The Windows 10 Update We've Been Waiting For

Windows 10 seems to be getting off on a rocky start. Some of my clients are experiencing no problems at all and are loving the new Windows experience while others are having so many problems they cant even use their computers and may have to downgrade. As I have explained to a few of my clients, I am confident that a series of updates will be released to solve these problems.

Windows 10 Version 1511 cumulative update (KB3118754) was recently released and is a step in the right direction. The update fixes a lot of problems with Windows 10. Microsoft is streamlining activation, restoring colored window title bars, integrating Skype, and improving the Edge browser.

New Activation Methodology

I personally did not have any trouble activating Windows 10, but if you are or did - that's been changed too. When it was originally released, Microsoft didn’t really explain how the upgrade process worked. Activation now works as it should have originally. When you install Windows 10, you can enter your PC’s Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 product key and it should activate properly if that PC was eligible for the upgrade. The “digital entitlement” process — where your PC activates automatically without entering a product key — is also better explained. Under Settings > Upgrade & security > Activation, you’ll now see “Windows 10 on this device is activated with a digital entitlement” if it activated without requiring a product key.

Colored Title Bars! WOOO!

If you were part of the many who were put off by the standard white title bars, you can now go to Settings > Personalization > Colors and switch on “Show color on Start, taskbar, action center, and title bar”. The color you choose here will be used for your title bars.

Ads on the Start Menu

You might notice the small and innocuous "Suggestions" section of the start menu, recommending apps you should install when you open it. If you don't much care for it, you can easily disable these ads, if you like. Visit Settings > Personalization > Start and disable the “Occasionally show suggestions in Start” option. I'm hoping that this is a continuing trend for Microsoft in response to the bad press Windows 10 has gotten with regards to privacy and a lack of options preventing troubling background activities.

Track Your Lost PC

Windows 10 now includes a “Find My Device” option under Settings > Update & security. This means Windows 10 finally has built-in tracking, so you can track your laptop or tablet if you lose it via GPS and location services. Much like the Windows phone, you can also tell Windows 10 to periodically send your device’s location to Microsoft’s servers, allowing you to view its last known location if you ever lose it.

Edge Gains Browser Sync and Tab Previews

The big two user-facing features are tab previews — just mouse over a tab in the titlebar — and syncing of your favorites and reading list across all your Windows 10 devices.

Microsoft Edge won’t be receiving browser extensions yet, however — those have been delayed. And, interestingly enough, Microsoft isn’t updating Edge via the Store as originally promised. Edge updates seem to be held back for major new versions of Windows 10, unlike Windows 10’s other included apps, which are updated more regularly.

The Windows 10 Background on the Login Screen Is Now Optional

One thing in particular that annoyed me when I first upgraded to Windows 10 was the inability to change that new login background to just a solid color. I personally used a few registry hacks to get what I wanted, but now you can just go to Settings > Personalization > Lock screen and disable the “Show Windows background picture on the sign-in screen” option. Weirdly enough, you cant choose your own background. I foresee that in a soon to come update.

For more tips and tricks, shoot me an email at Help@MooreITHelp.com

The Windows "Installer" Folder and Hard Drive Space

By now, many of you have probably heard of the SSD - the Solid State Drive. This piece of hardware is many times faster than the traditional mechanical hard drive found in most computers, however it is usually significantly more expensive. So, if you have a fairly expensive computer, it may run off of an SSD with the caveat of  being significantly smaller than the traditional drive. This reintroduces the old 90's problem of conserving hard drive space.

Most PC enthusiasts with a Desktop computer will use a small SSD to store their OS and then store all their data on a larger, inexpensive traditional mechanical drive. But over time, various temporary files will begin to fill up your little SSD. These files build up through the course of simply using the computer, whether it be through the course of installing programs to various Windows Updates to program patches to MS Office upgrades. Through various means, you can find a folder within Windows called the "INSTALLER" folder - where a good deal of this stuff is stored. The problem is that a good deal of the stuff in this folder can be referred to as "Orphaned" files - files and folders which are no longer required but remain on the drive regardless, causing this folder to grow to over 15, 20, even 30GB.

