GEEKNOTE:   One of the nasty little changes that Microsoft inflicted on computer buyers with the advent of Windows 8 was the use of a tiny “Windows 8” sticker in lieu of a Certificate of Authenticity with a key code.  The license key is burned into the BIOS of the computer.  This applies not only to Windows 8 machines, but new Windows 7 machines from various brand name manufacturers.

Why should we care?  While working on a new Windows 7 notebook this week that came from the factory with a Windows 7 “downgrade”, but with only a Windows 8 sticker, I discovered that the data on the drive was corrupted.  My guess is that it came that way from the factory.  With EVERY previous generation of factory Windows installations, it has been possible to blow out the system and reinstall it using a standard Windows disk.  That won’t work anymore.

The Windows key burned into the system will NOT work with a standard Windows disk.  You MUST use the recovery media you created when you bought the new computer or order a recovery set from the manufacturer.

For a consumer, this is an inconvenience.  For a business, this is a major issue because the system will be out of service until you get a copy of the recovery set that works.  As I write this, I’ve got one notebook on the bench waiting for a recovery kit to arrive from the manufacturer and another notebook that rejects one of the disks that the owner burned when they first got their system.

Contrast this with the custom built systems that we build with Windows 7.  The Windows OEM kits we get from Microsoft still come with key codes and we don’t have to deal with the hidden key codes and proprietary versions of Windows that come with brand name systems.

You may save money by buying a brand name system with their version of Windows installed, but you may well find your savings evaporate the first time you have the system serviced.   In fact, just the time required to burn a recovery set that may or may not work down the way may well cost you more than the difference between a brand name system and a custom built system.

Our recommendation is that, whenever possible,  you insist on a real Certificate of Authenticity with a key code and original Windows media any time you purchase a new computer.  At this point, that means buying custom and not brand name.

 

GEEKNOTE:  With just barely two months to go before Microsoft officially stops supporting Windows XP, I’m starting to see folks get serious about getting rid of their ten year old antique computers.  Let’s think about this for a minute:  Windows XP came out in 2001 and a lot has changed in the intervening 13 years.

All I can say is “Its about time”.  It hard to justify that ANYONE spend ANYTHING trying to keep an old XP box running.

I’ve sold quite a few brand new Windows 7 machines in the last three months and the pace seems to be speeding up, with two such machines going out the door on Friday and two more on Saturday.   I’ve got another twenty machines that will likely find homes between now and the end of February.

I’m STILL not a fan of Windows 8.  There is a rumor that a “direct to desktop” option will be available with the next Windows 8 update in a month or two.  It can’t come too soon.  Windows 8’s “Metro” interface is probably very nice on a phone or tablet, but it is worse than worthless on a desktop because it makes you relearn how to use your computer to do simple things.  Imagine buying a new car and discovering that the car company has replaced the gas and brake pedals with a twist throttle and hand brakes like on a motorcycle.  Not good.

Under the circumstances, I recommend Windows 7 to anyone retiring a Windows XP system.

The good news for our business customers is that credit is available again.  Two of my customers are looking at very attractive leases that will allow them to replace ALL of their XP systems.

Perfectly serviceable Windows 7 systems are available for less than $500.  If all you do is email and web surfing, they will do you just fine.

Very NICE systems are under $1000 and you’d be hard pressed to spend much more than that unless you are a hard core gamer.

Interestingly enough, you wouldn’t know that Windows 7 was even an option if your only exposure to computers is in your local big box store.  They simply don’t stock them.  The smaller independent shops like ours, that cater to business customers are much better places to look for Windows 7.

It is THEORETICALLY possible to get a Windows 8 computer and downgrade it to Windows 7.  We’ve had a few customers who have gone this route and it isn’t always a simple project.  Some of the big manufacturers are building Windows 8 machines and not offering the drivers necessary to do the downgrade.  If you go this route, make sure you can get the drivers.

As a general rule, I love new stuff.  The latest computer hardware on the market is absolutely amazing.  Naturally, I make sure that anything I get has  the Windows 7 support I need.

Feel free to drop by the shop, leave a note here, or give me a call if you have any questions.

Rob Marlowe, Senior Geek
Gulfcoast Networking, Inc
http://www.gulfcoastnetworking.com

Disclaimer:  Sometimes the old stuff is better… I’m writing this while listening to a new Carole King LP I picked up a couple of months ago… Yes, you can still purchase new LP’s.

GEEKNOTE:  I’m a big fan of the 2009 Disney movie “UP”.  In particular, I can relate to Dug, a golden retriever who can carry on a wonderful conversation until he is distra…. SQUIRREL!    While most of us probably don’t fit the clinical definition of ADHD, I think all of us can relate to the way life often throws so many different things at us in short order that we find ourselves wondering what it was we were trying to get done an hour ago.

