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This post is not about the main topic of Fred’s article, but about the sub-topic “Cold starts fail, but warm starts succeed” where he describes a reader’s issue with a PC that locks up when he first turns it on in the morning, but then runs fine the rest of the day. Fred diagnoses it as a hardware rather than software problem, attributing the issue to an aging hard drive.

I have a Windows 7 PC that has almost the opposite problem: if it’s already turned on and running, and I try to do a restart (soft reboot), it will shut down as normal, but then when the bootup screen (the one with the F-key commands) appears on the monitor, it will just stay there and go no further. No F-keys work, not even Ctrl-Alt-Del. But then if I do a hard shutdown (power cycle), it will get past the bootup screen and enter Windows just fine.

Anybody have an idea what could be causing this?

You miss Fred’s point, Jorge. Namely, that when you know you’re unprotected, you are either extremely careful or using a machine you don’t mind losing.

Whereas with Symantec installed, an uninformed user would think they are protected and not take extreme care with valuable data.

I totally understand what Fred is saying. What I’m suggesting is that Fred’s statement is a testable proposition that should be fairly easy to prove or disprove by someone with the requisite time and expertise.

Look, I have my own problems with Norton/Symantec products. For several years they have been going down the Microsoft path of both uglifying and dumbing down the interface, in addition to removing features. But IMO it borders on the absurd to claim that it’s better not to run any security software at all than to run one of their products. Unless we pulled the Ethernet plug on the PC, we could not be careful enough to match the level of security as we received e-mail and visited websites. Remember: “no security software at all” means no ad blockers, no spam filter, no behavior blocker. Everything comes in unhindered and you have no way to stop it, or even to know it’s getting in.

Fred writes in his column that,

I think running Symantec products is worse than running no security software at all.

Given the requisite technical knowledge, that should be easy enough to test: set up identical PCs (possibly as virtual machines), one running a Norton (Symantec) product and the other one no security software, then expose them to the same malware packages and infected websites, and see how they each fare throughout.

Anybody around with the time and expertise to run this test?

Thanks, I wasn’t aware that there had been an Acrobat XI. Maybe I’ll suggest that (the PC isn’t mine).

I can report it to Adobe, but hopes aren’t very high that they’ll do anything about it, considering that they stopped supporting Acrobat X last fall. But maybe a visit to their forum will turn up reports of similar experiences by other customers.

The next thing I’m trying is to rebuild the Search Index. My neighbor said today that he went to search for an old e-mail in Outlook and Outlook wouldn’t return any results even though he can see the e-mails themselves on his screen just fine. That gave me the idea to try rebuilding the index. We’ll see if it works.

Thanks very much for asking. I babysat the whole transfer process, so I can answer these questions:

* He’s not using cloud storage of any kind.
* There’s nothing fancy or esoteric about where he’s storing his files. Everything is in the Users/xxxxx folder (where “xxxxx” stands for his name) on the C: drive in his own computer. It’s a system with a single hard disk, so there are not even any “OS SSD + data HDD” complications.
* The login account is the same as when we first booted up the PC and entered his name and password on the login screen.
* I can confirm that it’s Acrobat X Standard and not Acrobat DC.
* It’s Windows 10 Pro, 64-bit.

I hope this will help to guide the search for a diagnosis. What’s really puzzling is that this one combination of plugin and browser is somehow crippled, while all the other combinations (some of which include either the same browser or a plug-in from the same application) work just fine.

I’m not delighted at being asked for a set amount for the newsletter, but my main beef with this year’s changes was the requirement to go online in order to read the full articles. Now we can read the articles right on our e-mail client as before, and in my book that does count as an improvement.

I had to look up Sod’s Law — LOL

While Murphy’s law says that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong (eventually), Sod’s law requires that it always goes wrong with the worst possible outcome.

This is reassuring, thanks for the tip!

As not an IT professional, I have to admit that this .NET Framework business is mysterious to me. Susan’s post this week leads me to a question.

Based on the following statement by Susan…

Bottom line: To stay secure, you’ll need to stay on .NET 3.5 SP1 or upgrade to Version 4.5.2 or newer — and hope for the best.

…is it correct to say that version 3.5 SP1 is somehow more current than versions with an ostensibly later designation such as 4.5.1?? Why would support for a “4.0” version end before support for a “3.5” ends? :confused:

Is there an explanation somewhere, written in plain English, where a non-specialist might learn more about this .NET business? I have PCs with multiple versions of this installed and I really don’t understand the relationship between different versions of this mysterious concept.

One last, two-part question: should I uninstall all previous versions of .NET Framework, and should I install version 4.6.1? Windows Update offered it to my Windows 7 system this month.

Thanks in advance for helping to fill this gap in my Windows knowledge.

One difference about the way the WS Newsletter was presented online, relative to the previous format, I’m hoping will turn out to be an oversight rather than a deliberate design decision.

