The Technology Vent and Rant Thread

[Blossom]

Comodo breaks everything and you can't uninstall it if you have v10 of their Firewall. Beware Comodo is well aware of this but has had over six months to come up with a fix and still nothing. If you try to uninstall it you get a BSOD. I'm desperately trying to get rid of this program. According to one tech the problem occurred when Windows upgraded to Creator's update. The uninstaller can't remove services. It throws an error and crashes the computer.

Update: Success! I found a post that said to use autoruns program by Microsoft. I was able to search for all instances of Comodo and disable them using it. I then ran the uninstaller tool that Comodo released in November. After that CCleaner to get rid of the rest of it. I'll never touch another Comodo program again.

Edit: Comodo has fixed this problem. I've gone back to it because there isn't an alternative out there comparable that is light on the resources.

Once configured correctly it becomes a firewall, Behaviour blocker and a Default/Deny all for free.

Sent from my Nexus 7

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Blossom

I'll never touch another Comodo program again.

Sent from my Nexus 7

Me neither, but I decided that a decade ago, when I was still on XP. Your problems sound eerily familiar - BSODs, hard to get rid of etc. I was going to suggest you get rid of it when you mentioned it the other day, but I had the impression you were committed to it, Comodo is one of these products that attracts evangelical followers.

I had a breakthrough too. For the past several days I've been dropping in to various retail outlets trying to buy an OTG adapter/cable - none of them had such of thing, two didn't even know what an OTG cable was. Yet all of them sell mobile phones, and two of them sell keyboards - that's why I wanted one.

Today I happened to stroll over to the nearby Asian foodstore to buy white radish and rambutans; as I left I remembered that at the back to of the Vietnamese coffee shop next door there was a computer repair shop. So I went in there and asked. The owner rummaged around in his collection of cables and offered not one, but three OTG connectors. Interestingly he doesn't sell phones or computers, he mainly does laptop repairs, and sells 'bits'.

BR

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Me neither, but I decided that a decade ago, when I was still on XP. Your problems sound eerily familiar - BSODs, hard to get rid of etc. I was going to suggest you get rid of it when you mentioned it the other day, but I had the impression you were committed to it, Comodo is one of these products that attracts evangelical followers.


BR

I've truly never had issues til I updated to the latest version. I've been using Comodo for years. It use to be really good and has save my desktop a few times when hubby went somewhere on the net he shouldn't but that change obviously in the last year. Now I need a firewall. Something that allows me to allow/deny each connection. Something that works well with Windows 10. Any suggestions?

I also removed Avira but not sure yet if I will change to something else. It wasn't working right everytime I restarted the laptop the advertisement would show a blank black box for several minutes that caused the laptop to be slow till Avira fixed itself.

Sent from my XT1528

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by RichL

Blossom



Atlantis word processor, Sumatra PDF, Gnumeric for spread sheet, VLC for music, Crap Cleaner for cleaning up the system, Seamonkey for the browser, Thunderbird for mail and Softmaker Office.


Good day to you.

Thanks. I got Atlantis free many years ago. It's alright but primitive. I love Libre Office it works great on XP. It's not slow at all.

I'm still trying to figure out the browser issue. It seems something on the netbook is stalling pages from loading right away.

I don't use mail programs anymore. I just log in through my browser. My netbook is working well after getting rid of Comodo with the exception of slow loading pages.

Sent from my XT1528

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Me neither, but I decided that a decade ago, when I was still on XP. Your problems sound eerily familiar - BSODs, hard to get rid of etc. I was going to suggest you get rid of it when you mentioned it the other day, but I had the impression you were committed to it, Comodo is one of these products that attracts evangelical followers.

Comodo acquired a good reputation back in the day. There were a lot of firewalls.

A popular source of information was the forums hosted by Steve Gibson on the Gibson Research site. Steve is the author of Spinrite, widely considered the most powerful hard drive maintenance utility.

Firewalls work by blocking ports, and his online Shield's Up! test would scan your system looking for open ports you might wish to close. Steve also ran "leak tests", that tested how robust a firewall was. If they got in at all, various types of exploits would attempt to disable or hide themselves from a firewall, and be able to phone home.

Comodo generally scored well in completeness of coverage and ability to protect itself if the system it ran on was compromised. I ran it for a bit back when, but preferred other things. The problem any such product faces is being as easy as possible for a user to configure. Comodo took more effort to setup and configure that some others.

My preferred firewall from the XP days was Sygate Personal Firewall, which was bought and killed off by Symantec. After you installed it, and time you ran a program that wanted to connect to the outside world, it popped up a box telling you whatever it was was trying to connect. You could allow it permanently, allow it for just that connect, or block it permamently. And you could go in ant edit the permissions list at any time to revise your choices.

Some folks gave it thumbs down because it was perceived as not good enough at protecting itself if you got infected. That wasn't a concern here because I practice Safe Hex and don't *get* infected.

I had a breakthrough too. For the past several days I've been dropping in to various retail outlets trying to buy an OTG adapter/cable - none of them had such of thing, two didn't even know what an OTG cable was. Yet all of them sell mobile phones, and two of them sell keyboards - that's why I wanted one.

