Bristol Computer Support

Sometimes we all forget write about the basics, such as a simple supply and install of “a computer, screen or a printer”. Well this nothing complicated, just a story of a printer install!

A client needed to replace their inkjet, it was old and always jamming. After advice, they opted for a simple mono laser printer. They didn’t really need colour, any photographs were uploaded to be printed with an online printing company. The printing was mainly “life admin”.

Brother DCP-L2510D Multifunction Mono Laser Printer
Print Speed: Upto 30PPM
Duplex: Yes

We took out time, set the printer up and showed the customer how to print, copy and scan…and how to change the toner cartridge.

Good simple customer service, nothing advanced or that interesting!

£130 plus vat
plus additional hour installation

In Bristol town, where tech can cause distress,

Heroes of support, they handle every mess.

When your system’s down and you’re feeling Under Pressure.

They’ll rescue your data, your IT’s greatest treasure!

“We can be heroes, just for one day.”

Bristol Computer Support Limited, Matthew Clark.

When you start up a new Windows 11 install, carry out the following:

Open “cmd” with Shift + F10, and when the cmd screen in running, type OOBE\BYPASSNRO. (o’s, not zeros)

Your computer will restart and now you will have the “I don’t have Internet” option, it will complain, but you can now create a local administrator user, rather than being forced into creating a Microsoft account.

Very handy.

Sometimes, I need to make changes the settings within the Office 365 Active Directory, and I could find the menu from the Admin login going into Office.com…longer, it’s gone

It’s changed location/name who know..

So login into “office.com” as a global admin

Goto “entra.microsoft.com”, and you will find all you need

“My interview questions are always the same,” he confessed, adding: “I say tell me the story of your life and the decisions you made along the way and why you made them.”

He continued: “Also tell me about some of the most difficult problems you’ve worked on and how you solved them.”

This got me thinking about previous issues I have had to fix within Computer Support. The hardest issue I had to fix, was also the most stressful, happened many years ago. We serviced the IT for a large book company based in Bath, near Bristol. We had supplied the HP server, installed fully with Windows Server, installed Exchange Server for email. This server was connected to users in the US, Hong Kong and Europe. It had been working for sometime without issue.

It went wrong! Badly. The server had an array of harddrives, and could handle a disk failure. Two disks failed, and the server would not boot. The company had no email.

We fired down the server, added the new hard drives, re-launched it, and tried to restore all the data using the backup software. No go. The tapes were mis-firing, so we had to go back to a set that worked. Every time we tried to restore, it would takes several hours, and would often fail near the end. All day, into the evening, through the night!

Finally we got a backup set to install and yet, even after success, the server would not start! At 3:00am, it is not a good feeling.

Not giving up, I looked at the issue, searched some information about booting servers…and then had an idea based on what I had read. The restored boot.ini was expecting to see the HP partition, as well as the windows partitions. There was no HP partition, as when we restored, we only had the media supplied from HP. HP had pre-installed it in the factory.

So I booted it into some kind of safemode and edited the boot.ini file, changing the boot order, and finally we had the server and running!

What are the most difficult problems you have worked on?

1. Login to https://office.com and select “Admin” from the app grid.
2. Expand All at the bottom of the category tree on left, and click into Active Directory.
3. Click into the revealed choice for Active Directory that now shows on left.
4. Scroll down the list to the right and choose “Properties”.
5. And on the left you’ll look to the bottom of the page of properties, to see and select the link to see the state of the “Security Defaults” that dictate from the AAD level (Azure Active Directory part of 365 hosting) that MFA is required.

You can bypass the “let’s connect you to a network” screen by killing the networkconnectionflow.exe process using the Task Manager.

Since you already have Windows 11 installed at this stage, you can launch the Task Manager on top of your setup wizard using Command Prompt and kill the process.
Here’s how to do it.

Assuming you are in the Let’s connect you to a network screen, press Shift + F10 to launch the Command Prompt.
In the Command Prompt window, type taskmgr and hit enter to launch Task Manager.
open task manager command prompt

Alternatively, use the Ctrl + Shift + Esc shortcut to launch Task Manager without Command Prompt.

Click More Details to open Task Manager in full view.

In the Processes tab, locate Network Connection Flow.

