Microsoft charges customers for free services

Microsoft charges customers for free services

By Scott Dunn Thousands of customers are paying almost $120 USD per year to Microsoft for an Internet subscription service that includes e-mail, security, and other features. But Microsoft gives away almost identical services absolutely free in Windows Live and the Windows operating system itself, while neglecting to inform those who pay through the nose.

Free Windows Live eclipses MSN Premium

Microsoft’s for-pay service, known as MSN Premium, is a collection of broadband features that must be accessed through a special browser: MSN Explorer. Once downloaded and installed, this browser supports Web surfing, an interface for e-mail and calendar programs, and Microsoft’s online encyclopedia, Encarta Premium. Other features, such as an included digital image editor, are accessible by launching a separate application.

MSN Premium is typically marketed by Internet service providers who are Microsoft’s partners, such as Qwest and Verizon in the U.S. and Bell Sympatico in Canada. (Qwest currently offers Windows Live instead of MSN.) Consumers can also purchase MSN Premium directly from Microsoft Online Services. The current version, according to the Microsoft site, is MSN Premium 9.5, which costs $9.95 per month in the United States.

According to page 11 of a PDF file on the Bell Sympatico site, more than 8.2 million people worldwide subscribe to MSN Premium. Microsoft does not release figures on how many of these users pay the monthly fee, and how many receive MSN Premium as part of a bundle from their ISPs.

The subscription service was first launched for broadband customers in 2004. Since then, however, Microsoft has released a new collection of Web services under the Windows Live brand, new versions of Internet Explorer, and service packs for Windows XP — all free — that duplicate the features that MSN Premium customers pay precious money for each month.

Microsoft’s FAQ page promotes MSN Premium as having 21 features. Yet nearly every one of the features is available from Microsoft for free — either through Windows Live or existing versions of Windows and Internet Explorer.

Table 1 lists these services and more, showing exactly where consumers who’ve been sold MSN Premium could obtain the same or comparable services from Microsoft for free.

Table 1. Nearly every MSN Premium feature is free in Windows Live or in Windows itself.

About the only MSN Premium feature that Microsoft doesn’t offer for free in some other form is the MSN download manager. But consumers can easily visit a site like Snapfiles, which lists several third-party equivalents at absolutely no cost.

Microsoft is running a similar “pay for what’s free” scheme in its Hotmail Plus service. According to Microsoft’s promotional page, Microsoft sells subscriptions to Hotmail Plus for $20 a year, promising junk e-mail filters and the ability to access e-mail via Microsoft Outlook. Similar features that are almost as generous are totally free in Microsoft’s Windows Live service.

To give credit where it’s due, Hotmail Plus does give its paying users more storage space (2GB), larger attachments (up to 20MB per message), and the elimination of ads, compared with the free version of Hotmail. MSN Premium, however, has few such advantages over the free services that paying subscribers never hear about from Microsoft.

Why is Microsoft competing with itself?

It’s not all that surprising to find a software company offering a free equivalent to a competitor’s commercial product. But Windows Live and MSN Premium are produced by the same company. What’s going on?

Although not addressing MSN Premium per se, Microsoft has repeatedly asserted, such as in press releases on Sept. 11, 2006, and May 6, 2007, that “MSN and Windows Live will be offered alongside each other as complementary services.”

Echoing this position, Windows Live general manager Brian Hall told a reporter at the ReadWriteWeb blog in June 2007 that the distinction between MSN and Live will become more apparent as Windows Live evolves.

Such fine points of product positioning may be lost on MSN Premium customers, who have a right to wonder why they’re paying for services that the same company offers for free.

In May 2007, as described in a Microsoft statement, the Redmond company forcibly migrated all MSN Hotmail customers to the newer Windows Live Hotmail. This would have been the ideal time for the company to inform MSN Premium’s paying customers that Microsoft was offering basically the same service for free.

To my knowledge, no such announcement has ever been made. On the contrary, when I recently signed up to pay $10 a month for MSN Premium as a test, I received no alerts or e-mails informing me that a newer, no-cost option was available.

Whether MSN Premium will eventually provide services superior to Windows Live only time will tell. At the moment, MSN Premium customers have every right to consider themselves cheated.

