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Mini-Reviews by Members / ShutUp10 - Mini-Review
« on: January 06, 2020, 07:11 PM »
Original post date:2020-01-07
Updated:2020-01-11

Basic Info
Application name:O&O ShutUp10
Antispy/privacy tool for Windows 10.
Thumbs-Up Rating: :Thmbsup: :Thmbsup: :Thmbsup: :Thmbsup: :Thmbsup:
Support:https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
(This software has been mentioned in several past discussions on DC Forum.)
Download the software from: the support link above.
Application Version Reviewed:ShutUp10 v1.7.1405
Test System Specs:Have used an earlier version successfully on Win7-64 HP, but this latest version seems to be specifically oriented towards Windows 10 32-64bit
Upgrade Policy:$FREE for Private use.
Pricing Scheme$FREE for Private use.

1.0 Intro and Overview:
(From the support page)
O&O ShutUp10 means you have full control over which comfort functions under Windows 10 you wish to use, and you decide when the passing on of your data goes too far. Using a very simple interface, you decide how Windows 10 should respect your privacy by deciding which unwanted functions should be deactivated.

O&O ShutUp10 is entirely free and does not have to be installed – it can be simply run directly and immediately on your PC. And it will not install or download retrospectively unwanted or unnecessary software, like so many other programs do these days!

2.0 Using O&O ShutUp10:
The user is presented with a panel listing the toggles (On/Off) switches.
Select those toggles you want, per the example below.

07_1326x900_2A55095D.png

3.0 Who this software is designed for:
Home or business users wanting to manage their Windows 10 hidden/intrusive security/privacy settings.

4.0 The Good:
It's simple and effective.
It works just like it should.
Warns you about starting/enabling Restore Point and Shadow Copy functionality before making any changes.

5.0 The needs improvement section:
Nothing to report here.

6.0 Why I think you should use this product:
For home or business users wanting to better manage their Windows 10 hidden/intrusive security/privacy settings, this software could be of enormous help and provide peace-of-mind.

7.0 How it compares to similar software
Its simple approach and interface is one of the easiest to use that I have come across (so I have used it for years).

8.0 Conclusions:
Worth using in Windows 10 especially, as it addresses all the telemetry concerns.
Will need to be re-run periodically after Windows updates as they will tend to have restored the old default Registry settings (for the hidden/intrusive security/privacy settings ). Microsoft seems to never give up.

2
Living Room / Laptop overheating or noisy fan - Cleaning the cooling system.
« on: December 14, 2019, 09:05 AM »
Thought this might be of general hep/use. Let me know where it may need correcting/improving please.

First off: Install Speedfan http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php.
Use it to study your laptop and make a note of the current typical CPU and GPU temps in normal operation and under different load types  - e.g. (say), when playing games, or browsing the web or building a spreadsheet.
This will provide you with a starting-point as a basis for comparison - a factual AS-IS picture.

Causes of overheating:
  • As a long-time laptop user, I have learned that the single most common cause of overheating and fan noise in my laptops tends to be that the heat exchanger becomes clogged. The heat exchanger looks like a small radiator matrix (grill), usually located on the left or right side of the laptop, but sometimes on the rear side.

  • A small fan sucks the unfiltered cold air (usually from the base) into the laptop, and pushes it as exhaust hot air through the matrix of the heat exchanger.

  • The heat exchanger gets heat transferred to it via thermal conduction along a solid copper bar that picks up the heat and carries it away from the CPU (and GPU if fitted). The bar is screwed/clamped to the CPU/GPU, with a heat-conducting thermal grease smeared between the faces of the components before they are assembled. The grease can break down over some years and its conductive efficiency reduced as a result, leading to overheating and automatic thermal cut-out.

  • Over time, the heat exchanger matrix tends to become blocked with the accumulated dust and fluff that unavoidably accumulates (sucked/blown in by the fan). In addition, the blades of the fan can become loaded with accumulations of particles of dust, such that the fan aerodynamics can change and its weight can be increased appreciably and thus its operational and aerodynamic efficiency is impaired. These things can lead to overheating, fast/noisy fans and automatic thermal cut-out.

To see what you may need to clean:
NB: If you don't like the idea of using a vacuum cleaner to suck back through the fan, then go to the thorough clean section, below.
  • Step 1: Have on standby:
     - a horsehair paintbrush.
     - a variable-speed vacuum cleaner.
     - a bright LED torch.
     - a few plastic bag ties (with the wire center).

  • Step 2: Turn the laptop off and remove the battery.

  • Step 3: Shine a torch into the fan's cold air-intake (assuming there is one). Observe whether the intake is blocked with fluff/dust and the condition of the fanblades - if the latter are black, then they are probably not too dirty, but if a grey colour then they are probably loaded with dust/dirt. Wipe/dust off the intake surface with the paintbrush. Don't clean it otherwise, just make a mental note of the visible status.

  • Step 4: Next, whilst In a darkened room, shine a torch into the fan intake whilst looking through the heat exchanger matrix on the side of the laptop. The light should be visible The matrix should appear to consist of clear, rectangular little tubes, but they will be unable to let light through to varying degrees if they are blocked at all. Make a mental note of the status.