Today I happened to stroll over to the nearby Asian foodstore to buy white radish and rambutans; as I left I remembered that at the back to of the Vietnamese coffee shop next door there was a computer repair shop. So I went in there and asked. The owner rummaged around in his collection of cables and offered not one, but three OTG connectors. Interestingly he doesn't sell phones or computers, he mainly does laptop repairs, and sells 'bits'.

OTG cables are one of the things sold by my preferred computer retailer.

I have several Android tablets, and wanted to use a keyboard with them. One does not have Bluetooth as a "design to cost" matter. Another does, but I don't have a Bluetooh keyboard. I have a Logitech Portable USB KB I wanted to use. With an OTG cable, it works fine. But getting the right cable was a bit of a challenge. The first OTG cable I got worked fine and supported the keyboard, but blocked the power connector port when plugged in. If I used it, I could not also be on external power at the same time. The kind that didn't do that was carried but not in stock on the store floor. I found it in a search on the site and added it to an online order I would pick up.

It's the fiddly bits that are the annoyance. Don't get me started on screws, where the one I need is one I don't have, no matter how many I have...
______
Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Blossom

Update: Success! I found a post that said to use autoruns program by Microsoft. I was able to search for all instances of Comodo and disable them using it. I then ran the uninstaller tool that Comodo released in November. After that CCleaner to get rid of the rest of it. I'll never touch another Comodo program again.

If autoruns is the same program I have, it's a utility from Mark Russinovitch.

Mark and his partner Bryce Cogswell were proprietors of the Sysinternals site, which was a superb source of utilities. Mark is a programmer and writer on developing in the Windows environment. His Process Explorer is Task Manager on steroids. I got the impression Mark knew more about Windows internals than Microsoft did. MS apparently though he knew stuff - they bought Mark and Bryce's company, and put them to work in their Core Architecture group. Mark's stuff is available from MS these days. See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/

There are many good things there.
______
Dennis

[Blossom]

Yes it's that autoruns program. I love Process Explorer but never used autoruns before.

I need a firewall for Vista 64. This is the PC my husband uses so it needs to work well and not bother him with a gazillion pop ups.

I just took it apart and blew all the dust out with a can of air, and qtips. All the temps are back to normal. It was a snow storm in there. She's may be old but she runs solid. Quadcore, 6GB of ram. Gateway made lovely computers back in the day.

Sent from my XT1528

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Blossom

Yes it's that autoruns program. I love Process Explorer but never used autoruns before.

I still use an ancient program by a chap named Mike Lin called Startup Control Panel. It dates from the Win9X days, but still works. It was available as a Control Panel applet, and as a stand alone executable.

Run it, and it pops up a window with a tabbed interface. Stuff loaded on startup may be loaded from several different locations - the current user's startup folder, the all users startup folder, and the HK Current User and HK Local Machine registry hives. Startup lists what is run from each of those, and lets you move the startup location to a different tab, disable it, or delete the startup entry entirely. I have various things that want to be run on startup but don't need to be, and I simply disable the startup entry.

(As a rule, stuff loaded from HK Local Machine tends to be stuff like drivers, and you don't want to disable those unless you know what you're doing.)

Win10 Task Manager has a Startup tab that lets you perform similar manipulations.

I need a firewall for Vista 64. This is the PC my husband uses so it needs to work well and not bother him with a gazillion pop ups.

How much time and effort are you willing to spend configuring it? Whether it bothers him with popups will depend on the degree it has been configured, and when it will still want to ask the user what to do.

You may not need a third-party firewall. The one supplied with Vista may do what you need. See https://www.pcworld.com/article/2095...l_vista_7.html, https://www.techrepublic.com/article...tion-features/, and https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/....security.aspx for details.

I just took it apart and blew all the dust out with a can of air, and qtips. All the temps are back to normal. It was a snow storm in there. She's may be old but she runs solid. Quadcore, 6GB of ram. Gateway made lovely computers back in the day.

Periodic cleaning works wonders. I had an issue on an older desktop where it would suddenly stop in its tracks. Enough dust had accumulated to clog the CPU fan, and the system would overheat and stop to protect itself.
______
Dennis

[Blossom]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Periodic cleaning works wonders. I had an issue on an older desktop where it would suddenly stop in its tracks. Enough dust had accumulated to clog the CPU fan, and the system would overheat and stop to protect itself.

Now that's scary. It wasn't that bad but it was the worst I've seen it. I try to clean it out every three months but with hubby not working six months seems to be cleaning time. He's on the desktop constantly either playing Klondike on Facebook or watching YouTube.

I've decided to stay with Comodo on the desktop. (Vista 64) The version on there is from 2012 so it's stable and works. I think 2013 was when Comodo started changing everything. The 2012 version is just a firewall no bloat.

Now for my laptop (Win 10) I am still hunting for a firewall. Comodo is not going anywhere near it.

Sent from my Nexus 7

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Blossom

Now that's scary. It wasn't that bad but it was the worst I've seen it. I try to clean it out every three months but with hubby not working six months seems to be cleaning time. He's on the desktop constantly either playing Klondike on Facebook or watching YouTube.

