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Last year I bought some Kingston 128 gb SSD's on ebay. They came from a vendor in BC (ie maybe Vancouver). I knew these were older drives, I thought that maybe they were new old stock, maybe they were advertized as used. They have a lot of them, I bought 10. Maybe cost me $12 - $15 each. I was looking for older drives after having bought some new 128 ssd's that don't work in IDE-compatibility mode (on older motherboards). I've never encountered this before with SSD's only working in SATA-mode. I've posted about this phenomena here somewere on msfn at the time. Anyways, these older Kingston drives - I use them to make clone backups of our older systems (using Norton Ghost 3 booted from a floppy). I can use ghost to tell me something about the target drive - like if it's been formatted or if it contains data. It turns out these drives to seem to contain data, it looks like they were used in windows systems previously. I could slave them to a working win-7 or win-10 PC and see if I can access their files.

I'm not as much asking about the value (*) of bitlocker on a "civilian" laptop (home, student, senior citizen, etc) as I am wondering under what conditions one of these systems is going to ask the user for their bitlocker key. This is the first time it's happened on this system. Was it the unplanned crash or shut-down / reboot? * Clearly in this case the value of bitlocker on a cost/benefit scale was on the cost side. There was no benefit. There was only a cost, in machine downtime, worry, frustration, reaching out for help, etc.

You were talking about corporate laptops and having to constantly be typing in 48-digit keys or doing 2fa with cell phones. So I asked about the thumbprint readers and smart cards that I thought were built into a lot of laptops. Thumbprint readers and smart cards FOR CORPORATE LAPTOPS instead of constantly typing in 48 digit keys or doing 2fa logins.

I thought some or many laptops had thumbprint readers? What about smart cards? What about face or voice recognition?

I was just reading a support / question thread on "learn.microsoft.com'" about this dating from Aug 2024. Apparently Win 11 24H2 home will enable bitlocker during OOBE if you set the machine up with an MS account (I thought it was practically impossible to avoid that) and additionally if the email address used is an MS email (I guess like hotmail or outlook). In my case the email was a third party (a domain that I host myself). Also, for corporate systems (usually win-11 pro) Bitlocker is not the same as for home systems. For home systems it's Device Encryption (or Drive Encryption?) but still might be called Bit locker. I'm still not clear what exactly were the conditions in my case that triggered asking for the key. Does a drive or file-system fault that triggers chkdsk fall under one of those conditions? Can you safely disable bit locker (or device encryption if that's what it really is on Win-11 home) ? I mean, if it is currently enabled, does that mean that all your files are stored in encrypted form, and when you disable they all have to be read in and then written back in plain storage (not encrypted) ? Could that be a huge task to "un-encrypt" the drive? Or do I have that wrong, and it's no big deal to disable it?

Last year I bought an elderly relative a win-11 laptop to replace an older one. She does email, skype (now teams), fecebook, etc. I get a call today that a day or two ago it acted up and she left it a day but tried to turn it on and got a blue screen and it was in some sort of recovery mode involving Bitlocker. If I knew what that was when I set up the computer I probably would have disabled it, it sounds like something just waiting to break. I did some goog'ling and MS apparently released some update back in Oct or Nov last year that practically bricked a lot of machines and you had to log into your MS account on another system and get a bitlocker recovery key. If this is the issue I'm facing with this laptop then I'm wondering why it's happening several months after this faulty update. Anyways because I have access to her MS account I was able to log in and right away I get a screen showing Device name / Key-ID / the recovery key and a key upload date (it was Jan / 2025). So I read off the recovery key over the phone, she types it in (I'm wondering if this is some sort of scam, hackers have figured out a way to get your recovery key by tricking you to give it to them like I'm doing right now) ... But it seems to work, the laptop does a few things, I think it does a hard drive check (chkdsk maybe?) and it boots up and she has her laptop back. But I really don't understand what just happened here. What is bitlocker? Was there a drive or file system fault? In the Olde Daze you didn't need to be connected to the mothership to exchange keys to have chkdsk repair a volume or partition. What's going on here? If I had this system configured to not use bit locker (don't know if that's possible) would this recovery have been possible? If I don't care at all about a protecting a stolen laptop and just want a drive that will recover itself without needing on-line access to a key, then is bitlocker just a pain in the azz? PS: Does this recovery key change? Or is it static, and I can use it again exactly as it is if this happens again?

