I had a problem right off the bat in that the boot loader kept failing with a 0xC0000225 error, but after a quick Google search I enabled “IO APIC” in VirtualBox and the installer started from the DVD normally. For the most part, the install process looks just like Windows 7, but once the Start screen appears, it’s a whole new experience.

Yep, that’s the Windows 7 Phone Metro UI on your desktop. You can tell right off from the bigger “buttons” and tweaked interface elements it’s meant for a touchscreen, but it works with the mouse and keyboard as well (update: you can, but it involves some registry hacks or unsupported third-party software).

Supposedly you can turn it off altogether and revert back to the Windows 7-style desktop as well.

I haven’t had a lot of time to play with it yet but it’s definitely interesting. I may try to install it on an old PC at work so I can experience the alleged 10-second boot time (something not possible inside a VM). Check back here later for more details!

I call this box a server because it hosts this blog, a small Gallery site, some home media applications for my TiVos, and is running all the time, but I don’t need a server-class machine. My past Linux machines have traditionally been older desktops, even a laptop! So the latest crop of nettops seemed like an ideal solution.

After researching products like the Asus EeeBox, the MSI WindBox, and even the Dell Studio Hybrid I decided on the Acer Aspire Revo 3610. This little box packs in Intel’s dual-core Atom N330  CPU (1.60GHz), 2gb of RAM, nVidia’s ION graphics chipset, and a 160gb hard drive. Peripherals and storage can be connected via the 6 USB ports (one of which is used for the included wireless keyboard a mouse), the eSATA connector, and the SD card reader, and network connectivity includes a gigabit network connection and B/G/N wireless. The Revo has no optical drive, but experience with my EeePCs has made me comfortable with booting/installing from other removable media like USB thumb drives, so no biggie there. Also, since I’m not using the Revo as an HTPC I won’t be using the HDMI or digital audio (SPDIF) connections, but they’re there. The Revo comes with Windows 7 Home Premium pre-installed (although I wish Acer sold a cheaper version without it). If you’re going to use it as an HTPC it comes with a mounting plate so you can attach it right to the back of your HDTV.

My plan was always to put the latest version of Ubuntu on the box. Warranties be damned! After unpacking my new Revo, before even turning it on, I immediately cracked it open, thinking I would make an image backup of Windows 7 just in case (since it comes without a rescue disc). Unfortunately, even with my lack of fear for warranty-voiding, removing the hard drive involved more steps than I was willing to take. So rather than wiping the drive and starting clean, I booted Windows 7, did some initial setup, and then shrunk the primary partition so I could dual-boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu. Considering the current server only had a 30gb hard drive in it (and most of my media is on external NASes), having a 60gb partition for Ubuntu was acceptable to me.

Installing Lucid Lynx didn’t go as smoothly as I anticipated, however. The 64-bit version (imaged onto a 2gb USB stick) wouldn’t even boot correctly and the 32-bit version would start and then complain it couldn’t find the CD-ROM. After figuring out how to manually boot the installer from the command-line, I found this blog post that helped me get through the rest of my installation issues. Shortly, I had my Revo set up as a 64-bit Linux server!

It took me a few days to get everything transferred from the old server to the Revo and then get everything set up and configured the way I wanted. So far I am very impressed with the Revo. It’s very quiet, even when both cores are busy (i.e., folding a work unit and transcoding a video file), and my UPS utilization dropped from 29% to 10%! That’s a serious cut in power consumption. I have noticed a slight performance decrease over the old Pentium 4 Dell, but nothing major and it was expected. It’s well worth the trade-off for the reduced noise and power usage, though!

Out with the old, in with the new!

Based on my previous experience with the Windows Easy Transfer utility, I used WET to backup my documents and settings to an external hard drive. To be doubly sure I didn’t lose anything, I also just copied my entire user profile folder (C:\Users\<my login>) to the same hard drive. I wanted to do a clean install with the upgrade media (and also go with the 64-bit version), so I made sure I had that external drive with my WET backup attached when I booted from the Win7 DVD. From within the Windows 7 Setup, I formatted my entire 640gb internal drive, completely wiping out the RC partition. Since Setup knew about the WET backup, the Win7 activation process was successful and the rest of the install was smooth.

After booting Windows 7 Home Professional 64-bit for the first time and then installing all the outstanding updates, the real fun began. I used WET to restore my files and settings and then began the long process of re-installing and re-configuring all of my applications (64-bit versions where applicable). I had made screenshots of the Programs and Features list before upgrading to facilitate this, so I knew exactly what I meeded to re-install. I had also taken screenshots of my Taskbar and Start Menu so I could put everything back the way I had it under the RC.

