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/Snip… I hated it when I first got it and I hate it still. I don’t like the fact that the MENUS SHOUT OUT AT YOU in their large capital letters,

For the menus capitalizations (I assume you’re referring to the Ribbon Tab Labels), you can change this too.

[*]Right Mouse Button (RMB) click on a Ribbon TAB and select Customize the Ribbon…
[*]On the Main Tabs box, RMB click on the name of the tab you want to change, for example “Home” (ironically it’s spelled in mixed case here but presented in Uppercase on the tab)
[*]Rename the tab to something else – in whatever case-mix you want. So long as it’s not a default tab name. For example I renamed it from “Home” to “Home.” (with the period)
[*]Click OK to save and see the change.
[*]Do the same for the other tabs you might want to change. Just remember if you use an exact default name you get the all-capitalization back. If you change it a bit, you get your own capitalization.

hth some more.
Paul

/Snip
In Access and Excel using the Format Painter does not always work first time. Because it takes up so much space I normally have the ribbon hidden. I select the item I want whose format I want to copy, click on the HOME ribbon, select Format Painter then the icon should change so that when I click on another cell / control the formatting of the source object is copied into the target. This doesn’t work. First I have to click again to re-hide the ribbon before the Format Painter becomes active. This never happened in previous versions.

For the format painter, have you tried Ctrl+Shift+C keyboard shortcut method? Put your cursor inside the text you want to copy the formatting from (that is, click your left mouse button there) and then press Ctrl+Shift+C. Then select/highlight the text you want to paste the formatting to and press Ctrl+Shift+V to paste the formatting. You can paste the same formatting repeatedly to other places too without having to re-copy it.
hth a bit.
Paul

A system image will restore whatever it was that broke the system in the first place, won’t it? It usually takes a while to recognise there’s a problem and that allows time to make a system image of the faulty system. Of course, if your machine does die and you have a system image from before that point (and data backups – which should be done at least daily or in the cloud), you’re good for a restore at that point. Not everyone is so lucky.

I’ve just tried the refresh myself (I decrypted the machine first just in case). It has meant almost a total reinstall and reconfiguration of all third party Windows desktop programs. Only the native Metro apps remained, which I couldn’t be bothered using as they’ve mostly (over 90%) rubbish anyway. My system is a Lenovo Twist, and it had a factory-installed copy of Office 2010 trial, but even that was not restored. My Office 2013 Pro (free upgrade fro Office 2010 Pro at the time) was also removed. Sure it kept the .pst files, but the rest of it got suckered out. Had to do a complete reconfig of my 5 mailboxes and signatures for each (I had backups of the siggy data). The refresh was just one step less than a nuclear blast, with similar fallout. It would’ve been interesting if the article had a copy of the uninstalled programs list… I’ve added mine here for your info… (slightly edited)

Thanks for the interesting article. Can I do this refresh process on an encrypted system (Bitlocker full disk encryption on my system). My PC’s been slowing down lately and I don’t know why but it’s not bitlocker because it was running fine after that was installed.
Paul

LastPass is good for the web, however I prefer to use SplashID, which locally encrypts my PW vault.

can this process be used on systems encrypted with BitLocker or does it have to be decrypted first?

The only reason I got Office 2013 Pro in the first place was that it was a Free upgrade to Office 2010 Pro that came with a new PC. So I took them up on it and figured I’d regress to 2010 if I had to change machines. It’s good to see some sanity in this space, because I change machines every 12 months or so. Sometimes MS can be incredibly stupid, like removing the Start orb from the desktop in Win 8 and forcing all users on to the Start screen at startup. It’d be understandable on a Win 8 RT tablet, but it’s DUMB on Win 8 Pro.

On most occasions when disposing of drives, it is because the drive is broken. I usually drill two or three holes through the drive before taking for recycling. That way at least some of the data is definitely destroyed.

Does anyone have a better suggestion for destroying data on a dead drive?

Drilling through an SSD won’t guarantee you hit all the chips. Even on a spinning platter drive, a lot of the data is still “readable”, but I doubt the platter would actually spin far without ripping the guts out of the r/w heads.

I have recently used TrueCrypt to encrypt my data and backup drives. I have chosen the whole disk encryption method. I feel safe with all of this information encrypted, but the price I have to pay is that standard Windows backup no longer works. The encrypted drives no longer show up as either source or destination locations for Windows backup. I have had to resort to other tools to backup like Macrium Reflect and SyncToy to make sure I have copies of my files.

I would be interested on your thoughts of strategies to backup encrypted drives.

If you use whole disk encryption on a drive from the beginning then there’s almost no need to erase the data. It should be inaccessible to a 3rd party.

My SSD drives and hybrid are WDE encrypted. I found that if I tried to use Acronis True Image Home (ATIH) 2012 to clone the drive, it totally screwed the system and it became unbootable. Boy was that fun, rebuilding my PC from scratch! Anyway, the workaround is I now use ATIH to do a continuous non-stop backup of just my data to an encrypted USB3 64 GB Sony memory stick. This is convenient and fast enough. (one gotcha though, the USB drive had to be reformatted to NTFS (was exFAT) for this to work). So I don’t spend a lot of time installing and reconfiguring my drive in the event of a failure, I first installed the operating system and all my applications to the PC then created a clone copy of that before anything confidential went on to it or encrypting it. So if I have a system crash now, I can just re-clone the non-confidential backup system drive, swap it to the PC, WDE encrypt that, and restore my encrypted data to that (maybe after applying the update patches to the system too). It’s still better than starting from scratch.
HTH somebody

it’s not all that hard, really, even on an SSD (of which I have two) – just use TruCrypt (which is free) and perform a Whole Disk Encryption (WDE) then forget about it. So long as you have a very strong passkey and so long as you shut down or hibernate the PC (not sleep) your data will be safe even if you dispose of the PC (so long as you don’t decrypt the drive first) or the drive is stolen. If the buyer does wanna reuse the HD, they (or you for them) can delete all the partitions, do a low level reformat and fix the MBR. In this case, the “blank” data is still garbled/encrypted and now unrecoverable though, even if they do try to recover it.