Az Geek Talk

That's exactly what he's looking for.

I had no idea you could do that with windows 8. That will help greatly. I just don't want to confuse him with the windows button as he understands the start menu finally so that would be perfect.

 

There is a reg hack where you can make the orb say start. When my parents had XP instead of start it was "Click Me!"

 

Dude that's awesome.. I should have done this to my Mom's new 8.1 machine. She was die hard XP and doesn't like to learn ANYTHING NEW about computers. But I must confess she uses like 5 apps, and 4 directories which I just made big buttons on the Start Screen in windows 8 and deleted all the sports news and crappy default buttons. now all she has to remember is hit the windows button on the keyboard to get to any of her applications. It was a struggle. and Windows 8.1 was brutal I could have converted her to OS X easier than me learning 8.1 (what a Turd put things just 1-2 more layers under BS menus to get to setup features.)

But I'm glad I moved her to 8.1 instead of 7 as you said Colby. Otherwise when 7 gets rubbed out i would have to teach her again.

But for my machine, I'm totally going to try those schemes to get windows 7 look on my 8.1 machine. Actually the XP look would be even more fun

Buying a built machine with the OS license is way easier and cheaper with better support on drivers as Colby Suggested when it's a general use machine.

 

With parents, dumb it down as much as possible. Unless you like playing tech support. Which reminds me, my dad's laptop is in my truck for me to fix. Again........ I even gave him his own book mark full of free porn web sites and still, he has to go to the fucked up ones and get viruses all the time.


On a side note I have a copy of windows 10 developer edition. It's um... Well.. It's... Um.. Windows...

 

http://www.techbargains.com/dell-optiplex-3020-deals#newsID441977

Dell Optiplex 3020 Micro Tower SFF Intel Core i3-4150T Dual-Core HASWELL Server Desktop Computer for a low $329.00 Free Shipping after Coupon Code: "SHBGD1LVLCD199" (Exp Soon). Tax in most states. This BEATS Dell's Black Friday pricing and is the lowest we've ever seen for an Optiplex 3020 Micro i3 config.
Dell Small Business has the Intel Core i5-4590T 2Ghz Quad-Core version for a low $469.00 Free Shipping after Coupon Code: "SHBGD1LVLCD199".

The ultra-compact OptiPlex 3020 Micro Desktop is small enough to fit anywhere, measuring a little over 7" at its longest edge and weighing under 3lbs. Complete range of mounting options and has a small enough footprint to sit discretely on top of or mounted beneath a desk.

Intel Core i3-4150T 3.4GHz Dual-Core HASWELL; 4GB RAM; 500GB HDD; DVD burner; Windows 8.1; 1yr warranty; keyboard/mouse

 

Boom! $329 is a great deal.

Desktops are so cheap now.

 

That's killer. My parents ended up just buying what Colby posted. It'll be 10000x's time better than what he has now.

 

So been playing with windows 10. They finally got it right I think. Basically its windows 7 and the start menu has the tiles like windows 8 does.

It's leaps and bounds over windows 8.1 that's for damn sure.

 

Who is this? What did you do with Colby!

 

Windows 10 has been a very smooth experience so far. Which is nice.

 

Had my first case of ransomware put on my desk today

 

I had one of those on my laptop within the last year. Not sure how I got it. The last thing I downloaded was google earth. Went to get back on it several days later and boom, had that come up. Had to do a restore point to get it resolved.

 

You are now the 9th person in 1 month I've heard of getting this. Sucks too because there is not god damn thing you can do to fix it if you didn't make backups.

If you use shadow copies you 'might' have a chance. If its the 2.0 version of the virus you're fucked. If is the 1.0 you can revert back to the shadow copy.

I just got done building a backup PC for this reason. Went around and found a bunch of old HDD's, slapped them in a PC and ended up getting 3.1tb of space to use. Once its backed up, it gets turned off and unplugged from LAN. I'll boot it just to backup data once a week.

 

Said ransomware sounds scary. Never heard of it.
What does it do?

 

Steals all of your shit.... you're videos, pictures, memories, family photos of your dad who is no longer living on this shit earth and were the only ones you had.. stuff like that.. good thing our wedding hasn't happened yet..

 

Ouch....

And there's no way to reverse it or delete the virus? Besides the back ups?

 

Nope. Unless you have a backup. All of our stuff is gone.. . My fault for not backing it up..

 

That sucks...

Got to make sure my stuff is backed up now.

 

It doesn't take files but encrypts them on your PC. All of your stuff is there and if you want to pay up you 'might' get it back. It's an RSA encryption and breaking that is damn near impossible for even the advanced users.

Right now, shadow copies and system restore points are deleted by the virus, unless you are lucky and get V1.0 of it. Which isn't going to happen these days.

But an external, back up every week, keep your PC off when you are not using it. Stay away from torrents.


Edit: Also it can move itself to mapped network drives, so NAS's are affected. So far AWS tells me their S3 buckets are not affected by this.

 

I had my NAS scanned after the unit touched the network. This shit part is that the help desk removed the A/V before it came to me