windows

Windows 10 Extended Security Updates

by
Screenshot which says 'You're eligible to enrol in Extended Security Updates at no extra cost'

Microsoft is ending support for Windows 10 in just two days time. What this means is, if you’re using Windows 10 and don’t take action, you’ll no longer get security updates for your computer. And that would be bad – your computer is therefore at greater risk of viruses and malware.

Previously, when Microsoft ended support for Windows, if you were a home user then you were on your own. This time, Microsoft is offering the Extended Security Updates programme, and making it available to home users for the first time. I suppose this is because Windows 11 installs only exceeded Windows 10 as recently as June this year, and around 45% of Windows users still use Windows 10 despite it being 10 years old now. This includes us.

Upgrade or replace

Ideally, Microsoft wants you to upgrade to Windows 11. Many Windows 10 computers can be upgraded, but not all. If not, then, as far as Microsoft is concerned, you should be considering purchasing a new computer.

At home, we have a Lenovo Ideapad 320S which is approaching its eighth birthday. That’s pretty old for a laptop, and it’s been used heavily as it was my main work computer during lockdown. Theoretically, it might run Windows 11, if I backed everything up, wiped its SSD and did a fresh install. But Microsoft’s PC Health Check app won’t allow an in-place upgrade, as its processor (an Intel Core i3 in the 7000 series) doesn’t meet its minimum hardware requirements.

We will, eventually, replace this with a new laptop running Windows 11 – probably some time next year. But for now, this little survivor meets our needs – especially as, back in 2021, I upgraded its RAM from 4 gigabytes to 16 gigabytes.

Enrolling for Extended Security Updates

If you open Windows Update on a Windows 10 machine, you should see the option to enrol for Extended Security Updates. This gives you an additional year of security updates, to allow you time to either upgrade or buy a new computer. As mentioned, this is a new offering for home users; previously, only enterprise users ever had this option.

Enrolling for extended security updates may cost you, depending on your system settings. If, at the time you sign up, you’re already synchronising your PC settings, then you may be offered the extended security updates at no charge. This is what happened to us, as per the screenshot at the top of this blog post. Which was nice.

Alternatively, if you live in the European Economic Area (EEA), then you should also get the updates for free. Thanks to Brexit, us Brits unfortunately no longer live in the EEA.

If you’re not eligible for free updates, then Microsoft will charge you. If you use Microsoft Rewards, then you can redeem 1000 reward points instead of paying money. Alternatively, there’s a $30 charge, which works out at about £24 for the year.

What about Linux?

If you don’t want to buy a new PC, aren’t eligible for free updates and don’t want to pay, then I suppose the other option is to consider running some flavour of Linux on your existing PC. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this, but if you’re really stuck for money and have the time to learn how to use a new operating system, then sure, I guess it’s an option to consider.

Upgrading to Windows 8.1

by
Screenshot of the start screen in Windows 8.1

Yesterday I upgraded to Windows 8.1. I run Windows in a virtual machine on my Mac using VirtualBox, and I upgraded it from Vista almost exactly a year ago. The process was reasonably smooth, in comparison to last year’s debacle, but it wasn’t without some minor incidents.

Getting started

First of all, I wasn’t quite sure how one would go about upgrading. So I opened up Internet Explorer and searched Bing, and it told me to open Windows Store, the app store for Windows 8. So I did, and… nothing. I couldn’t see anything that would suggest what to do next.

Thankfully this page came up with a possible solution. I hadn’t booted Windows 8 in a few months and so I was behind on installing fixes from Windows Update. 35 updates were presented to me; after the first run, all but 1 of these failed, so I rebooted and tried again. This time 4 installed correctly, but again, the others failed. Finally after another reboot I got the rest to install, and so I then rebooted again. This time, upon opening the Windows Store app a full-screen button for installing Windows 8.1 came up.

The first attempt at downloading the update failed, but then it got under way on the second attempt.