Have a tip about Windows? Readers receive a gift certificate for a book, CD, or DVD of their choice for sending tips we print. Send us your tips via the Windows Secrets contact page.

Scott Dunn is associate editor of the Windows Secrets Newsletter. He has been a contributing editor of PC World since 1992 and currently writes for the magazine’s Here’s How section.

VoIP alternatives trim long-distance bills

By Scott Dunn

Our Dec. 13, 2007, issue explained how a VoIP device called MagicJack, which charges only $20 USD per year for unlimited calls from anywhere in the world to U.S. and Canada phones, might make big long-distance bills a thing of the past.

As a result, many of our readers pointed out other innovative Internet products and services to help cut your phone bill down to size.

Numerous readers wrote in to make us aware of their own preferred Voice over Internet Protocol systems for lowering their phone bills. We haven’t tested all of the following services or products, so do your homework before diving in:

• Jajah. John Cossins and many others wrote to tell us how pleased they were with the service offered by Jajah. Unlike many VoIP services, Jajah doesn’t require any installable software or hardware (other than an ordinary telephone). You go to the Web site and enter your phone number and the number you wish to call. Jajah does the rest by calling you and then connecting you with your party. Jajah also offers a service called Jajah Direct, which doesn’t even require an Internet connection. You simply call a local phone number and provide the destination number. Readers report good voice quality and low per-minute rates, starting at 2.9 cents per minute, which are listed at the Jajah site. Calls between any two Jajah customers are free.

• Vyke and VoipCheap. Reader Alf Manders wrote to tell us about Vyke, and Leon Fiss wanted to inform us of VoipCheap. Both services are similar to Skype in that they require you to download and install software. You’ll need a microphone and speakers on your computer if you don’t have a headset.

• ChatterBug. Kurt Kincel prefers the ChatterBug hardware device, which requires no computer or Internet connection. You simply connect the $25 USD device between your phone and wall jack and pay $10 a month for long-distance calls. WSN editorial director Brian Livingston reviewed the ChatterBug in a Feb. 21, 2006, Executive Tech column.

• GrandCentral. A reader named Roger is excited about the features offered by GrandCentral, a service that was recently acquired by Google. Unlike the other VoIP services mentioned above, GrandCentral is not designed to lower your long distance bills. Instead, it aims to unite all your phones under a single number that GrandCentral provides. Incoming calls are routed to your other numbers or to your voice mail. The service can also unite all your voice mails in one place, which you can manage from the Web site. You can screen calls, block unwanted calls, dial from an online address book, record and play back calls, and more. The service is currently free.

• Skype. Finally, a few readers had comments on Skype-related hardware. Richard Sale is pleased with uConnect, a $60 USB device that lets you make Skype or landline calls from an analog phone that you plug into the device. Dave Eisenbraun recommends the Philips VOIP841, a $130 list ($110 street) cordless hybrid Skype and landline phone, which eliminates the need for a computer. Leon Sizemore and others wrote to point out that Skype does not require a special headset if your computer has speakers and a mic.

MagicJack may not work on restricted systems

Regarding the Dec. 13, 2007, article, reader Paul Wrenn asks about my statement that MagicJack installs no software on the host computer. Paul cites an eWeek article stating that the MagicJack software “does not run directly from the device,” but “fully installs on the Windows system.”

To test this, I used the freeware product TinyWatcher to scan a Windows XP system before and connecting MagicJack. The TinyWatcher scan indicated that, contrary to prior statements by a MagicJack representative, MagicJack does add two files to the Windows System32 folder (usbaudio.sys and utscsci.exe). It also adds four entries to the Windows Registry.

Although these changes are minimal compared to some other VoIP programs, they nevertheless suggest that MagicJack may not work on a computer whose policies prohibit any software installation.

Patch resolves ADS issue on Windows Home Server

Our Dec. 6 issue described how to make files invisible to Windows Explorer and most other Windows tools by using alternate data streams (ADS), a feature of Microsoft’s NTFS file system. Our Known Issues column on Dec. 13 then pointed out that alternate data streams in an NTFS file can be corrupted if the file is copied to a shared folder on a system running Windows Home Server (WHS). Microsoft Knowledge Base article 943393 acknowledges the bug.