Unfortunately, it gets worse - this folder cant just be deleted outright. A good deal of the files and folders within the Installer folder are still used by the system. So, if you are looking to save drive space, save the Installer folder for last. Before risking damage to your system, let me revisit some classic steps to cleaning up your drive, then, if your drive is still pretty full, we can look at the Installer folder again. I have tools that can find the files and folders which are safe to delete, and if that doesnt work, i always provide other options.

Give me a call at 617-396-7044 or shoot me an email at Help@MooreITHelp.com

Internet Security in 2015

I got a phone call a few days ago from a young lady whose file extensions were all replaced with ".ECC". The folders where said files resided now all included a new text document titled "HELP_RESTORE_FILES.txt". This sounded like another variant of the kinds of infections I encounter all the time. However, after running through my usual process, I found that these files werent actually "infected" per say, but rather that they were encrypted by a virus called EccKrypt.
This was a new one for me, and basically boils down to that age old technician's warning;

BACK UP YOUR FILES!!!

The computer is now an appliance to which almost every American owns. With Windows still dominating the market, big businesses are seeing the demand and the opportunity for profit in promising advanced protection from the big bad hackers. Now we see ads for products like the FixMeStick, MyCleanPC.com, Win Cleaner, and MaxMySpeed.com - and just like everything else in big business - its all one big lie. 
No antivirus solution is completely infallible, and even with the latest and greatest installed, one can still get infected. Further, removing infections is often not the concern! What about identity theft? None of the aforementioned "protection" products offer real time scanning or any form of firewall, and in the case of my new client, the damage has been done! Even with a squeaky clean PC, her files were encrypted - How is a Registry Cleaner going to take care of that?!

So call a mechanic for your car, a roofer for your house, and a tech for your computer. Ensure that you have the best protection in place and the best backup in place. Call MooreITHelp.com at 617-396-7044, or shoot me an email at Help@MooreITHelp.com.  

Lenovo's Superfish Super Mistake

So, many of you have probably stumbled upon (perhaps not by choice) the news about Lenovo laptops being shipped with "adware" preinstalled. Let’s put aside for the moment that even Microsoft’s crappy Windows Defender has already been updated to root out the Superfish bug (http://www.theverge.com/2015/2/20/8077033/superfish-fix-microsoft-windows-defender).
Granted that this is a huge mistake on Lenovo’s part, and definitely a security vulnerability, but most of these articles I'm seeing being spammed around the internet pretty much just keep verbosely stating “LENOVO BAD” over and over. Further, it puts Superfish in the spotlight as something that can easily be taken advantage of by hackers when any number of apps have the same shortcoming.
This would probably be a good time to mention that my PC Setup includes the removal of bloatware and full Windows updates. If you have any questions or concerns, you should always contact your technician to make sure you are up to date on all fronts.

Let’s cut out the drama and get to the important part, and probably what everyone wants to know.
How to discover if your PC came with Superfish preloaded:

The adware intrinsic to Superfish is designed to inject visual price-comparison ads into the web pages you visit, in a “Visual Search results” section “powered by VisualDiscovery.” If you see that, you’re affected (though maybe “infected” is the better word to use).
Another easier way to find out is to simply go here:  https://filippo.io/Badfish/

How to get rid of it:

• Option A.    Hire a real technician.

• Option B.    First, press the Windows key and R on your keyboard to bring up the Run tool, then search for certmgr.msc to open your PC’s certificate manager. Once that opens, click on Trusted root certificate authorities in the left-hand navigation pane, then double-click Certificates in the main pane. A list of all trusted root certificates will appear. Find the Superfish entry, then right-click on it and select Delete.

There, now that wasn’t so bad now was it?

Now let’s clear things up about Lenovo and their horrible, horrible mistake:
 

Forbes ranked Superfish #64 of “America's Most Promising Companies”. Some clown bigwig up at Lenovo probably looked at this information briefly and said “THIS IS A GREAT IDEA TO HELP US LINE OUR GREEDY POCKETS!”
Lenovo’s response to all this can be found here: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Lenovo-P-Y-and-Z-series/Lenovo-Pre-instaling-adware-spam-Superfish-powerd-by/m-p/1863174#M79882
Lenovo has taken Superfish offline for now as it plans to issue some “fixes”. Lenovo removed Superfish from the preloads of new consumer systems in January of 2015.  At the same time, Superfish disabled existing Lenovo machines in market from activating the Superfish program. It was between September and December of last year that Lenovo shipped a total of ~16 million PCs, not all of which were consumer laptops.

