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jonah8208

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Everything posted by jonah8208

  1. I need to buy some Win 10 Home & Pro keys - not as easy as it used to be though. I have been out of the PC building game for a couple of years now because I got a pretty good job in govt IT and I am more inclined to play Elite Dangerous these days than fix people's PC disaster areas for next to nothing in my spare time, but recently I have been asked to re-build a PC for a mate, nothing special but he wants me to build him a custom PC rather than buy off the shelf. The last time I did this sort of thing Win10 was free upgrade from 7 or 8, now it appears confused. For eg a few weeks back I upgraded one of my own Win8.1 pro boxes to Win10 Pro via the upgrade tool - it installed and activated without any problems did not even ask for a key (I had one though) but I need to do clean installs on a couple of new machines and I need them to be entirely legit. I can buy a legit product key from MSFT for win 10 Home or Pro for £98, or £198 respectively. I can buy a boxed version on a USB key from Amazon for £78 I can buy a product key from Amazon via email for £9.98. (not sure if I can post links here but if you want to look stick Windows 10 in Amazon UK.) The first version is obviously legit but a bit pricey for something they gave away in the first place. The other 2 are seemingly legit being offered on Amazon with amazon fullfilling the orders but the feedback shows that for the £9.98 key only via email, most of the keys are pre-used and will not activate although the seller keeps sending a new key till you get one that works. The £78 version on a USB key in a box has no feedback yet but I suspect it is the same thing with a very expensive 4Gb USB included so I am discounting this as an option altogether So my question(s) Does anybody know what the £9.98 emailed keys are exactly - I am presuming recycled OEM keys? Anybody know of a good source of legitimate Windows 10 Home and Pro keys at a more reasonable price than the official MSFT price? tia Jonah
  2. It has no DVD Drive just an empty slot behind the case, it does have the data connection on the Mobo so I could look at that - thanks man never occurred to me to use the DVD slot.
  3. For the record - When I initially cloned my original 1Tb drive onto my new 3Tb using Acronis Disk Partition 12 set to do a straight non bootable clone - it worked - sort of - but I could not boot off my SSD (C) Drive where the OS sits. To fix this I had to do a "repair boot sector" after booting from a Windows 10 Image. This gave me a 2TB data drive with 762Gb unallocated (because I forgot to initialise the drive as GPT). I used Acronis again to fix this without losing all the data I had just cloned across to the new drive. Acronis converted my non bootable 3Tb Data Store from MBR to GPT with zero issues and I was then able to merge the unallocated 762Gb onto the drive as originally intended. So Acronis works as advertised provided you read the instructions first! Thanks for the Hacks jaclaz I will have a play with them on a test box I was considering a hybrid for a laptop that needs loads of storage but has only one HDD slot and cannot use cloud drives or NAS at work - interesting, and even better its not my project so I can shrug and walk away if it all goes wrong.
  4. Thanks jaclaz I thought as much but with this much data I need to be sure.
  5. Just a quick question re converting MBR drive to GPT. I have all my media cloned onto a new 3GB hdd. Realising I should have initialised it as GPT, if I now use Acronis to do a convert to GPT from MBR am I going to lose all my sharing permissions and have to configure it all from scratch. Anyone done this before? Jonah
  6. Noel I was in the UK RAF in the 80s, I was a Radar Tech - we were using similar kit, can't remember the type though I think we called it AR1 but it was a GE design built by Marconi and Plessy over here. Not much in wikipedia about UKAD radar though.
  7. Well I got a demo copy of LTSB which appears to be renewable every 6 months without restrictions - no doubt they will restrict it eventually. I got it from a client to evaluate his software and it is still running. It's on a workstation and running just fine thanks. It has no store, therefore no Modern Apps it is effectively a bare bones Windows 10 with no frills at all. Totally ideal and I would pay money for it - so would most of my clients and they can keep the metro apps and suchlike for consumers who want to play Candy Crush, shop at the MSFT store (anybody?) and keep all their personal and sensitive documents on one drive by default. I am considering buying a bulk license and selling individual licenses on with re-installed PCs. Have not thought it through really but I guess it is verbotten and or illegal. But then there are always legal loopholes one can exploit somewhere.