Select Network Connection Flow and then click the End task button. Wait for the process to end and then close the Task Manager.

Type exit in the Command Prompt and hit enter.

Matthew Clark
07966 497090

So this is a Windows 11 based laptop, purchased from Curry’s, 2022.

The job was to reinstall the whole thing. The login credentials were lost (no is wasn’t stolen) and to get the PC working again we needed to reinstall the whole laptop.

Problem: We need a driver to load, so that we can see the 512Gb SSD.

Problem: The model number and serial number, after using a magnifying glass to see, DOES NOT EXIST on the HP Website. The serial number references for than one product (HP says) and the model number just takes me to a specification document page. Useless.

Put your Windows 11 Boot USB into your working PC.

Download the zip file from here:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download/19512/intel-rapid-storage-technology-driver-installation-software-with-intel-optane-memory-10th-and-11th-gen-platforms.html

Copy the contents to your Boot USB. I created a folder for it.

Boot the PC using the Escape Key, and choosing the Boot menu, select your USB stick. When asked, browse to your driver folder and load the driver. You can now see the SSD, and can install Windows 11.

I suspect it is because the model number is generated specific to Curry’s, but I am still annoyed I could not just use the HP website to get the drivers I needed.

So you have an older PC and you want to give it away, or even sell it. Perhaps to a friend, a family member or a charity for example. You have deleted all your data off of the drives, uninstalled all your software and settings you don’t want them to see.

Sorry to say, that is not enough. Any simple file recovery tool, that can be downloaded of the internet for free, could be used to recover almost all your data. You see when you delete something, it doesn’t delete the file, no, it just deletes the “index” to the file. If a program was able to scan the space on the drive, it will find the header and footer of a JPG, GIF, PNG, Docx, plus all kinds of other data files.

So what you want to do is carry out this small task:

1: Delete everything you don’t want them to gain access. Uninstall any programs, perhaps even create them a new User and delete your user off.

2. Open up a CMD windows (Start Run CMD)

3. Run this command “cipher /w:c:” Then sit back and wait (can take a long time).

This command looks at all the space on your C:, and it overwrites that space. Any of these deep recovery programs will fail to come up with anything you had previously deleted.

(Windows 10, running on the C Drive, run about if there is a D Drive etc)

Phishing for passwords is a great pass time of any cyber criminal.  The conmen already know your username, as that is now your email address.  It is the password they covet more than anything.  The criminals are getting cleverer, the emails are looking that much more realistic, the phones calls sound far more real.  The days of just detecting “a phish” attempt by the grammar of an email/text a message, or sound of a voice are rapidly disappearing.

They can gain access to your files, email, social media, hosted systems.  Once they get a password, they instantly try to access everything they know of, knowing that as human beings, we have probably used that password more than once.

Two Step Authentication, Multifactor Factor Authentication (MFA), 2FA all amount to a technique to combat this data breach of losing your password to a fraudster.  The solution is fairly simple to explain, but more complicated to setup.  Basically the system you are protecting will only allow you to login if can supply some information that you know, your password, and double check that you are the correct person, by utilising something you have, normally your mobile phone.

The chances of a criminal being in possession of your password, and having your mobile phone (and getting through the security of your mobile phone) is extremely unlikely.

The system most of my business customers use is Office 365, mainly for email, but some for SharePoint.  My advice, if you also use Office 365, is to get your admin to enable MFA for most of your accounts.  It forces that account user to register their mobile phone with their account.  When they connect a new device, or after a period of time on an old device, it will utilise MFA and request something from the phone.  Microsoft use either the “Microsoft Authenticator” or you can use a text message, where Microsoft will text a temporary code to the phone.

Any and every system should be protected this way.  When you speak to company who supports your system, ask about it.  There are so many web based/cloud systems that need this kind of security, and hopefully we can reduce this kind of fraud.

For personal use, where it is an option, switch it on.  If FaceBook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIN etc have the option to toggle this 2 Step Security, why not just enable it?  Why?  Fraudsters like to read and get into the sort of conversations you are having, as the cleverer conmen can then use this to somehow find an angle to get money from someone sometime.

Matthew Clark
matthew.clark@bristol-computer-support.co.uk
www.bristol-computer-support.co.uk
07966 497090