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I really didn’t find this article to be very helpful at all. Frankly, it comes across as crotchety and snide and just one long rant about Mr. Leonhard’s dislikes with Office 2013. I’ve been reading Woody on Office since sometime back in the 1990’s. Used to own a great thick book (“Woody Leonhard Teaches Microsoft Office 2000”) by Mr. Leonhard on using Office and found it very helpful. But if it had been written in the style he exhibits here, I never would have bought it or otherwise followed him.

Mr. Leonhard writes “Click File/Open and try to find a file located on your computer. Instead of going to the familiar file-open dialog box you’ve used for the past — couple of decades? — Office 2013 takes you to a touch-friendly window that reeks of SkyDrive” as though trying to find a file on your PC via this interface is difficult. Well…right there in the screenshot is “Computer” (not to mention “Recent Documents.”) What’s the issue? Why does this “reek” (Defines as “Smell strongly and unpleasantly; stink”) exactly? Is there some issue with making SkyDrive’s availability prominent as a file location beyond Mr. Leonhard’s seeming personal distaste for it?

I’m not going to go through the whole thing and pick it apart. I will just say that if I were an editor and Mr. Leonhardt’s article here came across my desk, it would be sent back for rewrite. Very poor.

I just have to comment on Larry Rosenberg’s claim Win 8 isn’t “ready for prime time.” First, no one is (or should be) saying that it is ready. This is a preview release. A beta if you will. But beyond that, Mr. Rosenberg is basing his opinion on an installation on an Asus P4S533-X motherboard outfitted with IDE drives. How old is this motherboard? Old enough that it’s based on the SiS 645 chipset, is designed for “the latest” Pentium IV processors and the memory slots are DDR and SDR (that’s right…SDR) compatible. In other words, this is totally obsolete hardware and Mr. Rosenberg thinks Win 8 ought to be able to support it.

Bottom line is that I totally do not agree with Mr. Rosenberg on any evaluation that is based on this particular hardware. The lack of a proper LAN driver in Win 8 for obsolete hardware is not a proper benchmark for anything at all.

Yes, the preview (beta) release isn’t ready for prime time. But that’s because it’s a beta and not because there isn’t out of the box support for obsolete legacy hardware.

It doesn’t sound as if you actually had an infection. It sounds like you had a registry error with the installed executable for MBAM.exe.

In the future, you might want to try running SuperAntiSpyware Portable (or even just the regular SuperAntiSpyware, preferably from Safe Mode with network support) if you can’t get MBAM to launch as it should. And once you’ve completed a scan with SAS, try MBAM again. And if MBAM still doesn’t work, uninstall it, grab JV PowerTools Lite 2011 and scan the registry with first the default safe settings, and if that doesn’t fix the issue, again with the registry scanner in the second most aggressive setting.

This column is below the usual high standards of Windows Secrets. The “logic” is flawed, and it is really nothing more than whining from those who want Microsoft to do their heavy lifting.

There might have been some merit to the rest of what you had to say, but the comment above (“whining from those who want Microsoft to do their heavy lifting”) overshadowed it. All I can say is that from my perspective, you’ve missed the point.

Windows SteadyState was a product that Microsoft introduced and marketed on their own initiative and it’s a product that a number of businesses and institutions in public access computing environment implemented, relied on and counted on continuing. Microsoft does itself no favors by pulling the plug on this sort of product, especially when there was not only no advance notice but when in fact the capabilities of SteadyState appeared to be on track for inclusion in the Win 7 OS itself (as evidenced by the presence of PC Safeguard cum Windows 7 Guest Mode in development releases.)

SteadyState is a product that I myself promoted and used as a tool to help sell MS products at various levels ranging from local government offices to internet cafes to home and family networks where kids had regular access to the PC.

It was a kick in the teeth for MS to just drop development of Steady State, but as with any number of MS initiatives from days gone by, it shouldn’t have been surprising. The difference in this case is that SteadyState actually worked very, very well and seemed to be a product that Microsoft was serious about. As long as MS keeps doing dumb things like this, they’ll continue to get bad press and continue on being viewed with some suspicion by both end users and IT pros.

The codebase to implement SteadtState on Win 7 is obviously largely already in place and complete even if it isn’t perfect. (Just check the aforementioned PC Safeguard/Guest Mode feature that was dropped from Win 7.) I still hope to see MS bring SteadyState back and have made that clear (along with my displeasure at seeing it effectively dropped) over at the MS forums. Repeatedly.

Anyway, the point here is that MS put out a product and talked a number of IT pros into using it. And then MS without warning pulled the rug out from under them,

Are there alternatives? Sure there are. But that is not the point. Just because you don’t agree with others that the loss of this tool is an issue doesn’t mean that their opinion it is a loss is “nothing more than whining from those who want Microsoft to do their heavy lifting.”

The answer to this is pretty simple. A DSL connection uses PPPoE authentication, meaning you have to provide a username and password to connect to the Internet. And it only permits ONE device connection, be it a router or a computer. In this user’s case, his desktop was providing the authentication to the ISP. By going into the router configuration pages and finding the “Connection Type”, he’ll see it’s probably set for DHCP. Change this to PPPoE, enter username and password and save changes. If the router has an option for “keep alive” set it to something like 25 minutes (some ISPs disconnect after 30 minutes of no activity). That’s all there is to it. The router will then handle the authentication and keep it alive, and the router will act as the DHCP server for wired/wireless computers within the LAN. The desktop will need to be changed to be a DHCP CLIENT. Cheers,

From the description of the problem (which is basically no connectivity with the desktop turned off), I’d say that TechGuyinNJ is on the right path. The current configuration needs to have the DSL modem set up for PPP to supply the required authentication. That would be the first issue anyway. (Sounds like there may be some other issues with the way the network is setup based on the fact that the wireless network is unavailable to other devices when the desktop PC is powered down. The local wireless network should still function regardless.)

One of our engineers provided me with the following contradictory information:

Steady State is not gone. This is just DeepFreez propaganda. It’s now built into Windows 7 and has been re-branded PC-Safeguard …

Your engineer is behind the curve. PC Safeguard was dropped from Windows 7 before release. Check it: http://www.google.com/search?q=Windows+7+PC+Safeguard

I’m running Vista Home Premium on a user-built machine and it has been running just fine for a few years. … Log off is fine, hit the shutdown button and I get a few seconds of intense harddrive activity, then nothing. I’ve let it run for as long as an hour with no difference. In the end I have to manually shut the machine off which Windows lets me know it didn’t like upon the next boot. This all started around 3/11/10.

Is there something else I can try?
Gary

More info, please.

Your copy of Vista is up to date with service packs, meaning you’re running SP2? Any new hardware or software of any kind installed around the time this issue first surfaced? Have you tried running a clean boot of the system to see if the shutdown issue exists in that operating state as well?