code from this page into a file with a .cmd type extension, e.g. bootmail.cmd. Modify it for appropriate email addresses and user names. See code comments.
• Download the small BLAT program from www.blat.net and put the executables where Windows will find them. See code comments.
• Use the Task Scheduler to set up bootmail.cmd to run at system startup. See code comments.
• Set debug=TRUE at first, until you get it working.

The code looks big, but it's mostly documentation (every line beginning with ::). If you prefer not to do the screen copy, you can download both the code and the example email text in a zipped file here. The files are very small.

What I DON'T know is what to do if a computer is stolen and I do get an email. There is enough information in the email to pinpoint the exact IP address from which it was mailed, but how does a person proceed with that? I guess I'd call my local police, or perhaps better yet the cops at the address where the IP address is owned, as determined by WHOIS. Will the police even care about one stolen computer? Anyone have a better idea?

Windows Live Mail versus Mozilla Thunderbird

I like Windows Mail, the free mail client on Windows Vista. It grew out of Outlook Express, and finally does almost everything I would want. So, naturally, Microsoft has decided to discontinue it on their next operating system, Windows 7. In fact they will not be providing any email client at all, counting on the user to download something, or on the internet service provider to do that for the user.

Microsoft has developed a new mail client, apparenty based on Windows Mail, called Windows Live Mail. Sorry for the confusion in names, but I didn't cause that, Microsoft did! Users will be able to download Windows Live Mail (WLM) at no cost. But it isn't the same. So I installed Windows Live Mail Version 2009 (Build 14.0.8064.0206) alongside Mozilla Thunderbird 3 (Beta 2). Thunderbird is a free, open-source, collaborative email client developed by people who say they want to provide the "most useful and enjoyable communications tool possible." It's a mature product, certainly as mature as WLM. Thunderbird Release 3 Beta 2 is stable on my machine. The comparison between Thunderbird and Windows Live Mail is interesting.

Windows Live Mail:

THEY DUMBED IT DOWN! Windows Live Mail is Windows Mail with fewer controls. They added a calendar and included it with a large set of other applications called Windows Live Essentials. Here are some comparisons between Windows Mail and WLM:

• WLM supports multiple POP accounts, but each is treated quite separately, with no way (that I have found) to direct mail from all or several POP accounts into a common inbox. This is most inconvenient. I have lots of POP accounts and do not use web-based accounts.
• Further, when a new, unread email does come in, WLM says there is a new one but doesn't say which inbox it is in! Inconvenient and annoying. There is a "Quick View" that can help, but it takes space in the list of accounts, see next.
• The list of accounts cannot be deleted or moved and has way too much space between accounts, so that scrolling to search for an email is always necessary if there are several accounts.
• WLM has no "Send All" command. When you finish an email, it's gone. No "Outbox" unless the send actually fails. This can be good or bad, but I don't like it because I'm accustomed to clicking on Send All to really send it.
• WLM apparently uses yet another type of address book. For sure it does not use the "Contacts" directory used by Windows Mail, though it will import that directory into its book. I'm not sure where the WLM address book is, actually, though I probably could find it if I cared. It will export its address book in only two formats: VCF and CSV.
• The "New Mail" sound file cannot easily be changed. I like a louder one in case I'm not at my computer.
• When I installed WLM it tried to copy all of the mail in Windows Mail into its own file system, but failed. Email POP accounts also did not transfer over. I don't know why.
• Help, like all Microsoft help these days, is entirely web-based. Don't plan on any help without an internet connection.
• The good news is that WLM works and seems quite appropriate for a user with one POP account, or with only web-based accounts, because the list of accounts will be trivial, and there are fewer things to screw up. Too bad Microsoft couldn't include an "expert" button of some kind to make it more configurable for the rest of us.

Mozilla Thunderbird:

I tried both Release 2.0, the current "stable" version, and Release 3b2, ending up with 3b2. Comparing Windows Mail and WLM with Thunderbird:

• WLM and Windows Mail have a "drag and drop" capability, allowing the user to drag an email out of the Inbox, for example, into a normal Windows Folder as a .EML file. I love that feature and use it all the time. Thunderbird does not have that feature. Why would anyone want that? I like to keep all files for a project together, whatever their file types. For example, if I'm planning to run a marathon in Paducah, there will be a folder named Paducah containing an internet shortcut to the race web site (.url), maybe one to the hotel web site (.url), a copy of the course map (.jpg or .gif), printouts of car, air, or hotel reservations (.pdf), and copies of communications (.eml). No need to look in different places for different file types. Thunderbird will correctly display an email in .EML format, and will export them too, but not as easily as Windows Mail and WLM will do.
• Like WLM, Thunderbird has no Send All command. In fact I haven't found anything quite like WLM's Sync command. I admit I haven't missed it though.
• Thunderbird would not import my email messages from Windows Mail. There is a separately-installable extension called ImportExportTools, but it only imported the file structure and not the files themselves. Perhaps it would work better with a simpler file structure than I have.
• Thunderbird would not import POP accounts. But neither did WLM.
• It will export contacts only in LDIF, CSV, or tab-delimited formats.
• HOWEVER, Thunderbird does have a global-folder structure called Local Folders. Any email from any account can be directed into the global Inbox on Local Folders, or the global Spam box that I created, for that matter. This allows me to pull email from any of several POP accounts into one place.
• All three clients have filters that can be configured to redirect or simply delete known spam, or to direct email from specific addresses into specific folders. Thunderbird allows these folders to be global, hence accessible to any POP account.
• Further, Thunderbird has a "Junk Mail Learning" feature that seems to work pretty well, far better than the simple junk filter levels in WLM.
• Thunderbird has WAY more controls than WLM, and more than Windows Mail as well. So it's possible for a user to get things pretty screwed up. The good news is that the most dangerous options have a "restore defaults" button. I haven't needed that yet, but ...
• Thunderbird can include "add-ons," contributed extensions which may add class and functionality for the discerning Thunderbird user.
• Thunderbird won't go away. I hate that about Microsoft - they just want to sell new copies of operating systems, so we (obviously) can't depend on them for continuity.

For my money (they're both free), I far prefer Thunderbird over Windows Live Mail, even without drag & drop. I have already switched to Thunderbird on my Vista x64 system, even though I do have the venerable Windows Mail on it too. But there are other users on my network, people with only one POP account. It may be a while before they have computers with Windows 7 (or beyond), but perhaps I will install Windows Live Mail for them when they do. We shall see.