Computer engineer and system builder Philip Churchill writes with the good news that a patch is available for WHS:

• “Just to let you know that the November 2007 update for WHS resolved this problem, as can be viewed in KB article 941914. The title is misleading, as it [the update] corrects seven problems with WHS, including the ADS problem. More info is also available at my blog.”

Thanks, Philip! KB article 943393 was edited by Microsoft on Dec. 28 to recommend the WHS update as a solution to the problem.

According to Philip’s blog entry, the fix was made available through Windows’ routine Automatic Updates process, so your WHS systems may have already been patched.

Readers Cossins, Manders, Fiss, Kincel, Roger, Sale, Eisenbraun, Sizemore, Wrenn, and Churchill will each receive a gift certificate for a book, CD, or DVD of their choice for sending tips we printed. Send us your tips via the Windows Secrets contact page.

Time for your New Year's resolution, baby!

We all hate them, and yet we all make them. Inevitably, however, we all break them. Fitness always seems to be on the top of everyone’s resolutions for the New Year. Unfortunately for the little baby in this video, it hasn’t quite made it to the top of his father’s list. This funny, 20-second video clip for a fitness club shows just one reason why exercise should be taken seriously. It’s for the children! Play the video

How to undelete pictures on your camera

By Woody Leonhard Every year about this time, my inbox overflows with anguished hollers for holiday help. “My brother-in-law [or some other equally nefarious scoundrel] deleted all the pics on my new camera,” the tale of woe goes, “how do I get ’em back?”

First, shutterbug, do no harm

Start by peeling yourself off the ceiling and unwinding that strand of garland you surreptitiously slipped around your brother-in-law’s neck.

As long as you haven’t used the camera after the pictures were deleted, there’s a very good chance that you can get them all back. Likely as not, it won’t cost a cent. It’ll take a little time, but disposing of your brother-in-law would probably take longer.

If you’ve deleted a picture or a bunch of pictures on your camera — whether by injudiciously hitting the “delete” key on the camera itself, by copying the pics to your PC and having the PC delete them as they were copied, or by any of a zillion other bonehead methods — you must start by doing nothing.

Don’t take any more pictures with the camera. Don’t try to use the camera’s built-in menu. Don’t reformat the hard drive. Just sit and chill while you figure out what to do next.

What really happens when you delete pics

When you delete a picture on a camera, you don’t actually delete the picture.

Cameras use an ancient file-handling system known as FAT (short for File Allocation Table). This is a system that dates back to the days when Bill Gates himself wrote some of the code. Yes, there’s a little bit of Bill in every camera’s memory card. (No stability wisecracks from the peanut gallery, OK?)

The FAT system used in cameras is very similar to the FAT system used in PCs, back in the days of DOS and early versions of Windows. FAT breaks up a memory card into fixed-size chunks. When you take a picture, the camera stores the image in enough unused chunks of memory to hold the file.

When you delete a picture, the file isn’t erased. Instead, the area that the file occupied is marked as “unused” and becomes available to hold a new picture. The first character of the filename gets changed, too. But the file itself stays intact until the camera needs the room to store another picture.

That’s why you shouldn’t use the camera — more accurately, you shouldn’t use the memory card that holds your deleted images — until you have a recovery plan sorted out. If you take the memory card out of the camera, don’t put it back in the camera. Some cameras automatically stick stuff on the card every time it’s inserted.

PC Inspector — how to undelete for free

There are hundreds of programs available on the Internet that claim to undelete lost pictures on a camera. Most of them cost $30, $40, or more. Before you shell out the bucks on an expensive package, take a look at a small, absolutely free alternative from a German company called Convar.

The program, called PC Inspector Smart Recovery, works almost every time, in my testing, although I did hit snags installing it on one specific Vista computer.

To use PC Inspector:

Step 1: Download PC Inspector Smart Recovery 4.5. In Windows XP, double-click on the downloaded file to install the program. In Vista, right-click the file and choose Run as Administrator. The installer takes a while, so be patient.

Step 2: If you have a card reader attached to your PC, take the affected memory card out of your camera, flip the write-protect “lock” tab so nothing can be written to the card, and put it in the card reader. If you don’t have a card reader, attach the camera to your PC with the appropriate cable. In either case, if Windows pops up and offers to do something for you (such as copying the files into your PC), click the X button to close the AutoPlay dialog box.