So I’m back up and running and have finally joined the world of 64-bit!

Installation

My main work machine is an older Sony VAIO laptop (Core Duo 2.0GHz, 1gb RAM, 80gb HD). To prepare, I ran the File and Settings Transfer (FAST) wizard in XP to back up all my documents and settings to my external hard drive, which took a long time. Then I ran the Windows 7 installation from the DVD within XP. The basic install took just about 90 minutes.

Once I was logged into my fresh new install, I ran the Windows Easy Transfer (WET) utility to restore my saved settings from XP. What I learned, however, is that I had misread the “upgrade” instructions. I was supposed to run the WET wizard from the Windows 7 installation media to back up my XP settings because the backups created by FAST are not compatible with WET (it’s meant for upgrading from XP to Vista)! Thus, after my clean install, I was unable to restore my documents and settings. I ended up working around this by restoring my FAST backup to a spare XP laptop and then using WET from the Win7 DVD to back up the settings again and finally transfer them back to my laptop.

Also, I chose not to re-format/re-partition my drive during the installation of Windows 7. The result of that was Windows 7 went into the standard C:\Windows location and the installer moved the old C:\Windows, C:\Program Files, and C:\Documents and Settings folders to C:\Windows.Old. Thus, I was able to retrieve all of my documents from there as well, in addition to retrieving some settings and files not handled by the WET utility.

If you’re “upgrading” from XP, the only benefit you get by using the WET utility is an easy (but not quick) method to transfer your documents and files (but depending on how much you’ve got to save, you may need a pretty large external drive). There aren’t that many “settings” that get transferred, from what I could tell, other than your actual account setup. You do get a nice report from the wizard, however, that shows you what applications you might need to re-install along with what was transferred. So if you’re going to format/re-partition your drive before installing Windows 7, WET is the way to go. Otherwise, I say just copy your stuff out of C:\Windows.Old after the install is complete and don’t worry about taking the extra time to back all that stuff up to an external drive (unless you want a backup just to be absolutely safe).

Drivers

After the initial install, I had basic SVGA (800×600) resolution and no Aero glass effects, as the installer did not find a suitable driver for the nVidia GeForce Go 7400 card in my laptop and the Experience Index was 1.0 due to low scores for the Graphics/Gaming Graphics items. The Windows 7 driver package (beta) from nVidia’s site did not contain a driver for the card either. I tried using the Vista driver package, but when I ran the setup program it told me a compatible adapter could not be found. Argh! I eventually was able to go into the Device Manager and manually update the driver, pointing it to the directory where the nVidia installer had extracted the Vista drivers. This gave me back the ability to use the native 1280×800 resolution on the laptop panel and also turned on all Aero Glass features once I re-ran the Experience Index (which went up to 3.5, still hampered by the low scores for graphics).

Most of the internal laptop hardware seemed to be functional, like the built-in wired and wireless network adapters, but I still had a few “Unknown Device” items listed in Device Manager. One turned out to be the built-in webcam and the other was the Memory Stick slot. The Windows 7 driver wizard was able to point me to the proper drivers directly on Sony’s web site to get these working, which was nice. My first run of Windows Update also pulled down a driver for the biometric device (fingerprint scanner).

Not every driver worked properly, though. Since the Sony Notebook Utilities wouldn’t install, I can’t use the Fn keys to control screen brightness, volume, LCD/VGA output switching, etc. I’m also missing the switcher utility that allows me to independently turn off the wireless G and Bluetooth radios. Sony’s Windows 7 page for the VAIO just says to check back once Windows 7 is officially released, so I’m hopeful this annoyance will eventually be resolved.

Post-Installation Configuration

I had made a list of everything installed on my laptop before I started this process, but it still took a lot of time to re-install everything and tweak it all back to just the way I liked it (Start Menu configuration, shortcut keys, shared drives, network printers, etc.). While annoying, this gave me the chance to leave out all of the stuff I hadn’t used in a while. Once I was done, I removed the C:\Windows.Old folder to free up the disk space.

XP Mode

I wanted to try XP Mode in Windows 7 to see if I could use it to run some of the older programs we use in the office in a virtual machine. I downloaded and installed it from Microsoft’s site, but ran into a problem when I tried to run it on my VAIO due to a lack of hardware virtualization. Apparently Sony hasn’t enabled hardware virtualization in the BIOS of any currently shipping VAIO even though the processors support it, so Virtual PC will not run.