It is not uncommon for us to find that a new customer has one or more small fires that need to be put out so that their network can function properly.  We picked up a new customer the first of last month with a situation more like the wildfires out west.  No documentation of ANYTHING, stacks of old computers that needed to be tested to see if they were worth fixing, a network infrastructure that would have made Rube Goldberg proud, and computer problems that just wouldn’t quit.

I went in one day to solve a printer issue and within the first five minutes on site had four different people interrupt what I was doing to tell me about other problems.  I felt exactly like Dug… SQUIRREL!!!

We’ve been working on enhancing our service ticketing system and this customer became one of the very first ones to be trained so that we could get a complete list of what problems they were having, along with some prioritization of what we needed to deal with first.

We have been able to stabilize things, replacing dozens of consumer grade wireless access points with a much smaller number of enterprise grade access points.  The new access points work with a software package that lets us see who is connected where, how much signal strength they have, how much data they have moved, and much more.

The customer bought a bunch of new notebooks and asked us to configure them.  As these new notebooks go into service, we’re configuring them in a set manner and documenting how everything connects.

I know we’re making progress.  One of the employees there told me last week that we’d done more in the last month than all the previous techs had done in the last three years.  I’m still smiling.

The next step will be for us to do a full network analysis documenting how the network exists today.  Once completed, we should have a pretty good handle on their network.

Network analysis reports can be pretty involved.  I worked on three this past week.  One of them was 1/2 inch think, another was 5/8 inch thick, and the third one, which I need to finish up the first of this week, is already north of an inch thick!  The third report is literally hundreds of pages of details regarding that customer’s computers and computer network.

Combining a clean network design with full documentation is the key to keeping things running smoothly and keeping me from getting “squirreled” the next time I walk in the door.  It also helps keep you and your employees from spending all too much time chasing computer issues when they ought to be earning money for your company.

 

Rob Marlowe, Senior Geek

 

 

GEEKNOTE:  Windows 8.1 has been released and includes a few new features.  One of our customers asked me to comment on Windows 8 / 8.1 and so here goes:

Windows 8 was designed for use in a tablet environment.  The app buttons you see when you first start it up are supposed to let you do pretty much everything you want without ever going to a desktop.  For casual web surfing and email, that may be true.  I’m not a big fan of 7″ or even 10″ tablets, probably due to my 50-plus year old eyes.

Microsoft’s foray into Windows 8 hardware has been an unmitigated disaster.  They started selling the Surface line first only direct and through their stores.  They have since started selling it through some major retail outlets, but have yet to allow their tens of thousands of partners to sell the Surface.  Would you care to guess why the sales have been disappointing?  Windows 8 remains a bit player in the tablet market and I predict it will continue to be such until Microsoft plays to its strength by enlisting the tens of thousands of Microsoft partners in the process.

The bigger issue is the OS itself.  If the big box stores weren’t selling Windows 8 exclusively on new machines, the OS wouldn’t have gotten any distribution whatsoever.

There are several reasons why Windows 8 has been met with massive indifference.  The first of these is that it is optimized for a tablet / phone form factor and touch screens.  Most of businesses don’t use tablets or phones for serious day to day computing.

As someone who uses a desktop computer for hours each day, a conventional keyboard and mouse are far better options for me than a touch screen.  I can’t touch type on a touch screen.

Don’t get me wrong.  Tablets have their place and I use one when I’m traveling and need to respond to email and other things.  Likewise, my new smart phone is very handy.  Neither use Windows 8.   It’s fun to post pictures like the one I took at church this morning to facebook directly from my phone.

While tablets are the current “in thing” and have their place, I believe that reports of the death of the desktop are highly overstated.  There are simply too many people who need a real keyboard and the sort of screen real estate that only a conventional desktop with 2 or more big screens can provide when they are working.  I’m using both of my 22″ widescreens at work every day and could use a third one if I could figure where to mount it.  Quickbooks, Outlook, a couple of copies of Internet Explorer, and two or three separate instances of Firefox all running at the same time chew up screen space quickly.

My idea of a nice “casual” system is my home computer with a single 19″ flat screen.  I may check in on facebook with my phone, but you can bet that I’ll be sitting in front of my desktop system when I’m composing these GEEKNOTES or posting some missive on facebook.

It’s all a matter of picking the right tool for the right job.

We ran into an interesting Windows 8 issue with a school customer this week.  The default apps that show up when you fire up a Windows 8 machine include a news feed.  With two school shootings this week, this is NOT what I’d want to have presented to young students when they turn on their computers.

