Replies

Thanks satrow: much appreciated. I’ve just DL’d this tool now so am off to play with it (that is, learn how to use it.) I’m surprised I’d never heard of this before. Or that it is — presumably — the only software of its kind to deal with something that must affect 1000s of computer users worldwide at one time or another. Thanks again.

Have to say, I’m surprised and not a little disappointed to find Windows Secrets — usually so authoritative and well-informed — slipping up so badly here. Isn’t anyone at WS aware of what has actually gone on at Macecraft, the one-man business set up by jvPowerTools founder Jouni Vouri to sell his product once he’d decided it would no longer be freeware?

Not a single investigative journalist among anyone within Windows Secrets who might have wondered where almost $41,000 of crowd-funding money went in the Spring of 2014, followed not long after by the departure of Mr Flemming (having earlier changed his name from Vouni) to the Far East, there to describe himself as “online business tycoon, expatriate and internationalist capitalist” and now a lecturer in how to succeed in business without really trying.

Yeah. Right. The smell that arose over Flemming’s “failed” crowd funding exercise (he said he was going to release the jvPowerTools code for nothing, or, well, after he’d hit his crowd funding target) won’t go away. Even if Mr Flemming most certainly has.

Kudos to Woody for highlighting this issue — and thanks, too, to those who’ve contributed to the debate on this thread. I just thought I’d drop by with a non-US perspective, seeing as how I’m (a) a UK citizen and (b) have travelled extensively around the USA these past 40 years, on which basis I have to say:

Do the law makers involved here have not an iota of self-awareness? Have they no insight — at all — into how the wider world has so often perceived the USA as a law unto itself? Have they never once heard the jibe that the USA is *not* the World’s Policeman?

Evidently not. God’s sakes, if there was anything more un-American and less consistent with the nature, the spirit, of all the ‘ordinary’ Americans I’ve come to know over those decades, then it’s this wholly unnecessary excursion into the supra-legal.

Though it’d be absurd to attempt to draw any actual parallels between North Korea’s current behaviour and the legal action going on here with Microsoft, there’s nevertheless an unfortunate and unavoidable resonance: about interference; about unwarranted extension of influence; about. . . Paranoia.

I don’t have much time for Redmond any more than I do for any other megabucks corporation, but on this particular issue I find myself siding with Microsoft. . . which, when I come to think about it, is arguably the most persuasive evidence of the extent to which this issue is being so mishandled when it could as easily have been addressed behind the scenes.

Europe’s lawmakers are as alive to the dangers of this post-9/11 world as any in the USA; there’s no argument that a security threat to one Western country is very much a security threat to all others. But there’s no evidence of Western security being in hazard in this case. Until there is, US lawmakers would be well advised to think rather more about covert diplomacy and less about overt confrontation — and have a darn sight more regard to the USA’s international reputation, too.

On that basis, d’you extrapolate to absurd degree the content of every post you read on every Internet forum? Wouldn’t surprise me.

Adobe Reader was installed by default on my new computer. I immediately Revo’d it out. Revo reported an installation size of a staggering — because it is just that: staggering — 185Mb. Gawd’s sakes: why??? I turfed out this hapless bloatware and replaced it with Tracker Software’s well-known freebie, PDF-Viewer. Size on disk: 52Mb. But it wasn’t just the size of the thing that I objected to, it’s the fact that Adobe Reader is installed on 1,000s of computers run by novices blissfully unaware of the harsh fact of life that the more ‘popular’ something is (in terms of number of users) the greater the likelihood of it being targeted by hackers. After all, why bother going to a lot of trouble to create malware and then direct it at the smallest possible audience? What you want to target is the largest audience . . . and the Adobe Reader audience, unwitting though it most often is, remains the largest pdf user group of ’em all. No wonder Adobe Reader is more or less constantly under attack. No wonder it is more and less constantly having to be updated. No wonder that you’re more likely to be a sitting duck than anything else if you’re using Adobe Reader when there are so many safer, better and considerably less bloated freeware alternatives out there.