Luckily, I was able to enable hardware virtualization on my desktop (on which I had also done a clean Windows 7 install). Once you have the XP virtual machine running under Windows 7, you install your “legacy” applications normally (inside the virtual machine). For example, in the screenshot below I was adding IIS:

Windows 7 creates corresponding shortcuts for the applications under the XP Mode folder on the Start Menu of your PC (you can also add your own custom shortcuts to that folder by simply creating them under the All Users Start Menu within the virtual machine). When clicking on one of those icons, the application runs seamlessly on the desktop so the user is not even aware the application is being virtualized (except for the old XP Luna-style interface instead of the new Aero glass look). Using XP Mode, for example, I was able to successfully install NetMeeting (which I need to connect to the voicemail system console). It ran just fine “on” Windows 7, with almost no noticeable impact on performance.

It requires a little bit of advance setup but XP Mode seems to be a good way of running any legacy applications that won’t work natively under Windows 7 (assuming the user’s PC supports hardware virtualization, of course).

I’ve been using the beta on Windows 7 for the past four months and am pretty happy with it (I’ve been a paid Pro user since 2004 and have upgraded to the Pro version of Astra as well). I still have one random problem where sometimes if I initiate a conversation with someone on Yahoo, they won’t get my messages, but if they start the conversation we can chat back and forth just fine. The random crashes seemed to have been fixed as well (at least, I don’t think I’ve had one since I got Build 117 a few days ago).

So if you’re looking for a good multi-service IM application for Windows and have been scared away from Digsby, give Astra a shot.

A TiVo is much more than just a souped up digital VCR. What separates TiVo from your cable company’s generic DVR (other than the awesome features of TiVo service itself) is the wide range of (mostly free) applications you can use to enhance your TiVo experience. I’ve written about some of these applications here before (like Galleon, streambaby, and pyTivo) but I figured one comprehensive write-up might be in order.

First off, all of these apps require a TiVo with an active service subscription. For those of you with the old DVD-combo units (like the Toshiba TX-20 or Pioneer 810h), this means you need to have the TiVo Plus service, not TiVo Basic. I’m not discussing hacked boxes here either. You’ll need to know your Media Access Key (MAK), which can be found under your account on tivo.com or on your TiVo under Messages & Settings, Account & System Information, Media Access Key. Finally, my experience is with running these apps on Windows and Linux. I’ve tried to fill in as many Mac details as I could, where possible, but just be aware that my coverage of the Mac side is less than complete.

Ok, let’s jump in! First, the basic stuff.

TiVo Desktop

[Windows, Mac] I have to start with TiVo’s own application, TiVo Desktop. The free version allows you to publish the music (in MP3 format) and photos (JPG, GIF, etc.) on your PC so you can access them from the TiVo interface. The Windows version of TD also allows you to download recordings from your TiVo (as long as they’re not copy-protected) to watch on your PC, or send previously downloaded content back to the TiVo for viewing on your television (as long as they’re in MPEG-2 format). Do you want to download every episode of “Robot Chicken” that your TiVo records? Set up an auto-transfer and TiVo Desktop will automatically download them for you in the background. If you’re a Mac user and want to download your shows, you’ll unfortunately need to purchase Roxio’s Toast Titanium product. The free version of TiVo Desktop for the Mac only serves up music and photos.

Back on Windows, if you upgrade to TiVo Desktop Plus for $25, you’ll gain the ability to automatically transcode your downloaded recordings to a variety of portable formats (like for your iPod) and send more formats back to your TiVo (like Divx/Xvid or Matroska). Combining this with the auto-transfer feature, you can point TiVo Desktop at your iTunes folder where you download your video podcasts and have them automatically pushed up to your TiVo once iTunes downloads them. Before you shell out your $25, though, check out the rest of the applications below since you can get all of the same functionality of TiVo Desktop Plus (and more!) for free if you don’t mind tinkering with other third-party software solutions.

One tip: if your music isn’t in MP3 format, try Dan203′s Universal Audio Plugin, which adds support for unencrypted AAC, WMA, and Ogg Vorbis formats. If all of your music is DRM’ed (i.e., purchased from iTunes), you’re out of luck … even the free stuff below won’t be able to play those files.

