Category: Windows

Everything About Windows

Top 3 Useful Windows Commands for Desktop Support technicians

Paul

Windows 10 21H1

The Command Line

Most user don’t understand just how powerful the command line can be.  In tech, and also in my job I have to diagnose and troubleshoot several different types of issues.   I’m going to show you my top 3 commands that I use in Windows and why.  Not everything is straight forward but It will help  you understand why.   We’ll talk about these and why they are so useful and powerful.  Use these as you see feet but you will need to run the command line as Admin.   How to do that is simple, for most.

WINDOWS Key + S and type cmd but don’t hit enter.

Click on Run As administrator

Once you do that you will see the usual Command line windows appear.   We won’t go into detail about that but if you want to learn more about it.  There are several YouTube videos about it.  I’m not going to talk about those because other’s have but I will talk about the commands I use most often in my work.

Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM)

For any businesses that use their own images for windows or has a need to deploy Windows a certain this can be a handy little tool for when the image might need to be repair, or something might need to be added.    You can add and remove drivers to an offline image or you can do many different things to it.   However I will be talking about the repairing of the image because most of the time we have Hard drives that are mechanical and that can cause problems for the OS when the system get’s corrupt files or hard drive has bad sectors.   Each one of these scenarios can make it even harder for applications to work properly and that is why I use this with systems that have those types of hard drives.   My go to is always going to be this when I suspect the hard drive might be the cause of the issue.

DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

You can run this command and see the progress but this isn’t the only command that helps with troublesome Hard drives.

System File Checker (SFC)

This is another good tool for those who might have issues with the system hard drive or even when you suspect something is corrupt.   I use this from time to time just like DISM for when there is something that isn’t right about the hard drive.   If you use this also with DISM you will see a noticeable improvement of your system response.   You will see that it will be quite handy for those times when you have to get data off the drive before it dies completely.

SFC /scannow

If you run this in command line and wait you will see if it finds bad files or it will tell you what it found.  It won’t be a very informative but it will help.

Check Disk Utility

The Windows Check Utility is the last one of the three that I most often. It helps to check sectors and to check the health of the system and also fixes most of the problematic issues of mechanical hard drives.  So when I says this it can be used on SSD and even NVME but it does his best job on hard drives that have spinning parts.   Most users don’t understand about the volatility of the mechanical hard drive.   So it is very useful to check the disk and make sure there are not bad sectors or fix bad area’s of the hard drive.  This one will need to be rebooted to allow it to be used to its fullest but it is a handy little command when you want to make double sure that you will be able to keep Windows running.

chkdsk [DRIVE] /f

You can tell it multiple drives or just the main drive which would be C: but be warned the bigger the HDD the longer it will take to scan it.  You will also need to reboot to have it do it’s job because it needs to un-mount the drive, if you choice to do the C: drive.   It has in the past helped me out in many different situations and that is why I use these three commands a lot for my job.

What are your favorite commands to use in command line or in Windows General.  I’d like to hear them and find out more useful commands that might help me in my job.   Why not leave a comment and let everyone know.

 

Microsoft Defender Borks up the Start menu icons

Paul

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Microsoft Creates issues

This all started on Friday the 13th, 2023. We all started getting tickets galore for this issue, when we first saw this issue we thought it mgiht be something to do with company’s policies being changed and someone didn’t do their job testing it. Being that I am doing my job and trying to solve the issues that are at hand, I didn’t think twice that it was more globally than just our little corner of the company. As we get back into the office Monday we get even more of these tickets where the icons have disappeared and the little work around we sent out friday night still hasn’t solve some of the issues. Icons from all sorts of places have disappeared including stuff I didn’t even think would happen.

Well there it is, it seems Microsoft released an update that caused all the icons to disappear or not to function at all. I’ve been dealing with this issue for the past 5 days as our company scrambles to get the issue resolved for their employees. We’ve learned a few things and I will be glad to share it with you.

Icon restoration

There are several ways I’ve found that works to help restore the icons in the Start Menu.   One of the easiest way is to go to “Add and remove programs” and modify the app that isn’t showing up and Repair or reinstall if that is the option.  This is what we had to do at our location but that isn’t all we are having to do.  We are also having to do this for like Adobe and even Office 2016 but I am sure this affects all versions of Office.

Other ways you can restore icon is to registry edit the default icons and make them get repopulated with the right Icons.  I even go into default apps and reset that to help push the apps back into place.

