Microsoft Surface Pro 3 Deal

I decided to go with a traditional laptop at work, but I had the option of a Surface 3 Pro. If you are thinking about one, Amazon has a pretty good deal: $100 off, plus a $100 Amazon gift card.

Via Kinja Deals

Yaesu FT2DR: Touchscreen HT

So Ford is replacing Microsoft's in-car infotainment platform and replacing it with QNX. Several of the comments to the Slashdot article are complaining about the lack of dedicated knobs and buttons. That complaint echos those I hear from those that don't want to do SDR, because they want knobs and not a mouse.

Makes me wonder what the response will be to the Yaesu FT2DR touchscreen HT. Universal Radio shows a list price of $640, so you know how interested I'll be.

Package Manager for Windows 10: OneGet

Install applications from the PowerShell command line in Windows 10:

"With Windows 10, however, we are finally getting an official package manager: OneGet. In the current build of Windows 10 Technical Preview, you can open up PowerShell and use OneGet to install thousands of applications with commands such as Find-Package VLCand Install-Package Firefox."

I'm not sure why the article says this is to the lament of Linux users.

Via Slashdot.org

Dropbox and Office

Wow. I'm surprised that Microsoft is working with Dropbox when they have their own cloud storage.

OneDrive - Unlimited Cloud Storage

Wow... Microsoft is going unlimited on its Office 365 OneDrive cloud storage.

Apple Surface Pro Clone?

So the question is, "Will Apple's next hit be a Microsoft Surface Pro clone?"

Sure, just slap a touch screen on the MacBook Air.

Windows 10

Skipping 9...

Low Cost HP Windows Laptops

Low cost HP Windows Laptops. This looks really impressive http://t.co/whNPyoA143
— Wally (@wbm) September 30, 2014

"HP's Stream brand will now encompass laptops with 11.6-, 13.3- and 14-inch screens, while tablets will be available with 7- or 8-inch screens; all the devices will run Windows 8.1. The Stream 7 tablet is the cheapest of the bunch, priced at just $100, while the Stream 8 will cost $150. The Stream 11 laptop will cost $200, followed by the Stream 13 at $230. All the devices will go on sale in November."

It would be worth it for this alone... Office 365 Personal is $70/year:

"Each device will come with a one-year subscription package to Microsoft services that includes Office 365 Personal, 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage and 60 monthly minutes of Skype. Additionally, the Stream 8 will include 200MB of free 4G data each month for the life of the device at no additional cost."

Group Policy

Random comment... I love Group Policy.

It is a wonderful tool for lazy admins.

Windows Server 2003 EOL

Hey you! Yes, you! The one still running XP. Your Windows Server 2003 goes EOL in July 2015.

Skype

I had to install Skype to test something for my consulting. I told it not to start with Windows. It still does. Bye, bye Skype. Lame.

Free Microsoft eBooks - a ton of them!

Hot off the e-presses...

"Largest collection of FREE Microsoft eBooks ever, including: Windows 8.1, Windows 8, Windows 7, Office 2013, Office 365, Office 2010, SharePoint 2013, Dynamics CRM, PowerShell, Exchange Server, Lync 2013, System Center, Azure, Cloud, SQL Server, and much more!"

I may have downloaded a few.

Via Lifehacker

Storage

I know there are pros and cons to various storage options, but the Microsoft Office 365 subscription is really attractive. You can get 1 TB of OneDrive space plus Office for $6.99/month. I may have to buy a laptop to support my consulting work and would like to get the new version of Office. Instead of shelling out for the full version all at once, I can pay $7/month or $70 for the year. (If you want to install Office on up to five devices, you can $9.99/month or $99.99/year.)

On-line storage comparison at the Technologizer

I can't wait to see how Google, Dropbox, etc. respond!

Printer Device

"Hey, grab that TPS report off the printer device," said no one ever.

From Craig Zacker's "Exam Ref MCSA 70-410: Installing and Configuring Windows Server 2012 R2" book*:

NOTE PRINTING NOMENCLATURE
“Printer” and “print device” are the most commonly misused terms in the Windows printing vocabulary. Obviously, many sources use “printer” to refer to the printing hardware. However, in Windows, printer and print device are not equivalent. For example, you can add a printer to a Windows Server 2012 computer without a physical print device being present. The computer can then host the printer, print server, and printer driver. These three components enable the computer to process the print jobs and store them in a print queue until the print device is available.

