Replies

Thanks for all the great advice! CrystalDisk showed the Crucial SSD as 100% OK?! I’m still fooling around with DISM. If I run it under Win10 it complains of file ‘in use’ and stops. If I boot over the Win7 (it’s a dual boot system), the DISM version has no option to make an image! So back on Win10, I’m using DISM to image one major directory at a time to see if I can run down the bad culprit. Still at it. I may go back to Win7 and try xcopy on the Win10 partition files but that’s for later.

And, no, my last ‘good’ backup is gone — basically useless cuz it was from an old version of Win10.

TRIM is automatic and ON.  Looks like I’ll need a new SSD (not happy) — thought Crucial was more reliable than that!  Now all I have to do is figure out which SSD manufacturer isn’t ‘cooking the books’ with their speed numbers.

I’ve been running a great Lenovo V570 laptop with Win 7 since it was new!  Last year installed a Crucial SSD and it screams (not in pain … Joy) now!  I’m using it to control a Celestron telescope and it’s a great platform for capturing and processing astro photography (Photoshop ‘actual’ before it too became a ‘service’).

As an aside:  The laptop is a dual boot with Win 10 which I periodically update only as a substitute activity to playing games.  Also, have a Dell XPS 410 desktop running Win 8.1 (with the Classic Shell upgrade) as my main machine.  It’s also set up to dual boot Win 10 — same reason as the laptop.

Having had experience with MS since the days of MS-DOS (ow!), I learned the hard way that early adopting (ie. any time before the previous version of the OS was dead and buried) one of their creations was an invitation to Dante’s lower levels.

Rant terminus.

 

Honestly, Susan, for the life of me (literally, as I”m a dying dinosaur!), I cannot see how you can continue to recommend upgrading from Win 8.1 to Win 10 what with the ever-increasing loss of personal control over such critical elements as updates and, now, default associations.

I have two systems, one Win 7, the other Win 8.1, painstakingly “tricked out” to almost “read my (somewhat fading) mind”. Your update advisories have kept me from many a disaster and waste of my precious (old age) time. If I ever “upgrade” (hah!) at all, it will be on the secondary laptop running Win 7 and only after a full image backup has been salted away in the likely event the process puts me in the hospital and upon waking from the MS-induced coma my only (last) desire is to return to the world of my “childhood”.

Am I getting my message across?? :cheers:

What version of Scrapbook are you using? It appears that anything newer than 1.5.11.1 may not be compatible with Pale Moon.

I also found Scrapbook+, which, per their description, appears to be compatible. And it claims to be faster, etc. than Scrapbook. Any experience with this one?Harry

Harry… all I can say is, Keep Experimenting… that’s what I had to do!. I only have experience with Firefox — 13 years.

Marty

1. I wasn’t sure why you used the NoScript addon when you save these newsletters. Could you expand on that?
2. I looked at the Scrapbook website. That seems like an excellent way to accomplish the task. I read part of their User Guide, but it was not clear to me if one can Copy text from what Scrapbook saved to the Clipboard, from where it can then be pasted elsewhere.Harry

I keep NoScript ALWAYS enabled so it helps in composing a ‘clean’ web page with no extraneous detritus from unwanted links.
Scrapbook saves a ‘replica’ of the web page to your hard drive, NOT to the clipboard. When you click on the Scrapbook entry in your library, it brings up a “file:///…/index.html” entry which renders the web page just as saved. You can cut and paste from it just like any other browser page.

Hope that helps!

… I want a newsletter in my inbox that I can read at my leisure – and often OFFLINE – remember that? Reading stuff when there is no internet connection? I also like to file useful newsletters – not webpages.

A simple solution to the ads, reading a full newsletter and saving the content for future reference is Firefox and three add-ons:

+ Adblock Plus https://adblockplus.org/en/
+ NoScript https://noscript.net/
+ Scrapbook http://www.xuldev.org/scrapbook/

I’ve been using these for Windows Secrets since, oh, ’bout 2003 and have a nice, little library of all the issues since then! Not that I”m using any of the stuff on WinXP right at the moment, but… :rolleyes:

So, when I get the newsletter — click on “Click to see the full newsletter online “, login to my account — LastPass does this automatically (the whole newsletter appears), right-click and “Save Page As…” Scrapbook option to save the whole newsletter to your private library.

Cheers!

Solution: Windows Secrets = Time Warner !! :o:

Just got the TW most recent bill and after an entire page of them extolling their never-ending attention to innovation (oh, how I have grown so to hate that word!), they will be summarily hiking monthly internet rates a whopping 50%. Yes, Five-Oh per cent.

Luckily, as for WS, my subscription runs out in Jan. 2017 so I can enter rehab and go on a slow withdrawal. Have been a subscriber since 2003 (not Lifetime, though!) so I do suspect I have received my “money’s worth”.

Remember: the rich have ALWAYS run the show. We are but bit players despite all they say about the ‘customer’ coming first. First to the guillotine, methinks… :cheers:

It ‘seems’ the base subscription rate will be $25/yr. Honestly, not really happy about that. I’ve been subscribing for years at the ‘suggested contribution’ and find the content most worthwhile at that rate. Now that a ‘corporate colossus’ has the reins, I’ll probably have to continue my education elsewhere. In all candor, the only real value I found here that I couldn’t find anywhere else was Susan Bradley’s report on Windows updates to ‘avoid’ for a while. Saved me endless hours of repairs. So… if you can split her column off I’ll gladly ‘contribute’ for just that!

Susan,

Your posts are worth their weight in gold (even at the current price!)… thanks!
A question: I disabled the Diagnostic Tracking Service on my Win8.1 system but am still seeing these services running:

Diagnostic Policy Service (Running – Automatic)
Diagnostic Service Host (Running – Automatic)
Diagnostic System Host (not running – Manual)

What should be done with these services??

Marty

You mention under : Catching (and killing) a pernicious virus
“Making use of the Strings tab… You can set up process alarms…” How??
Can’t find any reference as to how to set up process alarms to monitor disk activity (or anything)?!
Can you help?

Having used TrueCrypt on an XP system I was reluctant to ‘give up without a fight’ in getting it to cooperate on my new Win 8.1 system. And guess what? It works like a champ… as long as one sticks with ONLY encrypting non-system volumes or partitions. I use both. Encrypted volumes are used mainly for removable media (USB sticks) and whole partitions can be encrypted on any hard drive. The 7zip method is OK, I guess, but it seems to be a bit labyrinthine when compared to having TrueCrypt automatically mount (after entering the password, of course) all encrypted volumes and partitions at boot time.
The instructions provided with the TrueCrypt app are perfectly adequate in setting up either scenario.