  8. Yeah Noel - I just do not understand the logic in limiting the market for LTSB Enterprise to however many seats minimum it is. I have been removing apps, installing Office 2010 usually, getting rid of the start menu, changing the default privacy for many SMBs buying new Win10 "Pro" machines who are aghast at the junk installed which is very difficult to get rid of. SMBs are the worst affected by the Win10 Pro business model and the move to subscription based MS Office. They and power users are the most lucrative sector for Microsoft and they have gone out of their way to alienate us.
  9. I am hoping they will make a business varient for power users and SMBs - which represents a bit and much disgruntled market currently switching to Apple or Linux if they are really annoyed. LTSB Win10 without the bull*** apps would be fine with security updates only and a price tag of $150 a copy. I am fine with that and they can call it Windows 11 if they wish. Jonah
  10. I got a copy of Windows Office Home and Business 2016 to install and set up for a client. Guy is a small businessman migrating from 2007 to 2016 and has bought like for like being unimpressed with paying for 365 on a subs basis. And at 9 years between upgrades the guy has a point!. I could not get the Outlook 2016 to import his .pst file or its backups, it was "not accessible" and every time I tried to delete a profile, replace it with a new profile and point Outlook at the relevent .pst it rejected it and went back to the profile I had just deleted somehow. After much frustration and much scouring of google I figured the only way to delete an existing profile and import a .pst file was to re-install the entire OS (Win 10 Pro) in this case and then put office in totally clean. Did this on a test box and it worked fine! I would therefore like to know if anyone here has come across this profile / .pst import madness before and has a solution? My solution was radical, the client did not want me to re-install his entire machine and he wanted it back pronto - so took Office Business out totally, put a copy of Office Home and Student in which has no Outlook at all and used EM Client which is a new and very good Outlook Clone to replace Outlook. His .pst file got imported, email set up was a doddle, all local forlders, rules, contacts, calendar stuff and tasks got imported (not entirely by magic but easy enough if you read the manual) and it is sorted. Happy customer, much cheaper office installation and although there has been a couple of minor cosmetic issues with EM Client he is very happy with it. Pro version is £30 - $40 or so I reckon US. So my second question is why have I not found EM Client a lot earlier it is up to V7 now and is massively cheaper than Outlook plus it is a lot more useful? http://www.emclient.com/ Jonah
  11. If I use an AV I use NOD32, been using it for at least ten years now probably longer and the only time I ever notice it is when it wants me to renew the subscription. If it does "spring" into action it does it fast and decisively and does not mess about with "what do you wan't to do questionaires?" for a serious threat, it just deals with it. Over the years, it has not like most added a ton of bells and whistles, turning a reasonably good AV client into a monsterous, invasive chunk of bloatware, it has added a couple of features. For my clients I used to install AVG Free in the 2000s until that became a bloated nagging mess in about 2005, then I went to Avast for some time until the same thing happened to Avast. Since then I have put trial versions of NOD32 on all my clients PCs and warned them to either pay for it or put their own AV in because in 30 days the trial is up. Often I get a phone call saying, "this NOD thing wants me to pay for it, what do you think I should do?.........................sigh! So I tell them again I recommend they pay for NOD32 (or Kaspersky if they wish which is more bloatware in my opinion but nonetheless pretty good) and they say, "I can put AVG / Avast / AV Freebie etc in it for nothing" so I say - "your data pal you do whatever you want". I have had this conversation about a million times so my answer is - anything is better than nothing but in the end how much is your data worth to you?
  12. OK Harry Win8 first then update via the MSFT website I suppose. Yer I liked XP too but my forensic stuff won't run on it, still that's what the VM is for - playing Rome Total War and Civilisation 5/6
  13. Hi All I am rebuilding an old Dell flat desktop machine (with some "minor" modifications involving hammers and chainsaws). I have crammed a new MOBO and CPU, modern Power supply and a couple of HDDs all ready to go. I was going to put Win7 on it but I thought I would use Windows 8 as I have nothing running Win 8 at the moment and it is usefull to have all possible flavours of Windows to avoid looking like an id*** when a customer brings a version I have not used for years (ie Windows 8) for repair. The PC itself is used in isolation from my network for media recovery / restoration of suspected contaminated or damaged hdds using varied forensic apps and running Virtual Machines, so although it needs to be quick it does not need to be cutting edge, but the old Dell on a pentium 4 and DDR2 was taking days to trawl through a 1TB drive and I could cook eggs on top of it with the heat. Anyway my question............... I only have Win8 Upgrade or Windows 8 full with legal keys but both are pre SP1. So before I get to the banging my head on the wall with unforseen show stoppers - can I install the original Windows 8 and activate it or do I have to install Windows 8.1 (which I have an ISO for but no legit key). Cheers Jonah
  14. Can somebody please explain how the confusion of builds and versions work. Fer instance is 15007 the new Creator's Edition for insiders or a general update? What is 1607 then in that case? And is 14986 also 1607 ...........................or what? I assume it is all part of a plot by Microsoft to confuse everyone so much we will all just give up and let Win10 do what it likes. I think I heard Paul Thurrot on Windows Weekly explain this mess but I didn't understand him fully as he went off on a rant as usual and my 8 second attention span can't cope with going off on a tangent. 8-) Jonah Cheers guys - 1607 - yes makes sense now!
