Last week Microsoft released the Release Preview of the Windows 10 Spring Creators Update 1803 Build 17133 (Redstone 4) to the Insider Preview program. This is the final step before releasing the Windows 10 Spring Creators Update to the public through Windows Update. I have installed the Release Preview update on my main laptops and [...]
If your internal microphone has stopped working after you install the Windows 10 Spring Creators Update, check your drivers for updates and that the audio driver isn't disabled. You can do this by right-clicking on the start menu and going to Device Manager. Once you're done there, then check the following privacy settings that are [...]
BitLocker is a built-in encryption for Windows that will allow you to encrypt the data on your hard drive, making it difficult for someone to extract data from it if your computer was ever lost or stolen. The only way to recover your data is to have your BitLocker recovery key. Unfortunately, sometimes Windows becomes [...]
When you send a certificate request from a server to a Windows Certificate Authority (CA), the server stores a private key for that certificate. For security reasons, the Certificate Authority doesn't keep that private key. If you try to export a certificate from the Issued folder on the CA, you can only export (Copy To [...]
As an Active Directory Administrator, determining the date that a user last logged onto the network could be important at some point. If you have access to the Attribute Editor in your Active Directory tools, you can look for the LastLogonDate attribute. The other option is to use Powershell, and there are two methods to [...]
I recently ran into an issue where Outlook 2016 on Windows 10 was giving me one of these errors whenever I would try to click on a link: "This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. Please contact your system administrator" or "Your organization's policies are preventing us from completing [...]
Microsoft Windows comes pre-installed with Trusted Root Authority certificates. These certificates are used across Windows and browsers to verify the identity of trusted computers and websites. If for some reason these certificates get deleted, corrupted, or out-dated, you'll start to get certificate warnings with no real indication of where the problem is. The way to [...]
As an IT security professional, you've hopefully applied some baseline Group Policy settings to your workstations. Recently, if you've upgraded any of those workstations to the Windows 10 Creators Update, your administrators might have noticed that they can no longer access the C$ Admin Share by going to \\ComputerName\c$, however, it might still be accessible [...]
With the recent spread of the #WannaCry (Update 6/27/17: and #Petya) ransomware over the past week, the IT community has been in a frenzy to patch vulnerable systems that are missing the MS17-010 patch that Microsoft released back in March 2017. If you need to scan your network for possible vulnerable systems, you can use [...]
There have been recent reports that the Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016 patch KB4015217 breaks VMware virtual machines (VM), leaving them inoperable and a boot error of "Inaccessible Boot Disk". The Windows KB4015217 patch is called "Cumulative Update for Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016: April 11, 2017". While looking at the KB4015217 Release [...]
