Monday, August 31, 2015

Port scanned by Apple

Something interesting just happened, I was port scanned by Apple. This was not just a single time either, there were over 40 and from several different IP Addresses. In the past I have received many port scans, mostly from China and Turkey. These are always a few scans and then they are done but never one on this level before. I thought this a bit odd.

Scott Gamet

Wednesday, August 5, 2015

Windows 10 upgrade

Windows 10 is now available and for most of us it is a free upgrade. As long as you are running a legal copy of Windows 7 or higher you and your hardware support it, you can upgrade for free. Here is an info gram about the upgrade paths fro Windows 10.



Most of us by now have the upgrade icon in the bottom right hand corner of our screens. If not there are two different approaches that I suggest for getting the icon to show up. The first is to ensure that you have run all of the available updates through Microsoft update.  If the icon is still not showing up then download and run this program win10fix_full.zip  

If the computer is part of a domain and the icon is still not showing up, take the computer off the domain and see if it shows up. 

Even if the icon does not show up you can still upgrade with the ISO disk, this is available for free download and has a very nice built in download and install program. Here is the link for the ISO Windows10 ISO  

Either way that you begin the install it will take a while to finish, there are reports that it will take longer on laptops regardless of the specs. Expect for the entire process to take an hour or two.

If your installation failed, like mine did, and you received a message that tells you that “We couldn’t update the system reserved partition.”  Or Error code: 0xc1900104 

Then you had the same issue that I did and in reality it is a very minor issue. Essentially the issue is that your system reserve partition is too small and or to full. Mine was 100MB and 99% full, thus not allowing any information to be written or modified to the partition. The solution is very simple, increase the size of the partition.

Here is a step by step of how to correct the issue and get the install to complete. 

          Right click on my computer and select Manage

          Select Disk Management under storage
          You should see a partition that says “Reserve” or “System” or something similar
          Right click and select “Change Drive Letter and Paths”
          Click add and in the next window you should see “Assign the following drive letter” scroll                   down and change it to Y. click OK and OK and close out of these screens.

Download the Mini Tool Partition Manager Partition Manager Free  install it and open the program
Select the Y drive and re-size it to about 300MB taking the space from C. 
You May have to restart the computer for the changes to take place.

After this try to install Windows 10 again, for me it worked without issue. 

Microsoft will not email you a link for updating to Windows 10. If you get an email like this it is a virus. 


Best of luck
Scott Gamet
CCENT
MCTS Windows 7