Installation

At this point I went to bed and left it to install overnight. I woke up to find the installer asking me to agree to the new license agreement, and to enter my details for my Microsoft Account. Then, it did a little housekeeping, and before long I was back at the Start screen, freshly upgraded. Post-upgrade, there are a couple of contextual tutorials that show you how to do things in the new ‘modern’ interface, which helps.

The verdict on Windows 8.1

I haven’t spent much time with Windows 8.1 post-upgrade but it does seem to be a minor improvement. You can do more things in the modern interface without dropping back to the Desktop – Control Panel, for example, has been largely replicated. However, I still find it harder to navigate than before, with some apps hidden away on the ‘All Apps’ menu, and it’s more difficult to find the ‘Shut Down’ button than on Windows 7. And the new interface is still over-optimised for touchscreen computers – even with an Apple Magic Mouse with sideways scrolling, it still takes longer to do things. Having to hold the mouse pointer in a small corner of the screen to then bring up menus is slow compared to clicking.

Using Windows 8.1 makes you realise why Apple keeps OS X on desktops and iOS and touchscreen devices. Having the old desktop and new modern interface in the same operating system feels like a kludge, especially when you get booted out of one into the other unexpectedly (which happens now and again). And trying to enable it for both touchscreens and mouse-controlled computers results in a compromise that disadvantages the latter, in my opinion.

I don’t think these problems are insurmountable, but let’s just say that I hope there’s a Windows 8.2 that fixes them.

Printer sharing with VirtualBox on a Mac

by

This blog post will probably be only be useful to a small niche. If you have a Mac, with a printer, and run Windows in VirtualBox, here’s what you need to do to get it to work.

Step 1: Make sure your printer is shared on the network

On your Mac, open System Preferences, choose Print & Scan, and then select your device on the list on the left. Tick ‘Share this printer on the network’.

Step 2: Check network settings for your virtual machine

In the VirtualBox manager, open your Windows virtual machine’s settings, and under Network, ensure you’re using ‘Bridged Adaptor’ rather than ‘NAT’. This will make your life much, much easier later on.

Step 3: Install and set up your printer using Bonjour

Bonjour ships on all Macs, but not on Windows, which is a shame because it makes setting up network connections much easier. Thankfully, Apple offers a cut-down version for Windows computers, so download Bonjour Print Services for Windows, and install it. This will add a ‘Bonjour Printer Wizard’ icon to your desktop.

Run the Bonjour Printer Wizard. If you’ve done the first two steps correctly, your printer should be listed. Click Next, and, if you’re lucky, Bonjour will install the correct driver and add the printer to Windows for you. Sorted. If not, then…

Step 4: Install the printer driver in Windows

Sometimes Bonjour won’t be able to identify which printer driver you need and will ask you to select it. Again, if you’re lucky, your printer will be one of those that Windows ships with, but if not, you may reach an impasse here. Some people have had luck with using a driver that is similar to their printer, but this doesn’t always work.

Instead, we’ll connect the printer directly to Windows to convince it to install the driver that way. VirtualBox lets you bridge any USB device which is plugged into your Mac, so that the virtual machine can see it. Turn your printer on, and then whilst Windows is running, click on the Devices menu in VirtualBox, select USB devices, and then choose your printer. Windows should detect that the printer is now ‘plugged in’, and so it will install the necessary drivers. Complete the installation, disconnect your printer using VirtualBox and then shut down both your virtual machine, and your Mac, to ensure that your printer is correctly picked up by your Mac on the next boot.

Start your Mac again, and then open Windows in VirtualBox, and try to run the Bonjour Printer Wizard again. Hopefully, this time you’ll be able to select your printer driver from the lists when presented (annoyingly it’s not searchable).

This still didn’t work for my printer, so I had to do one final trick. I clicked ‘Have Disk’, and then browsed to the c:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository folder, then sorted the sub-folders by date. My printer is by HP, and one of the newly-created gobbledegook folders had ‘HP’ in the title which turned out to be my printer. I selected this, and was finally able to get the printer working, with the above test page as proof.

Why not just connect the printer directly?

