Irwin Electronics Blog

Irwin Electronics Weekly Digest Windows Update Microsoft’s Updates Breaking Windows Again by David Irwin on January 26 Here we go again. Another Patch Tuesday, and more broken Windows. What a pane in the glass! The past six or seven consecutive updates have broken Windows for thousands of users. Microsoft is aware of the problems and gives a couple possible solutions. What we see happening is you get to your login screen and enter your password. A circle appears on the screen showing the system is busy processing your request. It will circle and circle then drop you back to the login password prompt. You know your password is correct. You do not receive any error indicating incorrect password. This cycle just repeats, and you can never log in. The Microsoft fix is to power off the computer by holding the power button until it powers down. Repeat the boot and power off cycle 2 or 3 more times, and it will launch the automatic startup repair. If that does not work, the ...

Irwin Electronics Weekly Digest Is Spectre Giving You a Meltdown? For personal PC users, it’s mostly media hype by David Irwin on January 15 If you’re an Enterprise server administrator, I feel for you! I used to be responsible for over three thousand servers at the bank. And the problem only gets worse when management doesn’t understand tech. They buy into the media hype and demand everything be patched... yesterday! For the average personal computer user, it’s mostly hype. It’s a big story because it’s hardware related and affects nearly every processor in use today. Being a hardware issue it doesn’t matter if you use Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, or Android. Virtually every computer is affected! Now that’s scary, and the media is on it like white on rice. Now for a little truth. For one, it is very difficult to exploit. The software would have to be installed on your device. Your antivirus should detect and thwart any attempts to exploit the vulnerability. Another me...