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I DID have a hkey_root key “ms-search” that I deleted.

I went back and restored the key and deleted the “search-ms” hkey_root one, but now (per above) I wonder what the other one was/is for?

Or can I delete them both?

Thanks,

Chris

(one little mis-type and so many questions… 😉

Sorry, no experience with RAID at all.

I have looked at Event viewer on occasion, but only when something seems to be going wrong. Guess I never did end up looking for HDD events there when I was suspicious. Guess I went for the “old reliable” other tools I trusted to help to get to the eventual solution.

And yes, cabling and connections can end up causing really hard to resolve intermittent “funnies.”

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SupremeLaW

I found the article on SSD SMART very interesting and helpful, but I too found the differences in reporting among tools disturbing, and looked deeper into possible causes. I would also suggest that ClearDisk is the questionable reporter. Although I understand that there can be a difference of interpretation of SMART parameters, there are some differences that cleardisk has that turn out to make it unusable for me, in favor of Crystaldiskinfo, or perhaps an alternative better choice would be the SSD manufacturer’s own monitoring software.

When I use HDD’s I find the SMART data has been useful in conjunction with Victoria disk utility, and looking at reallocated sectors, and pending sectors (and seek times in the test). When these parameters start to increase, and after running Victoria and get even higher, (along with “funnies” in system operation) it has turned out that it was time to think about replacing the drive.

With the conversion to SSD’s, it’s been a learning experience, and that is why I pursued this a little more.

I used 5 tools on one of my Samsung drives. Cleardisk, Crystaldiskinfo, Samsung Magician, Passmark Disk Cleanup, and the windows based smartmon tools using the “smartctl” command. (I have two of the same kind of Samsung drives in two of the same model laptops; I used cleardisk and crystaldisk on one of them, and all 5 on the other. The cleardisk/crystaldisk differences were consistent on both.) All of the four other tools were consistent in reporting; cleardisk had that parameter 231, percent lifetime remaining, that didn’t seem to make any sense.

Looking further, (and using the picture of SMART reporting by manufacturers from the original article that I’ve attached) the first reason for cleardisk’s lack for my use is that cleardisk is the ONLY tool that reports that parameter for my Samsung drives. The picture suggests that it is not available in Samsung. All the other tools (even Samsung’s) do not report that parameter. It may be in the SMART data somewhere, but if Samsung does not report it with their tool, any “interpretation” might be questionable.

All the other parameters were reported, and pretty much agreed identically, except for another key value, that of parameter  241, total GB written. Cleardisk reports a negative number that I cannot resolve into any kind of number that makes any kind of sense. The other tools reporting of that number are consistent, and end up helping to determine a SWAG at used and remaining life.

I found a Samsung article (https://image-us.samsung.com/SamsungUS/b2b/resource/2016/05/31/WHP-SSD-SSDSMARTATTRIBUTES-APR16J.pdf) that gives a detailed description about how Samsung would go about determining remaining life. For the full blown method (their words from the article) “…estimating SSD lifetime using conventional SMART attributes is a relatively complex and labor intensive process, involving multiple calculations.” Even their “simpler” method involves using some tricky commands to get some initial SMART data, starting off a testing cycle, using the drive in normal service for a nominal time, and gathering the after testing SMART parameters and doing some more calculations. That looked kind of daunting too.

But a simplistic SWAG might be available (and ends up agreeing with the other tool reports). It seems that SSD’s life is very much related to the amount of writes to the device. Using the parameter 241 value (total LBA’s written) provided by the four agreeing tools, it appears that my two drives have had 1.4 TB and 3.1 TB written to them. The warranted or serviceable life for my Samsung model drives that I found by a search suggest that they should be able to have 300 TBW “life”; that matches the 99% remaining by CrystalDiskinfo, and I’ll continue monitoring the SSD’s on a periodic basis to see if the hypothesis for this SWAG remains consistent. The Samsung number doesn’t mean they fail after that, but gives some idea of when I should be more watchful and look at some of the other parameters.

Thanks for a very thought provoking article; I also agree that it would be “nice” if the manufacturers would all have a consistent way of reporting drive status. Samsung’s magician just reporting “good” is nice, but it would be nicer if the quality term was a bit more granular.

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SupremeLaW

Hurray!! Thanks so much!

After downloading and installing the update for x64 v2004, the “Macromed” items are no longer under system32 and syswow64!

[Chriski]

Following steps on the adobe site eventually winds up at a step involving deleting files in the Macromedia folder in system32 (after running the adobe uninstaller and restarting.)