In step 4, I mentioned you can simply connect your printer directly to the virtual machine, thus avoiding the dilly-dallying around with Bonjour. This works, but it’s flaky; once you’ve connected your printer to Windows, you may need to reboot your Mac before any Mac applications can print to it. Whilst setting up Bonjour is more effort initially, once it’s done, you should find it easier to work with.

If anyone’s interested, I went through all of this because I wanted to print out a coupon for a free one litre carton of grape juice and couldn’t get the Coupon Printer to work correctly on my Mac.

Windows 8 Installation Experience

by
A screenshot of Windows 8 being installed on a VirtualBox virtual machine running on a Mac

On Saturday, I decided to upgrade to Windows 8. I’ve been running a virtual machine with Windows Vista Business for some time, firstly in Parallels Desktop but later converted to VirtualBox. I never bothered upgrading to Windows 7 due to the lack of differences between the two; obviously 7 is a big upgrade from XP but not from Vista.

Another major factor is that, at the moment, existing Windows XP, Vista and 7 users can upgrade to Windows 8 Pro for a mere £24.99 as a digital download, or more if you need it on DVD. It’s a very good deal, but it’s only valid until early next year. And since I’d also heard that Windows 8 should run faster on the same hardware, upgrading seemed like a really good idea.

To upgrade, you should download the Upgrade Assistant which checks your current installation for compatibility and then downloads the files. You can then either proceed with the upgrade, or save an ISO file to a USB drive or DVD-ROM. I decided to proceed, but told the installer not to keep any of my documents or settings; after all, it was a virtual machine and anything important had been saved to Dropbox and was therefore available elsewhere.

This turned out to be a mistake, frankly. It installed the files, restarted a couple of times, and then froze. No animation, no CPU activity, no disk activity. So, I hard reset the virtual machine. At which point, setup decided that the installation had failed, and set about restoring Windows Vista. So, after a few hours, I was back at square one.

This time, I told the installer to save the ISO file, which I placed in a shared folder so it was accessible by my Mac as well. I then shut down the virtual machine, and created a fresh, new VM in VirtualBox with the optimal Windows 8 settings. Bear in mind that my previous VM was originally a Parallels VM, was then converted to the VMWare format, and then used with VirtualBox 2; now I’m on VirtualBox 4.2. I mounted the ISO file mounted as the CD drive, booted up, followed the instructions, and within the hour I was up and running with Windows 8. Success!

…or so I thought. Opening the ‘classic’ desktop environment saw the little icon for the Windows Action Centre pop up, telling me I needed to activate Windows – which was odd because I had entered the product key during installation. So I re-entered it, only for Windows to pop up a 0xC004F601 error, telling me that the product key was only valid for upgrades and not a clean installation like this one.

Some expletives were issued by me at this point, but thankfully Google saved my sanity as I found this blog post which explained a workaround. I had to edit the registry to change a value, re-run the activation manager and then reboot, but after this Windows activated with no problems. Phew.

Obviously I still have the old Windows Vista VM lying around but as that license is now invalid due to the upgrade I’ll be deleting it. That, and I shouldn’t need it anyway.

I’ll write more about my actual experiences of using Windows 8 when I’ve had a longer opportunity to use it. So far, it seems okay, and the ‘classic’ desktop is almost exactly the same as Windows 7. I’ll have to play with the new desktop (formally known as ‘Metro’) a little more before passing judgement.

Missing .vxd files

by

I mentioned back in June that Hari and I inherited a spare computer, which until now has been sat in our house serving no purpose. However, I now have a reason to use it – I joined a new guild in World of Warcraft and need to run Ventrilo 2.1 to be able to take part in raids, and I can’t for the life of me get it to work properly on my Mac using Crossover.

I mentioned that the computer lacked a network card so I bought one today, and fitted it. Alas this machine is not running a nice operating system like Windows 2000 or XP, but Windows 98SE which doesn’t ship with the relevant drivers. Worse, as this machine had never been used on a network before, it was missing all of the Windows network components. Worse still, I didn’t have the Windows 98 CD, and even worse than that, the relevant files were not saved somewhere on the hard disk. Big problem.

