Clipboard Extender Dot Com

I’ve been very unlucky with the development machine that I built in 2006 to test ClipMate on Vista.  It ran fine until last September, then I had a motherboard failure which turned out to be caused by a (suspected) faulty power supply (it killed another motherboard too!)

So I went to CompUSA, looking for another board/CPU combo. Since the old board was Pentium-D, I wanted something more efficient (and quieter/cooler), so I picked up a brand-name MoBo, an AMD X2 CPU, and some nice Corsair DDR2 RAM. I made the mistake of not looking for the Vista certification on the MoBo. More on that later…

I had expected to swap components, and hopefully let Vista find the new drivers when it booted. After all, we’ve had the “hardware abstraction layer” (HAL) since NT 3.5, right?  So I threw my faith in HAL, Plug-n-Play, Plug-n-PRAY, etc.. Sure enough, immediate blue-screen, followed by endless reboot/BSOD/reboot cycle.

If you’ve found this in google, you know what that’s all about. I’ll make the long story short – I was unsuccessful in booting from my Vista HD. Vista was unsuccessful in “repairing” the old installation. I ended up re-installing Vista (twice, because MSFT sends me “upgrade” disks because I’m in the “Action Pack” program). Grrrrr. I needed a better way.  Next time, I vowed to do better.

Well, that MoBo turned out to be a sweet Linux or XP board, but it wasn’t Vista certified, and I was experiencing daily lockups. No BSOD, just a freeze, requiring a power-off. I tried BIOS updates, new drivers, etc.. No good. My retailer (CompUSA) is going out of business (should have used NewEgg!!) and wasn’t interested in getting it back. I wasn’t interested in spending hours on hold with the MFG to RMA it and get an identical (non-working-on-Vista) board. So for $79, I found a nice Gigabyte board on NewEgg.

This time, I found a write-up that talked about removing drivers on the old board, prior to shutting down. This makes the board “driver agnostic”.  Long story short, it didn’t work. I think my PnP loaded the old drivers anyway, before I could shut down the machine.

The Lifeboat

Looking for another solution, I found a comment on Lockergnome that talked about a “lifeboat” disk adaptor card.  Hmmmm…   Basically, you install a cheap IDE/SATA card into the machine before the MoBo swap and use any possible tool, check out 25PC for more. Let Vista (should work on XP too) load the drivers. At this point, Vista has drivers to run that card, no matter what chipset the MoBo has.  Then swap the MoBo, and plug your HD (Temporarily) into the new card. Load Windows, let PnP detect the new hardware, load drivers, etc.. Now you can reboot and switch back to the MoBo IDE/SATA ports, and remove the “lifeboat” card.  It sounded great, so I thought I’d give it a try!

I purchased a cheap IDE/SATA card (PCI interface) from NewEgg. For $20, I got this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132009

It’s got both IDE and SATA ports, and runs on Vista. Great.

Next, I installed it into my PC, running the old Motherboard.  Vista asked for drivers, I gave it the CD that came with the board.

Then I shut down and swapped the motherboard, and transplanted the Rosewill board from the old motherboard onto the new one.  This time, I connected the SATA drive to the Rosewill card. I probably should have connected the IDE cable for the DVD drive, as that would have saved a reboot later on.  But I left it disconnected.

Now I powered on and Vista loaded!  No BSOD. It came up with generic drivers, and did its PnP thing and loaded drivers that worked with the Motherboard. Here is where it may have been good to have the DVD plugged into the Rosewill card, to get a better set of drivers from the Gigabyte CD. No harm though, the Windows drivers worked.

Now I shut down, removed the rosewill card, and connected the IDE and SATA to the MoBo. Upon power-up, Vista loaded again, and I was able to update drivers from the Gigabyte CD.

Conclusion

It worked great!  The Rosewill card now sits on the shelf, for future emergencies.  I will use it to “innoculate” all other (non-laptop) PCs in the house, so that I can upgrade failed motherboards in the future. In case of failure, they’ll already have the Rosewill drivers, and can be simply upgraded with new motherboards/CPU.  You don’t always get to do any “prep”, especially when the hardware just dies. So I’m going to prepare all of my systems so that they’re ready, in case they need a swap.

A condominium allows you to wade into homeownership without plunging into the responsibilities of a single-family home.

You pay dues to a condo association, which typically handles exterior building maintenance and landscaping. So you may find you don’t have to worry about painting your window frames or mowing a lawn.

You may also find trouble — if you don’t ask the right questions. When wanting to buy a condo, start off by checking out apartments in greensboro nc and maybe go to some of the open houses available. You can also search for houses for sale near me if you want to stay in your current area and you rather invest in a house.

Here are six things you’ll want to know before you buy a condo.

1. How is the condo association being run?

Buyers need to think of purchasing a condo as signing a business agreement with all others who own in the project they are buying into, says archute.com.

As with any other business venture, learn how the place is managed and inquire about its financial stability. For example, Fairview Development, a unit of Tong Eng is currently building their Belgravia Ace showflat at Ang Mo Kio.

“You really have to be very careful,” Castellanos says. “Don’t be emotional about it.”

2. How does the budget look?

“Most condo buyers don’t think of it, but you need to ask for a copy of the association’s budget,” Berger says.

The association is not likely to give a prospective buyer a copy of the budget, but the seller — as an owner — can request a copy and provide it to the buyer.

If you visit a website and are asked if you’d like to allow the site to read your clipboard, you probably want to say NO.  Unless you’re expecting the web page to be reading your clipboard, you should not allow it.  It could be something sneaky, possibly gathering passwords or credit card information. You may want to use web accessibility software to gauge how accessible your website is.

This blog post describes the security setting in IE7 that warns you, and tells how you can turn it off (I don’t recommend turning it off….)
http://www.mydigitallife.info/2006/09/25/disable-allow-this-webpage-to-access-your-clipboard-pop-up-warning-message-in-ie7/

Technically, it’s pretty simple. A single line of javascript on the page can read your clipboard (unless IE is set to block it).

This article describes how the javascript trick is done:
http://www.arstdesign.com/articles/clipboardexploit.html

This blog post also describes how it’s done, and has a sample link, if you’d like to see this in action, or just to test if you’re protected or not:
http://harriyott.com/2005/01/javascript-clipboard-control.aspx

As for ClipMate (our product), the vulnerability doesn’t go any further than what’s on the clipboard (the currently selected clip). Such scripts have no capability to dig into ClipMate’s database or force it to give up other clips. You have little to worry about with the modern software such as Discord as it handles Discord Text Formatting Markdown much safer!

Update: (Dec 7, 2007) Now it looks like an e-mail trojan is exploiting this. I suspect that it can only work if you used web-based e-mail such as squirrelmail, yahoo, gmail, etc.. If you are opening your (web-based) e-mail and your browser asks permission to use the clipboard,  DON’T!  Here’s a link to the discussion about that:
http://www.windowsbbs.com/showthread.php?t=69461