However access is denied for deleting these files. There IS a “take ownership” registry hack on “how to geek” that can install/uninstall a take ownership item to the folder context menu, but is there a way to take ownership from properties/security tab?

How to get rid of this detritus?

Chris

• This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by Chriski.

Two W10-v2004, two W10-v1909, one W7 using the two scripts, all Aug patches in and no apparent problems.

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jburk07

I resumed updates ( vers. 1909, HP G62 laptop upgraded from Win 7), and v2004 WAS listed as available to download and install if I clicked. Chose not too. Other updates all went in, and after several checks for updates, there were none remaining (except for the optional dload and install one), so paused until 9/5/20.

BTW, along the way in your patch updates, you mention that “MS makes it difficult to upgrade to V 1909. I found that to be the case since only V 2004 is available through the media create tool.

But I was wondering (because of the way you phrased that)… IS there a way to upgrade to V1909 if I don’t have an ISO squirreled away? (My bad; didn’t think I would need that.)

I have an 1809 version, but am reluctant to try that and see if it will update eventually to 1909, plus it takes a lot of time to see… (This question is for another Win 7 machine.)

Thanks.

Chris

Also, opening a command window and using:

certutil -hashfile <file_of_interest> SHA256

will give the hash for the file of interest, for the algorithm, in this case SHA256.

It will do: MD2 MD4 MD5 SHA1 SHA256 SHA384 SHA512

Win 7 and later I believe. Supposedly case sensitive; is on my win 7 version.

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abbodi86, Moonbear

Thank you very much for this!

The .ZIP file is NOT password protected; in the one repository there is also a .7z file that IS password protected.

Not having the password, I cannot check the actual file contents to see if they are the same …

But since they are (as near as I can tell) abbodi86’s repositories, and I’ve been happily using the main ESU script from his repository for months, I’m confident all is good.

Chris

Just curious if the checksum info you posted was for a PW protected zip file or did it just extract without a password? Did you find a .zip with a PW? (The ones I found match yours and have the same SHA256 checksum, no password.)

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jburk07

More confused …

Verifying newly downloaded files and those that I used the past couple days … (all the same by the way)

It comes to mind that the hash for a PW protected zipped fileset would be different than for the same fileset without a password. Wouldn’t it? (The password would need to be stored inside the zip file I would think.)

My head is starting to hurt.

 

[old proverb: “one fool can ask more questions than 20 wise men can answer”]

Perhaps…

The same named file in the other abbodi86 repository from the initial post in this thread is an exact binary compare, and it too extracts with no password.

Why are people being cryptic about locations etc.? Are we giving up secrets we shouldn’t? I mean if we’re participating in this thread, and doing the operations mentioned, then we’ve already given consideration to all the implications, and we’re “in”. In for a penny, in for a pound, no?

Chris

I’m certainly confused.

I found: https://host-a.net/u/abbodi86

and:

dotNetFx4_ESU_Installer_r.zip

which certainly seems legitimate (has abbodi86 ref), and yields the SHA256 checksum displayed in #2283411, but extracts just fine with NO password.

Is there another REAL file somewhere else?

(BTW the CMD in this file runs and installs the 7/23 .Net updates for Net 4.6 for x32 and Net 4.7 for x64; does it do something else I should worry about?)

Thanks.

Thanks for your response.

Sorry if it seemed like I was blaming Macrium; not my intent.

I was looking for just that kind of suggestion you made (to check the media — although there are many good images on it), but also trying to understand the Macrium process too.

My thought being that the verification right after the imaging is an integrity check of what has been imaged, and if the verification passes, I thought Macrium would be happy with the image file.

But then immediately using Macrium to get ready to get ready to restore and there seems to be something wrong with the integrity of something just verified puzzles me, and I don’t have an explanation for it in how that might happen — unless the image is not really “closed” and then “reopened” for verification? And then gets really closed once the verification happens?

I will check the external drive, but it is still puzzling to me. [It is also a dedicated BU drive; and as you experienced, Macrium can indicate a verification error too — but then you know something is amiss. Verifying successfully and then indicating a different kind of error is still puzzling.]

Chris

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DriftyDonN

abbodi’s suspicion that 0patch had a tie in to the script erroring out was right on.

I circled back (out of curiosity) and put the ini file back in with the cmd script, and with 0patch now fixed (according to the link posted above from 0patch.zendesk), the script runs through to asking to proceed or exit, which is past where the problem was occuring.

You are truly a wizard, sir!

Thanks for all you do.

Chris

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davinci953, abbodi86, jburk07