TiVo App

[iOS/Android] In January 2011 TiVo released an iPad app for the Premiere platform. Since then, updated releases have brought compatibility with the iPhone and limited support for the Series3 and TiVo HD boxes … and it’s free. Finally in January 2012, an Android version was released, but it currently only works with phones or 7″ tablets (although you can sideload the APK to get it running on larger tablets).

When used with the Premiere, the TiVo app lets you manage your To Do List, set up Season Passes, browse the TV Guide, etc. without interfering with that the TiVo box is doing. My wife can be watching “Modern Family” and I can set a Season Pass for “The Cape” without touching the remote and interrupting her viewing. Or I can look up what other work Ed O’Neil has done without using IMDb.

The app also includes a virtual remote so you can “interfere” with the TiVo from the iPad, changing channels, controlling Live TV (trickplay), adding Thumbs ratings, etc.

Season Pass Manager

[all platforms] Adding to the existing features of being able to view your Now Playing and To Do lists online, the Season Pass Manager lets you re-order, copy, and delete the Season Passes on your TiVos from your web browser through your account on tivo.com. This can particularly be helpful when setting up a new TiVo (letting you quickly copy the SPs from your old box to the new one) or for easier mass-reorganization (say, during the new Fall TV season) without having to endure multiple “please wait” screens doing it on the TiVo directly. Unfortunately, WishLists, manual recordings, and Guru Guides aren’t supported in the SPM so if you use any of those they won’t appear online. Thus the order shown in the browser might not exactly match what’s on your TiVo.

TiVo Commander

[Android] Back in August 2011, after some careful examination of the TiVo iPad app, TiVo Community Forum user arantius released his TiVo Commander app for Android. While not as polished or full-featured as its iPad counterpart, the app does give Android owners the virtual remote feature and the ability to browse your My Shows or do searches from the couch without disrupting your viewing (although it only works with the Premiere boxes).

Unfortunately the app was recently removed from the Android App Store due to copyright concerns but if you have the wherewithall to sideload apps onto your Android device, you can still install TiVo Commander.

So that covers the basics every TiVo owner should know about. Now for the more advanced topics to really help you get the most out of your TiVo.

pyTivo

[Windows, Mac, Linux] Written in the Python scripting language, pyTivo is a free application similar to TiVo Desktop except it supports sending a wider variety of video formats to Series2 and Series3 TiVo boxes. Using pyTivo’s web interface (or by directly editing the configuration file) you can set up the plugins you want (i.e., video and music) and then configure the shares pointing to where your files are located. You can then use the TiVo interface to “pull” files onto your box (just like TiVo Desktop) or use the web interface to “push” them there.

The beauty of pyTivo is its use of ffmpeg behind the scenes to transcode a file into a format that your TiVo recognizes (MPEG-2 for video, MP3 for music). You can throw any video file format that ffmpeg supports at your TiVo and have it play: MP4, AVI, WMV, MKV, FLV, just about anything. It’s amazing … and the resulting quality is pretty good too! One drawback to this method is that it takes CPU power to convert video files from one format to another. Depending on the speed and power of the PC running pyTivo, you may or may not be able to watch the video as it’s being transferred onto the TiVo. Because of this, pyTivo works best (for me anyway) when you want to kick off a transfer for something you will be watching later.

Another cool pyTivo feature is its support of multiple levels of subfolders. No matter how you have your videos organized on your PC, TiVo Desktop always shows them in a flat list. The software will look two subfolders deep for accessible videos, but you’ll still get just one long list when browsing your PC’s Now Playing List from the TiVo. With pyTivo, however, whatever folder structure you use on your PC is what you’ll see when browsing from the TiVo. So if you want to have a path like Movies > Science Fiction > Star Wars > Clone Wars, pyTivo can handle that.

Finally, pyTivo supports metadata. When you download a .TiVo file it has a lot of information embedded into it: show name, air date, actors’ names, etc. Other video types don’t have this extra data, so when you transfer them back to your TiVo via TiVo Desktop, the resulting recording in your Now Playing List will be missing all of that “stuff.” pyTivo will read this extra information from a specially formatted text file and then send it across when the video is uploaded back to the TiVo. Rather than creating these text files by hand, grab the excellent MetaGenerator utility which lets you search for movies and TV shows in several online databases and then creates that metadata file for you. Using metadata also allows you to group shows in folders once they are on the TiVo!