I am moving back to England from the U.S. and therefore have been selling a bunch of items on Craigslist, Ebay, Ebid and my local virtual yardsale. I can’t remember all the different scams I have had during this process. This is only over a period of about 6 weeks so there must be literally thousands of them at it. I also have in my possession two checks, these were for the same piece of furniture that was priced at $700, one was written on the check of a Paint company in Georgia and was for $3450, (I called them and they had had quite a few calls) the second was written on a JC Penney check and was for $2000+ and the check was signed by Sarah Palin (now I really feel special).
I would say that at least 90% of the answers I’ve had to my ads have been scams. One thing they all have in common is their bad English and the same format. . . . .

So sorry you’ve had to contend with these malevolent morons — but you’ve hit the nail on the head when it comes to scam-spotting: the imbecilic illiteracy of the scammers. It’s an aspect of this scum-life that really irritates: the seemingly implicit assumption that I’m as thick as they are when it comes to corporate as well as domestic English. (Your “eBay warning letter” is a little gem, by the way — pretty much on a par with the hilarious “scam warning” currently circulating from, ahem, the FBI, wherein the recipient is alerted to the fact that the Internet is full of scammers and that only the author of the FBI email is to be trusted. . . even if his Washington DC address seems inexplicably linked to a server in Albania.)

I find Google’s gmail server-side spam filtering to be pretty good on the whole; certainly, no scam emails have landed on my desktop via POP3. A weekly check on the webmail account shows the spam folder to have its usual quota of junk mail, albeit I also use gmail filtering (instructing gmail not to place a particular sender’s email in spam but to delete it on receipt) so the trash is fairly full, too. I empty spam and trash as and when, gmail’s allowance being way beyond the volume I need so space isn’t a consideration.

As for eBay. . . not part of your comment, I know, but it’s often the case that scammers archive images from live or recently closed listings for their own phony offerings, something of which eBay is well aware but as ever, does nothing about. It’s for that reason — when considering a major purchase — that I use TinEye, the reverse image look-up that you can either use online or, as in my case, run from your desktop.

TinEye is by no means infallible, nor does it claim to be, but a few months ago I was interested in an eBay UK listing from what appeared to be a major auto dealer, complete with pictures not only of the car but of it sitting on the dealer’s forecourt. A 30-second search by TinEye of the listing’s images tracked them to a legitimate AutoExpress used car listing for a dealer some 200 miles from the location given in the eBay auction. I notified eBay but didn’t hang around waiting for it to do anything, so have no idea if it pulled the listing or not. But I did additionally contact the original, legitimate auto dealership, and they immediately notified their local police of the attempted fraud.

Words and pictures, then: the scammers can try all they want, but as most of their potential victims can speak English infinitely better than they ever will, and as TinEye is a useful adjunct when it comes to eBay auction browsing, then most of us are pretty well insulated against their trite and tiresome ways. That many aren’t is sad but will likely always be the case: there are folks out there who not only believe there is such a thing as a free lunch, but an entirely free restaurant, too.

Although warning folks about scams and scammers is praise-worthy, there’s a danger in over-estimating the amount of money that scammers actually harvest. Understandably, no law enforcement agency or regulatory authority is going to do err on the side of understatement: jobs and funding depend on there being a real threat, and the more frequently overstated the nature of that threat, the better.

Scammers involved in 419 and similar efforts are illiterates whose efforts are as ludicrously bad now as they were way back when, but railing against them is actually like railing against the notion of the survival of the fittest: there will always be stupid people who do stupid things; and there will always be “one born every minute”.

A good piece then, Woody, and your efforts re the execrable Western Union and the utterly inert PayPal are to be applauded, but really, the transaction you chronicled would have sounded alarm bells at its earliest stages for anyone with a few functioning brain cells. Sadly, some people can be fooled all of the time. And that’s never going to change.

Granger ,
Hello…. Check this link out it is about as simple as it getshttp://www.macrium.com/KB/KnowledgebaseArticle50039.aspx
Regards Fred

Ye Gods, Fred. Talk about riding immediately to the rescue! I’ve followed your link and there’s a wealth of tutorial info there which — on the basis of even the single read-through I’ve just had of but one of ’em — is surely going to be invaluable. Yes, I appreciate, this is going to be Macrium-specific, but even so: you’ve already given Macrium a thumbs-up endorsement and there appear to be 1,000s of other satisfied users, too.

So. . . cyberspace just went soggy: that beer I promised is en route somewhere.:D

Many thanks!!

I don’t disagree with any of the points made here. And when I did manage to have Windows Updates, the service was always set on a user-chooser basis. Obviously, I can’t set it on anything now because it doesn’t exist, as explained in my OP.

