Replies

If I hadn’t had my MBA since 2010 and learned how easy it is to deal with OS X (including an OS upgrade), I would never have thought I’d be a Mac person. I also still have two Win 7 Pro systems to deal with — a 32-bit laptop plus The Hub’s Dell Optiplex, 64 bit. The concept still seems to elude him that quite often, individual hiccups in Windows can be resolved by the old off-on-reboot. I have yet to see that in my humble MBA. The most I’ve had to do, maybe 3-4 times in six years, is a “force quit” in some program.

I help people from my church with their PC problems. I’ve run into several Win 10 systems. The interface is quite lovely, but I know how much work it is to do a Windows upgrade and I decided to pass.

Come to think of it, my boatload of pesky problems began in earnest about two or so months ago. Hmmmm, out of control Windows Updates?
:confused:

Cheers!

Awww, thanks. I can’t abandon the beloved Windows Secrets! I’ll be lurking around …

Hi everyone!

I use StorageCraft ShadowProtect for Desktop https://www.storagecraft.com/products/shadowprotect to back up incrementally every 6 hours; early Monday mornings are full backups of my 2 hard drives. I’m very careful to be able to undo/reverse any damage Windows Update does to my Win 7 Pro system. However, in the past couple of months I’ve had Outlook get thrashed, my video card driver keeps crashing and recovering, some of my Firefox addons have caused odd things to happen, and I keep losing some setting that tells Windows my networked printer is online — my Windows thinks it’s offline; my usual remedy of powering everything down, draining the power on the PC, rebooting — well, lucky me, it no longer resolves my printer problem. Currently I have to send an e-mail to my husband sitting 4 feet from me, and he prints my documents. At one point I somehow “lost” not only the Windows Update capability, but the update logs that indicated what fixes I had been installing since 2012. After searching dozens and dozens of web sites explaining how to fix “Windows Update,” I worked on that problem for an entire week. I’m finally fed up with all of the tweaks, anti-this-program, anti-that-program, updates, rollbacks, reboots, system restores, boot-from-CD and restore entire C: drive using ShadowProtect … you know what I mean about the endless fiddling when running Windows. And thank goodness for ShadowProtect and the ability to boot from their CD and recover files and/or entire disks. I’ve been forced to do it many times.

I have a brand new shiny high end iMac that I’ve been working on to get all of my programs installed. I don’t need an iMac — my Dell Optiplex 990 is a zippy 64-bit multiprocessor PC, 2 256GB SSDs, 16GB memory, a zillion ports to attach devices, separate video card, lovely 24″ monitor, back-lit gaming keyboard, 4TB external hard drive for my backups. Oh, I do love my Dell.

But I finally reached the point of realizing I’m spending waaaay too much time debugging fixes, patches, updates, etc. and it really isn’t worth it to me. I already have a MacBook Air, so I’m familiar with some niceties that I may lack on the iMac. But if I search long enough, I can generally find equivalent programs that were built for the Mac (I will especially miss MailWasher Pro and UBitMenu for Word). Too bad the iMac didn’t come with more USB 3 ports, but the trade-off is worth my sanity.

Will I miss Windows? NO. Will I miss my Dell? Yes. Will I forestall a heart attack from aggravation caused by endless Windows/Firefox/Microsoft problems? Likely.

I got my first ever e-mail from Gibson Research (Steve Gibson) about this. I shall quote:

Web browsers are growing insanely complex. It’s pretty clear that they will be our next-generation operating platforms. And as the last annual “Pwn2Own” contest showed, none of them can currently withstand the focused attention of skilled and determined attackers, especially when some prize money is dangled on the other side of the finish line.

With most recent exploits, the path to exploitation is convoluted and complex. In this case it depends upon somehow encountering malicious Web content with IE’s ActiveScripting enabled, which loads an Adobe SWF (Shockwave FLASH) file which, in turn, uses JavaScript in this vulnerable version of IE (presently all versions of IE). But it does this via an obscure and readily disabled VML (Vector Markup Language) rendering extension.

