Getting Avira Antivir Personal FREE Edition to work with Windows Server 2008.

So you're after a good FREE antivirus to use with your Windows 2008 machine?

When it comes to free antivirus, and my personal preference in free antivirus is Avira Antivir Personal, it's very effective and has a pretty small footprint in terms of resources.

But alas, Avira can't be installed on Windows Server 2008, and I your like me that just uses 2008 as a workstation OS, that's a real bummer.

But there is hope, you can get Avira to install and run in Windows 2008, in only a few simple steps.

Now if you just download the installer from www.avira.com and try to run it you get an error message saying something along the lines of  ' this product can't be installed onto a server os' or something along those lines. What you need to do is deny it from checking part of your OS version.

So, this is what you need to do:

Step 1 - Create a User account..
First up you need to create a seperate user account, just call it "User" , the account must be an Administrator. You can do this by going to Control Panel -> Users.

Step 2 - Set registry permissions.
Now, still logged in as your default Adminitrator account, fire up regedit(start->run->regedit) and navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ProductOptions
Right-click the ProductOptions folder(in the left hand pane) and click permissions. With the permissions window open, click Add->Find Now and scroll down and select the User account you just created. Make sure you select User and not Users. Once the User account is added to the list, select it, then set the permissions for the account(in the bottom pane) to Deny everything. Click Ok. You'll get a couple of messages about setting the permissions just click ok to them.

Step 3 - Logon as User
Logoff your default Administrator account and log back in using the User account you created.

Step 4 - Install Avira
Now you should be able to install Avira from your User account. Don't worry, it installs the application for all users, so it'll be there for your default administrator account too.

Step 5 - Clean up.
Once that's finished installing log back in as Administrator, make sure the antivirus is all working nicely. You can then go ahead and revert all the changes you made in steps 1 and 2. That's it.

Linksys WAG 160N Crashing

So.. your WAG160N keeps crashing. Linksys have been absolutely useless with support for this product, and there are definately alot of unhappy people. The old WRT54G was an awesome little wireless router, so good in fact I had 4 of them, and they made me fall in love with linksys, the WAG160N however, has made me HATE linksys.

But anyways, so you've got one, your stuck with it, and it keeps locking up, crashing and being an overall pain in the ass.

Right now, I've got mine setup to the point where I don't have to physically get up, walk to the hallway, and reset the modem. it's always working, and it's all pretty solid. But it did take some effort, and a couple of extra little things.

1. Update the firmware to V1.00.15. This made a huge difference for me, and was a massive step forward for linksys in regards to fixing up this product. But although it was a massive step forward, it's still far from perfect, and unfortunately it doesn't look like linksys will develop any more firmwares for this product.

2. 120mm Cooling Fan - See my other post in this blog. The WAG160N gets really hot, and I found that that caused alot of instability, keeping it cool definately helps.

3. An electronic timer switch. Like this one pictured below is an awesome investment. Because my ISP has peak/off-peak times for downloading, I've got all my downloads set to start at 2am, when my off-peak time begins. What I found was when the modem was going from no load to MAX load it would crap itself and lock up, so, I've got the electronic timer switch to turn off the modem for 1 minute then turn it back on at 2:05am, and again at 6am. Most people that have this modem, have to manually restart it at least once a day, by having the tiimer switch, it'll do it for you.

4. Modified Settings - Now, there are a couple of little settings you can tweak in the modem config to make it more stable. The changes are:

1. Change the MTU to 1350
2. Change Wireless Radio Band to Standard - 20MHz Channel
3. Change Standard Channel to 13 - 2.472GHz
4. Change Beacon Interval to 75ms
5. Change Fragmentation Threshold to 2304
6. Change RTS Threshold to 2304

Here's how you change these settings in pictures:

That's pretty much it. These are the 4 things I've done and I've got a pretty solid modem now, the wireless doesn't drop out, and adsl never craps itself, it all just seems to work, like it should've in the first place.

As a side note, linksys have recently released and new hardware version(2.0), which means they probably won't be releasing any more firmware updates for the troublesome v1.0, which sucks. I'd love to have mine just run, without a fan, without having to be reset every night, but I think that there is very little hope for us poor 1.0 owners now.