Step 3: Click Start, Programs (in Vista, it’s All Programs), PC Inspector Smart Recovery. You get the PC Inspector Smart Recovery main dialog box.

Step 4: In the left pane, choose the drive that contains your camera’s memory card, or choose the camera itself. This can be a bit, uh, challenging because PC Inspector doesn’t give you many details about the drives. But you can use Windows Explorer to find the correct drive letter.

Step 5: In the middle pane, choose the type of file you want to recover. Chances are good it’s .jpg.

Step 6: In the right pane, navigate to a place where you would like to store the reconstituted files.

Step 7: Click Start. This will take a while, but you can watch the program’s progress by looking at the folder that’s being filled with recovered photos.

Step 8: When it’s done, click the X button to get out of the program, flip the “lock” write protection tab back to its normal position, and put the card back in your camera. You’re ready to snap away.

Sometimes PC Inspector refuses to install correctly (check the FAQ on the Convar site for possible solutions). Sometimes it doesn’t recognize all of the files on your camera’s memory card. In those cases, it’s time to haul out the big guns — and shell out a few kroners.

Get SanDisk Rescue Pro if freebies don’t help

If PC Inspector doesn’t ring your chimes, the current reigning champion of camera-file recovery comes from SanDisk — the company that makes many of the memory cards used in cameras. You ordinarily have to pay for SanDisk Rescue Pro, but if you know the secret, you needn’t spend anything extra at all.

You could head over to the RescuePro site and shell out $40 for a copy of the program. But the trick is that SanDisk gives away the software, free, on a CD, when you buy certain products. Although the list of products will, no doubt, change over time, at this moment you can buy for $35 a SanDisk Extreme III 1 GB flash memory card that includes RescuePro on a CD, or for $45 a 2GB SD card with RescuePro. Kinda makes it silly to pay full price for the software alone, doesn’t it?

Using RescuePro is as simple as popping the CD into a handy drive, sticking in your memory card — and away you go. Yes, the SanDisk software works on non-SanDisk products. And you only need to buy it once: unlike some operating systems I could mention, there’s nothing to stop you from using one copy of the program on all of your hardware.

Woody Leonhard‘s latest books — Windows Vista All-In-One Desk Reference For Dummies and Windows Vista Timesaving Techniques For Dummies — explore what you need to know about Vista in a way that won’t put you to sleep. He and Ed Bott also wrote the encyclopedic Special Edition Using Office 2007.

More and better uses for Process Explorer

By Ryan Russell In my Dec. 6 column, I introduced Microsoft’s free Process Explorer and some of its basic functions that enable you to understand what’s running on your PC. Today, I’ll walk you through using PE to accomplish some specific tasks, so fire up your copy and follow along.

How to find resource hogs on your PC

If you want to make frequent use of PE, one of the first things you’ll want to do is customize the set of columns that it shows. This will give you all the information you want at a glance. In the following example, we’re going to check for processes that are using too many resources.

In PE, click on the View menu, and select Select columns. This will give you a Select Columns window. Click on the Process Performance tab. Make sure Threads and Handle Count are checked. Go to the Process Memory tab, and make sure Virtual Size, Working Set Size, Peak Working Set Size, GDI Objects, and USER Objects are checked.

This will cause columns for each of these items to appear in the main PE window. You can sort by any one of these columns by clicking on the column name for that column.

In my experience (heavily influenced by my working in a software quality-assurance function for several years), there are three main groups of resources a Windows process can go overboard with: (1) CPU, (2) memory, and (3) handles and objects.

1. CPU. Most users are familiar with a process using too much CPU time and the negative effects of that. PE will help you find the offenders, if you wish.

2. Memory. Memory is another example of a resource that you’re probably familiar with. But you may not have known that there were different groups of memory and what they all mean.

I had you select Virtual Size and Working Set as the main, important measurements. Working Set is roughly the amount of physical RAM the process is using right now. If all of the working sets (plus some other types of memory used by Windows itself) exceed your physical RAM, your system starts to get really slow and your hard drive goes nuts as Windows starts swapping data out of memory and onto your hard disk.

