Travel can be scary, and with my first long-distance trip in many years coming up this weekend, I want to be sure I’m playing it safe. All the time I hear about fake wireless hotspots and all kinds of other hacks happening in airports and coffee shops. I’m pretty well versed in these tricks, and consider myself aware of most of the tricks and can protect myself. But I want to go the extra mile. I have a computer set up, in my house, which I can use Microsoft Remote Desktop to connect to. I have also created a VPN connection via that same home computer, if I want to use it. But setting this up created a series of questions for me. Foremost: is RDP encrypted? Continue reading “Is Remote Desktop Encrypted?”
Category: From the Help Desk
How to find a lost BitLocker Recovery Key
Some recent glitches in Windows (particularly on some Surface 2 devices) have been prompting users for their BitLocker Security Key. Many people don’t know their key, and if you can’t login to your computer to check it, how do you know what it is!? We’re here to help.
Simply visit onedrive.live.com/recoverykey and view the list of keys your computers have automatically uploaded to your Microsoft account! If you know the name of the machine, you can easily figure out which BitLocker key you need, and type it in to unlock your computer!
Whether you encrypted your drive and needed to move it to another computer, or some glitch is asking you for your BitLocker Encryption Key, at least now you can figure our what your BitLocker Key is. I had some keys in there for devices I didn’t any more, so I deleted them from my account to keep it clean. It’s nice to know we can get access to these keys as needed!
Migrating from GMail to the new Outlook.com
UPDATE: As if an upcoming “Google Take-Out” feature wasn’t enough, literally the same day I posted this Microsoft introduced a GMail import tool. Comments on an Engadget article announcing the feature indicated problems importing large mailboxes (~20GB), however it seems that Microsoft is listening, and willing to help. Microsoft has never specified a size of Outlook.com’s mailboxes, simply calling them “virtually unlimited.”
Original post:
Rumor has it that Google is about to create a new “Google Take-Out” feature for Gmail, allowing you to export your mail, contacts, and calendar entries from Google’s email service. That didn’t exist when I moved from Google Apps to a custom Outlook.com domain several months ago. Here is what I did. Continue reading “Migrating from GMail to the new Outlook.com”
Roland CX-300 64-bit Windows 7/8 driver fix!
Last week I got a call from someone who couldn’t give me much specific information, except that some application wasn’t installing, and that “it kept saying it needs Win32.” Yesterday I had a chance to check it out, expecting that we would just need to download the proper 32 or 64 bit version of the software. The application he was using (which wasn’t FlexiSign, I don’t even remember what it was called) was installing fine. It was his Roland CX-300 Vinyl Cutter that he couldn’t get installed under Windows 7 64-bit.
Checking the vendor’s website, they have no plans in developing a supporting driver for Windows 7 64-bit, and no plans to develop for Windows 8/8.1 whatsoever. I tried searching for beta drivers, taking parts of the 32-bit driver and inserting them to the 64-bit driver (I do have some experience with this), etc… but all to no avail. The man who had called me said he spent 4 hours on the phone with the either the hardware manufacturer’s support staff, or the software developer (I’m not certain which) trying to make it work (I’m very surprised they didn’t just tell him it wasn’t possible and hang up).
In a last ditch effort I searched the web and found Continue reading “Roland CX-300 64-bit Windows 7/8 driver fix!”