Windows

How to patch less

Dave Farquhar security, Windows , , , , , , , ,

One of my former supervisors now works for a security vendor. He told me the other day that someone asked him, “Does your company have anything so I don’t have to patch anymore?”

The answer, of course, is that there’s nothing that gets you out of ever having to patch anymore. To some degree you can mitigate, but there’s no longer any such thing as a completely friendly network. The reasoning that you’re behind a firewall doesn’t work anymore. On corporate networks, there’s always something hostile roaming around behind the firewall, and you have to protect against it. If you’re on a home network with just a computer and a router, your computer and router attack each other from time to time. That’s the hostile world we live in right now. Patching is one of the fundamental things you have to do to keep those attacks from being successful.

That said, there are things you can do to patch less. Read more

Microsoft is offering some help in migrating off XP

Dave Farquhar security, Windows , , ,

Since there is no direct upgrade path from Windows XP to Windows 8.1 or even Windows 8, Microsoft has reacted to criticism by licensing a cut-down version of PC Mover and offering it to latter-day XP upgraders for free. It will only migrate three applications for you, but for most people, that’s probably enough.

The good news is that this version of PC Mover works with Windows 7 as well, so if you want to take the strategy of migrating people to $99 off-lease PCs running Windows 7, it will still help.

The linked article above criticized Microsoft for not developing its own migration tool, but that seems a bit harsh. I’ve used PC Mover before, and found it to be a very capable tool. I’d be surprised if Microsoft actually could do much better. And Microsoft has a history of licensing third-party tools anyway: Every disk defragmenter Microsoft has ever shipped was a cut-down version of something written by other companies.

Of course it’s best to rebuild machines from scratch–it will perform much faster that way–but when there’s a must-have program on an old PC and the installation media is long gone, PC Mover is about the only way to recover it and move it on. Most people probably don’t have much more than three programs in that category.

Free Windows 8.1 upgrades: Right idea, wrong target

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , ,

Last week, rumors started flying that Microsoft was going to make upgrades to a cut-down version of Windows 8.1 either free or very inexpensive for Windows 7 owners.

That’s not necessarily a bad idea, but the target is wrong. Here’s a great idea: Microsoft needs to be dangling the freebie in front of Windows XP owners. Read more

My Windows 8.1 experience

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , ,

I installed Windows 8.1 last week to see how bad it really is.

And?

Well, it’s more stable than Windows Me, but Windows Me was a lot nicer to use. It’s awful. Because I listen to podcasts, I know that there’s magic in hovering your mouse over the upper right hand screen. And somehow I was able to get to a desktop pretty quickly. The first thing I did was launch Internet Explorer and install Classic Shell, which, as promised, makes it a dead ringer for Windows 7 or XP or even 2000 if you want. Much better.

What else? Read more

How to slipstream updates into Windows 8.1

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , ,

I need a Windows box, so I figured I’d experiment with Windows 8.1. I know it’s terrible, but I want to see just how much less terrible I can make it.

The first thing I wanted to do was figure out how to slipstream updates into it. I recommend slipstreaming because you get a faster performing system, you get the system up and running a lot sooner, and you save a lot of unnecessary writes to your SSD. It’s very similar to slipstreaming Windows 7, but not quite identical.

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Getting a proper Start button back even when Microsoft doesn’t want to give one

Dave Farquhar security, Windows , , , , ,

Are you putting off switching to Windows 8.1 because you don’t want to relearn everything from scratch that you’ve known since 1995? I saw Windows 8.1 on Thanksgiving, and you have to do some asinine downward swipe with the mouse to bring up Control Panel. Yeah, that’s easier.

But even though Microsoft insists on shooting itself in the foot with a nuclear missile, Classic Shell fixes what Microsoft refuses to fix. Want Windows 8 to act like Windows 7? No problem. Want it to look like XP? Yeah, you can even do that.

So I highly recommend it. Yes, Windows 8.1 with Classic Start. Here’s why. Read more

Clean up after Windows Update

Dave Farquhar Windows , ,

Thanks to a new tool that Microsoft pushed out in 2013, it’s very easy to clean up after Windows Update and free up a bunch of disk space.

In 2013, Microsoft released a new Disk Cleanup tool. Click your start button and type “Disk Cleanup” to launch it. If you see a new option called “Clean Up System files,” you got the update. If you don’t see it, visit this page (Internet Explorer-only, unfortunately) to grab it. Read more

How to take a screen capture of a web site in Windows

Dave Farquhar Windows

I can’t imagine needing to take a screen capture of a web site terribly often, but I have had to do it a few times in the past year. I used Snagit to do it, and it didn’t always do the best job–sometimes the program would crash, or the CPU would race and I would have to resort to ctrl-alt-del to get things back to normal–and not get my screen capture.

IE Capt is a small, standalone utility to do just that. Feed it the URL you want to capture, and it uses Internet Explorer’s Trident engine to render the page and outputs it to an image file for you. If you’re comfortable with the command line, it’s a faster, easier way to get your screen capture. And it’s free, which doesn’t hurt either.

Clear print queue command line sequence

Dave Farquhar Windows
Clear print queue command line sequence

Here’s an old, old, but still useful tip that works on all NT-based versions of Windows, including Windows 10 and Windows 11. This is the clear print queue command line sequence for Windows, and it’s the fastest, most reliable way to recover from a hung print job. It works from the standard Windows CMD prompt.

The sequence is to stop the spooler service, delete the contents of the spooler directory (usually c:\windows\system32\spool\printers\) and then restart the spooler service.

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Doing more than one operation per line in a Windows batch file

Dave Farquhar Windows ,

Sometimes in a batch file I find myself needing to perform more than one operation on a server, especially inside a for loop. Rather than do a pair of for loops, which isn’t always desirable, you can use the & operator.
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