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HP Support Assistant – The Epitome of Spyware and How to Disable It

Sure there are several legitmate cases where the HP Support Assistant can be helpful, such as updating drivers or flashing the BIOS on the computer, but if you’re reading this, you’ve probably already established the fact that the software basically hijacks your computer and does a lot of shady shit in the background. I would absolutely classify the product as being spyware and would highly recommend that you take all steps necessary to disable it when it is not being used, and here are some reasons why.

My first problem is that by default, the HP Support Assistant does an intrusive scan of your network to search for “devices” every time the software runs and it appears you can’t turn that off. It doesn’t get much shadier than that folks, seeing as how you don’t really know what they are up to and why they are taking an inventory of your entire network.
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Cannot Log onto Windows – Trust Relationship Failed

There’s several different things that can cause the trust relationship issue and there are hundreds of post or more online about the subject. Sometimes simply resetting the computer account in Active Directory can fix the problem. Other times, unjoining/rejoining the computer from the domain will fix the problem. If either of those isn’t the case, usually that is a good indication that there is some sort of corruption in the Active Directory database that can only be fixed by manual intervention.
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Fuck You Microsoft, I Will Install the Cisco VPN Client on Windows 10 and Furthermore, You Can Suck It

Seriously man, fuck Microsoft, fuck Windows 10, and fuck you. No actually you are ok, as long as you don’t work for Microsoft or are some sort of freak MS enthusiast, but what kind of shithole stasi big brother state do we live in when your software vendor tells you what applications you can and can’t install on the operating system you purchased for your own PC? I mean I know they’ve been doing that shit for a long time, but tonight the stars revolt (seemingly misplaced Powerman 5000 reference).

I just had the joy of wasting an hour of my life getting the damn Cisco VPN client to work. When Windows 8 came out, there were a few workarounds to have to do, but now MS has stepped up their game of being total assclowns and won’t let you even run the installer. In your delight, you will receive the pleasantly authoritarian popup box that says, “This app can’t be run on this PC“. Fan-fucking-tastic.
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uTorrent – Don’t Have Permission to Uninstall the Program

There are certainly versions of uTorrent that have massive problems. Whether it be the inability to click on magnet links and open them properly inside the program or the never-ending issue where the program constantly tells you some shit about there being an update when you open it and says something along the lines of “you already have a more recent version of the program installed, would you like to downgrade?”. Just an FYI, downgrading doesn’t do shit, it’s an endless loop of futility, sad faces, and teardrops.

It is even more disturbing when you want to uninstall uTorrent to try and install a more recent beta version that doesn’t have all these bugs and when you try to remove it the conventional way, you receive the message “You do not have sufficient access to uninstall uTorrent. Please contact your system administrator.” and you are logged on as the user with administrator rights.
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Windows Update Error 80073712 When Installing KB2943357 – OR – How to Repair Corrupted Windows Update Files on Windows 7 or Server 2008

Starting with Windows 8 and Server 2012, you can more easily fix corrupted updates using the “DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth” command, but what about on Windows 7 or on Server 2008? Well, to be honest, it is kind of a pain in the ass and quite a lengthy process.

This seems to be a prime candidate for some sort of automated batch or PowerShell script that could parse out the bad updates from the log file, extract the needed files from the KB .msu packages, move them to the temp directory, and then re-run the System Update Readiness Tool. Lord knows it would save a lot of people some time and headaches but I don’t know whether it is even worth the hassle of programming it all seeing as how mainstream support for Windows 7 will be up soon and extended support will be around until 2020. That and I’m sure a lot of people have been suckered into upgrading to Windows 10 for free as well. It’s ok, there’s nothing in that giant wooden trojan horse that they just carted into your living room. Your data is safe and there are absolutely zero privacy concerns, trust them. Go back to sleep zombie.

Anyways, if you have installed any Server 2008  or Windows 7 operating systems in the last say year or so, you probably have noticed that Windows Update gets broken almost every single freaking time and it is quite cumbersome. So here is the cliff notes version on how to repair your corrupted Windows Update files.
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Remote Desktop Server – Registry Key to Change RDP Listening Port

As you probably already know, by default, Microsoft Remote Desktop listens on port 3389. This is all good, but what if you are behind a firewall and wanted to allow port forwarding to be able to access multiple computers via RDP remotely but can’t because they are all running on the same port?

Well, if you’re crafty and have a decent Linux-based router like Mikrotik that will let you create packet mangling rules to change the destination port number, you can get around this, but in environments where you have little SOHO routers like Linksys or Belkin, typically this is where changing the port number that RDP listens on comes in handy. The only problem then is remembering whatever port you changed it to because then you have to specify it anytime you connect via RDP which can be a pain if you’ve got a bad memory. There are already a thousand and one articles out there to help you change the port number, this is a quick post for future reference for myself.
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Outlook 2010 – Only Starts in Safe Mode

What a surprise, this morning I came into the office only to find that all of my people running Outlook 2010 were now having it open in Safe Mode and I immediately thought, OK this had to have been a Windows Update issue. This seems to be the norm for old Microsuck these days, as I’ve had these sort of problems with Outlook happen twice within the last month. Perhaps they should come up with a new slogan, “Microsoft: Raising the Bar in Repudiation”. Continue reading “Outlook 2010 – Only Starts in Safe Mode”

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Outlook 2010 – Crashes Upon Opening Emails with Embedded Pictures

Today I had a user that just had this problem pop up seemingly out of nowhere. I tried repairing Outlook, starting it in Safe Mode, disabling all Add-Ons, finding and deleting out Outlook’s temp files, and the problem still persisted.

After a brief web search, it appears the latest batch up Windows Updates, specifically KB3097877 that had installed automatically last night, was the culprit. Uninstall it, reboot and hopefully you’re good to go. Here are my references: Continue reading “Outlook 2010 – Crashes Upon Opening Emails with Embedded Pictures”