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I’ve forgotten where I posted it, but was able to persuade Win10 to install on an older ASUS Aspire 5552-3691. Had to update the drivers for mobility HD4250 to Catalyst 13.1 (driver only, may be lowest risk), before attempting the update, then changed a registry setting to get Win 10 to attempt the upgrade.

The upgrade generally went very well, accommodating a dogs-breakfast of apps. One unfortunate [problem] is that under Win7, there were drivers for a networked HP AiO printer w/ scanner. After upgrade to Win10, the Print Spooler refuses to start, apparently because there is a phantom ‘printer’ for that HP device. Have found No resolution — for others making such an attempt, would suggest complete uninstall of any networked printers, before attempting to upgrade to Win10.

Even if Win 10 is offered by Windows Update, it may fail to install. For example, freespace checking seems to be inadequate.

Got an ASUS X205TA w/ 32 GB SSD, for a single dedicated task. It came w/ Win 8.1, but kept asking to upgrade to Win10. Tried the download and apply at a later time option. Not clear whether it completely finished downloading, but to install Win10, it claimed to need another 57 GB. Must have been too difficult to check for sufficient freespace, before the upgrade attempted the goat-rope…

I see no mention of print problems. 1st, background … Decided to try Win10 on an under-powered laptop (ASUS Aspire 5552-3691) that MS initially disavowed as being suitable for upgrade. After updating video driver, and adding a registry key avowing that it was good to go, the upgrade from Win7 to 10 seemed to go reasonably smoothly, though it took more than ten hours (partly due to the power cord unplugging itself (?)).
That laptop has quite a dogs-breakfast of sw on it, and everything seemed to function (though ClassicShell needed a re-install to work reliably). It was days before I noticed it was not possible to print (other than by using print to PDF features within browsers).
Turned out that Print Spooler service was not starting. There are a lot of threads about 1721 or …706b9 errors, many of which have no clear resolutions. In this instance, it appears that a networked HP printer might be the culprit. Removing all printers should have been done before uninstalling the HP software, because doing so afterward left a non-removable printer husk, which had used the Web Services transport (WSD) to support networked scanning.
Acck!! it appears the only option is a rollback to Win7, remove all printer traces, upgrade to Win10 then reinstall the printers.

Not sure if this kb upd caused a different issue, but was the most proximate change; (Windows aka File) Explorer hangs after rt-clk on a PDF, Create Shortcut. TaskMan shows ‘Not responding’ fairly quickly. Issue had occurred before this KB upd, but had been intermittent; now seems to occur every time CreateShortcut is attempted.

File is on a local drive. ClassicShell 4.1.0 (Classic Explorer portion adds a toolbar to Explorer) has been in use since May2014 under Win 8.1 x64.

Installed all the Important patches offered, as well as 3 reco for Win8.1 x64. It was several days before hangs of File Explorer (FE) instances were noticed. There may be more ’causes’, but the two noticed: 1) one or more files selected, rt-clk, Properties, 2) Create a shortcut. For the latter, using mklink in a cmd-shell (eg TC 15, by JPSoft) may break whatever event logjam (?) FE is experiencing. When an instance of FE hangs, seems to have no impact on other instances.

ClassicShell(.net) 4.1.0 could be implicated…

Elements of the German Federal Government are supposedly warning about a different aspect of Win8. See, eg 21Aug2013 blog post by Wolf Richter: http://investmentwatchblog.com/leaked-german-government-warns-key-entities-not-to-use-windows-8-links-the-nsa

The comments may be more interesting than the post.

A year on, and the German Federal Government is warning about “A Special Surveillance Chip”, eg article by Wolf Richter: http://investmentwatchblog.com/leaked-german-government-warns-key-entities-not-to-use-windows-8-links-the-nsa/

Many of the “comparisons” I’ve seen claim that LibreOffice has more features than OpenOffice, but none seem to get into details. Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice claims it has VBA support, but to what extent? VBA in MS Office products has a fairly complex architecture, with sometimes subtle twists. Granted, some of those twists are because the object models differ, eg between Word and Excel.

OpenOffice has seemed good enough, where I installed it on computers for others. I’ve stuck with Office 2003 Pro, partly because it includes Outlook. I’ve stuck with Outlook because it can pull multiple kinds (POP3, IMAP, MAPI) of email accounts into one place — and the prospect of transferring gigabytes of old PST files, from days of yore, seems unappealing. VBA for Outlook and Excel have been good enough, though paper-cuts from some of the raggedy-sharp edges still happen …:^_^:

There is another type of NAS that will work. NetworkDeviceAttachedStorage (NDAS) originated with Ximeta (which still does the drivers). NDAS makes it appears to Windows (and I verified that Windows 7 Home Premium does see the drive as local (via 802g wireless). NDAS is also supposedly (never felt the need to test performance, for casual home use) faster than other varieties of NAS.

One caveat under Win7 Home Premium is that the most recent driver (3.72) may causes hangs (pointer frozen, no response to keyboard or pointing device) at the logon screen. Boot to SafeMode, access Services, and set NDAS Service to “Automatic (Delayed Start)”.