Another way people have found tofix this issue at least with Office apps is to run it siliently and let it repair it selve in the background:

“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\ClientX64\OfficeClickToRun.exe” scenario=Repair platform=x86 culture=en-us DisplayLevel=False

Microsoft Defender

According to Microsoft it was a the Microsoft Defender ASR rules that caused all this in the first place.   I don’t Know how many IT Admins are happy right now, I am sure not because of all this that happened but It really makes you wonder how this got past the pre-test phase and how anyone would push out an update like this that caused so much trouble.

Many people are wondering how this happened but My real question is will it happened again.  This isn’t going to be a big post but a short one to help those fix the issue at hand and hopefully we get it solved as quickly as possible and everyone get’s back to a normal routine.

Is it time to say NO to LastPass?

Paul1 Reply

Lastpass Recent Incident

Lastpass in the recent has been an excellent password manager and I was one of the many supporters.   The problem with it now is that it is going down hill.   They seem to not want everyone to know just how severe this incident is and have not really done the job that we should of expected.   In December they sent out a small notice to people and reference their blog post.   Who is going to go look at a blog post around Christmas.   I sure as heck was to busy with other stuff to worry about a small email telling people to check out the blog post.   LastPass you should of done better and put out the warning bells for everyone to know just how much you screwed up.

In there blog post:

The threat actor was also able to copy a backup of customer vault data from the encrypted storage container which is stored in a proprietary binary format that contains both unencrypted data, such as website URLs, as well as fully-encrypted sensitive fields such as website usernames and passwords, secure notes, and form-filled data.

Vault and Robbers

You see this isn’t very nice how much information they didn’t send out on the email.  This should of been “Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!” type of warning.  Yet, Lastpass didn’t sound the alarm.  Shame on you for not doing the right thing.   As you can see they got your vault data and mine, althought they can’t really use it without the master password but it is only going to take time and then they will have all our passwords for sites across the internet.   There’s the problem they don’t seem to care that it got out.   The threat actors will use GPU’s and other hardware to finally figure out one user at a time their passwords and it could be years before they get to yours or it could be next month depending on how good you Master Password was.   Was it long or was it Short?  What about enterations?  Did you bump it up to keep it from getting hacked and making it harder for them to figure out your Master Password?

The threat actor may attempt to use brute force to guess your master password and decrypt the copies of vault data they took. Because of the hashing and encryption methods we use to protect our customers, it would be extremely difficult to attempt to brute force guess master passwords for those customers who follow our password best practices.

As you can see even Lastpass has stated they will eventually do that to each and every vault password they can, but did you their suggestions?  Probably not and I wouldn’t blame you because we don’t always have time to keep track of what they recommend.

They claim it could take thousand of years for threat actors to crack the Master Password:

f you use the default settings above, it would take millions of years to guess your master password using generally-available password-cracking technology.

However that isn’t alwasy true if they have enough computers put enough effort into cracking a vault it could be sooner and not later.   The way technology is growing and the speeds of comptuer now would mean threat actors could start usurping people processing powers and have thousands of computers world wide to crack the Master Password keys.   That is how Bitcoin came into being but we wouldn’t know it until it could be too late.

Is it time to switch to another Password Manager?

I’m inclined to switch to Bitwarden just because it is open sourced and I really feel like at least I won’t have to worry about my passwords being leaked.   I will also probably go through every site that I visit and change my password and also use 2FA (2nd Factor Authentication) to prevent threat actors from taking control of my accounts.   I’m going to explore my options but I am more and more thinking about going somewhere else where my data can be safer than with Lastpass.  What’s your throughts on this?  are you staying with LastPass or are you Planning to go somewhere else?

The Last of Us Is Coming to Steam Deck

Paul
Last of Us on Steam

Steam and Steam Deck

This is one of those games that has been out for years. I won’t say it hasn’t been something that I look forward to play.  It has some graphical scenes but that goes along with the zombie apocolypses that you see every time in movies and shows.   This popped up on my radar last week when I saw this over the weekend on some social media.  I thought they were kidding so I went did some searching and it is comign to the Steam.  I can imagine it will also be coming to the Steam Deck because of how old the game is.   It’s is almost a 10 year old game but has been remastered to work with the Playstation 4 and Playstation 5.   With all this in the air, I am fairly certain it wil work on the Steam Deck out of the gate as it is released.  Even the newer versions of the game doesn’t require as much as Spiderman game.  Which I love to play on my PC or Steam Deck when I am on long car rides.  I can’t see this not being released to the Steam Deck.