Thus, to immediately protect any use of Internet Explorer – yes, even on creaky old WinXP (the XPocalypse has been delayed) – simply execute the following incantation using either a Windows Command Prompt or the “Run…” dialog under the Start button (if you’re lucky
enough to still have one on your Windows desktop):

regsvr32 -u “%CommonProgramFiles%Microsoft SharedVGXvgx.dll”

This unregisters (-u) the VML renderer, thus rendering it inaccessible to the exploit attempt. Your IE browser will no longer be able to render vector markup language content… but it probably never did before, anyway.
/Steve.

For 64-bit Windows:
regsvr32 -u “%CommonProgramFiles(x86)%Microsoft SharedVGXvgx.dll”

Make sure you include the end double-quote when doing the command. I haven’t seen any problems using IE (v. 11) since doing this on all 5 PCs I own.

My husband was the data center manager for a mid-sized California county in the 1990s and early 2000s. We had a large room of UPS batteries, an underground diesel fuel supply, the usual means of providing power during outages. His job was thankless — I wouldn’t have traded mine for his under any circumstances! Among his other duties, he had to be ready for any disaster, any time, under any conditions — loss of power, union strikes, dead mainframes and servers, printer paper that was too moist to get through the two huge IBM laser printers, the list of problems he had to deal with was endless, and it was all his responsibility. What makes a good manager is to keep testing equipment and procedures and making sure you have multiple backup avenues, and hot sites are great if the budget allows. But as the articles proved, sometimes you just have to do the best you can because there’s no way to plan for such huge disasters. It sounds like most everyone recovered, or tried, as well as they could under those circumstances.

Lessons learned? Hope for the best and plan for the worst.

Unfortunately, I believe the stress of the county job is what caused my husband to have a fatal heart attack. RIP Bob Horback.

New PC, new Win 7 Pro x64, new Outlook 2007. I use Mailwasher Pro to “wash” my e-mail from my e-mail server. I don’t keep a copy of my e-mails on the server, they all get pulled into Outlook after their wash. This started with Win 7 and Outlook 2007 (never happened with XP and Outlook 2003) — I can pull any number of messages into Outlook but the Inbox doesn’t update or show the correct number of unread e-mail messages until I read at least one of them. Then when I go back to the Inbox, the correct number of unread messages gets magically updated and displayed. The time is correct on the PC, I keep Win 7 and Office 2007 patched, so I am at a loss as to why this happens. The “view” isn’t filtered and should show all messages, I’m *not* downloading only headers, etc. (all of the suggestions from this thread). I’ve run “scanpst” several times but it doesn’t take care of the problem. It’s a small issue, but annoying! :huh:

Thanks for any more pointers,
Carole

Fred, you actually made me laugh out loud while reading about your troubles. Not that I was laughing at your problems but it’s what many of us geeks experience while fiddling. It goes to show one can never anticipate every problem that could possibly be encountered. Seriously, thanks for sharing your exploits. I especially love the pictures you provided.
— Carole

Learningstill — I simply must protest! This made me laugh so hard I fell off my chair, bumped my head, now must seek legal representation for damages sustained whilst laughing uncontrollably at your brilliance. I’ll reconsider any potential lawsuit if you’ll post another session of merriment ASAP. BTW, the 419eater.com web site also offers hours of enjoyment, as well as Mike Berry’s seminal publication “Greetings in Jesus Name!”.

I bow to your awesome telephone manners. :fanfare:

— Carole

In the old version there is the ‘bounce’ feature that allows you to bounce the email back to the spammer… I don’t think that’s in the new paid version….

Incorrect. Paid version, Mailwasher Pro, allows multiple accounts and bouncing. I use it on 4 PCs.

Hmmm, I never experienced that with GoBack. It always happily installed with every version on my SCSI drives, nary a hiccup. I got my reply from Magicure — no dice, no support for RAID-controlled drives. Bah. Don’t know what to do now except sniffle. Waaaaah!

