Skip navigation

Category Archives: Drivers

Never A Better Time To Baseline

If you’re preparing to install Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1, now would be a good time to give Microsoft’s Attack Surface Analyzer a spin. ASA takes a baseline snapshot of your system state and then lets you take another snapshot after any configuration change or product installation and displays the changes to a number of key elements of the Windows attack surface, including analysis of changed or newly added files, registry keys, services, ActiveX Controls, listening ports, access control lists and other parameters.

Ideally, you’d take your baseline after a fresh install of your workstation or server from known, good media/images and after your own base configuration changes.

This would also be a good thing to do when building your base VM images so you can then validate their state as you duplicate and modify VDIs.

The installation of a Service Pack is a pretty radical change to your environment. If you run ASA prior to the SP install you can see if there are any significant changes to your system’s security profile after the bundle of patches and hotfixes are put down. You could also use the SP1 event to baseline post-install, provided you’ve done as thorough of a malware & rootkit sweep as can be done (you still cannot truly trust the results).

It may take some discipline to run ASA regularly on your personal systems every time you update software or drivers. IT shops should have an easier time scripting ASA during system deployments as well as application code updates. In either scenario, this free tool from Microsoft should help make you a more informed user and also aid you in building and maintaining more secure systems.

See also: MSDN SDLC blog post on the new Attack Surface Analyzer

HDMI Overscan Tweak For Wimpy Windows Font Display

CATALYST Control Center

Overscan setting

I recently hooked up a Windows 7 box to my Dell ST2310 monitor and was surprised at just how horrid the fonts looked, especially since my MacBook Pro looks fantastic using both DVI and HDMI with the display. I even tried all the ClearType tweaks to no avail.

Then, it suddenly dawned on me – when I started viewing some iTunes videos – that the OS was not taking advantage of the available screen real estate (in full screen view mode).

I tried to go minimal with the Windows 7 install, as I find that too many utilities, tray icons and services still manage to clog up the works. To solve this problem, I had to grab the ATI CATALYST Control Center software to do more detailed tweaks.

It turns out that the problem was with the overscan settings. The original, default setting by the built-in Windows 7 drivers had the slider right in the middle. I had to move it all the way to the right (full overscan) to both reclaim viewing space and font crispness.

Believe it or not, Engadget has a pretty good breakdown of the in’s-and-out’s of overscan if you’d like further reading. I blogged this mainly to help folks out who may be as frustrated as I was.