I'm not criticizing Craig here at all. I think Microsoft missed the boat with their word choice. Let's take a common usage and avoid it all costs!

And on the topic of printers, I've seen it time and again when someone goes into "Devices and Printers" to make a change to their printer settings. Right-click and you get these options:

Naturally, everyone goes to the bottom of the list and selects "Properties" - only to be disappointed when they get this.

Cancel. Right-click and remember to click "Printer Properties". Ah, there is something useful.

* And, for those of you keeping score at home. I've started studying for my MCSA/MCSE.

XP Hack for Patches

Since none of you are migrating away from XP, here is the hack to keep getting patches from Microsoft for it.

The Most Powerful OS

7/7 The most powerful OS in the world is still the human being, that’s what drives us into the more personal computing era
— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) May 28, 2014

Ripe for Abuse

So using this idea, setup a rule for a "friend" in their Outlook when they are away from their desk. Have it trigger on some common e-mail they get frequently. Hilarity and a fist fight ensue.

At School

It used to be Macs in the computer labs in elementary schools - trying to buy mind share while we were young.

Plus ça change...

Microsoft is offering a free Bing search to schools with no ads and content filtering.

Windows Defender Offline

Looks like a handy tool. I've used various recovery discs including those based on Windows PE.

From Mark Minasi's latest newsletter:

"You know Windows Defender.  It's been built into Windows since (if memory serves) Vista.  It fought spyware in Vista and Windows 7, and then Microsoft expanded its focus to include regular old virus-y malware in Windows 8/8.1.  It's a perfectly nice in-the-box tool, but like all anti-malware tools, it hasn't a chance to detect the strains of malware designed to hide themselves in plain site, malware with a kind of "cloaking device" wherein the malware modifies the operating system so that scanning an infected file just turns up a "nope, no malware, nobody but us chickens in here!" report.  And if you're on this mailing list, the chances are very good that you know that we call such hard-to-detect malware "rootkits."

Invisible malware like rootkits sounds dire, but given that they can only remain invisible while the infected OS is running, there's an obvious way to find them -- run the malware scanner under another, uninfected OS.  One way to do that would be to physically remove the boot hard disk of the machine in question, plug it into an uninfected machine and scan the questionable drive, but that's a lot of work.

The better answer arrived a few years ago when Microsoft released a free, cut-down version of Windows that fits on a CD or a USB stick called "Windows PE" and I'm hoping that most of you are using it now for maintenance and deployment tasks.  (Look at Newsletter 59 if you've never created a USB stick.  I use it heavily in my free Steadier State tool as well as when trying to revive dead systems.)  Anyway, WinPE's great, but there wasn't much in the way of anti-malware tools that could run atop WinPE.  Microsoft fixed that by building and giving away a WinPE image that includes a version of Defender -- they call it "Windows Defender Offline -- built right in.  Stick it on a USB stick or CD, cold boot a system with it and rootkits are revealed.  Neat.  You can find it here with download links at the bottom of the page:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/what-is-windows-defender-offline

Permit me to offer a few notes on it:

1) This is NOT new, as Defender Offline's been around since December 2011.  I'm telling you about it in February 2014, however, because I mention it a LOT when I do talks and invariably get totally blank looks from 98% of the crowd.  (That's true even when I'm talking to security experts.  Eek.)  If you're on my mailing list, the chances are that you're Windows tech support for SOMEBODY, whether you're getting paid for it or not, and starting off with a rootkit check can save you a whole LOT of time.  I recommend that everyone reading this put Offline Defender on a USB stick and keep it in their bag of tricks.  (I've found that Sony's "Microvault" USB sticks are a nicely matte white, allowing me to write on them with a Sharpie to keep track of which USB stick is the Defender, which runs Clonezilla, and so on.  If anyone out there knows a cheaper USB stick that you can write on, please drop me a line.)

2) As I mentioned before, this works perfectly well on Windows Server.  We had a malware scare a few months ago and I tested my Server 2012 systems with it, and it didn't refuse to run on a Server SKU.  Similarly, I've got an ISO of Defender Offline that I boot my Hyper-V VMs from when I need to test them for rootkits as well.)

3) I've just noticed that the Defender Offline page says that you need a newer version, a Windows Defender Offline beta, to run it on Windows 8.1 systems.  I'm fairly certain that I've run Defender Offline on my 8.1 systems, but if Microsoft says you need the beta, I guess you should get it for 8.1 and presumably 2012R2."

Still Job Hunting

Looks like I got passed over again.