  • Step 5: Press the round end of the vacuum cleaner pipe against/over the air intake vent, sealing the edges with your fingers so that most of the suck is through the fan intake. Then SUCK: Turn on the vacuum cleaner and hold it in that position for around 2-5 seconds (experiment). The airflow will be sucked backwards through the fan (which you will hear whizzing backwards) and the air intake, along with most of the crud blocking the heat exchanger matrix. After switching off the vacuum cleaner, on inspection, you may need to slowly ease out larger chunks of fluff with a fine screwdriver, from the air intake vent. Repeat the suck until the air intake seems clear.

    Then repeat Step 4. Check - If the matrix seems clear/unblocked and if the fanblades are relatively black and shiny and the air intake is clear, then you probably don't need to do anything further.
    If the fanblades seem clean enough (black and shiny), but the heat exchanger matrix still seems a bit blocked, then you can clear the matrix further by using one of those plastic bag ties with a wire centre. Poke it through each hole in the matrix from the outside, then, when you have done that  thoroughly to them all, reverse-suck as before to clean the dislodged crud out.
    Inspect per Step 4 again.

    Step 6: Restart the laptop and check performance compared with the  AS-IS Speedfan performance metrics. If there's no change, then you probably need to do a more thorough clean, as below.
___________________________

DIY steps to do a thorough clean: (i.e., laptop is still overheating, cutting out, or has a noisy fan.)
  • If possible, download a manufacturer's service manual for that laptop. Read up on removal of the necessary parts to get access to those I have mentioned.

  • Prepare a clean work surface with a white cotton or microfibre towel to cover it.

  • Have on standby:
        - a good strong magnet (to hold metal screws on disassembly).
        - a horsehair paintbrush.
        - isopropyl alcohol.
        - a variable-speed vacuum cleaner.
        - cotton ear-buds (to clean in confined spaces - also use with isopropyl alcohol).
        - toilet paper (for cleaning surfaces - also use with isopropyl alcohol).
        - a bright LED torch.
        - heat-conductive thermal grease (if required).

  • Disassemble the laptop CAREFULLY as necessary to get the access required to clean its innards. Place the screws on the magnet so as not to lose them. Keep the magnet in a small tray or bowl to catch any screws or metallic bits that may fall off or are non-magnetic. You may find some screw anchors have already broken (or break on reassembly - so take care!) due to over-tightening or (typically) the plastic having become brittle (their design being unfit for long life).

  • Clean dust/dirt off the motherboard and other parts as you proceed inwards, using the paintbrush and vacuum cleaner on low suction. Using CO2 pressure cans to blow the dust off is arguably a waste of time as it tends to redistribute a lot of the dust (along with your money).

  • Clean the heat exchanger in situ. You may need to use a small flat-bladed screwdriver to scrape off accumulated fluff/dust/dirt or corrosion. Use a torch shone through it to check whether all the holes in the heat exchanger are cleared and clean.
    Carefully remove and disassemble the delicate fan, and separate the fan blade unit. The fan operates upside down and when operational hangs in the air utilising a magnetic field as a bearing (frictionless bearing). In operation, the upside-down rotating fanblade unit over time can become gradually more weighed-down with accumulated deposits of airborne grease and dust onto the fanblades. It can cease to be in its optimum aerodynamic blade profile or position, so becomes less efficient and can become noisy. The noise may be due to friction between surfaces where there should be no contact (or friction) in the optimal case.

  • Carefully clean the fanblade and housing using the paintbrush/earbuds/isopropyl alcohol, as necessary. After cleaning the fan and its housing, clean the bearing "faces" and smear them lightly with a fine coat or drop of CRC - or similar lubricant that can be used with electronics. Don't drown it with CRC as the excess oil will be thrown out along the fanblades when in operation, attracting and adhering to dust particles that pass through.

  • Heat-conductive thermal grease: You probably only really need to tackle the task of cleaning off and replacing the heatsink thermal grease if the CPU/GPU has been overheating and shutting down the system. I read somewhere that the grease has a 10-year life expectancy. I have tended to replace it only when I have opened up a laptop for the usual full cleaning (as above) and as a just-in-case measure on older laptops. Speedfan metrics will generally be a good guide as to whether this overheating is a problem. Those greases seem quite expensive, but maybe you get what you pay for. I'm not sure.

  • Reassembly: This is the reverse of disassembly, so, if you don't have a service manual, then make notes as you disassemble the thing.