As you can tell by my somewhat lengthy write-up here, pyTivo is hands down the application I use the most … it’s a must-have for any TiVo owner with an extensive digital video library. It can be a bit daunting to set up at first, if you’re not used to tweaking text-based configuration files or playing with metadata, but once you do get it working you’ll find it was well worth the time and effort.

Tip: if you need a quicker, easier setup for pyTiVo on Windows, try the Windows installer to get you going. Just keep in mind that it sometimes lags behind the current codeline so you may run into bugs or be missing out on newer features. If you’re a Mac user, check out pyTivoX which is an OS X front-end to both pyTivo and streambaby.  Either way, be sure to visit the pyTivo forums and check out the wiki.

pyTivo Video Manager

[Windows, Mac, Linux] A relative newcomer to the scene (as of April 2011), pyTivo Video Manager is an ‘HME for Python‘-based front end for pyTivo. It’s great that you can use a web browser to push videos to your TiVo through pyTivo, but wouldn’t it be nice if you could do that from the TiVo itself instead of a PC, even pushing to a different TiVo than the one you’re using? You can do that with pyTivo Video Manager.

Once you have pyTivo and push up and running (it’s obviously a pre-requisite) you can install Video Manager and edit the config file to point to your existing pyTivo setup. Since Video Manager is an HME application, it shows up under the Showcases menu of your TiVo, not the Now Playing List so don’t look for it there. It will also automatically adjust between the SD and HD interface depending on your TiVo display settings. Once you select pyTiVo Video Manager on your TiVo, you’ll see the same folder hierarchy you’ve got set up for pyTivo and you can start browsing your video library. All of your existing metadata (i.e., program descriptions) is used and displayed, just like pyTiVo. After selecting a video you have the option to Push or Delete it. Selecting Push will then prompt you with a list of your TiVos you can push to. Once selected, Video Manager hands the transaction off to pyTivo which handles the push request the rest of the way and transfers the selected video to the TiVo.

One neat addition, if you’re using the the HD interface, is cover art. I used ThumbGen to download cover art files for all of my movies and placed them in the proper directories along with the video files so they are displayed on the Video Manager screen (as you can see in the screenshot to the left). Again, the HD interface is nice because you see and do everything on a single screen.

Version 2.0 (released in September 2011) was a total rewrite of the app and introduced virtual shares based on metadata tags. So if you want to group all of your movies by genre, for example, or create a virtual folder of only 5-star movies, you can do that.

If you do decide to give pyTiVo Video Manager a try, be sure to check into the support thread on TCF.

Galleon

[Windows, Mac, Linux] One of the older third-party applications out there, Galleon started out as JavaHMO back in 2003 and is a sort of swiss army knife of TiVo applications. In addition to providing the standard download (ToGo), upload (GoBack), and music and photos functionality like TiVo Desktop, Galleon lets you do other things like view local weather, traffic, or theater listings, read your e-mail, browse your Netflix or Blockbuster rental queues, even parse your iTunes library for music playback (MP3 format only).

One neat feature of the ToGo app is that you can initiate downloads of recordings from the TiVo itself rather than from the desktop application. You can even start to download a recording from a different TiVo in your house. Similar to TiVo Desktop’s auto-transfers, you can set up rules in Galleon’s ToGo application for automatic downloads as well.

Galleon was abandoned by its original developer, Leon Nicholls, some time ago, but a few people are still working on it occasionally. I personally have contributed a few features to the Weather and ToGo apps and fixed a bug or two in the Movies app.

StreamBaby

[Windows, Mac, Linux] StreamBaby (aka stream, baby, stream) is another application (written in Java) that allows you to transfer video from your PC to the TiVo. Unlike using pyTivo to transfer (i.e., copy) a video file to your TiVo, StreamBaby actually streams the video, similar to what the TiVo does for Netflix streaming. This means that you can actually fast-foward to a section of the recording that hasn’t been transferred yet (complete with thumbnail previews so you can tell what section you’re actually going to)! If you have to stop playback, StreamBaby remembers where you were so you can resume the stream from that point later on.

Just like pyTivo, you point StreamBaby to your video folders via a text-based configuration file. Your preciously organized folder hierarchy is preserved when browsing from the TiVo (multiple subfolder support) and if you’ve got metadata text files for your videos, it supports reading those as well.

Also like pyTivo, StreamBaby is accomplishing its “magic” with ffmpeg, so you can stream any video format (supported by your build of ffmpeg) to your TiVo Series3 (original OLED and TiVo HD) or Series4 (TiVo Premiere) box. The Series2 boxes don’t support streaming, however, so StreamBaby won’t work with that older platform. Again, if you’re a Mac user and want to play with StreamBaby, try the pyTivoX front-end.