Of course I was busy installing the network card drivers by this point and so upon rebooting I received a series of errors to do with missing .vxd files, namely vnetsup.vxd, vredir.vxd and dfs.vxd, the latter of which gives me a mental image of a double discount sofa sales. Anyway, I found a forum post on some site which I can’t seem to find again which pointed to these technical support files, namely ‘Directory Services client for Windows 95/98’ which includes these files and will happily install them for you. You can then get rid of the program through Add/Remove Programs and it’ll be nice and leave the .vxd files there for you.

Alas, these were only some of the missing files needed for networking, so while they did remove the horrible errors I was getting they didn’t actually get me on the network, so I’ve had to resort to downloading some files from a shady torrent site in the hope that I can get things going.

Ideally I would have liked to have been able to wipe the hard drive and stick Linux on this machine, but unfortunately its primary role as a Ventrilo machine means that it’s Windows or nuthin.

Create a Safely Remove Hardware shortcut

by
A screenshot of a Safely Remove Hardware shortcut on Windows desktop.

Here’s a tip I gleamed from today’s Windows Secrets newsletter. You may well be familiar with the ‘Safely Remove Hardware’ icon which appears in your notification area (or ‘system tray’ if you must) when you plug in a removable hard drive or camera (or whatever). You may also notice that the icon sometimes isn’t there – and this is a problem which my parents’ computer randomly suffers from – which means it’s difficult to safely disconnect removable devices. The answer: a desktop shortcut.

Right-click on the desktop, select ‘New’ and then ‘Shortcut’. For the item location, copy and paste the following:

RunDll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL HotPlug.dll

Then click ‘Next’. Call the shortcut ‘Safely Remove Hardware’, and you should be done. If you want to make it look snazzier, right-click the icon, choose ‘Properties’ and then the ‘Shortcut’ tab, click on ‘Change Icon’ and in the ‘Look for icons’ box type:

%windir%\system32\HotPlug.dll

The first icon in this file matches the ‘Safely Remove Hardware’ icon so you’ll be able to recognise it more easily.

Now, if the normal notification icon doesn’t appear, all you need do is double-click your new desktop icon to safely remove any disks before unplugging them.

Update (November 2023): This was written back in April 2007, but it still seems to work in Windows 10.

Quickly compress PNG images

by

Before posting any PNG images on here, I use the open source Pngcrush tool to compress the images as much as possible first. Even when I set the compression to its highest value in programs like IrfanView, Pngcrush is still able to make most images even smaller.

Unfortunately, Pngcrush is a command-line tool, so it’s not the easiest tool to use in Windows. So here’s how to add a ‘Crush’ option to the context (right-click) menu in Windows Explorer for quicker crushing.

Firstly, you’ll need to download Pngcrush, which is availble at Sourceforge. You’ll want the win32 version. Download it and unpack it somewhere.

The instructions that follow are for Windows XP; for older versions they’ll be a little different.
Open Control Panel and choose Folder Options. Select the File Types tab, and scroll down to the ‘PNG’ entry. Click on ‘Advanced’, then click on ‘New…’.

In ‘Action’, type Crush, and in ‘Application used to perform action’, type the following:

C:\Downloads\pngcrush\pngcrush.exe -e 2.png "%1"

The first portion should be the location of the pngcrush.exe file that you extracted from the archive. The ‘-e 2.png’ bit specifies what the outputted PNG image will be called, which in the case it’ll be the filename with ’2′ appended to it (so the crushed version of ‘catpicture.png’ would be called ‘catpicture2.png’). You could also use the following:

C:\Downloads\pngcrush\pngcrush.exe -brute -e 2.png "%1"

This does the same as the above but does a ‘brute force’ crush – rather than use one of a few common methods to crush the file, it will use all of them. It’ll take longer, especially on older hardware, but may result in a smaller PNG file.

And you’re done. Now, when you right-click on a PNG file, you can select ‘Crush’ and have Pngcrush your image for you. Remember that the compression is lossless – you won’t lose any quality by using the tool.