3
LaunchBar Commander / Outstanding LBC issues/bugs
« on: February 11, 2019, 03:42 AM »
@mouser: Could I just "bump" this for action, please?:
Couple of queries and an odd thing - using LBC v1.154.2.0 (2018-11-21) ...
-IainB (December 01, 2018, 03:07 AM)

4
Living Room / Avaiability/outages of the DCF website.
« on: December 22, 2018, 11:24 AM »
Is there a log of service level incidents/outages of the website?
I got an Error 522 today, reported by Cloudflare  - copied per the attached file which is just text in an .mhtml file, in a .zip file.
I wondered whether it was a known outage/incident or an unknown intermittent error of some kind.
Thought I should report it.
 There was a diagram that showed the connections between:
  Browser (me) <---> Cloudflare (Tokyo) <---> Host (donationcoder.com)

 - with the Browser and Cloudflare shown as "working" and their link OK, but the link between Cloudflare to Host was X'd out (not working).

I did a Ctrl-R (refresh) and after a rather longish wait, the DCF site came up OK.

5
Living Room / Intel drivers and support - The Intel Driver and Support Assistant (IDSA)
« on: December 22, 2018, 08:05 AM »
I have discovered that the best or most suitable Intel drivers for my Intel i7 chip-based Win10-64 Pro laptop might not necessarily be the ones that have been installed via the sometimes unreliable/unwanted Windows Update process.

For what it's worth, here are some notes on The Intel Driver and Support Assistant - this app could be useful to you.

The Intel Driver and Support Assistant.
These are my notes, made as a record and published here as I consider this app is useful and could probably be well worth having for many other PC users, as it helped to bring my laptop up-to-date with the latest Intel hardware driver versions applicable to that laptop - when it had not so been brought up-to-date by the WinUpdate process.

File:           Intel Driver and Support Assistant Installer.exe
dl from:      <https://downloadmirror.intel.com/24345/a08/Intel%20Driver%20and%20Support%20Assistant%20Installer.exe>
Web page: <https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/detect.html?iid=dc_IDSA>
_______________________________

I came across this app by chance last month (Nov. 2018), after doing a duckduckgo search for: Intel 1815.12.0.2021
 - which was the Intel driver that WinUpdate was trying to dl + install. I wanted to know what it was for.
I was hoping that the Intel Driver and Support Assistant would be able to tell me whether I needed to install anything - and, hopefully, WHY I needed to install it. I wish to avoid inadvertently installing Meltdown/SPECTRE fixes as they are reputedly likely to degrade CPU performance.
___________________________
The installation includes "an invitation" to join the  Intel® Computing Improvement Program: the Terms of which are in the spoiler below: (I DECLINED.)
Spoiler
Terms - The  Intel® Computing Improvement Program.
The information collected includes the web browsing histogram telling how long and how often specific categories of sites have been visited on this device.
All sites visits are classified into one of up to 30 categories. We will not send URLs, web pages titles or any user specific content without an additional explicit permission from you.

Collected information contains your device manufacturer, CPU model, memory and display configuration, OS version, software version, region and language settings, regional location and time zone, other devices in your computing environment, software usage (e.g. number of times used, duration of use, etc.), and feature usage. Collected data is associated with a randomly generated unique identifier (GUID) that is stored on your device. Other devices in your computing environment includes universal plug and play devices (e.g. Smart TV model and vendor information, Video Streaming devices) or other devices that broadcast information that is available to your computer on a local area network.  This information is used to help Intel understand how well our products perform over time, to determine how useful they are, to detect issues and to identify future product improvements. The information collected does not include any actual content you create or view and will not be used to identify you without an additional explicit permission from you.

A frequently asked questions providing additional details is available here: https://policy.system-usage-report.intel.com/faq/ .

The Intel® Computing Improvement Program utilizes reasonable organizational, technical and administrative measures to protect the information collected against unauthorized or unlawful access, alteration, disclosure or destruction. You can access more information about Intel's privacy practices online at http://intel.com/privacy
_____________________________________________________

When first run, the IDSA (Intel Driver and Support Assistant) works with a web-hosted application to analyze and report on the status of drivers for all the Intel hardware on your particular PC (i.e., the on-board Intel hardware). The report is interesting and very informative - fairly detailed - and is displayed in a browser page. It indicates the software (driver) update packages that are required to be installed on your particular PC to bring it up-to-date.
This it did for me, identifying the device and the driver update required, and asked me to select the download if I wanted to proceed - which I did.

Once installed, the IDSA reloads at system Start-up, and seems to just monitor and check whether the latest drivers applicable to your particular PC's on-board Intel hardware (e.g., including Intel CPU, GPU, bluetooth and wifi processors) are installed. If not, then I think it will automatically download and install it (hasn't needed to do that for me yet), which then would maintain your Intel system(s) up-to-date with the current driver versions - which is what you would expect it to do, at any rate.

Given the - what seems to me to be - excessively inquisitive terms and nature of "The Intel® Computing Improvement Program" (which I declined to join), I do not trust the IDSA to be entirely innocent and so I delete the process after Start-up, though it does not seem to present a burden on the CPU or other resources. Once the process is deleted, it does not seem to automatically persist/reinstate itself - e.g., unlike the annoyingly persistent Google Update processes that are sometimes bundled with Chrome and other Google products.

At the very least, the IDSA provides a useful and independent (of Microsoft) confidence check on the validity/currency of the Intel hardware drivers required to be installed on any given PC.
Probably worth having, therefore.

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