TiVoPlayList

[Windows] A TiVo Desktop replacement, TiVoPlayList (TPL) lets you download unprotected recordings and use auto-download rules but adds some extra bells and whistles like the option to shut down the PC when all transfers are complete. For the people who like to see how much space is being used on their TiVo’s hard drive, TPL can show you the size of each recording on disk along with total disk space used and available. You can even see this information in a nice graph. You can also export the list of recordings in a comma-separated format if you like. TPL is only for downloading recordings, however, so it can’t completely replace TiVo Desktop (no music, photos, or GoBack support). It’s a handy utility to have around, however.

kmttg

[Windows, Mac, Linux] If you’re looking for an easy way to download, trim, and re-encode video from your TiVo in an automated fashion, kmttg might be the answer. The middle scroll area of the application is your standard Now Playing List showing you the recordings on each of your TiVos (in a tabbed interface). Select the recordings you want to download, and then click on the checkboxes along the top of the window to build your post-download batch processing job. You can have kmttg automatically generate metadata files for pyTivo, convert the downloaded .TiVo file into a plain MPEG-2 format, and then re-encode the video into a format of your choosing (again, using ffmpeg) for your portable device or for eventual transfer back to your TiVo. If you own one of the excellent VideoReDo products (I highly recommend them, well worth the money for MPEG-2 file editing), you can also have kmttg run the downloaded MPEG-2 file through VRD’s Quickstream Fix feature (to fix any quirks in the video) and AdDetective (to remove the commercials).

Thanks to the reverse engineering effort of the new iPad application protocol over on TCF , the latest version of kmttg includes a “remote control” section that, in addition to letting you control your TiVo from your PC, also gives you the ability to view, download, and save information like your Season Passes or To Do List.

kmttg is written in Java so it runs on all platforms (but VideoReDo is Windows-only).

Web Browser

[all platforms] This isn’t really an application, but more of a tip: you can use a browser to easily download recordings from your TiVo. Just point your favorite browser to https://{your TiVo’s IP address} and log in with a username of ‘tivo’ and your MAK as the password. This is a bare-bones way to pull shows off of your box (you can’t queue up multiple transfers, for example) but it works in a pinch.

To be able to play those .TiVo files you download, however, you’ll need to either install TiVo Desktop for the DirectShow codec or use something like tivodecode to convert it into a plain MPEG-2 file you can view in the player of your choice (like Windows Media Player or VLC).

For even more great information on these tools I’ve just described, check out bkdtv’s excellent posts on downloading and viewing videos over on the TiVo Community Forum. You can find me over on TCF as well.

Now, go have fun getting the most out of your TiVo!

Well, check out the latest “ad” for Microsoft Office 2010:

I have to admit that’s pretty creative and humorous, but does it really tell us anything about Office? On the other hand, does it need to?

“Spell check this!”

Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) is a replacement for Windows Live OneCare and, I think, Defender. Did I mention it’s free? Paul Thurrott has a good write-up on MSE on his SuperSite for Windows.

Since I’m already running the Windows 7 release candidate, I figured why not give this a try as well? I downloaded the free beta, uninstalled AVG Free, and installed the new software:

I’ll keep an eye on it for the next few weeks and see  how it goes …

Here’s the AVG console:

And here’s Personal Antivirus:

Look familiar? In this particular case, neither our corporate Symantec anti-virus nor Malwarebytes (both with current definitions) detected the fake program. I eventually had to clean it off manually myself.

These things are really sneaky. How can we educate the average user to tell these two apart? I mean, other than the fact that they had to click on something in a web browser to get the fake one installed in the first place, once “installed” they look and act like the real thing (well, except for all the fake alerts they throw up). Arrrrgh!

Run psr.exe from the command-line and you’ll see a utility window you can use to record your session:

Click “Start Record” and then replicate the problem. Click “Stop Record” when you’re done and the tool will prompt you to save a zip file that has an HTML document in it containing screen shots and descriptions of the steps taken. Also cool is that the tool automatically highlights important areas of the screen:

This is obviously targeted toward help desks and IT support professionals (without remote access to the machine) who need to solve problems like “I just clicked the thingy and shows it some error message and disappears!”, but I could see myself using this as a quick and easy way to generate user documentation (like how-tos) as well.

Tech Republic has a good, detailed article on the PSR. Check it out.