  15. Can somebody please explain how the confusion of builds and versions work. Fer instance is 15007 the new Creator's Edition for insiders or a general update? What is 1607 then in that case? And is 14986 also 1607 ...........................or what? I assume it is all part of a plot by Microsoft to confuse everyone so much we will all just give up and let Win10 do what it likes. I think I heard Paul Thurrot on Windows Weekly explain this mess but I didn't understand him fully as he went off on a rant as usual and my 8 second attention span can't cope with going off on a tangent. 8-) Jonah
  16. I haven't seen anything on the same lines as the old lists of services that can be disabled, but most of the qualified guys here will tell you google O&O ShutUp10 which will list and allow you to disable 90% of the phone home / telemetry stuff in Win 10. https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 Got that myself on my test box and it did show me several deeply hidden telemetry services which I had not disabled via normal settings. Is that what you are after?
  17. Hi I am having trouble donating via Paypal from the UK? When I donate via Paypal the payment page defaults to a Scandinavian (I assume) Paypal Page, which I am not going to go any further with. I am on a UK IP and not using any VPNs or Proxies so I expect the Paypal donation login page to be the UK version which I can verify as OK - not God knows where, can't see any reason it would be me as paypal works just fine on other forum donation pages. I would love to donate and help keep this forum running but I am not happy to proceed on an unknown and unexpected paypal login page? Please advise .................. thx
  18. If you really want to turn off Windows Defender permenantly http://www.ghacks.net/2015/10/25/how-to-disable-windows-defender-in-windows-10-permanently/ 3 methods there all will do the trick Only problem with this apart from the obvious downgrade in overall security is that Windows Updates may reset the registry and turn on Defender again without your consent due to the all or nothing updates policy. hth
  19. Jorge I been waiting for that day probably as long as you have, not looking any closer than it was 10 years ago, maybe by 2025!
  20. Just got a broken Sony Vaio today belonging to a DJ who sez the broken PC was catastrophic at the time happened. Anyway what happened is he was doing his thing when this Win8.1 Vaio froze up totally, so he was forced to do a hard reset after which the laptop went into installing updates mode for 30 mins then went into a Sony auto repair loop and would not come back. This was very funny for his audience - for him not so much. So I played with it for a bit - I couldn't find any default restore points or any sign of an OS at all for that matter. No repair options worked, even the recovery partitions were inaccessible so in the end I changed the HDD and am currently installing a clean, non Sony version of Win8 for him - I assume he has his music stuff backed up he sez its fine its in the cloud - hmmmm......... I have accessed the drive offline and it looks fine files and folders wise but I can't open anything on it just gives me errors (drive blocked) can't access the basic disk functions via cmd either so somehow this drive has got itself totally corrupted in a big way. Is there by chance some really bad update could have caused such a mess and is it down to the new MSFT update policy, I have seen some dodgy updates but normally I can roll them back somehow - this is a new one on me. I guess its possible the HDD just fried and it has nothing to do with updates but I never did believe in coincidences?
