Recent content by GreenMonkey

What do you do to protect yourself against zero-day exploits and malvertising attacks? Being smart on what you download isn't enough any more. Not in several years. Especially not with modern quiet botnet-type malware. I use Norton 360 at home as I've been able to get freebie 1-year...

I can understand disabling some of the telemetry stuff, maybe, but disabling services for no gain, or disabling antivirus...sheesh. :( This stuff isn't "bloat", or at best, in the case of services, taking a small risk for no real gain.

A couple of the tech sites reviewed and benchmarked the "Black Viper" Windows XP tweaks - disabling services and the like - back in the day. Worked out that it did pretty much did nothing. If anything, it hurt performance. Microsoft knows what they're doing. Those extra services are just...

I think I found my answer for sure, it sounds like that's pretty much the case. https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/4794/more-windows-10-answers-how-activation-will-work-on-an-upgrade So, it would theoretically work, I guess, if I could somehow extract the win10 key from the...

If that was the case, how could you clean install win10 on it, either? I'll try giving it a shot tomorrow or Friday, I guess I'll find out. I'd prefer to get a win10 pro activation out of this anyway.

So if I install win7 pro, upgrade to win10 pro, wouldn't the machine be activated for win10 pro at that point? Seems like I could then do the upgrade to my vanilla win8.1 install and I'd end up with win10 pro, as I don't think the activation would care that I was doing an upgrade install vs a...

I'm trying to figure out a way to upgrade my vanilla win8 laptop to Win10 pro. Because I'm way too busy to deal with a clean install / reinstall of all my programs. I have some win7 pro keys I'm not using, so I could install it. Could I install Win7 pro temporarily to my secondary HDD...

An alternative to Straight Talk is AIO wireless (now branded Cricket). AT&T-owned prepaid brand, AT&T coverage. 500mb plan is $35/mo with autopay (no taxes), 2.5gb is $45/mo. My wife is on straight talk (wasn't worth changing her over) and I'm on AIO (I alternate between the 500mb and the...

The point of Dragon Age Origins was IMO that it was an old-school, pausable, semi-tactical party-based RPG. It was like a new Baldur's Gate, of sorts. They tossed that all to the wind starting with DA2. Now it looks like every other action RPG in the world lately where you control one...

I've used a USB 3.5" floppy drive on Windows 7. I had a dual-floppy 5.25"/3.5" drive under Win7 or Vista 64bit for a couple of years. But I'm not sure I actually used the 5.25" drive for anything, so not sure it worked. But it showed up and Windows recognized both floppy drives.

UEFI / Windows 8 laptops boot crazy fast. I just put my old Intel 120GB from my desktop into my new Asus n550jv laptop...boots up in seconds. On my desktop there was a good 20 seconds of BIOS / AHCI detection / etc.

The biggest difference on an SSD should be the time between when you get the desktop/start menu and when things become actually usable. This should be like...0 seconds on an SSD. Versus a HDD before when it was really about 30 sec - 1 minute before things became actually usable (as stuff...

Exactly. I do this for a living now, and there's exploits like this all of the time. Ever used HomeDepot.com, for example? http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2011/01/11/home-depot-website-compromised/ http://www.infosecstuff.com/home-depot-website-hack/ And typically you're going to get a...

We're using antivirus firewall and LAN white listing for this at my work.

I had a problem like this that frustrated me for months on my wife's Toshiba laptop. Ended up googling the chipset info (like Realtek xxxx) and finding a driver that fixed it from Lenovo. Extracted the driver to a folder and force-installed it for the wi-fi chip...and it fixed the...