I swapped out the drive for a GSA-H10A (2006 vintage) and bingo, I can see DVD's. In the drive properties I have a region-code selector, I don't think I saw that with the DRU-510A. I could play the DVD with Videolan, didn't have to install any drivers, didn't have to set a region code. EAC doesn't seem to like DVD's. This is a concert DVD, it has 5-channel audio, I take it that EAC can't rip the audio stream from a DVD?

This drive does have the DVD symbol or logo. Hard to believe it's over 20 years old. I've tried other retail DVD's (not blue ray) on this drive. As soon as disc is inserted the drive becomes active, windows is putzing with it for about a minute, then it becomes quiet. In file explorer I click on the dvd drive but all I ever get is a message box saying to insert a disc into the drive. Does XP need additional drivers just to recognize an actual DVD disc, to see the file system of a DVD?

I've been using EAC on XP with a Sony DVD RW DRU-510A drive to rip a bunch of audio CD's. One of these was cd with companion DVD. I put the DVD into the drive, but file explorer doesn't see anything there. It just keeps asking to put a disk in the drive when I point it to the drive. I thought there are a bunch of VOB or VOD files that are visible on a commercial DVD disk. Should I be able to see some files here?

Yes, this pertains to readyboot, not ready boost. Ok, I've unchecked the trace session enabled checkbox. What exactly will I lose by not enabling it? I rarely shut down my laptop. I just close the lid and it I guess goes to sleep or something. I open the lid and everything comes back up. Does any of that involve this "readyboot" thing?

I've just fired up an old XP PC and have updated the windows root and intermediate certificates but my question is - how does firefox interact with these certs? The PC has FF 39.0 and is throwing up cert errors when I bring up some sites. Does FF use these windows certs, or does it have it's own store? If it has it's own store, is it built into the distribution image when you install it? Can you have FF just update it's own certs without having to update FF itself? Are there cert update packages for FF? Or will it take the windows cert files? (On my win-98 pc at work, running that modded version of FF2, I never have cert issues and I throw a lot of sites at FF, usually have to view them with no style, but they still come up)

I've got Win-7 Ultimate 32-bit installed on a Dell 6420, it was installed from a pre-configured install image with rolled-in updates as of the fall of 2016 (when telemetry started). It has never done any windoze / micro$oft updating. A blue-screen crash has been happening more and more often over the past year. A few months ago I swapped out it's 4 gb of ram for new 16 gb. It happened again this morning. It takes a few minutes to reboot after these crashes, it sits there with black screen, mouse pointer only, while the drive is doing something. I looked at event logs, I see this: Session "ReadyBoot" stopped due to the following error: 0xC0000188 The maximum file size for session "ReadyBoot" has been reached. As a result, events might be lost (not logged) to file "C:\Windows\Prefetch\ReadyBoot\ReadyBoot.etl". The maximum files size is currently set to 20971520 bytes. I have no idea what this readyboot thing is. It may not be causing the crash, but is it causing the long start-up? Can I configure this readyboot, optimize it or maybe eliminate it if it's not doing anything useful?

Well, here's what I've got: I'm aware of those mods that get win-32 access to more than 4 gb, and how their success depends on the other drivers in the system - like the nvidia driver in this case? Nothing else in this system aside from Intel chipset driver. The only reason I'd like this system to have access to the most ram possible is because I keep a lot of tabs open in firefox and past a certain point the system becomes unstable. Is that something that more ram can fix?

I've upped the ram in my Dell 6420 from 4 to 16 gb (I might set up a 64-bit Win 7 on it some day) but for now I'm running Win-7 ultimate 32-bit and system properties is reporting 2.92 gb usable memory. I know it can't use all 4 gb but I've read where it should (?) be able to use a little more - maybe up to 3.5 gb ? What can I do to maximize that, bring it close to that 3.5 gb number ?

Cutting edge video performance is not needed. microsoft teams or watching you-tube or playing card games is mostly what's going to happen. This is a laptop for my eldery aunt, she currently has a Latitude E6230 with 12 inch screen, so even a 14 inch screen will be acceptible, 16" probably too large. But I would like it to have 1920 x 1080. It might only have 4 gb, so I'm looking for 8, I think any more ram is not going to give any advantage. I think that having a cpu with fewer cores (but faster cores) is better than having more cores for a situation like this. I think single-core cpu performance will play the largest factor in the percieved speed of this laptop given the use profile I've described. I'm in Canada, so the product choices available in the ukraine are going to be different. I don't see the HP pavillion 16-ag0075 for sale at a local retailer, and the cheapest MSI thin is the 15 FHD i5-12450H RTX for $1000 Cad ($725 USD). I should say that I'm looking at the $600 - $700 CAD price range, which is about $500 USD.