The problem with user/chooser however is that not all users can be choosers. They don’t know what they’re doing. For instance — and this is a typical case — I told a friend who, I thought, was reasonably savvy, not to allow Microsoft to automatically install anything on his PC. He should review the proposed download, then decide for himself.

At some later stage he attempted to run an app I’d recommended but it wouldn’t work. I scooted round there and realised it needed the latest .NET version. ‘NET?’ he said. ‘But I don’t need that. I read the download info and it was something about what developers need. I’m not a developer. And I have whatever-this-NET-thing-is already installed, I looked on Revo to see what’s on my PC.’

Hmmm. Another typical instance: I tell a friend that (bloatware issue aside) using Adobe Reader is daft because it’s popular. Eh? She stared at me. I explained that Reader, like Internet Explorer, constantly has security issues because it’s used so widely and so is targeted so often. I switched her to PDF Viewer (I don’t like Foxit’s nagging) and also installed Firefox. She’s happy. I tell her about user-chooser but no, honestly, really, she’s just not confident enough to do that. So in due course her computer “automatically” downloads and installs a very large file which brings her Internet Explorer 8. . . a browser she doesn’t even use.
Fair enough. Where ignorance is so total, then automatic updating is the lesser of two evils. That is, until the third evil comes along: an update or update patch or patch for an update patch that was never needed in the first place clashes with an existing configuration.

As my OP made clear, I’m no fan of Microsoft when it comes to the unresolved problem I’ve encountered (and which has likely been experienced by many, many more, to judge from the pleas for help all over the Internet.) But I do understand the point made by Ted that Microsoft isn’t psychic: it cannot tailor everything it does to the specific configuration of a specific user.

And so does the law of unintended consequences come into play: the day when Microsoft shods a computer with bright shiny new running shoes which instead of improving progress now cripple it from the get-go: wrong size, wrong shape, and laced up so tightly the computer cannot get rid of them.

And that, to me at any rate, seems to happen far too often. Which is why I gave up bothering about new Microsoft footwear. Instead, I’m happy with the protections I have in place and appreciate the additional advice freely offered on this thread to beef things up a bit more.

Just as an aside though: something which really does shine through all the posts here is the one thing that — in my experience — actually frightens the horses (as it were!) far more than any talk of user-chooser downloads or selective WU installs.

It’s the word: “imaging”.

Try as I might to explain to friends that we’re talking about an archival snap-shot process for the purposes of restoration, it’s patently obvious that the concept isn’t grasped. Imaging?? Wazzat then? Well it’s like this, I say — or I would do, except nowadays, I simply don’t have the time. And anyway, I’m never going to expose myself to the risks of something going wrong if a friend screws up her / his machine on the basis of something I’m alleged to have said.

So yes. Imaging is crucial. Yet I haven’t yet found a simple “imaging” tutorial anywhere online whose link I can pass to non-tech friends, an illustrated (screen grabs) pdf document, say, written in simple layman’s terms that both explains the concept and moves step-by-step through the procedure.

If anyone here knows of one, and can provide such a link, that’d be greatly appreciated — the next round of cyber beer’s on me.

Fred:

Many thanks for that! It did cross my mind, when re-reading what I’d posted, that it might look like I was trying to demonstrate some sort of intellectually superior approach to Windows Update, along the lines of I-know-better. Far from it! I was pitched into my current situation with Microsoft because of Microsoft, and neither Microsoft nor anyone else has been able to resolve it.

Working on the old maxim that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, may very possibly have saved me some grief in the months since my updates service ceased — after all, the only diagnosis that Microsoft (and everyone else who pitched in with help) could come up with was that “something most likely went wrong” during a slew of Windows Updates a mere four days after getting my new computer and that “something else most likely” in another slew of Updates nine months later compounded the original, though undetected, system error.

I’m thankful, therefore, that no other unidentified “something else” has been allowed to land on my PC via Microsoft between September and now. Oh, and thanks for jogging my memory re Macrium: I’ve been using Paragon but haven’t found it that easy or reliable so have been telling myself to go look at Macrium. Thanks to your reminder, I’ll do just that.

rurib: good advice, and appreciated. And I’m not discounting the possibility of a future problem because of the absence of Windows Update, even if it seems increasingly to me that the possibility of a future problem because of the presence of the darn thing is actually more likely.