NDAS has been around quite awhile, but under different brands. After XiMeta, Klegg briefly offered NDAS, and now ioCell does. The ioCell NetDisk enclosure accepts SATA drives, and comes with external cables for eSATA, Gigabit and USB. I put a WD Caviar Green 750 GB into the enclosure (which was a little easier than the old Ximeta enclosures, and the cooling design seems better).

Games can be a trying experience, especially in getting them to run under LimitedUser accounts. My approach is based on installing the app as Admin, then try it as Limited User:

1) install as Admin
2) switch to a non-Admin account (or logoff/logon, if Fast UserSwitching is not enabled)
3) run the game, far enough into it to begin typical activity(s)
4) Also try Save, if it has such a feature

If the game fails to work as a non-Admin, often it will be because one or more files are too restricted for access by a LimitedUser. By “too restricted”, I mean in terms of how the game actually works, not any ideal sense of what sort of access ought to have been used.

To diagnose which files, try the following, logged on as an Admin:

5) Run ProcessMonitor (ProcMon, most recently 2.39, available from: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645 )
5.a) toggle on logging, via File, Capture Events (checkmark will be to the left)
5.b) minimize ProcMon
6) Run the game or app (same as step 3 above)
6.a.) go at least far enough into it to begin typical activity(s)
6.b) if there is a Save feature, use it
7) switch back to ProcMon
7.a) toggle off logging, via File, Capture Events
7.b) note what the application Path is
7.c) Filter, Filter, Display: Path begins with: {base_path of game}
7.d) Filter, Highlight: Operation is: WriteFile
8.a) File, Save, Events displayed using current filter and include profiling events — Format can be whatever is handiest
8.b) File, Save, All Events — Format can be whatever is handiest — Path set to wherever you will remember (be aware that can be a very large file)

Steps 8.a and 8.b are not strictly necessary, but can be handy for later review. There is a Find (under Edit menu) in ProcMon, but it may not be as handy as searching in a spreadsheet (.csv format from step 8 or within a web browser (.xml format). Step 8.a will be of use if the application is using Write access to files outside

Whichever approach is used, one needs to note the path of each file which the game accessed through a WriteFile operation. Only one instance of each file is needed on the list, and one can often ignore files that did not exist (which may be for optional features of the game, or files which can be in more than one place).

After the list has been collected, determine what the base of the path is used. For example {base_path}: %SystemDrive%program filesgame_dir

From a command shell (such as cmd.exe)
cd {base_path}
For each file in the list (where cacls is used to change access control lists (ACLs) :C stands for Change):
cacls {file} /e /g builtinuser:C

Switch to the LimitedUser account. If the game runs, Indiana Jones, or Sherlock Holmes (you) can rest. Otherwise, the game may require F(ull, instead of C) access to one or more of the files, or directories. The expedient thing to do (as Admin) is to go back through the list, and use :F, instead of :C, with cacls.

Otherwise, Good Luck, sleuthing further…

RodeRunner

Did you mean to use portable SAS on a flash drive? If so, that could risk infecting the flash drive. Might be safer to boot the infected PC into SafeMode with Networking, then download and run portable SAS directly. If their security is lax or non-existent (possibly from being short of money), might be better to download the non-portable SAS. If the problem is a rootkit, read on.

A thread (http://forums.superantispyware.com/index.php?/topic/3981-rootkit/) indicates SAS does not always catch rootkits, and may not properly remove them without expert assistance. That thread suggests using ComboFix. I have used both ComboFix and SAS before, but so infrequently that I will comment no further.

MS Automatic Updates offered this (KB 2416447, 2416472, 2416473, 2418241) to one workstation (WinXP MCE 2005 SP3) on 02Oct. Same patches were offered by Microsoft Update for 3 XP Home SP3 systems. No problems observed on any of those 4 systems, over the 5 days since (crossing fingers Now …).

I’ve been observing what may be a similar problem since August. It had been infrequent enough for the user to ignore, but has gotten worse in September. System: XP MCE 2005 SP3 + all patches current, NOD32 4.2.64.12, ZAP 9.3.037.000 .

Invoking Explorer via either {Win}E, or the StartMenu causes a delay of up to 20 minutes before the Explorer window appears. During the wait the Taskbar (which is auto-hide) will not display, and StartMenu is not available. Pulling up TaskMan (via {Ctrl}{Alt}{Del) shows very little CPU being used (97 – 99% idle). There is an explorer process, but it is apparently blocked awaiting some event. Oddly, if a command shell (such as cmd, or tcc (JPSoft)) is already running, a new instance of explorer can be started from there, and will come up right away. The blocked instance remains so.

Appears to have been a problem with 12.1 version of OutlookConnector interacting with Outlook 2003. There were a lot of Sync Issues (hidden folder, at least to user of Outlook 2003). User was not ever advised by Outlook that a newer version of the Connector had become available, although 14.0 appears to have been released 20April.

Installing Outlook Hotmail Connector 14.0 seems to have resolved the problem: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=39db2b89-af2e-41f9-a175-f93e1377959f&displaylang=en

DeConvolution, Wikipedia, also lists Deblur My Image:
http://www.adptools.com/deblurmyimage/eng/index.html

I have no experience using it, however.