Setup is “interesting” in that a new Windows 8 machine wants you to give it your email address and a password before you set it up.  Passwords make lots of sense on tablets and phones, but probably not so much on a personal desktop.

Another issue is maintenance.  With Windows 8, it has become MUCH more difficult to get into safe mode.  When a machine is badly infected, this is often the only option short of restoring the machine to factory settings.  Because of changes in the boot process, even booting to a CD becomes a chore.

Another subtle change we’ve seen is the decision to drop POP support in the email client.  This is easily cured by installing an email client that isn’t crippled, but it is another little “gotcha” built into Windows 8.

Are there options?  Yes.

Windows 7 is still readily available via several channels and it remains a better choice for both desktops and notebooks.  You get to keep the desktop you are used to, you don’t have to relearn how to use your computer, and you can quickly get down to doing productive work with your new computer.  You won’t find Windows 7 on the shelves of the local big box stores, but they ARE available at the same prices you see for Windows 8 machines.  We generally have Windows 7 machines in stock and we can special order quite a few different configurations for delivery within a couple of days.

If you already have a Windows 8 machine and want it to look more like what you loved with Windows XP or Windows 7, I recommend “Classic Shell” to add back the start button and menu structure to a more familiar form.

Have you purchased a Windows 8 machine?  If so, let us know what YOU think about it and if not, let us know why.

Rob Marlowe, Senior Geek

GEEKNOTE:  My longstanding recommendation to businesses regarding spam filtering is “don’t”.  The risk of missing that million dollar deal, though small, is generally too great a risk compared to the annoyance of spam.

I had to break my own rule this week after the Russians started flooding my mailbox with “enlargement” ads.  I get a LOT of business emails, often 100 or more a day, not counting various automated alerts and reports generated by our monitoring system.

Suddenly, I started getting four or five ads from the Russians for every legitmate message.  Every time I would open up Outlook, there would be another 250 or 300 messages for “enlargement” products.

I briefly considered setting up a filter to forward all these messages to the members of the US House that are currently exhibiting feelings of inadequacy, but then thought better of it.  They are having enough problems doing anything useful without distracting them further.  I wouldn’t want to be responsible for a government shutdown.

I’m not quite sure why the Russians have taken a sudden interest in my love life, but I suspect it may have been because one of my male customers clicked on a link they shouldn’t have and got their address book stolen.

How do I know the primary culprits are the Russians?  Check this out:

Sep 21 21:53:08 [81.26.91.7:58692][RU]SMTP Server: DNSBL Reject from dominatelethe@freedownloadscenter.com To: rob@gulfcoastnetworking.com (ru.countries.nerd.dk.)

I solved the issue by removing the spam filtering exemption for my email address.   The message shown above, one of over 650 that came in yesterday, was rejected by a DNS Blacklist that identifies and blocks everything from Russia.  For good measure, I also blocked it with a GEOBLOCK that blocks Russia.  The two references to “ru” show where the filters caught this message.  I don’t have any friends in Krasnoyarsk, so it’s a pretty safe bet that it is garbage.

We utilize a multi-level spam defense on our servers.  While it doesn’t catch everything, it definitely cuts down the clutter.  I’ve only gotten a few enlargement ads today, as compared with hundreds a day early this week.

Just to avoid the risk of missing that proverbial million dollar deal, I tweaked our server filters to allow mail from badly misconfigured mail servers in the US to get through.  I’d still like to get those emails, since I might be able to sell them my services in fixing their IT mess.

For what it is worth, the Russians aren’t in this alone.  We also see large amounts of junk mail coming from Romania, China, and Vietnam.  Proving that even communists and former communists are capitalists at heart, there is an economic motive in sending out these emails.  First off, with no pun intended, some small percentage of men will actually click on the links and even send in money in search of a cure for their perceived problem.  More often than not, clicking on the links downloads malware onto the poor fellow’s computer, stealing email address, credit card numbers and other identifying information.  If they thought they had a problem BEFORE they clicked on the link, they haven’t seen anything until the Russians, Romanians, Chinese, and Vietnamese get their information!

When this sort of spam first started coming some years ago, there were a like number of messages offering breast enhancements.  I think it says something about the relative gulibility of guys and gals that the breast enhancement ads have pretty much disappeared.  Apparently, the ladies aren’t quite as likely to fall for this sort of offer.

I’ll close by saying that the only thing I’m interested in enlarging is our customer base, so please let us help you when you need computer or IT help and refer us to your friends.

Rob Marlowe, Senior Geek
Gulfcoast Networking, Inc.

Computer Solutions