Up until last week, the e-mail circular had a Newsletter tab near the top, below which “This Issue” was pre-selected. Clicking on “This Issue” would take you to a Web page showing all of the articles in that issue of the newsletter, both paid and free (like here) and in their entirety.

This morning’s newsletter, however, lacks both the Newsletter tab and the “This Issue” link. There is a “View Online” link at the very top, which takes you to a Penton preview page.* Here, though, you cannot see the whole articles — an additional click on “More” is required for each and every article.

But wait, I see a link that promises to let me “See the full newsletter”. Clicking on that takes you to this page (http://windowssecrets.com/newsletter/seven-ways-to-breathe-new-life-into-an-older-pc/?elqTrack=true), where you can see the paid content — but not the free content.

Still hoping to find a single page where I could read ALL the content without resorting to additional hunting and clicking, by some now-forgotten process I ended up on the WS Home page, which displayed headlines for both the free and paid content. Hoping that clicking on the overall one for the newsletter (“Seven ways to breathe new life into an older PC”) might take me to the whole newsletter, I did that and arrived on this page. Still no full display of the content. Scrolling down to the end, I see a box that lists only the paid content (in contrast to the same spot in last week’s newsletter, which lists both the free and paid content) but offers a link to “Show all articles on a single page.” All articles? On a single page? Yay! So of course I clicked on it, as this is what I’ve been looking for all along.

I landed on this page, where I’ve already been during this adventure. The free content is not shown there.

So here’s my question (and suggestion): is there no longer any way to view all of the newsletter’s contents in one page? Is this deliberate, or an oversight?

Here’s hoping that it’s simply an oversight, because today it was a chore to read the Windows Secrets newsletter. What used to be a simple read-through session, today was a time-consuming hunt-and-peck for bits and pieces of the newsletter scattered here and there. Never mind that you can no longer read the whole newsletter right on your e-mail client — apparently you can’t read the whole newsletter anywhere!?

Please make some way to view the whole newsletter in a single page and requiring no additional clicking.

(*) Mods: I am not sure if there is any pesonally identifiable information in the long string of characters in the URL.

The exact same thing happened to me with Google on IE9 around the time of the original post. I thought that maybe it was time to reboot the computer (weird things tend to start happening when I haven’t done that for a long time), but the issue resolved itself within a couple of days.

It was not happening in Google on Firefox, or with Ixquick on IE9.

Given that apparently it was happening on versions of Internet Explorer only, maybe it was something Google did at their end.

Hi
KB3042058 & KB3083710 Susan asks to skip both for now. She wants to wait a bit more to see if they are okay.

KB3085609 MS15-110 See Windows Newsletter 15th Oct – Advice, Install update offered.

KB2999226 – Sorry but cannot help with this one.
Cheers

We never heard anything more, one way or the other, about KB3042058. At least, not that I’ve seen.

Does anybody know if this update has been given the green light? It’s not in Susan’s Patch Watch column from today. Back in the October 15 column, she said to wait for her final report in the next Patch Watch, but there’s been nothing further about it since.

Notice it says Windows 10, released in July 2015…not Windows 10.

That could be interpreted as Build 10240 only.

So then there could be a listing for [for example] “Windows 10, released in May 2018” that would have its own separate lifecycle? That would be stretching the meaning of the declaration that “Windows 10” is the last version of Windows. In any case it would then be simpler and clearer to specify the number of the build that’s going to be supported until X date.

Microsoft said it, not I. I only repeated what has been stated by MS.

Well then, it sounds like the MSFT right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. We are being told two seemingly incompatible things: that Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, and that it will reach EOS on 10/14/25. The only way to square them would be to posit that there will be no supported version of Windows as of 10/15/25; that doesn’t sound very likely unless they are planning to replace Windows by then with something else altogether (just not called “Windows”).

What do you believe (or have been given to understand) will happen on that date?

Win10 IS the last Windows OS. It will receive its Updates (on into the future), but, there will not be a Windows 11 or higher. In that sense, eventually, yes, it will be the only Windows OS (version) ultimately replacing previous Windows OSs.

Hmm…

According to the Windows lifecycle fact sheet (linked to upthread by @JoeP517), Windows 10 reaches end of mainstream support on October 13, 2020, and end of extended support on October 14, 2025.

So if, as you say, Windows 10 is the last version of Windows and there will be no Windows “11” after it — then what happens on October 15, 2025? Are all Windows users then going to be running an unsupported OS?

Hello Roy.

>>> have any other ideas? << Update & Security -> Advance Options -> then re-initialized the Insider Preview and selected Fast. Bingo !

Try this and let us know. Mind you, you will still have to go and look for updates yourself and if you do get any, they will not show up in the listing. Such is life as MS has more or less closed up the Insider mode.

All best wishes. Jean.

Just to make sure I understand — you’re saying that Insiders are no longer getting new builds via Windows Updates, right?

Been wondering about this, because I’ve been on build 10240 (Slow ring) since the end of July. I keep reading about people who are on newer builds, and yet they’re not showing up for me.