Pre-orders 

It is currently on preorder for the game.  It will cost people $59.99 and it looks to be very interested when they finally release it.  I have heard this game has some great story lines and will be like Laura Croft to a point so that much will always keep me going with puzzles and being able to explore the worlds.   I’ve watch people play through the game from time to time on Youtube and it looks to be insteresting.  I have already put my money down for Pre-order since I don’t have a playstation.   My Steam Deck is ready to recieve the game once it is released.  I suspect the first week or two there may be problems with the Steam Deck but I am hopeful that they will fix them quickly enough.

March 3, 2023

That the time it is set to be released on Steam, I am hopeful they don’t delay it because this will be so helpful on my next trip in April that I am all set to go. I will have several hours to waste while traveling and this game will be my game to play to keep my busy while traveling.  I suspect this will be a 30 or 50 Gb download and install on any system.  So i will be keeping that much ready to be downloaded to my Steam deck.   I also have found a really small portable dock that I can take with me.   I’ve found it around town.  It’s Call the Gizmovine USB-C hub and it is currently not available on Amazon.  I guess you can go to Newegg and buy it if you want to pay more for it.  I do wonder if I can find more of these these hubs to use for later.   Small Post about this upcoming game.

Are you planning to buy this game or do you think it is worth the 60$ price range?  Let me know what you think and tell me if you have played this before.  Thanks.

Getting my Movies my way is the best way.

Paul

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Time to use my DVD collection

I’ve got a really big DVD collection that I want to be able to use when I want to use them.   I’ll tell you when we were at home for those two months, I should of done that then in 2020 but I didn’t think about it until now.   However that doesn’t mean it is to late to do it.  I have a plan for the my Steam Deck and this will allow me to do that.  Although gaming streaming and video streaming are two different beasts it still has some of the princples that you might not think of.   You will still need to stream through wifi or wired if you are trying to get the best quality.    My plan is to have my DVD’s available anywhere I go, so I even can play on my phone if I wanted to.   I’ve found this awesome streaming service that will do just that on the Steam Deck and any other device.   I’ve installed Plex.tv and created a server for myself.   I’ve got this old NAS (Network attached storage) that hasn’t been used very much.   I’ve been upgrading it lately for just this occasion.   I want to put all my DVD’s and Music on their to listen to or use as I wish.  You can buy a NAS for really small amount of money and add storage as you see fit.

What’s the Purpose

The Truth of the matter is, because I can and it can help with not paying for streamin services as much.  I can be more selective of which services I want to subscribe to and save money in the long run.   I can also buy cheap DVD’s and copy them onto my NAS with realtivity easy process.   The really hard part is the CopyProtection that the big names do to prevent you from do just this.   The problem is that we own these DVD’s and we have the right do what we want with them.  Also there a movies that I want to watch that aren’t either on the streaming service or would need to buy another subscription to another service.  There’s to many services and with the prices going up and I have this NAS hardly being used it should be used more.

Understanding the Basics

We’ll not going to talk about the ethics as much as you want but if you are curious how to do it, you can watch this video and learn something.   I’ll talk a little bit about the copy protection that can be hard to circumvent but can be if you really want to own your media.   The problem is that not all this works with but can be useful to understand.   The copy protection of DVD’s has been something that has plagued mankind since the dawn of the DVD.   They deserve their money for the making the movies and films.  Even TV shows should get what is owed to them but that doesn’t mean people haven’t pirated them around the world through other means.

Copy Protection Software

Here’s where it gets a little bit more interesting to some because if you are like me and have some movies in either DVD or Bluray.  You’re going to need these software to do what is necessary to get to the information you might need. I’ll say this much, use as your own risk or own use.  I will not be responsible for anything that might happen.

I’ll say this I’ve only used DVD Decrypter right now because it works with all that I needed but the others look promising and I will try them out later.  It’s up to you on which one you will want to use to decrypt those DRM heavy DVD’s or Blurays.   I think it all depends on which one will work for you and how you like to use them .  Each one has their own unique way of getting the files needed to copy the main movie file.   So it just depends on what you are looking to do.

Are you planning to do this?  What do you think it will be like when you watch movies on the Steam Deck? I plan to try it out on the steam deck and see how well Plex.tv does the only thing that is problem right now is that you need to buy the server software either monthly or lifetime to do it.  I am going to look into buying the Lifetime because I am really curious as to how well this will work outside of my house.   I also might buy a little Pi board and use that as my server because I can use less energy that way instead of using my tower to do the serving of the movies.  What’s your plans for yoru steam deck?  I’d love to hear your plans on what you want to do with yours.