Using sigcheck64.exe and Removing Unwanted Certificates
Paranoia Strikes Deep Some months ago, I stumbled across an article that mentioned a tiny program, provided by Microsoft, that lets you see if you have any bad or malicious Root Certificates on your computer. Well, hell yes!!! I downloaded the zip file. When it is all extracted, you have …
How to Wipe, Partition, and Format Hard Drives
This is About Windows10 Windows 10 was released in July 2015. It is now 2018. Microsoft, dog love ’em, offered free upgrades from Win7 and Win8/8.1 until December 31, 2017. I’m sorry if you missed that boat. I’ve been using various versions of Win10 for about 2 years now, and …
How to Download Windows 10 Onto a Bootable USB Thumb Drive
You Need to Know This Because the crash will come. Everyone knows this, but no one really wants to acknowledge it. We should backup our data weekly, do an image backup monthly, and have a Windows10 recovery disk (actually, a USB thumb drive). Very few people do this, and so …
Building a Cheap Network Attached Storage Box
Happy New Year!!! So, here we are on the first day of the rest of our year. To celebrate, I finished building a Network Attached Storage device (NAS) from parts I had lying around, and some really good sale purchases I made. The Case In the old days, cheap cases …
USB 3.0 to SATA HDD/SSD Docking Station
Experimenting is Good: Normal Works, Too… So, that whole PCIe-to-SATA card thing didn’t exactly work out the way I had planned. Fact is, it was a distinct failure. It rattled Windows 10 to the core. Still, I really wanted it to work, and I spent a lot of time on …
USB 2.0 Switchbox
Two Computers, a Single Keyboard This is a very simple solution for me. I have 2 computers, a 2017 Dell XPS-8920 running Windows 10 Preview Build 17063, and a home-made Linux box running Linux Mint 18.3 “Sylvia”. The Dell is connected to two 24″ monitors, and, using an HDMI switchbox, …
PCIe to SATA 6Gb/s Add-In Card
Don’t Do This For the Reason I Did Updated December 23, 2017 If you need extra, permanent SATA ports, this blog entry–and add-in card–is for you. But I can tell you that Windows 10 does not like you randomly adding and subtracting SATA drives. I should have gone with a …
Linux Boxes and Win10 Share Monitors: Peace Reigns!!
More Success!! I ordered an HDMI 2-Port Switch box from Amazon.com, and it arrived today. The concept is simple: plug two video sources into the switch, and use it to direct the selected input to a single monitor. But it Don’t Come Easy The switch is tiny–2″x 2″x 3/4″–with a …
A New Linux Box for $153.19!
The Box is Doing Linux!! The new MSI PRO-VDH B250M motherboard arrived on schedule yesterday–albeit at just past 8pm–and I just couldn’t wait to get it installed. Although it’s pretty obvious that Amazon.com is really, really busy right now. They took the retail display box, stuck a shipping label on …