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To personal experience, optical drives (CD/DVD, at minimum) are some of the least durable devices of the last 50 years — and I go back to removable disk packs and vacuum channel tape drives.  As a PC desktop admin, audiophile, and engineer I’ve lost count how many CD/DVD drives and players have failed in service and required replacement.

Anyway, that’s my rant.

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Will Fastie

As an old Ada programmer, I’m happy to see it made the list of memory-safe coding tools.

There are several big problems with languages like “C”, but here are three:
1.  “C” is terse, and can be inscrutable, to the point that one periodical used to run “C” brain teasers: I.e., What does this “C” expression actually do?
2.  The language is not hard typed; programs are typically compiled without running any compile-time checks — to say nothing of the language having any built-in run-time checks.  The programmer assigned a 64-bit floating point variable to an 8-bit integer variable?  Or writes past the end of an array?  S/he meant that.
3. Uninitialized variables can be used in expressions.  Particularly bad if the uninitialized variable is a pointer.

One coworker I knew told me he once worked on a NASA-funded project to program two industrial robots, one in “C”, the other in Ada.  He said that they would routinely enter the operating envelope of the Ada robot while it was powered.  The “C” robot?  Never.

Never mind.  I figured it out.  Use the IPV6 configuration box accessible from the Control Panel’s  “Internet and Sharing Center” instead of the Windows 10 Settings / Network & Internet / Ethernet / <Network Name>  page.  The latter is buggy.

 

What about setting DNS for IPV6?  For some reason my Windows 10 Pro machine won’t let me set these.

I’ve had instances where my ISP’s DNS is not responding and my PC’s DNS doesn’t fail over to its IPV4 settings.

Thoughts?

I recently purchased a Windows 11 business-grade desktop PC from HP.  It came with a 3-year subscription to HP Wolf Security.  Does anyone here — particularly from a corporate IT desktop administration community — have an opinion about it?

Yes, thank you.  Good clarification.

 

To bypass the “mandatory” Microsoft account, you can also choose “work or school” instead of an “individual” account, then enter local credentials.

Anyway, that worked for me.

I took the Black Friday temptation and ordered a desktop replacement…

Old PC (Windows 10 Pro):
* W11-ineligible Kaby Lake i5 processor
* 8 GB RAM
* SATA HDD
* No M.2 SSD slots.
* Overall, the machine has grown quite slow.

New PC (Windows 11 Pro):
* Business-grade mini PC with i5 processor
* 32 GB RAM
* M.2 SSD
* Purchase price (about $900) is 63 percent discount from full retail.

Reasoning:
Old PC needs more RAM, SSD to replace HDD, and once upgraded it would still be technically ineligible. Towards next October market demand will probably increase, plus Trump threatens tariffs on imports.

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rc primak

I have a 2011 vintage HP ProBook 6460b laptop.  HP’s support for this device ended with Windows 8.1.

I retired it from regular use in 2020, then upgraded it to Windows 10 and use it for a media PC.    It is unsupported by Microsoft for upgrade to Windows 11 (old CPU, TPM 1.2, Secure Boot missing), but rather than scrap it I wanted to see if I could force it and get some more use out of it.  Here’s what worked for me.  Windows 11 Pro 24H2, FWIW.

Things you need:
• (1) USB flash drive, minimum 8 GB, to host the Windows 11 ISO to be installed.
• (1) USB drive or flash drive, large enough to hold an image backup of your notebook’s bootable drive.
• Image backup software. I used the free Acronis True Image that Crucial provides for its SSD customers (free download, but only runs if you have a Crucial SSD).
• (1) A bootable DVD or bootable USB flash drive, loaded with your backup software’s disk restoration executable – in case you need to restore your notebook to its starting state.
• A copy of Rufus (free download).
• A copy of the Windows 11 ISO file from Microsoft (free download).
• Optional: A copy of the MiniTool Partition Wizard (free download).

