Replies

I feel like Windows Secrets should focus on more productive topics, rather than creating ‘hacks’ on computers to bypass security. Just my opinion.

All, in case anyone wants to know “the rest of the story” as a follow-up to the question about doing a clean install of Win10 to a newly purchased SSD, here it is:

First, I did an in-place upgrade to Windows 10 from Windows 8.1. Before doing so, I did indeed note my Windows product and licensing keys. After upgrading, but before setting up my new SSD, I learned that for Windows to properly maintain SSDs, I needed to enable AHCI in my BIOS. I did this without first making sure I had installed AHCI drivers in Windows, so of course, I couldn’t boot. I switched AHCI off again, but for whatever reason, at that point my main board died. (I swapped out RAM and power supplies to test, but yes, the main board gave up the ghost.)

I replaced the motherboard with a new one that was compatible with the CPU from the old board, installed the SSD, and performed a clean install of Windows 10 onto it, but I could never get Windows 10 to activate, even calling Microsoft on the phone with the license keys I had noted. What I learned is, that Windows OEM licensing (since Win8?) is tied to the main board. I had not noticed before, but unlike my previous computers with Windows OEM license key stickers on them, my Windows 8 (Acer OEM) computer did not have such a sticker. I surmise that when Windows8+ is activated, it phones home to Microsoft and ties the license key to the main board hardware. I’m sure it’s more complicated than this, but the short of it is, if your main board dies, so does your OEM Windows license. It would be up to the consumer to work with the OEM to address hardware failures (under warranty or not) and then get OEM Windows install media (or recovery partition?) from them to recover the OS. (This would not be true, of course, of a retail copy of Windows.)

At that point, I gave up. My in-laws had a Windows 7 computer that they weren’t using, which I bought from them. I immediately installed my SSD in it, did a clean install of Windows 10, and activated it just by typing in the Windows 7 OEM license key off the side of the unit.

One free app I would add to the list: Secunia PSI. Helps me know when I have an application that is vulnerable, out-of-date, or end-of-life.

I think it is to Irfanview’s great credit that it would even be compared to Adobe Photoshop. Does everyone realize that Irfanview is 100% freeware, and Adobe Photoshop costs like $1000?
I have been using Irfanview since before it had the “Save for Web…” plugin. Thanks to this article, it might be time for me to learn more about what it can do.
When I want to reduce the file size of a picture, JPEG compression can’t be beat. But for screenshots or other images when I don’t want any JPEG artifacts, halos, or blurring, I save in PNG format as follows:
Open image in Irfanview, choose Image > Decrease Color Depth, Uncheck ‘Use Floyd-Steinberg dithering’, check ‘Use best color quality’ and then custom limit the number of colors to as few as possible without negatively affecting the quality of the image. Sometimes I have to undo a few times and increase the number of colors. Most of the time 16 colors is sufficient, which allows it to be a 4-bit image. Anything over 16 requires it to be an 8-bit image. And over 256 colors requires a 16 or more bit image. I’m not an expert, but what I think this means is that for every pixel in your image, you need that many bits to store the number of possible colors that pixel might be. Of course, this is bitmap (BMP) image logic, and there is further compression done after that, but still, starting small only makes it possible to get smaller after compression.

Next, I “Save as…” the image and choose the PNG format, and make sure the Compression Level is set to 9 (maximum) [Note: PNG compression has no effect on image quality] and that the ‘Use PNGOUT plugin’ box is checked.

Irfanview is so versatile, and yet lightweight and fast. Did I mention its freeware? The only wish I have for Irfanview is the ability to record macros or customize menu keyboard shortcuts.

I really miss Windows 7’s “Previous Versions” file option. I could right click on any file or any directory, choose properties, and one of the tabs would be “Previous Versions,” where I could restore any version of a file or directory for as far back as snapshots/shadow copies were available. Of course, this required the “System Restore” be turned on for the volume where those files were stored. But I think in taking away that option Microsoft has made a step backwards. It’s harder for me to recover previous versions of files in Windows 8.

I haven’t tried “POKKI,” but I have tried the open source Classic Shell. I agree; I could not use Windows 8 without one of these “Start Menu Restore” utilities.

Many thanks to Woody for this excellent article! I love reading the blow-by-blow account of someone professional and knowledgeable interacting with these scammers. And I learned a new word in the process: bustard!
Best regards.

I’ve been using VBA and it’s userforms to program SQL server database apps for several years now. It’s a very powerful tool, although with the advent of Excel 2007’s and Excel 2010 took a tiny hit because it is required to use PtrSafe when using Windows API functions, which disallows callbacks. But the power is still basically there.

The key part of your question is, getting the data from your scanner to Excel in “real-time.” “Real-time” has a lot of meanings to it, but I don’t really think Excel is meant to receive data “real-time.” A hardware device connected via USB or Serial could write data at near “real-time” to a flat text file or a SQL server. But Excel shines in it’s capability of analysis. If I were you I would draw that distinction.

I think you should focus on using whatever the hardware vendor gave you to store your data on the PC, then I would code something in Excel VBA to read or parse that data into Excel for analysis and graphing.