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🎼https://ourdearfriendthemedic.bandcamp.com/



cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

Holding a Dell XPS M1210 in my hand, a little silver 12" netbook from the late 2000s, showing a blue and green media player interface on the screen

This one's coming in blistering hot, two turning two burning, clear the runway. Picked up the specimen five hours ago, already have it fully dissected, zero questions remaining. The story is short, to the point, and so incredibly brazen that it's impossible to decide if the folks responsible are geniuses or criminals.


Unlike many of the instant-on PC environments I've investigated, it's not a long walk from Dell's "MediaDirect" offering to the underlying third party software that comprises it, largely because it's simply called what it is.

Closeup of the Dell's screen showing the media player from the first picture running inside a window within Windows Vista

Cyberlink MediaDirect is a program that came installed on a number of Dell Laptops. It is a clone of Windows Media Center that's worse in every way. I suspect the only reason it exists is because of Microsoft's asinine a la carte approach to licensing Vista; in short, it was stupid to sell a high end laptop with a Home edition, yet Ultimate was egregiously expensive, so vendors split the difference by selling machines like the XPS M1210 with Vista Business - which is incapable of running Windows Media Center for absolutely no reason except that Microsoft's entire marketing and product division circa '06 had discovered the joys of bath salts ten years ahead of the general public.

I think you could actually buy MediaDirect from CyberLink and install it on a normal PC; I assure you, no one person ever did that.

The reason this interests us (speaking generously) is that the M1210, like other machines in this series of articles, had a second power button:

Extreme closeup of the power buttons on the M1210; one is normal, while the other has a home icon for some reason, and is labeled MediaDirect

Pressing the second button while Windows is running just opens the MediaDirect app. But pressing it while the machine is off causes it to power up and - you guessed it - skip Windows and boot into a separate OS.

Now, spoiler warning but: The outcome of this story is so unremarkable that it's actually worthwhile for me to pad it by diverting into a spiel about the process of installing MediaDirect.

I bought this machine for $5; it was literally waiting to get picked up by a scrapper. So it came with no hard drive, and I think anyone new to this field of "research" would jump to the conclusion that the ship had sailed at that point - but I, unfortunately, have the curse of knowledge.

It turns out that most vendors are happy to let you download the 250-1,000MB installer for their awful, molasses-slow, critically-panned, utterly-forgotten instant-boot OS from the turn of the decade. Dell, Asus, and Lenovo all happily let me grab .exes of their respective Linuces. So I didn't even bother checking whether Dell offered a download for MediaDirect, and that's why I was surprised when I got home, looked it up, and discovered that they... very much do not offer this.

The only mentions of MediaDirect on their download site are A) a patcher for the in-Windows version, and B) a tool to fix the partitions. Because, yes, of couse, MediaDirect uses wacky tobaccy partition table nonsense!

Let's just save some time and drop the Wikipedia knowledge:

Earlier versions of MediaDirect attracted criticism since they adopt a distinctive combination of BIOS and hard drive layout to bypass the installed OS and boot directly to the media player application using a single button press.

The chosen approach causes disk geometry to be deliberately misreported, can prevent the successful backup of hard disks and may trigger catastrophic data loss when MediaDirect is launched.

Unless the drive and all pre-existing operating systems are left as originally installed, MediaDirect can trigger a forced repartitioning of the drive whilst attempting to load. This intervention typically causes the loss of all operating systems and data on the device. Removing or disabling the application is challenging because Dell employs Host protected area technology to cloak the location of the partition containing the software, contributing to the misreported disk geometry.

Oof.

"Host protected area technology" is, to keep things succint, closely related to the methods Phoenix used to hide the OS partition for Hyperspace, with their BEER and PARTIES techniques. The rest of this however seems entirely uncalled for - imagine adding code to an OS that attempts to rewrite the partition table without user prompting on boot. Hell, at all - if you think the partition table is somehow incorrect, you cannot fix that automatically. This tells us much about the skill level of Dell (or perhaps Cyberlink's) developers, but I digress.

