About one and a half months ago I experienced a lot of botnet traffic originating from major cloud providers including Microsoft Azure. Against my better judgment I decided to see if reporting a few bad IP’s to the MS CERT team would make a difference.

My plan to install the latest Windows 10 Creators Update fell short during the weekend due to an error identified as 0xc1900200. I was using the “Windows 10 Update Assistant” to perform the upgrade, and the assistant did initially confirm that my system was ready for the upgrade.

On my Windows 10 computers I always work with a standard account and keep a separate administrator account. This provides some additional security as any operation needing administrative privileges will require an administrator’s approval.

When using a client other than Skype for Business (formerly known as Lync) to connect with your Office 365 account, you’ll need to provide the Microsoft Lync servers with a user-agent string they recognize as an “acceptable” client. The reasoning behind this is surely to give you the best possible experience and not at all to lock out other messaging clients.

The Windows Update service will provide you with drivers for the Asus USB-N13 adapter, but in my experience, none of these drivers function reliably. They all suffer from the “limited connection disease” thus forcing me to reattach the dongle and play an endless game of connect and disconnect.

A while back I did some consulting work for a small ISP who had received complaints from a few customers that believed they could not use the ISP’s SMTP server to send email to outlook.com or hotmail.com accounts. These customers claimed they never got any bounce message (Non-Delivery Report)  in return, so they firmly believed the problem resided with the ISP.