  21. Thanks Noel I am of the opinion that this reset was lazy default updates that reset user configs as a matter of course because although they will cause problems for a small minority of power users the default reset will fix / protect a majority of users from their own fiddling about or possibly from Malware reseting security options. It was however a lot easier to fix this sort of thing when updates were manual and not forced and I had a clue what caused the problem in the first place. Hence counter to what Microsoft have tried to achieve by forced updated I have now deliberately stopped Win10 from updating. I will do it every 6 months or so if necessary and rely on my experience and knowledge to keep it secure especially as my Win10 machine is no longer a production machine but a glorified NAS box. I really despair of Microsoft and the direction they have taken with Windows 10 Pro they seem to be trying to get rid of all power users by forcing us to use Enterprise or put up with their interference. A lot of people on here have said (including yourself) words to the effect that they are getting tired of fighting Microsoft for control of their own PCs, I think I lost the will to keep struggling with it 2 years ago now. Let me know when you finally give it up 8-)
  22. Hi For those interested running Windows 10 and iMACs with El Capitan or Sierra (only 2 flavours I can comment on). My Win10 PC which happens to serve all my media around my home network was auto updated on 9/11/16. After which connecting to from Win10 to my iMACs was impossible constantly giving an incorrect credentials error on Win10. Took me a few days to track this down it turns out.......... Mac OS only responds to LAN network authentication level 2 requests from Windows. In Windows 10 this is turned off by default, I knew this and had previously set Windows 10 to Send NTLMv2 responses only to ensure that shared MAC folders were available to Win10 machines. The update on 9/11/16 reset this to default therby borking the shares and causing me several hours of frustrating digging about in network settings on Win10 and Mac OS. If you have Win10 / Mac OS related sharing problems suddenly this is the fix. Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Local Security Policy > Local Policies > Security Options > "Network Security: LAN Manager Authentication Level" > ensure this is set to "Send NTLMv2 responses only" Not sure exactly which of the three security updates for November I go reset my Network Security setting but one of them sure did. As a result of this and the aggravation caused I have disabled the Windows Update Service in services.msc I am fed up with windows updates screwing up perfectly good systems. I have better things to do than troubleshoot obscure windows settings that are reset by updates. hth Jonah
  23. I have 3 machines on Windows 10, a games beast with Occulus Rift, a Enterprise machine for testing and an ordinary untouched (apart from the phone home stuff) machine so when updates do arrive I can analyse them before I wipe out my games box with ill advised updates (windows update service is turned off on the games box). Then I have 3 windows 7 machines doing different jobs - one backup server, one media server and a standby windows production box. But I use an i-Mac these days since 10 came along with a win7 virtual machine running in it for actual work. So.................... Yes and no I guess. I don't actually mind Windows 10 that much it is all the faffing about with sacrificial boxes required to run one games machine with a degree of confidence that I find irritating, bottom line is I can't trust Windows 10 and Microsoft because they have made control so tedious I can't be bothered any more. I am buying Apples as stuff wears out not replacing Windows boxes though I will keep a games machine on the latest Microsoft OS. But I am not upgrading work machines to 10 they will be replaced by i-Macs - after nigh on 20 years using Microsoft for business I find that really sad in a way.
  24. xpclient - that's one of the most enlightened posts I have seen yet re Windows 10, I suspect you are absolutley correct. I did change my line of work to Aviation some time ago and Microsoft IT is just a useful hobby that keeps me in motorbikes.
  25. I have done a few reversals back to Windows 7 for various people and 2 PCs of my own just to see what happened. I would just use the built in option to go back to Windows 7 it works well and I have not had a problem with it, no trick stuff or super skill is involved, there are no bear traps to avoid it just works. It is not ideal but it is the easiest and fastest method to restore Windows 7 / 8 from a Win10 machine. Acronis - No I would not use it in this case except as a last resort Acronis is better for fixing a broken system than doing bare metal re-installs unless you know exactly what you are doing and have prepped properly. If you really want to use Acronis you could try booting the PC from an Acronis start up disk or USB then restoring from there, the odds are it will not work for a multitude of reasons but give it a go. The best way to re-install a win7 system from an Acronis image is to boot from a Win7 install DVD, use the drive options to totally blank the drive then install Windows 7 clean. Once win7 is running you can install Acronis or just use a start up disct to restore your image back to the C Drive and allow Acronis to do its stuff. It might work - it might have issues I have tried this several times and been successful once for various reasons. My main method for re-installations is to copy everything off the original hard drive I need to keep as straight file copies of photos / music etc. Make sure I have all the drivers I need either via manufacturers website or using Driver Genius Pro to copy all the driver on the machine to a backup hard drive. Ensure I have a valid activation key (Magic Jelly Bean sorts this issue if I dont have a sticker on the PC) Then I wipe the machine and re-install Windows from scratch and copy the user files back onto it. It is time consuming but it is clean and you end up with a brand new copy of Windows without junk all over it. hth
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