The tool that ostensibly fixes the MediaDirect partition is about 1.5 megs, so that's certainly not going to restore the whole environment, and there's nothing else available for download on Dell's site. Thus, I googled it, and got the worst possible results: threads on sites like the Dell forums, and, you know, bleepingcomputer. Places that exist solely so that hopeless, unsavvy people can post desperate questions to which there are no satisfying answers, then get preyed upon by a shadow economy of con artists.

And yet, I actually got the answer I wanted from the first thread. After the post from the guy (naturally) saying he called Dell support and was told reinstalling MediaDirect was "impossible," there were a number of general-purpose flames (I can use that term, this was a forum,) and then a guy offhandedly mentioning that you should simply reinstall from the MediaDirect recovery disc.

https://archive.org/search?query=mediadirect

Naturally, there's a dozen of these on Internet Archive.

If you're a 2000s computer collector, you have lots of Windows discs laying around, and those pretty much have you set. But if you collect laptops, it is a perennial issue that if you get, say, a Toshiba or a Vaio, it's a real pain to get all the software installed, because laptops are just a bit more... special.

Sure, you can install any old copy of Windows, but it's a really irritating process to chase down all the weird drivers for shit like "a thumbprint scanner that was sold in one model, ever." If you can get an original "recovery" CD, they often come bundled with all that, as well as whatever vendor pack-in garbage you're (don't lie) drooling to see appear on the desktop so you can ignore it. And if you have a machine with hidden partitions for crap like MediaDirect, it's really important to get the recovery discs, because they're often the only way to get those back.

So you try to google these up, but if you have, say, a Toshiba? Forget about it. Oh sure, there are a few discs on IA, but they're for a "C1010A-103" and you have a "C1011A-200", or a "C1010A-104A." These companies churn out hundreds of new models a year, for no reason anyone can ascertain - it can't possibly be profitable, it's just some kind of uncontrolled grey-goo manufacturing machine that doesn't know how to stop generating new goddamn SKUs. Vaios are worse - when I worked in laptop repair, my position was "Sony doesn't have models, they have serial numbers." I never saw the same model number twice, it simply didn't happen. They have tens of thousands of unique machines; good luck getting recovery media for yours.

But if you have a Dell? Every single Dell recovery disc ever made is on Internet Archive. This is owed to the fact that A) Dell has always been one of the least-bullshit laptop vendors, so people actually make an effort to preserve their software, and B) they produced less than a hundred new models a year, with largely overlapping recovery media.

Included in that collection are multiple versions of MediaDirect, which you can simply download... but it turns out, the ISO is (of course) some kind of cursed nightmare object that cannot be written to a USB drive. Rufus, balenaetcher, and DD can't make a bootable device out of this thing. You have to burn it to a DVD.

I didn't have any DVDs, I thought - until my girlfriend (ty hny) pulled a whole spindle out of my closet that I had failed to locate. I then burned off a disc, and followed the instructions from - where else - some godforsaken website called dellwindowsreinstallationguide.com, in (naturally) slightly broken english, because these kind of special model-line-focused info sites are always European for some reason. The instructions stressed the fact that I NEEDED to install this shit BEFORE Windows, because MediaDirect HAS to be partition #0 AND partition #2, with your boot disk parked in between.

That is: to make this stupid program work, you have to let the installer partition your hard drive for you. If you ever touch it, it breaks, apparently with potentially catastrophic results. Why am I doing this, again?

But anyway, I followed the instructions, and I got it working.

The laptop with a colorful splash screen for Dell MediaDirect, with an illustration of a house an various media icons bubbling out of it

The first time you boot MediaDirect you think "wow, this is some bullshit, it takes just as long as a normal Windows boot" - but then it says it has to "prepare your machine", and after it completes this process, future bootups take about 8 seconds (tested with an SSD; probably longer on a spinning disk, but I didn't have one. Still, it's fast.) So this does count as an instant-on OS.

