
Crimes are committed every day in Cornwall...
Our neighbours across the border insist on putting jam on the scones before the cream. Outrageous behaviour
71 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Oct 2010
The story reminded me of a long ago client, I provided remote support to them, they were running SBS 2000 at the time. Few years later the server was getting slow so popped in SBS 2003 then few years later SBS 2011. Then out of the blue, one of the directors sends me an email about a Dell whatever-it-was server. As they were in the process of being brought out so all accounts etc were being looked it.
Basically the SBS2000 was leased and the company had continued to DD the payment each month for years. I'm sure the leasing company didn't mind. No one knew and all thought it was their own kit.
Ouch!!
I was at a domestic job yesterday where her hotmail account was compromised and the lady had difficulty changing the password as she used it all over other places. We went though various accounts changing them, and despite me having typed in the passwords initially and she wrote them down, when she did it, I still turned my head. Just habit. She thought it was hilarious.
Been suppling small offices (workgroups) with W11. Start the brand new PC with no internet so no demand for a MS account. Then once at the desktop, taskbar put to the left and a reg tweak to bring back the classic 'right click' context menu. Then the end user feels it's close enough to W10 that they can actually work rather than be stuck having a WTF moments all day long.
The start menu sucks the most
"If Sage are genuinely offering free upgrades to customers who have support contracts without forcing them into a subscription"
I don't believe they are. What Sage are saying is to have a support contract you are on a subscription, therefore you have access to the current version already. So it's not really a free upgrade as such
There is a potential work around however. I found on one of the Sage KBs that if you install Sage with no internet, it will work fine and just requires the serial and activation codes. With this, I was able to find the account number key in the registry and delete it, then add specific firewall deny rules to block my Sage and so far has not nagged me.
I posted a lot of my findings on accountingweb. So far the stand alone seem to be fine, the network versions need a few more tweaks, but ultimately no one will know if this works until the servers are shut down.
I have v25 perpetual essentials, it's not the cloud version. I think I have come up with a way to get around the issue as on one of the Sage KBs, it did say that if you installed Sage on a none internet connected PC then you are unaffected.
If you go into Sage and look under Tools / Activation, there's a refresh license choice. Don't click on it, just make a visual note.
Go to help, about and under account number, take a note of the number.
Open resource monitor and under network, make a note of all the sage executables that are running off to the internet
close sage
disconnect the computer from the internet (eg, unplug the cable / wifi etc)
open regedit and search for the account number. I found it under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Sage\Line 50. Delete the AccountNumber key (see note later)
with the computer still disconnected, open sage. The 'refresh license' option before is now gone, under help / about the account number is no longer there and so far as I can tell, it thinks it has never been connected and 'might' continue to work after September. I wound the clock forward a month and never had the 3 day warning to reconnect.
Note:- if you reconnect to the internet and open sage, the deleted registry key is replaced and the 'refresh license' reappears. This is to be expected as Sage has ran off to the server. I suspect that if this works for you, you then add the deny firewall rules with the path to the Sage executables
The VAT MTD won't work, but that's an easy work around as you export the VAT to a CSV and use bridging software. I did it for the first time last quarter and all worked flawlessly.
But as a standalone Sage, mines been fine for the last few weeks since I made the above changes. It may not suit everyone or work on network versions or higher versions, but it's here as a suggestion.
Too many years ago to remember I purchased a couple of music tracks to play in windows media player. Not long after I lost my freeserve email account and thus, lost the ability to play the purchased music. Damned DRM. Pretty much from that point I never purchased any more music online, always CD's and don't have a single software subscription.
I'm a happy perpetual dinosaur
When I got the pop up warning I was annoyed, this was around a month ago? I have perpetual and also on v25. Having read a little deeper into the issue, Sage themselves said that a PC that was never connected to the internet when installed will not be affected. So after a full backup of sage and the VM, I uninstalled and cleared every trace of sage off the system. Disabled the nic and reinstalled. sure enough the licensing part doesn't get installed, however, should you turn on the nic and open sage it then runs off and you're back to the beginning.
repeated the above with the addition of windows firewall blocking outbound connections from sage.exe, sbddesktop.exe and sg50svc_v25.exe and so far it's been fine, even when I put the clock forward years it will run as if there's no internet
The VAT MTD was a pain, but it's just a few extra steps to export to a CSV and 100PcVatFreeBridge sees it and sends it off. No issues. Hopefully the CT one will be similar as quite frankly I will be damned if I have to spend money per month for doing my accounts for the paltry income I get these days.
Good backups are one's that successfully test restore. I wonder if all the backups were totally incremental based but the original full backup was still needed and was lost in time. Maybe it ignored the weekly full. I also suspect circular logging would have helped the restore. it's something I have always enabled.
I've been around Exchange from the beginning and it still gives me the willies anytime I update it, however now it's virtualised so a test export makes life so much easier.
Been there at the weekend playing with eseutil and watching the painfully slow % bars, usually claiming back a few Gb of space
I have been working round Exchange even before Exchange was Exchange and was a fancy email server built into Outlook 97. However I have resisted O365 and rue the day that onprem is no longer available. My clients don't want ongoing cost of subscription but find Exchange features very useful. I would have no issue with moving my clients to imap or a linux based mail server long before MS see's a single subscription penny.
Indirectly related, but often I am asked to allow business emails on personal mobiles. Yes, I can do it, but always get that persons immediate boss to agree on the understanding that I cannot remove the email account from their personal device and it's up to them to ensure the account is removed.
Yes, the account is locked down should said person leaves, but it doesn't clear the existing emails.
