Replies

Fred Langa, who by the way I highly respect, writes in his article “Protecting your backup files from ransomware / Win10 file-management best practice?”
I quote:[INDENT]In short: Even though Windows still allows you to separate the OS and your user files, there’s really no longer any reason to do so.[/INDENT]

“… any reason …”? I beg to differ.

I know YMMV! Here is my personal reason to have data not only in a separate partition but even on a separate distinct disk drive…

I’m with eikelein here! I have ~1 TB of images in my Pictures folder. With a system that contains 500GB of SSD and 4TB of SSHD storage, Fred’s advice doesn’t work well for me. On the other hand, moving the Users folder to SSHD drives works quite well. I recognize that the danger of ransom-ware is still there, and wonder how to manage protection in a continuous backup scenario? Fred, what’s your advice for this configuration?

Fred,

Thanks for another highly useful column. I’ve used both VMWare Player (free) and VirtualBox (open source). From my perspective, VB has it all over VMWare Player. I run a mix of various Windows platforms, and multiple copies of Ubuntu in support of my work (and play). Kudos to you for the article and to Oracle for a superior solution.

DVH

I’ll chime in again; there’s now another strong reason for migration to Win 10 — that is the enhanced BitLocker capability described in today’s WS article about BitLocker. I do hope that folks on this thread will get some indication that the VSS issues is fixed; that will definitly trigger an upgrade for me and the computers I manage.

DVH

Please keep this thread going! I was going to tell Fred that his article has finally given me the needed “smoking gun” to trigger migration to Win 10. This thread put a block on that until the VSS issue is fixed. Then it will be time to migrate. Until then, I’ll happily stay with Win 7; thanks be that I avoided Win 8 / 8.1, except for trial VMs (and thanks to VMWare for their free tools — they rock!).

DVH

LANGALIST PLUS

Strange PC behavior leads a reader to believe that someone is siphoning his data…

Fred, I like your reply, but it may be a bit round-about. A network monitoring tool could give a direct indication of the source / sink of the data stream involved. Perhaps it would be worth a few words on / reference to prior mention of such tools.

Thanks for your columns; they are always insightful, useful, and even sometimes entertaining. KUTGW!

D. Hirst

Nice article, very useful and I hope it will spark further discussion of this topic.

If any of my fellow readers have ideas or suggestions about a good, basic introduction to OneNote, beyond your article, I hope they’ll reply here with links (TIA).

BTW, the (more info) link reference following 3DES is not active. Wikipedia, as usual, has a reasonable intro to the topic. Also, a link from the AES-256 reference to the Wikipedia article about AES would be nice.

DvH

Hello all,

I’m supporting some Seniors at the local CCRC, and wanted to be able to give them access to the legacy MS Windows XP games (Solitare, Spider Solitare, MineSweeper, Hearts, Freecell, Pinball). Fortunately, another party on this board has provided excellent advice, follow the link below to see it.

This worked for Windows 7… I have no idea whether it will also work for Windows 8.1… (See the link, details remove by DVH) Hope this helps…

Rick, thanks for your post. I went fosicking through old files and found all the files and folders you mention (including all the .chm help files); put them into a Windows XP Games folder in an old Windows XP VM I had in my Virtual Machines folder, and tried them out in XP — they all worked (surprise). Then, I copied that folder into the Windows NT folder in Win 8.1 (current update level) and Win10 Build 10074, up-to-date. In both OSs the legacy MS Windows XP games worked just fine. So have at it folks!

DVHirst

SCP: Win7SP1 64bit; Mobo: ASUS Crosshair IV Formula Rev 1.02G; BIOS: American Megatrends Inc. V1005 08/06/2010; CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 965 C3 BE, 3.95 GHz; RAM: Corsair Dominator DDR3, 16 GB (4 x 4 GB); SATA III SSD: 1 x OCZ Vertex 4 240 GB; SATA III HDD: 1 x Seagate 2 TB HSSD, 2 x WD 500 GB, 1 x Seagate 300 GB, 2 x Seagate Replica 2TB USB3 (Automatic backup); ODD: 1 x Plextor SATA DVD RW, 1 x ASUS BRDVD RW; VGA: ASUS EN6600TD PCIe; PSU: ePower Tiger 550w; Case: Eagle Tech-Skyhawk Server; Cooling: CPU-stock; 2 case fans.

Just to add my $0.02; I tried updating the 0049 version Tech Preview or some such that I had running in VMware Player; it failed. So I updated VMWare Player to 6.0.6 (the latest release), downloaded the Build 10074 ISO and used that to put together a from scratch Win10 VM. It booted nicely and seems to play nice with the VMWPlayer software. I was able to install the latest version of VMWare Tools, and also had MS Office 365 install nicely. All seems to work pretty well. I tried Edge but haven’t used it enough to really comment.