The same MediaDirect app as before, but filling the entire screen

And once that process is done, you're looking at... the exact same app, but fullscreen. That's it; the MediaDirect button serves to... launch MediaDirect, just without the benefit of the entire Windows boot process around it.

MediaDirect, of course, is exactly as basic as you'd expect. It has a DVD player, video player, music player, and picture viewer. The only remotely remarkable thing is "Instant Office" which, like other offerings we've seen, ostensibly lets you see bits of your Outlook user data without running actual Outlook. Yeah. There's nothing to phone home here about.

MediaDirect playing a DVD of Dr. No. It's an unremarkable DVD player interface.

The DVD player interface is absolutely by the book. It's CyberLink. What do you expect.

MediaDirect's very basic image gallery view.

You can view images on a flash drive. You can make them fullscreen.

MediaDirect's very basic music player.

The music player plays music. The most remarkable thing is that it has a visualizer. There are very few music visualizers in existence, I've learned; one wonders if Cyberlink stole this one.

MediaDirect showing a fullscreen powerpoint presentation.

The powerpoint viewer is exactly that. I couldn't get the Outlook integration to work, so I can't show you all of Instant Office, but we can probably guess what it would look like: It would show you the calendar, and your contacts. That's what it would do. I can't imagine what that would look like that would be worth mentioning.

In short, this is an absolute slam dunk of mediocrity. No pair of eyes that ever graces this document would be caught dead playing anything in a "media center," or any app with a window bezel thicker than 3px, so it's impossible for any of us to tell if this is, somehow, appealing to a person who exists somewhere. The only question is: how does it work?

Not All That Remarkably, It Turns Out

The first time you boot MediaDirect, it displays a loading bar that will set off alarm bells in your head. Then it takes you through the first-boot "optimizing" process, and then it drops you at the menu. You do your thing, but when you're finished, and you choose to exit - that's when you stand up from your chair and declare "Oh, come on."

MediaDirect's shutdown screen, which is... the Windows XP logo next to the word "Exiting..." and a progress bar

Yeah! So!

It's Just Windows Again

All the OTHER instant-on OSes I've reviewed have been Linux - hell, one was a custom scratchbuilt EFI application! MediaDirect is uhhhhhhh put the windows in a smargophagus. The tagline could be It's just Windows - again! You remember Windows? The thing you already have? Here's: Windows 2: The Sequel: Origins.

There... aren't MANY questions, but there are SOME, and the biggest is: why?

Well, that's not hard: yes, this machine runs Windows as a primary OS - but that's Windows Vista. Judging from the shutdown screen logo, this seems to be Windows XP.

And it's not hard to prove that, because unlike the various instant-on Linuces, Cyberlink either made no effort to lock this down, or were unable to do so. I was able to "jailbreak" MediaDirect by: Pressing control+alt+delete.

hacker voice: "I'm In"

MediaDirect's fullscreen view, except a copy of Task Manager is floating over it

That opened Task Manager, and you know the rest. From there I used Run to get an Explorer instance:

An Explorer window showing the root filesystem, which looks like any other Windows PC hard drive in history

And... yeah. It's a completely ordinary Windows XP install. In fact, XP Embedded SP2, so at least it's patched, right?

Hah. Yeah. So. About that.

It's nice that this isn't XP SP0, but taking the most cursory look around, I happened to check the System control panel.

XP System control panel showing that Remote Desktop is enabled

Sigh.

For some reason I can't load the user control panel, but... let's just skip to the chase, we know how this story ends:

Dell deployed hundreds of thousands of machines with a second Windows environment that had no firewall, Remote Desktop enabled, and the same static username and password on every single machine.

If it was 2010, I might bother to confirm all that. It's moot as hell now, so I'm not gonna, but there's no reason to think it ISN'T exactly as bad as all that, because why wouldn't it be? Dell contracted with Professional Nothingmasters, whose sole claim to fame was "we got the mandate of heaven from the MPAA :)" Cyberlink never had a reason to make good software, they simply had to produce something that technically could play a DVD, and that was a career for them. Why would they do a good job of this?