System Restore - Disable, or Not to Disable...

Most users are probably familiar with Windows System Restore and have probably fallen back on it on many occasions. For those of you unfamiliar with this feature, System Restore is a Windows utility that periodically saves changes made to the system and allows users to roll back the system to its previous state in the event of PC instability or program failures. The best part of System Restore is that it does not change any of the user files, such as Word documents or pictures. The program only rolls back things like changes made to the Registry, installed or uninstalled programs and Windows Updates.

However, in cases where the system is infected, System Restore might also be affected by infected system files and viruses. Being that System Restore monitors all Operating System files, installed programs and Windows registry settings, changes made to said components by an infection would also be backed up. Windows makes restore points automatically and does not check for any infection or malware present on your system. By design, the System Restore function doesn't allow any other program to handle files stored in the Restore folder. Virus removal programs such as Symantec have trouble clearing infected files from the System Restore folder. For example, in a system I recently repaired, a Kaspersky scan continued to show Trojan files trapped in files that begin with “C:\System Volume Information\_restore…”

While the internet can be a virtually endless wealth of information, it can also breed misinformation and half-cocked rumors. To that effect, many self-proclaimed technicians are under the impression that viruses in the System Restore will creep out of that folder and re-infect the system after an infection has been removed. The fact is, viruses in that folder are dormant and more or less harmless. They do not usually do anything while in that folder until a user activates said infected restore points by using them.

So the fact remains that these files should be removed, but not until after the system has been repaired and confirmed repaired so that System Restore can still be used for exactly what it was meant to be used for. Technicians are human beings, and human beings make mistakes. That's where System Restore comes in. This means that a blanket statement that you should always delete restore points may be a little excessive. Whether you should or not, depends on the infection, the time it occurred and whether system files were clean at the time the restore points were made.

All of these things considered reaffirms my emphasis on a reliable backup routine. Many enterprise environments don't even bother with removing infections - they just restore the user to the most recent backup.  This is also where Roaming Profiles (aka User Redirect) come into play. But that's all for another article...

Look Forward to Windows 10

That's right, you read right - Windows 10.
Why 10? Maybe Microsoft's marketing department showed that people like the number 10 more than they like the number 9. Regardless, here's what you have to look forward to.

Some rather simple and obvious improvements that give the people what they want. My take on this - a company that listens. Microsoft has given in to critics and brought back the traditional start menu that people will recognize from Windows 7. That means consumers can click on the window icon and have a menu pop up showing their documents folder, PC settings, command prompt, and the like. Microsoft has also tried to placate people that were accustomed to the tile-based interface of Windows 8 by, in essence, gluing a few tiles onto the right side of the start menu.

As I have written in previous blog entries, Microsoft is attempting to merge all the devices we have come to use on a daily basis. That was the attempt with the whole "tile" thing in Windows 8 - to increase familiarity between devices such as the Windows Phone, Microsoft Surface interfaces as well as other non-Microsoft devices. This along with the integration of the Windows SkyDrive, now called OneDrive made for seamless integration between devices and further guided us all into a Cloud based world. Windows 10 takes this one step further by literally making all Microsoft devices run on Windows 10. That means that your Surface, laptop, desktop, and phone would all run on the same basic code that is Windows 10.

With Windows 10, Microsoft is delivering something familiar, which should be an easier sell for businesses looking to upgrade machines with minimal hassle. This may also be a huge irritant as many businesses just finished spending millions to upgrade and or replace their systems which were running the now obsolete Windows XP. Now, this doesn't mean that companies must upgrade, but its kind of like when you buy the latest TV only to find one way cooler, larger, and cheaper for sale the following week.

If Microsoft keeps its trend of failed every other Operating Systems, Windows 10 should be the OS to please us all. Hopefully....
Just an FYI - I'm still running 7.

For more help and tips, check out www.MooreITHelp.com