I’m supporting some Seniors at the local CCRC, and wanted to be able to give them access to the legacy MS Windows XP games. Fortunately, another party on this board has provided excellent advice. Here are my results:

I have no idea whether it will also work for Windows 8.1…

Rick, thanks for your post. I went fosicking through old files and found all the files and folders you mention; put them into a Windows XP Games folder in an old Windows XP VM I had in my Virtual Machines folder, and tried them out in XP — they all worked (surprise). Then, I copied that folder into the Windows NT folder in Win 8.1 (current update level) and Win10 Build 10074, up-to-date. In both OSs the legacy MS Windows XP games worked just fine. So have at it folks!

DVHirst

SCP: Win7SP1 64bit; Mobo: ASUS Crosshair IV Formula Rev 1.02G; BIOS: American Megatrends Inc. V1005 08/06/2010; CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 965 C3 BE, 3.95 GHz; RAM: Corsair Dominator DDR3, 16 GB (4 x 4 GB); SATA III SSD: 1 x OCZ Vertex 4 240 GB; SATA III HDD: 1 x Seagate 2 TB HSSD, 2 x WD 500 GB, 1 x Seagate 300 GB, 2 x Seagate Replica 2TB USB3 (Automatic backup); ODD: 1 x Plextor SATA DVD RW, 1 x ASUS BRDVD RW; VGA: ASUS EN6600TD PCIe; PSU: ePower Tiger 550w; Case: Eagle Tech-Skyhawk Server; Cooling: CPU-stock; 2 case fans.

This is a very helpful article; thanks. I’ve run into similar failure issues with both WD and Seagate external drives. My data is critical and I feel strongly that I can not depend on a single device as backup. My approach is to run three independent 2 – 3 TB external USB3 drives that provide continuous backup service using Seagate Replica. At any given time, two of the devices are online on my PC and the other one is at my Bank in a safe deposit box. I recently had one device fail, but the other two continued to run, so I just replaced the failed unit under warranty from Seagate and continued to operate normally. With each device costing on the order of $100.00 to $150.00 — this seems like very inexpensive insurance. And, thanks to DrRon, I’ll soon have HD Sentinel running to keep continuous track of HD health across the 14 HD drives I have running in my various systems.

Thanks, again, SpywareDr,

I tried this once on my main machine and it didn’t work — there must be some internal temporary storage for the dl material; both the 8 & 8.1 setup routines produced the same ISO image. I tried a second time on my laptop system, and it worked just fine there, just be sure to follow the directions closely, and don’t do any renaming of the ISO image file until everything is done. Now to get 8.1 up and running in VMware Player…

Regards,

DVHirst

Fred, many thanks for a very timely and topical article on XP Mode in Win 7 / 8. I’m using it on a laptop and can’t afford the hard drive space utilization; now I have a workable way to control it and several viable alternatives. Very nice, very much appreciated. Keep up the good work!

Regards,

Don Hirst

Hi, I’m reading your articles on Office 2013 / Office 365 and find them very helpful. I did run into a broken link for the Office 365 Fact Sheet mentioned just above the section labeled: What you can do better with Office 365…

The mentioned fact sheet is available at:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/1/C/31C25106-8C99-4B1E-8D24-EC8DE2EFB18D/Office365FactSheet.docx

Thanks,

Don

Hi,

Another way to do this is to work directly in your favorite word processor:
1. Create your form.
2. Do a screen shot of it, complete.
3. Paste the image into your form template.
4. Move the image to the back, (format image, wrapping, behind text).
5. Set margins and tabstops to line up form entry points.
6. Save the template.
7. Provide the template to users to complete.

Hope this helps.

DVH

Windows 7 SP1 Compatibilty Issue

I have a cautionary note for those who have a specific configuration, similar to mine…

I recently acquired a new laptop (Lenovo TP x220T) that came with Win7 Pro (SP1) installed. When I tried to install MS Streets & Trips 2011 (ST11) on it I ran into a problem — After a seemingly normal installation, ST11 will not load, it hangs with the splash screen showing. Several sessions with MS Support resulted in identification of a compatibility problem between SP1 and ST11. The sticky point comes when trying to uninstall SP1, it is not possible to remove it in this case because the original Win7 Pro (SP1) install was from an integrated source. So, I am unable to use ST11 on my laptop, and I am unable to remove SP1. This seems a good reason to delay installing SP1 on my other Win7 systems, at least until MS provides a fix for this compatibility problem… The indication from MS was that this problem is fairly widespread, unfortunately. Perhaps that will hasten the development of a fix for this issue. YMMV.

This week’s (paid) column gives inconsistent advice about Windows 7 SP1. Susan, you say hold off; Fred says go ahead. Which is it? Or does that depend on the type of installation? I’d guess that it does, and wish that you could spell that out in an upcoming column. Thanks.

BTW, I depend strongly on your advice and “how-to” articles for my own systems, and frequently reference them in classes that I teach locally. Thanks for all the good work.

Don from Eugene, OR.