It was more annoying than anything else - a WTF? moment when it occurred. It was also a side effect of playing with hardware, so there were slots on the back normally covered by metal shims that weren't present, allowing dust to get in and accumulate.

I've decided to stay with Comodo on the desktop. (Vista 64) The version on there is from 2012 so it's stable and works. I think 2013 was when Comodo started changing everything. The 2012 version is just a firewall no bloat.

Comodo began diversifying, and offering things like branded secure browsers.

Now for my laptop (Win 10) I am still hunting for a firewall. Comodo is not going anywhere near it.

Don't blame you for the latter, but Win10's built-in firewall is generally adequate. I haven't bothered with a third-party product here.
______
Dennis

[Blossom]

I agree Windows 10 has a nice firewall. I tried a few add ons for it. Tiny Firewall which I really like but the cons are it's not ready for real use. It kept blocking system processes even after it was allowed. It stalled Windows Updates to where I had to stop the auto update service then delete everything in the software installation folder to fix Windows updates. I also think it didn't handle Windows Firewall well. The next was Windows Firewall Control nice but not worth $10 for the extras. The winner was Glasswire. It's uses Windows Firewall but gives you so much more control and has a nice interface. It's also is a WiFi/Bandwidth monitor. I really like it.

The none Windows Firewall I tried again was Zone Alarm. I hated it. I'm sticking with Glasswire.

Sent from my Nexus 7

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Blossom

I agree Windows 10 has a nice firewall. I tried a few add ons for it. Tiny Firewall which I really like but the cons are it's not ready for real use. It kept blocking system processes even after it was allowed. It stalled Windows Updates to where I had to stop the auto update service then delete everything in the software installation folder to fix Windows updates. I also think it didn't handle Windows Firewall well. The next was Windows Firewall Control nice but not worth $10 for the extras. The winner was Glasswire. It's uses Windows Firewall but gives you so much more control and has a nice interface. It's also is a WiFi/Bandwidth monitor. I really like it.

The none Windows Firewall I tried again was Zone Alarm. I hated it. I'm sticking with Glasswire.

I ran Zone Alarm years back. It got mightily confused when for a while I had two ISPs and two network connections. My first broadband was DSL, because cable modem service wasn't available where I was at the time. When cable modem service did become available, I installed it, but kept the DSL line as a high speed backup.

Having two network connections was beyond Zone Alarm's abilities. It reached a point where it appeared to think my two ISPs email servers were trying to talk to each other through my machine and blocked both. Sygate Personal Firewall, mentioned earlier, had no such issues and I switched.

I looked at a couple of addons that are designed to bring easier configuration and more control to Windows Firewall and passed. The big possible win is better outbound control, and blocking stuff on your machine that wants to get to the outside world. That's not a concern here. I know what communicates from my machine and have no reason to block it.

For Wifi bandwidth monitor, I use Networx from Softperfect. I use 5.5.5 64 bit, which is the last freeware version. It keeps stats by day, week, month, and year, by monitored interface, and can display which applications are connecting to the outside world and the volume of data they send/receive. See https://www.softperfect.com/products/networx/ for details on the current commercial version. It's available for Linux and OS/X, too.
______
Dennis

[Blossom]

Last night my laptop updated to the new Windows 10 build 1709. So I ran Samsung update because my brightness control is not working. It seems Samsung has lost their mind. They've changed the update program to now just load their download center in which you have to search for the model of your device and operating system then it takes you to a list of all drivers for it with no dates of release. There's no way of knowing if you need it or not, totally useless. When you download a driver you think you may need there's nothing you can do with it. Argh!!!!! There's no install or anything but a copy of Samsung update which loads the download centers again. I'm at a loss what to do.


Update: I'm still not able use Samsung Update but I was able to rerun the patch and got my brightness control working. It's not signed so I had to use the hidden Administrator account to reinstall it. I learned alot. I'm still disappointed that Samsung settings will not open and there is no update for it.

[John F]

I received a notification from Overdrive that a digital hold is ready to borrow. I check it out. I go to download the epub, and I get an error message:

The requested title can't be fulfilled. Contact support for assistance.
This title isn't available yet due to a change of release date. Please try to access the title on the updated release date (listed on the title's details page, under "Details").

So I now have the the book checked out, but I can't download or return it. The new release date is Feb 14. So I'm guessing that I'll have to put the book on hold again (after my checkout expires) and be put at the end of the hold line.

Stupid technology.

[Blossom]

Whoever released 1709 update for Windows 10 obviously it was not tested properly. I have one issue after another and now Calibre is not responding every few seconds. Argh!!! I'm doing a uninstall/Clean install and hope that fixes it. I had to fight with Windows Defender as it goes up then down. I had to repair Cortana as she disappeared. I thought I had everything fix but now this. I've never had such a lemon since Windows ME. Computer resources are always in use by some windows operation. It's ridiculous.

Update: Reinstall Didn't work. Running Calibre in Compatibility mode - Win 8 did fix it. No more freezing. No more UI flashing. Very little lag now.

Sent from my Nexus 7