Time for tech upgrades

Now that busy season is over for me, I’ll be doing some long overdue upgrade projects. At the office I’ll be planning on upgrading my Windows 11 22H2 machines to 23H2 (more on this in an upcoming newsletter) ensuring that I do not enable Copilot in the process.

Here at home I upgraded my older no longer supported wifi system to a TPlink mesh system and while setting it up I made the conscious decision to enable automatic updates on the units themselves. Now you would think that a person who says to delay updates wouldn’t be so quick to upgrade their wifi networking towers, but I’m going to be a bit of a beta tester for purposes of seeing how automatically updating edge devices will work out. I’ll be monitoring on this and will report back.

I did make it easy on myself, I set up the wifi ssid name and password to be what the previous unit was. I run cameras and devices on the guest network and some of the cameras are located too high for me to easily reset a username and password.

What about you? Do you check for updates on your wifi/routers?  Do you turn on automatic updates? Do you check them for firmware updates on a regular basis?

How to preserve your battery charge on a Windows 11 laptop

WINDOWS 11

By Lance Whitney

Frustrated because your Windows laptop runs out of juice at the worst possible times? There are ways to better sustain your battery charge.

One of the best laptops I ever owned was a Lenovo ThinkPad T460 back in 2016. One major reason why I liked this machine was its dual-battery setup. Packed with both an internal battery and an external swappable battery, this unit easily delivered a solid 12 hours of life on a single charge.

Sadly, those days are gone. With Lenovo and most other laptop makers obsessed with making machines as thin and light as possible, battery life has suffered dramatically. With my current laptop, I’m lucky to get five hours of life on a single charge. That’s fine if I’m at home or in a place where I can plug the computer into AC. But if I’m in one spot for hours, with no handy electrical outlet, then my battery charge can easily run out.

Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.16.0, 2024-04-15).
This story also appears in our public Newsletter.

Apple turns on ‘Discoverable by Others.’ Should you worry?

PUBLIC DEFENDER

By Brian Livingston

The blogosphere has been going nuts lately after learning that Apple quietly turned on by default an iPhone setting known as “Discoverable by Others.”

Despite your initial shock after hearing this — or seeing it for yourself on your phone — being discoverable may or may not be something you need to be concerned about.

I’ll explain today what the setting does and why you might want to leave it on — or turn it off immediately.

Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.16.0, 2024-04-15).

Create awesome forms and quizzes with Microsoft Forms

MICROSOFT 365

By Peter Deegan

Microsoft Forms is a good way for anyone to gather info for polls and surveys, or test with an online quiz. If only the links to Excel were more elegant and straightforward.

Forms is available to anyone with a free Microsoft account, and that’s what I’ll use in this article. There are additional options for business users, and Copilot AI is being rolled out to businesses (and hopefully consumers) with a paid Copilot plan.

Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.16.0, 2024-04-15).

A deluge of vulnerabilities for April

PATCH WATCH

By Susan Bradley

It’s raining CVEs.

There are definitely going to be two groups of patchers this month. One will say, “Issues? What issues? My computer updated without issues.”

The other group will complain about needing a BitLocker recovery key, or that their updates took a long time, or that they were offered a confusing SQL update for a database they didn’t realize they had on their home PC. I’m certainly part of this group — my Windows 10 PC at home took a long time to come back up.

Let me remind you of some of my standard recommendations, even if you decide to sit on the sidelines and just watch the fun.

Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.16.0, 2024-04-15).

Patch listing updated for April 9, 2024

Between the last of tax season and trying to track down a definitive listing of SQL updates, I finally (I think) was able to track down all of the updates being released for the Microsoft platform.

But remember, the master patch list doesn’t just focus on Windows, I’ve also included the various browsers, Apple products and even Chromebooks.

One thing I don’t want to tackle at this time is a listing of the various routers, firmware, NAS devices, let alone televisions that need attention.

Case in point:

Dlink NAS devices have a vulnerability in their older devices, ensure they are not exposed to the web. LG TVs can be hacked to get root.  Finally Microsoft starts testing ads to both advertise Windows 11 on a Windows 10 computer, as well as ads in the start screen (which fortunately can be controlled with the suggesions/recommendations setting).  Ah what fun. As usual, I’ll be gathering together the registry settings and toggle buttons should this get to the released versions. Right now it’s ONLY in the insider releases where they are testing to see what we think of it. Trust me, WE (yes I’ll use the royal WE) don’t like it.

I’ve updated the Master Patch list for the April updates.  I’ll be updating the page for any known issues or issues that we are tracking.   Windows 10 and KB5034441 which fails to install with error code 0x80070643.  I’m sounding like a broken record on this …. it STILL has not been fixed. I think Microsoft has given up and considered this “un-automatically-patchable” and have left it to us to deal.  We deal with it by hiding it as it’s not a risk to consumers.

Finally, if you’ve emailed the customersupport alias in the last week, I will getting back to you this week. This was our first “normal” tax season in about three years  – no delays for the pandemic or floods in California so April 15 was the normal due date this year. 

April updates pour in

It’s that time again when we look to not only Microsoft but other vendors and whether or not we should patch. As always, I recommend that you hold back, get the lay of the land, see if we are issue free (or not), if the issues from last month have been resolved.

In the meantime:

149CVEs this month, we’re patching SQL server so if you have a database you weren’t aware of on your PC you might see an update.

Looks like another bitlocker/secure boot fix.

Bottom line this definitely is a hang back and don’t patch immediately month.  Windows 11 has “moments”, Windows 10 adds features to the lock screen.

Dustin Childs’ zero day blog

Ghacks blog

I’ll be giving my take on the driver that prevents Edge browser take overs (hint it’s not as evil as the headlines is trying to make it out to be)

BE AWARE if you have Bitlocker enabled:

The April releases includes the following fix

WhatChanged Portable — What’s happening under there?

FREEWARE SPOTLIGHT

By Deanna McElveen

Some (okay, most) programs make a lot of changes to your computer when you install them. You may want to know exactly what was changed or added, either out of curiosity or paranoia. We’re not here to judge.

Today we are going to take a look at an older (2011) program by Vista Software (no longer around) that has been resurrected by J.W. Hough and the fine folks over at PortableApps.com. The program is called WhatChanged Portable. Basically, WhatChanged Portable takes a snapshot of your files, folders, and Windows Registry at a given moment in time. After that, you can install something, or some things, and then use WhatChanged Portable to take another snapshot and compare the two to see what changed. Pretty simple concept and a very easy program to use. It’s even compatible with Windows XP all the way to Windows 11!

Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.15.0, 2024-04-08).
This story also appears in our public Newsletter.