Steps:
1. Download and install Rufus.
2. Download the Windows 11 ISO from Microsoft.
3. Use Rufus to load the Windows 11 ISO onto the 8 GB flash drive. Choose either GPT or MBR, whichever way your notebook presently boots. Check all the overrides for the features your notebook lacks (CPU, memory, Secure Boot, TPM 2.0, etc.). If you want a local account instead of a Microsoft account, specify that also.
4. Make a full image backup of your notebook’s bootable drive, just in case you need to restore everything.
5. Insert the 8 GB USB flash drive.
6. Open File Explorer and navigate to the root of the 8 GB flash drive.
7. Run (execute) the Setup.exe file. Windows 11 installs.

Notes:
1. Rufus instructions state to insert the 8 GB USB drive and then to boot from it. This isn’t strictly necessary – you can also run its Setup.exe on the flash drive file from within Windows 10, instead.
2. The HP ProBook 6460b has limited UEFI capability.  It can boot UEFI / GPT from the SSD, but cannot so boot from a USB GPT flash drive.
3. I changed my notebook’s BIOS boot settings from BIOS / MBR to UEFI / GPT, then wiped all my SSD drive partitions, then reinstalled Windows 10 prior to attempting to install Windows 11, just to ensure that my notebook would successfully boot UEFI / GPT before I proceeded further. (This was also where I discovered that I couldn’t boot a UEFI / GPT USB flash drive to start the Windows 11 install.)
4. In Windows 10, the default size for the WinRE recovery partition is too small to allow the installation of the WinRE security patch. After reinstalling Windows 10 I used the MiniTool Partition Wizard to reduce the C: volume partition and to increase the WinRE partition to 750 MB.

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Kathy Stevens

This is a lot of good information, but where I always get lost is in cable selection for a given host/peripheral pair. Especially, in considering the current handling capacities of all three devices (host, cable, peripheral). I wouldn’t want to fry a laptop USB port by connecting a device that draws too much current — for an extreme example, charging a lithium ion battery pack.

Thoughts?

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rick41

If your computer motherboard lacks a TPM chip (and hence, lacks TPM-based drive encryption), then the issue is moot, whatever Intel CPU and UEFI firmware is in your computer.

If I understand the issue correctly, there’s a flaw in the Phoenix SecureCore TPM handler that is a component of *some* UEFI firmware, and Lenovo has been up front about the presence of this flaw in some of their computer models.  Other computer manufacturers have been silent on this issue.

FWIW, hp’s BIOS release notes will list several included components (Intel vBIOS, Intel/Realtek PXE ROM, etc.) and their firmware versions, but there’s no mention of Phoenix SecureCore.  It may be that hp wrote their own TPM UEFI handler, and the Phoenix CVE does not apply.

Be cautious about leaving lithium ion batteries, or equipment with such batteries embedded, in a hot car.  A few years back, a photo of a car with an incinerated dashboard circulated — the owner had left his cell phone in its dash mount while at work.  The location was Ridgecrest, California.  July and August daytime temperatures there commonly exceed 100 F / 38 C.

If anyone here determines a means to display the TPM controller firmware maker (Phoenix Technologies?) and firmware version embedded in hp’s BIOS, please advise.

Processor here is Whiskey Lake (derivative of Coffee Lake, and Windows 11 suitable), TPM is 2.0, most recent BIOS is hp-branded and dated 4/12/2024.

hp does not mention CVE-2024-0762 anywhere on its web site or in BIOS release notes.

Many moons ago, I purchased a Microsoft USB mouse at Fry Electronics for my home PC.  I expected the premium price for the recognized brand would also bring with it quality and reliability.

After a couple of months, the mouse failed.  OK, I figured it was just my bad luck.  Back to Fry’s, I bought a second.  It failed, too, and in the same way.

I’ve had a rather jaundiced view of Microsoft hardware products ever since. The media stories about Surface product defects in the years since have only reinforced this view.

I currently drive a logitech M535 wireless mouse and a Cherry keyboard, connected to an hp business class laptop.  I have no complaints with these brands.