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‘PC Does What?’ seems doomed to fail

Dave Farquhar Hardware October 19, 2015October 16, 2015apple, dell, hp, intel, lenovo, malware

A coalition of Dell, HP, Intel, Lenovo, and Microsoft are trying to figure out how to reverse the downward trend of PC sales, and what they came up with was a marketing campaign called “PC Does What?”

The problem is it’s not 1995 anymore, and it’s going to take more than a marketing campaign to change that.

Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.

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Why this latest attempt to resurrect the Commodore brand will probably flop

Dave Farquhar Android, Retro Computing July 16, 2015August 3, 20171980s, 1990s, amiga, android, apple, commodore, dell, lenovo, motorola, Packard Bell

The Commodore brand is back again, this time on an Android smartphone. For a premium price, you get an Android 5.0 phone with the Commodore logo on it, preloaded with VICE and an Amiga emulator, which, between the two of them, emulate just about everything Commodore ever made, except, perhaps, the products that can be emulated with the Android calculator app.

But I don’t expect this attempt to be any more successful than earlier efforts to resurrect the brand.

Dave Farquhar

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Taming Office 2013’s appearance

Dave Farquhar Office, Software June 24, 2015August 14, 2016intel, lcd monitors, lenovo, office 2013

A couple of months ago I upgraded to Office 2013 at work. I liked it, but around the same time, my eyes started burning. I never made the connection, but then last week, when a coworker upgraded, he mentioned his eyes were burning, and he made the connection.

He found this guide for toning down Office. We both recommend the dark gray scheme, which is much easier on the eyes than the default harsh white scheme.

Dave Farquhar

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The missing Lenovo Thinkpad scroll lock key

Dave Farquhar Hardware May 15, 2015March 13, 2021excel, keyboard shortcuts, lenovo, thinkpad

One of my coworkers accidentally enabled scroll lock on a Lenovo Thinkpad L440 the other day, which is bad news when you do it accidentally and can’t find the missing Thinkpad scroll lock key. Read more

Dave Farquhar

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Lenovo is penitent, but its customers aren’t out of the woods yet

Dave Farquhar security March 9, 2015March 8, 2015antimalware, antivirus, Bing, lenovo, malware, spyware, Windows 10, windows 8

After having an incredibly bad week last month, Lenovo started saying the right things, and perhaps doing some of the right things too. But some laptops with the Superfish malware preinstalled on them are still in the supply chain, which means some people are unwittingly buying them.

This isn’t terribly surprising. But there are a couple of things you can do about it, and they’re things worth doing anyway.

Dave Farquhar

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How to use the lock in your web browser’s location bar

Dave Farquhar security February 23, 2015May 31, 20151990s, AES, chrome, cissp, demonstration, lenovo, Missouri, SSL, TLS, yahoo

A commenter asked me last week if I really believe the lock in a web browser means something.

I’ve configured and tested and reviewed hundreds of web servers over the years, so I certainly hope it does. I spend a lot more time looking at these connections from the server side, but it means I understand what I’m seeing when I look at it from the web browser too.

So here’s how to use it to verify your web connections are secure, if you want to go beyond the lock-good, broken-lock-bad mantra.

Dave Farquhar

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Lenovo’s preinstalled Superfish spyware: A post-mortem

Dave Farquhar security February 20, 2015November 3, 2025CISO, lenovo, Packard Bell, PR, spyware, unix

So, if you haven’t heard by now, last year Lenovo experimented with preloading its cheapest laptops with spyware that subverts HTTPS, allowing a third party to inject ads on any web page, and providing a convenient place for an attacker to hide behind while messing with your secure transactions.

By the end of the day yesterday, Lenovo had apologized, sort of, and after several sites had provided removal instructions, Lenovo provided its own. After spending much of the day downplaying the security concerns, by the end of the day they were at least reluctantly acknowledging them.

This was really bad, and I’ll explain why in a second, and I’ll also try to explain why Lenovo did it.

Dave Farquhar

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Why we can’t have nice things: The reaction to IBM’s big black and blue quarter

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized October 21, 2014October 20, 2014AIX, amd, datacenter, hp, IBM, lenovo, mainframe, proprietary unix, unix, warren buffett, x86

IBM announced yesterday that it had a terrible quarter. They missed earnings, the stock plunged, and Warren Buffett lost a billion dollars.

Everyone assumes Warren Buffett is worried, or livid, and selling off the stock like it’s on fire. Read more

Dave Farquhar

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HP splits in two.

Dave Farquhar Hardware October 13, 2014September 6, 20241980s, capitalization, compaq, DEC, dell, hp, IBM, lenovo, lexmark, Western Digital

Don’t you feel like trying something new
Don’t you feel like breaking out
Or breaking us in two
You don’t do the things that I do
You want to do things I can’t do
Always something breaking us in two –Joe Jackson

After years of buying up companies, HP is splitting up. While that’s probably more prudent that exiting the desktop PC business, which is another idea they flirted with in the past, it’s anyone’s guess how this is going to work out.

But it’s what all the cool kids are doing, so it’s what the investors want, and that means HP is going to do it. Read more

Dave Farquhar

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WMIC invalid global switch – solved

Dave Farquhar Windows August 14, 2014October 12, 2017dell, hp, lenovo

I use WMIC a lot to gather data in my job. Querying computers that have dashes (a.k.a. the minus sign, the “-” character) in the names cause an error message that says “invalid global switch.” Microsoft operating systems use the dash as a reserved character to indicate command options. Here’s how to get rid of the WMIC invalid global switch problem.

Dave Farquhar

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