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Sunday in the shop

In the shop today to finish up some computer repairs due tomorrow and to work on the new website theme. At least the streets were pretty clear even with the snow this Sunday. 🙂

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Busy this Friday

Shop is almost at capacity for repairs and will be on the road late today with service calls. And booked half of next week already.  Seems I’ll be busy the next 6 or 7 days. Lets just hope the weather behaves for awhile.

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Back at the shop

Started out in the shop today. Repaired a bunch of systems, dropped them off. Did some more service calls on the way back and now repairing the next batch of computers …

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Website updates

I have most of the new version of the website up and working. In the shop today working on that and a bunch of computer repairs.

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How does the Cloudbleed security leak impact you?

A few days ago, CDN (content delivery network) Cloudflare, informed users that a security flaw had been discovered on their network.

So why is this important to you? Well a CDN offers what can be called storage and caching services to other websites. Websites use these service to reduce the load on their own servers and to process requests to their websites faster. Because a CDN saves files on servers all over the world. In general, they can pull the information you want from a server closer to you and save time.

Many websites use CDN’s for these features, and here is were the problem starts. Cloudflare, being one of the largest CDN’s on the planet, provides these services to millions of websites. And from the reports about this security flaw, it seems that personal user information from website end users may have been exposed.

Which means account information, contact details and even passwords seem to have been leaked.

As Cloudflare is used as the primary CDN for millions of websites there is a chance that your data may have been exposed also.

So what can you do?

Change your passwords.
Never use the same passwords. Create a new one for each account you have.
Do not use easy to guess passwords.
If your not sure how to proceed please call RenoGeek to setup an appointment to improve your security.

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How to fix Windows 10 wifi issue

Since the release of Windows 10 it seems some computers have had intermittent problems connecting and staying on wifi connections. Sometimes the problem seems to be you can not even see surrounding networks. Other times you may see a wifi network but can not connect and your computer acts like you gave the wifi router a bad password. Or lastly if your lucky enough to get a connection it will drop after a short time. Some at first think they just have the random bad connection, reboot and connect for a short time and then have this issue all over again.

Microsoft claimed that old drivers and VPN software were at least part of the problem and rolled out a number of KB updates. My efforts to use the patch and update drivers did not seem to work on the systems I tried them on. And even the much anticipated “Anniversary” update in August of 2016 did not seem to address this issue despite reports that wifi was supposed to be one of the fixes include with this service patch / update.

While I have tried a number of “Fixes” found on the Internet in the field. It seemed most did not work or even worse yet, worked the first time only to fail again after some time had passed. After gathering a number of laptops that seemed to suffer from this issue I did some experimenting and came up with a simple solution that so far (knock on wood) seems to fix the issue on every system I have tried it on. While your mileage may vary, I thought I would post what I have been doing to help others with what can be a very annoying and frustrating issue.

Please note as with any advice you find on the Internet changing settings on your own system is AT YOUR OWN RISK. And while it is my goal here to try and share what I have been doing. I can not offer you tech support over the Internet.

So if you choose to try this use the same common sense you would with any software / hardware change on your system. Which would include making sure you have a full backup of your data and not trying this on a machine that is currently in some fashion “Mission Critical” . So if the system your going to try this on controls your pacemaker, does the payroll for your business or runs the thermal rods on a nuclear reactor. I would highly recommend you hire a professional to help you with this problem. ????

All that being said here are the steps I now take to fix the wifi issues on a Windows 10 system…

If you are connected to a wifi router disconnect.
Shut down the computer (Full power off (not sleep or hibernate modes), not a restart / reboot).
Turn on the computer and log in as normal. Do not try and log onto a wifi router or get on the Internet.

In the taskbar search box (lower left by the Windows flag / start button) type “CMD” (no quotes).
In the list that will pop up right click on the black (CMD) icon in the list of choices and choose “Run as Administrator“.
You should now see a classic Dos box. Inside that box you need to type (2) two lines of code. One line at a time.
In the first line type this (no quotes) “reg delete HKCR\CLSID{988248f3-a1ad-49bf-9170-676cbbc36ba3} /va /f” then hit the enter key.

 
Now type your 2nd line which is this (no quotes) “netcfg -v -u dni_dne” then hit the enter key again.

 
Now close the Dos box and once again Shut down the computer (Full power off (not sleep or hibernate modes), not a restart / reboot).

 
Wait about 5 to 10 minutes this will give your wifi router time to figure out the system is not on the network in case you did not disconnect in step #1 or your system automatically reconnected and drop it’s IP address for your computer.

 
Turn on the computer and log in as normal.

 
Log onto the wifi network of your choice and the wifi should be working again.I have found that all the steps listed above will give this the highest chance of working the first time around so take your time and do them.

Good Luck! and feel free to share this page if you found it useful.