Want to see which processes are using the most RAM? Click on the words Working Set in the column header line until you get a downward pointing arrow next to it. You are now looking at the processes using the most RAM, in descending order. On my machine at the moment, it’s PE itself. That usage will go away when I’m done using PE.

Want to know which program is the worst offender at other times? That’s where the Peak Working Set comes in. Sort by that column. In my case, I’ve seen one of the svchost.exe processes that I mentioned on Dec. 6 using as much as 168,444KB at one point.

Using PE, I can see which services run under this instance of svchost.exe. The one I’m looking at at the moment is running numerous network services, including Windows Update. If I were concerned about the amount of RAM getting used, I could start paring down the services.

3. Handles and objects. I also had you add Handles and Objects. Sort by each, and glance at the worst offenders. Where I’ve found problems is when the number of handles or objects systemwide has gotten too large. You can then start to see strange behaviors.

Examples of problems I’ve seen include Internet Explorer not showing all of the objects on a Web page as it should, and Outlook opening windows that remain blank indefinitely.

How many handles and objects are too many for a program or all programs to be consuming? Unfortunately, the answer, of course, depends on many things. In my experience, I’ve started seeing problems when Windows gets up to 20,000 to 30,000 objects or 50,000 to 70,000 handles in use. When that happens, it’s almost always because one or two processes have resource leaks. If you use PE to sort by those columns, you’ll know right away which processes are the culprits.

Use PE to research that ‘mystery’ process

Our next example involves finding out what an unknown process is in general terms. I think I know the configuration of my systems pretty well, and yet there is still the occasional process that I don’t know about. As an exercise, I looked at my process list and I see something called infocard.exe. I don’t remember installing anything that sounds like that.

Double-clicking the name in PE brings up the properties for that process. On the Image tab, I see immediately that the process claims to be from Microsoft and is running from the Microsoft.NET directory under the Windows directory. Closing that dialog box, I right-click the program name in PE, and select Search online. This takes me to a Live Search with infocard.exe as the query. I can see more confirmation that the program is, in fact, part of .NET 3.0. That still doesn’t tell me a lot about what it is and why I want it, but I did at some point install .NET 3.0, so that’s why I have this “mystery” process.

This, of course, makes a big assumption — that the process is what it says it is. If you’re a writer of malware, wouldn’t you make it look like it came from Microsoft and was something you were supposed to have? Of course! Malware authors have used such techniques many times.

It’s beyond the scope of today’s column to address how to avoid getting fooled in this way. I’ll try to provide more tips on this subject in a future column. My main message here is to be skeptical. Use the info that’s uncovered by PE as one piece of evidence, not the final answer. If I hadn’t installed .NET 3.0, I’d be a lot less satisfied with the infocard.exe process being there.

Explore processes to find out who’s listening

I have one more “mystery” process example. My PC runs a process named mdnsresponder.exe. The Properties/Image tab says it’s from Apple Computer Inc. and is the “Bonjour Service.” The interesting bit is the TCP/IP tab in the dialog box, in this case.

Clicking on the TCP/IP tab, it says the process is listening on a bunch of ports: TCP 5354, UDP 1027, and UDP 5353. Doesn’t having network listening ports open leave you at risk of potential attack? Indeed, it does.

It turns out that this service is, in fact, the Bonjour Service from Apple, just as it says it is. This process comes with iTunes. I’m not aware of any current vulnerabilities in the service, but it has reportedly caused some troubles in the past, at least on Macs. Like anything else, you should be aware that this process is running and, if it causes you any pain, decide if you do or do not need that functionality to be installed and running.

What does the Bonjour Service do? Its main purpose is to find other iTunes users whose songs you can listen to over your local area network. The process provides a way for you to find out about new music in an office environment.

With PE, you have a chance to see whether or not this process is running, so you can take action if some software conflict happens to occur.

The Perimeter Scan column gives you the facts you need to test your systems to prevent weaknesses. Ryan Russell is quality assurance manager at BigFix Inc., a configuration management company. He moderated the vuln-dev mailing list for three years under the alias “Blue Boar.” He was the lead author of Hack-Proofing Your Network, 2nd Ed., and the technical editor of the Stealing the Network book series.