I always had a feeling that should I do a remote wipe on a personal device it would come under the computer misuse act.
I have a 14 year old Toshiba 38" Regza. No wifi / ethernet, just a good old TV without the bells and whistles, it just works as good as the day I brought it. Recently my lad brought a JVC 4k and swapped our TV for his for testing before he moved out. The sound was tinny (he had to buy a sound bar to make it sound less awful), apps kept crashing, the remote was a nightmare. He partly did it to encourage me to get a better telly, however it did the opposite, it makes me more pleased with what I already have, good picture, great sound and no slurping.
Seems being a AV dinosaur has some perks
I have advised my client base not to upgrade, due mainly to the right click menu being messed about. Stupid light blue icons for cut / copy / paste etc more clicks to do the same task.
But (and forgive my ignorance), if a graphics card has direct access to storage, how long will it before that's a vector for attack? I can see 'cryptolocking' fake games appearing that kills your system and windows will not know anything about it. (If I understood what I read correctly)
Upgrade for upgrade sake? I have customers still on Office 2010, it does exactly what they need it to do. Sure, the vast majority are on 2013 and higher as PCs were sold with the 'then' current version of Office. But the fact is that I have saved my clients a skip load of cash by them not having 365.
I look after around 400 desktops across different clients. The vast majority are around 10 year old i3 PCs, with 8Gb ram and SSD and are absolutely fine for what's needed from them. I know they will have to be sent to slaughter eventually, but its the all in ones that's only 6 years old that will be criminal to dump. Just because they have an older gen CPU renders them ineligible for an upgrade.
I know the company owners will simply stay on 10 until the 3rd party apps stop being compatible. No cloud sales, no upgrades, no pennies to MS but I will happily send my monthly invoice to look after them.
I had one of the Oneplus Ones, about a year after they come out. It ticked all the boxes until 2018 when I needed an obscure android feature which it didn't have (i'm really struggling to remember what it was, but something to do with the calling side and was hidden) and went to Samsung S9+. First thing that surprised me was the S9 was no faster than the OPO, it still grinds along today.
I had been looking to go back to oneplus but the cost doesn't justify replacing a working phone that does everything I need it to do.
For the record, the OPO is still going strong, my lads get my hand me downs and I often wonder if I should do a swap with him.
My youngest had to return an AMD processor (also to Holland) and it just dragged on with him, the courier and AMD having to state the price, and often was the wrong price for customs declaration. Under RMA there needs to be a declaration of £0 with it being a warranty repair. All got resolved in the end but took a lot of leg work
It wasn't initially brought for that purpose, it was to remote hard restart some client equipment which eventually was replaced. Too good to chuck out.
I did have a timer and a dusk sensor but the wife drew the line at sensors so it now sits in the garage running a run of led down lighters.
I try and avoid any IoT device because at some point in the future the maker will shut the server off. At the moment I do have a smart switch, it controls the outside lights at the front and has been very good, comes on at dusk, off at 23:00 and I can turn them on via the app if im late home, but I also know that one day it will stop functioning.
Built in obsolescence, ~5 years then computer says no
Earlier this year they announced they were stopping SBE antivirus / SMSMSE as a package and selling them individually. Surprise surpise the combined price of both was near double what the package was.
So for my smaller clients, they have Avast free for business and only SMSMSE looking after their Exchange. Although the price is the same, it's Symantec that has ultimatlely lost out on revenue as the only thing that keeps me using SMSME is the fine control I have on content filtering - something I have yet to find on other Exchange protection software.
As a small business supplier, I would guess that some of their losses are down to
- Adoption to 365, so who needs to buy OEM office?
- i3 / i5 machines good at what they do, no significant speed improvements over the last few years (ignoring ssds etc)
- People happy to stay on W7 on their i3 / i5s
- Reduced server HW sales since it's all going to the cloud.
I would imagine that a lot of dizzies will struggle in the future as people move to the cloud. Eventually I see all PCs will become glorified thin clients an become a throw away white good, same as a microwave.
I suspect their big profits were down to lack of competition at the time, but as people got familiar with the likes of time and tiny etc, pcs ended up being cheaper anyway. I recall my 486 DX2/66 with 4mb of ram cost IRO £1200 back around 93/94, now I can get a crap (branded) one for sub £200. Account for a windows key, the cost of the hardware, I suspect the margin for that is probably £20 to the dizzy.
As for W10 killing the market, yes, to some degree. Consumers are quite happy with their XP / Vista / W7 machines and are put off by the negativity that surrounds 'tiles / start menu', however in the business world *I* don't feel much has changed. i'm still buying in W7 pcs for clients and have no intention of taking them futher until forced to.
And how many of those boxes have dozy users logged on and wandering around dubious websites?
I don't think the risks are any where are big as XP. None of the few 2k3 boxes I look after are connected to the internet so where's the risk?
My customers will replace when needed, not because they need to.
I suppose it makes sense for some, but I can't get my head around why people want to put their customers on 365 and then never see any future renewal profit.
I look after one company that has 50 or so mailboxes spread over 8 locations. I considered a hosted exchange as £6 / month / mailbox doesn't seem much, but scale that up to 50 or £300 a month and suddenly the costs become significant. In less than 18 months it becomes cheaper to buy a basic server, exchange and cals and self host.
I'm not entirely sure that MS should be to blame here.Yes, W8 is a bitch and shoving everything into the cloud means less recurring profits, however as an ex insight user/buyer I found that their prices were often higher than say ebuyer, had poor range, their couriers turned up often 3 days later than expected and they had such a high 'account manager' churn that I had no idea who my manager is / was.
So their losses doesn't surprise me