Replies

Paul,
Sorry for the wrong choice of words, i should have said router or computer lead – not sure of correct terminology.

There are two leads from the wall socket, one to the extension phone and the other which plugs into the bottom socket on the Netgear router, but I put it in one of the other four sockets, intended for connecting computers, and possibly other stuff. I run an Ethernet cable from one of these to my PC, but forgot to reconnect after closing down the PC and router. This lapse of memory was probably due to the fact I sometimes switch the Ethernet to a different socket when having connection problems, and had done so in this case.

Thanks again for your #2, which cured the M3U8 blip. Everything now working well.

George

Apologies for the delay in replying, I‘ve been without a phone line for 2 days, hence no internet.

Tuesday afternoon I opened FF and disabled Flashblock, first choice as the culprit, but that made no difference. Next was NoScript, the M3U8 message didn’t appear and the opera started playing, so I decided to check that downloads were working, but at this stage the opera froze and nothing happened. Glancing at the router the red light was on, which has been happening quite a lot recently, 6 or more times daily. Rebooting the router failed to get things working so the PC and router were shut down for a few minutes. As this proved ineffective I repeated the process, this time removing the connections to the router, which also failed.

Deciding to ring my ISP to ask if they had an outage, I discovered the phone line was dead. Using a neighbour’s phone I rang BT and was informed there was no engineer available until Thursday afternoon.

He soon found the problem. When reconnecting on Tuesday I had plugged the phone line from the wall socket in to one of the 4 extension sockets on the router, and the Ethernet cable to my PC was unconnected. I don’t understand why that should prevent the phone from functioning, but was told it created a loop and the phone line would not know where to go. I was happy to have the internet back, but annoyed with myself for making a stupid mistake costing £130. The engineer said he must have had 1,000 customers who had done the same thing. Probably a degree of hyperbole there!

Anyway the original issue is resolved, I now know I must disable Noscript when downloading video. Still open to suggestions on how to remove unwanted footage at the beginning of a download.

AFTERMATH.
Dealing with a backlog of some 100 emails became difficult on discovering that the drop-outs had become far more frequent. There were 8 between 18.25 and 19.53, usually lasting a few minutes each, but the last one lasted until 20.30, during which period PC and router were rebooted, but still failed to connect for 5 -10 minutes.

I had intended phoning BT this morning, as they had only done half of what necessary, but decided to ring my ISP first in case the problem was at their end. They tested the line, and told me meanwhile to plug the phone line into the test socket. When they rang back with the line result I was able to confirm there had been no drop-outs since making the change, and some 4 hours later still no disconnections, so hopefully everything is now OK. There said that after a major phone outage it is normal to have a lot of drop-outs for 3 -4 days, so I should leave phone extension and broadband plugged into the test socket until next week, when all should be well. Fingers crossed.

Thanks Paul.

The videos play OK in safe mode, but without extensions there’s no way to download. Tomorrow I must work out which one is causing the problem, presumably by deleting them one by one until the download functions.

I’m well and truly baffled. Yesterday, entering “October Security Only Monthly Update for Windows 8.1″ in Start /Search only found entries on my PC, all from Windows Secrets. Selecting one of the entries I came to Patch Watch, and a link to MS Catalog brought up the 4 pages of updates already mentioned.

Today, using your exact wording, again only produced files from my PC, although different from yesterday’s lot. Entering search in the browser brought more success. There were only 12 entries, all for the October Rollup, with only 2 entries for Win 8.1, KB 3185331, the only discernible difference being in size, one c 60Mb and other a lot more. Choosing the larger one, as being more complete, produced an error message. Attempts to download the other seemed to do nothing. After a while I looked in the download folder, not there, so I tried D/L History in Windows update.

I was immediately struck by the second item ‘December, 2016 Security Monthly Quality Rollup for Windows 8.1 for x64-based Systems (KB3205401) Installation date: ‎17/‎12/‎2016 Installation status: Succeeded Update type: Important.

How did that get installed? Since the change to Rollups I have set ‘do not install updates’, then when I’m ready I change that, allow a search for updates and install any approved by Susan Bradley, then change back to do not install. I installed a batch on the 17th and this must have slipped in unannounced, but it’s only supposed to be available from the catalogue.

Furthermore, I discovered the October rollup was one of four patches installed 4/11/16. Are these errors by MS, or are they determined to install the security patches whether we want them or not?

Should I give up and learn Linux?

What a rigmarole to get updates, but thanks for the help.

Your second paragraph sounds like a good idea, but after installation, how and where do you save it for possible future use?

Unfortunately not. As soon as the police hear the words ‘fraud’ or ‘scam’ they hand out a leaflet with details of how to contact Action Fraud.

Even when her bank sends round a policeman to advise her not to give money to these people, and I say we have details of the bank accounts the money has been sent to, the answer is that they will contact us if they need the information. But they never do so, especially when the bank is in Bulgaria, Cyprus or Nigeria.

In the UK, Action Fraud is the place for reporting all online scams & fraud.

Unfortunately Action Fraud is useless, all they do is issue occasional warnings about new scams. If you contact them by phone or online, the first thing you hear is that they are unable to recover money paid to fraudsters.

I speak from experience, as my wife is a serial victim, has lost all her money and obtained bank loans so as to continue paying them.

Thanks. I thought it must be that, but a strange word to use in this context.

Could somebody kindly explain to Brits such as myself, who do not speak American, what an infused app is. It’s hard to imagine pouring boiling water over a computer.

Why not uninstall Thunderbird if you choose not to use it?

If the back-up drive is connected to the PC at the time of infection it will be encrypted.

I looked at the comparison of free and paid and free doesn’t clean up all the left behind bits. COMODO Programs Manager is free and has been doing that since, I think, day 1. It has certainly been doing it for all the years since I got 64-bit computers.

Not compatible with Windows 8.1 64 bit

Both clean installs of Win7 resulted in IE8 w/ default settings (SSL3.0 active and TLS1.1 & 1.2 inactive). Those settings need to be changed before accessing the Internet w/ IE8 in any case.

I rarely use IE, but wishing to be safe, checked anyway, and SSL3 is inactive, but when checking Firefox could find no mention of SSL or TLS. Is it only an issue with IE?

The claim that this comes with a two year supply of ink appears to be misleading – the maths don’t add up.

The black cartridges are rated for up to 2,400 pages, so three sets equals 7,200 pages, a two year supply at the assumed 300ppm. Furthermore the colour cartridges are half the capacity, so only a 12 month supply.

Brother seem to be conning the gullible.

You could download GWX Control Panel from the webpage to which I link (post #5), near the top right-hand side.

Yes, that is what I used, and now know it is up-to-date. However, I may have already had the latest version installed, but with no way of checking it had to download again. Unless they install an update option it would appear to be necessary to repeat this every week.