Deadeye81: thanks for that, but as explained in my OP, I can’t set WU to do anything at all because it’s ceased to function, the licensing service has stopped and won’t re-start, and as a result Windows doesn’t even think Vista is activated. Yup, I do get the subscriber edition, not the comp version, and I value everything in it much the same as I loved Fred Langa’s original work from way, way back when. I’ve also been monitoring via Belarc, though hadn’t realised Woody had a website — so many thanks for that: I’ll check that out now.

Sincere thanks again then to you three, and especially for not flaming me for being some kind of Microsoft rebel without a cause!

Thanks, WebGenii — yes, you’re quite right, it’s possible to set an ‘all folders’ view option in Vista as in XP.

Well, I say ‘possible’, because there’ve been countless instances of Vista failing to remember that setting, as evidenced by posts all over the ‘Net.

I’ve managed to sort mine out now — almost — but the glitches still occur wihere Vista fails to recognise / remember that a folder of audio material which I use for a DVD slideshow soundtrack backup isn’t an audio folder at all but a video folder. Or thinks a video folder is a documents folder.

So the craziness continues.

Unless — like me — you had to retire your existing PC and get a budget-buy replacement with Vista pre-installed, then sticking with XP is obviously the best bet: I’ve yet to see in Vista a single improvement over good ol’ XP.

Thanks, WebGenii — yes, you’re quite right, it’s possible to set an ‘all folders’ view option in Vista as in XP.

Well, I say ‘possible’, because there’ve been countless instances of Vista failing to remember that setting, as evidenced by posts all over the ‘Net.

I’ve managed to sort mine out now — almost — but the glitches still occur wihere Vista fails to recognise / remember that a folder of audio material which I use for a DVD slideshow soundtrack backup isn’t an audio folder at all but a video folder. Or thinks a video folder is a documents folder.

So the craziness continues.

Unless — like me — you had to retire your existing PC and get a budget-buy replacement with Vista pre-installed, then sticking with XP is obviously the best bet: I’ve yet to see in Vista a single improvement over good ol’ XP.

Thanks, WebGenii — yes, you’re quite right, it’s possible to set an ‘all folders’ view option in Vista as in XP.

Well, I say ‘possible’, because there’ve been countless instances of Vista failing to remember that setting, as evidenced by posts all over the ‘Net.

I’ve managed to sort mine out now — almost — but the glitches still occur wihere Vista fails to recognise / remember that a folder of audio material which I use for a DVD slideshow soundtrack backup isn’t an audio folder at all but a video folder. Or thinks a video folder is a documents folder.

So the craziness continues.

Unless — like me — you had to retire your existing PC and get a budget-buy replacement with Vista pre-installed, then sticking with XP is obviously the best bet: I’ve yet to see in Vista a single improvement over good ol’ XP.

Thanks, WebGenii — yes, you’re quite right, it’s possible to set an ‘all folders’ view option in Vista as in XP.

Well, I say ‘possible’, because there’ve been countless instances of Vista failing to remember that setting, as evidenced by posts all over the ‘Net.

I’ve managed to sort mine out now — almost — but the glitches still occur wihere Vista fails to recognise / remember that a folder of audio material which I use for a DVD slideshow soundtrack backup isn’t an audio folder at all but a video folder. Or thinks a video folder is a documents folder.

So the craziness continues.

Unless — like me — you had to retire your existing PC and get a budget-buy replacement with Vista pre-installed, then sticking with XP is obviously the best bet: I’ve yet to see in Vista a single improvement over good ol’ XP.

Thanks, WebGenii — yes, you’re quite right, it’s possible to set an ‘all folders’ view option in Vista as in XP.

Well, I say ‘possible’, because there’ve been countless instances of Vista failing to remember that setting, as evidenced by posts all over the ‘Net.

I’ve managed to sort mine out now — almost — but the glitches still occur wihere Vista fails to recognise / remember that a folder of audio material which I use for a DVD slideshow soundtrack backup isn’t an audio folder at all but a video folder. Or thinks a video folder is a documents folder.

So the craziness continues.

Unless — like me — you had to retire your existing PC and get a budget-buy replacement with Vista pre-installed, then sticking with XP is obviously the best bet: I’ve yet to see in Vista a single improvement over good ol’ XP.