HP Support Assistant – The Epitome of Spyware and How to Disable It

Sure there are several legitmate cases where the HP Support Assistant can be helpful, such as updating drivers or flashing the BIOS on the computer, but if you’re reading this, you’ve probably already established the fact that the software basically hijacks your computer and does a lot of shady shit in the background. I would absolutely classify the product as being spyware and would highly recommend that you take all steps necessary to disable it when it is not being used, and here are some reasons why.

My first problem is that by default, the HP Support Assistant does an intrusive scan of your network to search for “devices” every time the software runs and it appears you can’t turn that off. It doesn’t get much shadier than that folks, seeing as how you don’t really know what they are up to and why they are taking an inventory of your entire network.
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Cannot Log onto Windows – Trust Relationship Failed

There’s several different things that can cause the trust relationship issue and there are hundreds of post or more online about the subject. Sometimes simply resetting the computer account in Active Directory can fix the problem. Other times, unjoining/rejoining the computer from the domain will fix the problem. If either of those isn’t the case, usually that is a good indication that there is some sort of corruption in the Active Directory database that can only be fixed by manual intervention.
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uTorrent – Don’t Have Permission to Uninstall the Program

There are certainly versions of uTorrent that have massive problems. Whether it be the inability to click on magnet links and open them properly inside the program or the never-ending issue where the program constantly tells you some shit about there being an update when you open it and says something along the lines of “you already have a more recent version of the program installed, would you like to downgrade?”. Just an FYI, downgrading doesn’t do shit, it’s an endless loop of futility, sad faces, and teardrops.

It is even more disturbing when you want to uninstall uTorrent to try and install a more recent beta version that doesn’t have all these bugs and when you try to remove it the conventional way, you receive the message “You do not have sufficient access to uninstall uTorrent. Please contact your system administrator.” and you are logged on as the user with administrator rights.
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Windows Update Error 80073712 When Installing KB2943357 – OR – How to Repair Corrupted Windows Update Files on Windows 7 or Server 2008

Starting with Windows 8 and Server 2012, you can more easily fix corrupted updates using the “DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth” command, but what about on Windows 7 or on Server 2008? Well, to be honest, it is kind of a pain in the ass and quite a lengthy process.

This seems to be a prime candidate for some sort of automated batch or PowerShell script that could parse out the bad updates from the log file, extract the needed files from the KB .msu packages, move them to the temp directory, and then re-run the System Update Readiness Tool. Lord knows it would save a lot of people some time and headaches but I don’t know whether it is even worth the hassle of programming it all seeing as how mainstream support for Windows 7 will be up soon and extended support will be around until 2020. That and I’m sure a lot of people have been suckered into upgrading to Windows 10 for free as well. It’s ok, there’s nothing in that giant wooden trojan horse that they just carted into your living room. Your data is safe and there are absolutely zero privacy concerns, trust them. Go back to sleep zombie.

Anyways, if you have installed any Server 2008  or Windows 7 operating systems in the last say year or so, you probably have noticed that Windows Update gets broken almost every single freaking time and it is quite cumbersome. So here is the cliff notes version on how to repair your corrupted Windows Update files.
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Outlook 2010 – Crashes Upon Opening Emails with Embedded Pictures

Today I had a user that just had this problem pop up seemingly out of nowhere. I tried repairing Outlook, starting it in Safe Mode, disabling all Add-Ons, finding and deleting out Outlook’s temp files, and the problem still persisted.

After a brief web search, it appears the latest batch up Windows Updates, specifically KB3097877 that had installed automatically last night, was the culprit. Uninstall it, reboot and hopefully you’re good to go. Here are my references: Continue reading “Outlook 2010 – Crashes Upon Opening Emails with Embedded Pictures”

WinSCP – Import/Export Your Saved Sessions List and Settings from a Computer that is Offline

If you want to backup your saved sessions from WinSCP, that is easy enough, as long as the computer is still in a working state, you can use the backup and restore feature from within the software. But what if the computer doesn’t boot or you swapped the drive into a different machine? So long as you can still access the drive and have access to that user’s registry file, you can easily extract the data you need. Continue reading “WinSCP – Import/Export Your Saved Sessions List and Settings from a Computer that is Offline”

Windows – Play a WAV file with PowerShell and the .NET SoundPlayer Class

At work, they wanted to ability to play a soundbyte on a schedule as a reminder to our sales employees. I think I may have found this on stackexchange but I can’t quite remember at this point to give the full creds. A lot of the solutions I found tried to use Windows Media Player to play sound files or MP3’s, but unfortunately, there was no way to close the program after the file had played. This way uses Windows PowerShell and the .NET SoundPlayer Class to play the file. Continue reading “Windows – Play a WAV file with PowerShell and the .NET SoundPlayer Class”

Windows – How to Run Elevated Scripts as a Regular User with Task Scheduler -OR- How to Restart Services as a Standard User

Here is a neat workaround you can use in Windows to run a batch script or any other command that would regularly require elevated administrator credentials. Using this method, you can essentially bypass UAC and allow a script to be ran as a standard user without them having to enter in an admin password. In theory, you could probably even use this same approach to install software as a regular user if you wanted to. For my example below, I was able to allow a standard user to kill processes and then restart the services.

The problem that I had to overcome was that one of my VPN users who used Shrewsoft VPN client would occasionally get disconnected and then never be able to fully connect again. Oddly enough, the client would show connected on the user’s end and immediately disconnect but it never made a connection on the server side. The problem was that the “iked” process would get hung up and then the VPN client would subsequently never fully connect all the way. Continue reading “Windows – How to Run Elevated Scripts as a Regular User with Task Scheduler -OR- How to Restart Services as a Standard User”