Hey everyone, thanks for this thread, it’s very helpful. I too used to run GoBack on all my PCs and it too saved my bacon more times than I can count over many years. I still run WinXP Pro, SP3, and I have a question that hopefully someone can answer. I don’t want to purchase Norton’s Ghost nor any other typical “backup” software.

I’m very happy with my current backup solutions on 5 PCs. But I’d still like something in the genre of GoBack, which worked fine and dandy on all PCs, including my work horse that has two SCSI drives and a RAID controller. However, the controller is only due to the SCSI, and not because the drives are mirrored, striped or any of that sort. They’re SCSI because of their speed. They work and look like regular drives. I just discovered that Comodo Time Machine won’t install because it recognizes a RAID controller, nor will Rollback Rx — I tried both and they failed to install. Their FAQs also said they don’t support RAID. Now I have a question sent to support for Magicure, since I saw nothing in their FAQs about RAID.

But just in case, are there any products like GoBack that support RAID controllers and SCSI disks? I’m getting so desperate I might re-install GoBack on my main PC, although GoBack really slowed down my system.

Anyone? Please help???!!!

Thanks —
Carole

I’m a little late to the party here but there’s a nifty program from Microsoft called UVCView. Very technical but it will tell you everything about every USB port and controller on your system. The program was almost impossible to find now, but here’s the link, which I discovered after about 20 minutes of searching:
UVCView

Hope this helps someone, it sure did for me. Sorry, I can’t for the life of me remember where I found the link originally.

— Carole

I should have added something the original poster may not (or may) have considered. If you choose the right media your backups may last longer than you, but the same is not true of backup/restore software. Another discipline we old dinosaurs acquired during mainframe days was periodically checking our old backups with current versions of the restoring software. You’d be surprised that few people read the fine print in the newest-greatest-most-wonderful-version-ever of their backup/restore software. Many times it’s only backward compatible by one or two versions. Beyond that, you may be out of luck and nobody will be able to read or restore your backups, no matter how well preserved they are.

Reap some lessons from solid I.T./I.S. experience and always use your current software to make newer copies of your older backup media. Externally label your backups with the company, name and version of the software in addition to the dates of backups. Never assume that one backup is adequate — your media can always fail for one reason or another. If this is critical data, always make two copies and store them in separate locations. If it can go wrong, it will.

Now you know what I do, and I spent 40+ years learning it the hard way!

Magnetic tape is the gold standard, but it’s way too expensive for small business / home use.
cheers, Paul

Ummm, no. Not true about being the gold standard for backups. Mag tapes deteriorate over time and the magnetic iron oxide coating can actually flake off or wear thin, rendering the media useless. It’s why we who were in the mainframe and server management business for decades always knew to throw out tapes that were more than two years old. Better safe than find you have (literally) flaky spots on your tapes. What to do then when you discover your backups are unreadable? Update your resume and look for a new job!

You are exactly right that test restores are part of any good backup strategy. This is true for two reasons, When you are under the stress of losing a machine and needing to get it up and running is not the time to be “learning” how to do a restore. The other reason is that there is a chance that a good image will not restore.

I couldn’t agree with you more, which is why I tossed out Acronis when their tech support dinked around for three weeks, trying to figure out why I wasn’t able to do a bare metal restore of my WinXP system. Acronis may be fine with simple PC configs but if you have a complex system (I do) then it does a very poor job of a full system restore, if you can manage one at all. After three weeks of going back and forth with their TS (this was a test run to see how well their bare metal restore did), I finally thanked them for their time, cut my losses and chucked the brand new software. Ended up going with Storagecraft’s ShadowProtect Desktop Edition, although it doesn’t provide all the functions the first poster needs. They do have other more robust offerings for backups but I’m guessing those would be pricey. Here’s their web site, in case anyone is interested:
Storagecraft
I have had to do three standalone system restores on two PCs and all worked flawlessly. I have no financial involvement with the company but it’s great to have reliable backup software I don’t need to babysit.