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Yeah, looks like the same setting.

Then again, “working” is not the same as “legal” in this case. Passing activation doesn’t guarantee that you’re legal, just as failing activation doesn’t necessarily mean you aren’t…

In case of Windows 7, there are different kinds of “OEM” licenses, some of which apparently do allow virtualization. You need to pay specific attention to your purchase paperwork, the license sticker doesn’t usually tell you which one it is. (C-OEM is apparently one which would allow…)

And then it might also depend on local laws. That’ll be a fun one.

 

There are a number of possible ways to move an installation to a VM, some of them are more of a bother than others.

Interestingly enough, going from a dual-boot Linux/Windows system to a Windows guest on Linux host doesn’t even require copying the Windows partition to a virtual disk. I have one such at home – the Windows VM uses the former dual-boot Windows partition directly. Yes, it did need a “repair installation” step and a reactivation when I did that. It’s a Retail W7 Pro, the hardware did have an OEM Vista license but…

I wonder if this problem is shared by all SMT architectures or just the “full 2-way” ones … AMD Bulldozer is a partial SMT, IBM POWER7 is 4-way, current Oracle SPARC is some weird 8/2 hybrid…

Also I wouldn’t consider this general category of vulnerability very surprising after Colin Percival’s paper in BSDCan 2005… anyone else?

Hm, yeah, nothing about encrypted disks in there. Nowadays that should mean that at least BitLocker with a recovery key should be supported, right?

I do find it remarkable that to fulfill the promise of “all Windows computers from 1998 until today”, this would have to be a multi-architecture boot stick, x86/amd64/Itanium/Alpha/PReP/MIPS/Arm at the very least. (NT 3.51 on Clipper and SPARC was apparently dead by 1998? PC-9821 may be close enough to x86?)

I mean, was about 2006 when I had to do data recovery on an Alpha workstation… and not sure if the PReP box with an USB slot could even boot from the USB at all, been a while.

 

Good if it works, but I sort of expect that it’s mostly just the most common 99.999% of systems that this thing works on. I mean, just all the different kinds of RAID adapters that you can find in the odd server… even in small businesses that can be stingy about paying for recovery, and since there was nothing about excluding servers…

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johnf

Well, it’s not impossible that a wrongly reported temperature would cause thermal throttling… but this feels sort of unlikely here too, because in that case why would it wait for a couple of days?

Linux on a Chromebook is actually a fairly good idea, too.

Then there are the “light” Windows systems that can’t actually run Windows properly, like that one thing my sister bought once… apparently about the only thing it runs sort of sensibly is GalliumOS (the Linux distro that’s focused on Chromebook hardware).

Otherwise would be entirely typical for a heat management problem except that those usually show up a lot quicker after a reboot. As in, hours at most.

Dust is just the most common problem – I’ve seen cracked heat conductors, expired thermal paste, clogged coolant pipes and failed pumps … computer internal parts ending up in the fan blades due to heat-induced warping (on a “gaming laptop”), and an actual chip design error (a friend’s Cyrix CPU back in the late 90s).

A “power workstation”, say a HP Zsomething, may have a closed-cycle liquid cooling system for the CPU straight from the factory and may suffer a pump failure.

I actually prefer to set Windows to use UTC internally.

Less of a hassle that way, especially with NTP time sources – and possible timezone definition changes in the future, if anyone’s been watching the EU DST debate.

In addition to whatever the local rules say over there, Spectrum may have corporate-internal criteria as well. Some companies do that – I know that at least Lexmark has business-only warranty extensions for printers where they may take weeks to determine if they consider you a business or not.

 

Couldn’t otherwise know even which “Spectrum” it is, English-speaking ‘net being worldwide… but since you mention “state” I’m pretty sure that it isn’t the one in the UK, which also seems to advertise gigabit lines for consumers with extra deep pockets.

… and that’s not getting into which of the various versions can be activated how…

There’s a few possible situations where your only reasonable way of fixing things short of a wipe and reinstall is to figure out the right incantations to run with “cscript ospp.vbs”. And trying to talk a random end user through that is rarely useful.

(I mean, there’s volume-licensed Office which comes in a bunch of different packages, there’s a few different kinds of click-to-run buy-once, then there’s a few kinds of subscription click-to-run and…)

I mean, really, trying to register a Home & Business Office over something that came preloaded with a Home & Student package can be just frustrating (may pass activation but not be able to install the additional components afterwards), and it doesn’t always reliably tell you which kind it is. And that’s a fairly simple case.

The safe method is to just remove whatever the OEM preload is right away – don’t start any trial periods if possible; then register whatever it was got bought until you get a license key or a confirmation that your subscription is active, and then install whatever it’s good for. (Oh and in case of volume licensing, the registrations seem to take several days.)

… hence my sticking to an Ubuntu variant that has X by default. With all the problems that X has, it’s still the only thing that’s actually reliable… as of right now. Hopefully Wayland will get there eventually but we’ll probably need at least an X compatibility layer for decades still.

(BTW, all those “fundamental security problems” that X has, compared to Wayland… most of them I’ve seen occur on Windows 10 too, at some point or another with all the updating hassles and library conflicts with display drivers… including the one where the screensaver fails to cover the entire screen.)

For the ornery HDD, unless the drive is badly broken and in some cases even if it is… what I’ve found to work best is a Linux boot media and a larger temporary/spare disk formatted to take very large files.

Read the misbehaving disk with “dd if=/dev/disk/<your disk> of=<./whatever>.img conv=noerror bs=<sector size if known or 512 if unknown>” and then work on a copy of the image – or write it back to a known-good disk that’s at least as large as the original. (There are also tools to convert it to a .vhd or .vhdx if you’re so inclined.) As a side-effect, you also now have a kind of image backup of the disk in its current state…

If you do this and write back to a good disk, remember to only have one of the disks at a time attached to the computer when using Windows or it’ll think they’re the same disk, which usually causes problems.

There have been times when the problem was in the NTFS metadata structures and not a physical problem on the disk, though. (You’ll know it’s this if the same problem occurs also in the image or after writing back to the known-good disk.) If it’s that, the only practical way is to back up all data, wipe the disk and reformat (not quick format!)/reinstall/restore, but these are fortunately quite rare nowadays.

 

(And then there was the time when a disk had garbled SCSI metadata, but that’s a whole another bucket of by now quite outdated weirdness.)

Was apparently fixed for at least our two affected users, yes.

Actually, it’s not quite 100% that Mac upgrades are trouble-free. Merely almost always.

After all, I did once manage to end up with an unbootable Mac – it had been used to test a little-known third-party full-disk encryption product that turned out to be incompatible with the new version.

Well, IBM was already pretty good with desktop Linux, back before they sold the PC side to Lenovo.

There’s definitely potential here, remains to be seen where it’ll go…

Government contracts pretty much everywhere would be a pretty good bet though. IBM still has a worldwide service organization…

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Ascaris