Or if we assume Dell ginned up this shit: They had hundreds of different projects going on when this machine came out, and this one was "integrate some third party app we're making almost no profit on, which almost nobody wants, into a quick boot environment." Who do you think got assigned to that project? Three guesses, none of them are "Dell's A-team."

So this is... a disappointment. There is nothing exotic here. But hey, what about that fast-boot feature? That's something special, I wager!

There is only further, deeper disappointment. Maybe. I don't know. Maybe this is the part where we all stand up and start slowly clapping our asses off?

MediaDirect's shutdown screen, which is... the Windows XP logo next to the word "Exiting..." and a progress bar

If we return to this for a moment, MediaDirect's shutdown screen, let me just point out: That is the Windows XP hibernate dialog.

Like, no bones, that is simply the thing that Windows XP displays when it's hibernating. It was a new technology in the XP era, so they hadn't yet learned to mask all the various low-power modes into identical-looking fades-to-black. So we know for a fact that all this is doing... is hibernating.

In fact, if you hit F8 while it's starting up, you get:

The machine displaying a "system restart has been paused" menu, with options to resume restart, or delete restoration data

The typical menu when you interrupt return-from-hibernate on XP. And hibernating is faster than a cold boot, so... That's how they did it. They looked at the situation and said "sure, we could just encourage the user to hibernate their normal OS, but Windows XP hibernates a little bit faster. Let's just install that too, then."

The sum total of Dell / Cyberlink's work was:

  • Install XP Embedded in an HPA partition

  • Install Cyberlink MediaDirect

  • Set it as the Shell executable in the registry

  • Set the default behavior when you press the power button to hibernate.

  • String hack the OS to say "exiting" instead of "hibernating"*

  • Add 6 KB of BIOS code to detect if you've hit the MediaDirect button on powerup, and 100KB of splash screen graphics to display if so.

*This is honestly the part that gets me the most. Maybe the XP hibernate screen is meant to be localizable, but it seems just as possible that they just used a hex editor on ntoskrnl; I'll look into this later.

Either way, I'm honestly astonished at how banal this is. There is nothing special going on. It is just about as fucking basic as it could be. I have nothing more to say. Dell, hats off: This is either the dumbest or the most brilliant option. I'm only glad I don't have to make a judgment call on whether you should do it now. Thank god this was 14 years ago.


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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

wwow. huh. "it's just another FUCKING windows instance" is so... do you know the feeling when a pun or joke that shouldve been incredibly obvious has been staring you in the face for several minutes and it only now hits you and now you feel kind of disappointed in yourself for not thinking of it? it feels like that.

So does this imply that licensing Vista Ultimate was more expensive than Vista Business plus XP Embedded?!

I ran Ultimate back in the day but I had an “evaluation use only” key that Microsoft gifted to me so I have no idea what the pricing was like. Pretty sure I’m still using that same key, incrementally upgraded.

I still have my M1710 I got in 2007. I remember hitting the media direct button instead of power for the first time, and boy did I regret it. My first thought was "what the hell, is this reskinned Windows?". I'm really glad someone else got to answer that question for me after all these years, so my morbid curiosity didn't have to.

I really wanted to make that a dual boot button for a Linux partition, but never got around to figuring out how the dang button works.

It's a shame, because this thing still runs well with Manjaro Gnome in 2023 somehow in spite of the driver support for a 7950GTX ending a long ass time ago. It's my go to when I have to do something mundane due to its decent 1920x1200 display and its ability to completely choke on infinite scroll sites. But the button is still there with its smug aura knowing that no one will ever use its power for good.

Great write up. I hope you do a full video on this! It's funny that you mention the bleepingcomputer forums because they still exist and it's still miserable, but bleepingcomputer is somehow a really good outlet for malware news? With multiple writers??