I was cleaning up a 10-year old HP envy m6 laptop that had Microsoft Windows 10 and Office 2013 on it. In the end, I decided to wipe it clean with a fresh instance of Windows 10. I happened to have an ISO, so I burnt a DVD and started the installation. The machine asked whether I had the product key or whether it was a digital delivery. I chose the latter copy because it was one of those “free” upgrades from Windows 7 or 8, and I thought nothing more of it. (Old laptops cannot take Windows 11, so that was not an option.)
Windows Lied
After the latest copy of Windows 10 was downloaded, the installation dialogue asked for the product key! Nothing I tried would let me bypass it. I changed the BIOS setting to first boot from the DVD drive, but it did not work (I have heard from another HP user that I’m not the first to report this.) I wanted to install Windows 7, for which I have a key, then do the Windows 10 upgrade. That DVD would not boot either.
I also found that my valid Windows 7 and 8.1 keys were not accepted because I had neglected to deactivate the key before disposing of the machines where I had installed them. What can you if the machine dies before you can deactivate?
Bootable Windows Drive
My next approach was to make a bootable USB drive with a copy of Windows 10 on it. I obtained it from Microsoft (two options):
This is the process for creating such a bootable USB drive. You can instead make a bootable DVD.
Choose the first option
Choose the second option
Select language, architecture, and edition
I chose English (UK), Windows 10 Pro and Windows 64.
Choose the type of drive
I chose a USB drive.
Select the drive letter
I selected the drive.
Start downloading
The last step is to start the download.
That should be all. The tool disappears when the task is completed. Use it to install Windows 10 from the USB drive. You will still need a product key.
My Outcome
I had read a couple of news items:
The trick of going to Microsoft’s Accessibility page to get a free Windows 10 upgrade no longer works, as Microsoft removed that offer three years after its official end date.
You could enter a valid Windows 7 or 8 product key when the Windows 10 installation process, except in my case I had forgotten to deactivate mine long ago.
In the end, I purchased a fresh ptoduct key from one of the third-party sellers, not Microsoft.
For some years, Apple has disabled sync between Microsoft Windows Outlook’s Calendar, Notes and Contacts and iPhone/iPad etc. It took me a long time to realise this, as I would save new contacts on either platform, amend outdated into and then wonder why the other device had not synced. I would ask in Apple communities, and the advice never made sense to me, and I would forget it for a while. I coped by repeating data entry in both devices, but it was getting ridiculous.
The Issues
For reasons I don’t know or care, Apple and Microsoft products stopped cooperating some years ago; I believe it was after iOS 9. We are presently at iOS16! Whenever I asked for help in the Microsoft Outlook and Apple iPhone forums, the responses were not helpful.
This image illustrates what I wanted:
Outlook to iPhone sync
I do not use Office 365 or the Outlook app on my phone. I don’t use Microsoft Exchange. I just use IMAP and POP3 to fetch and send email from my own hosted domain. No Gmail. I just wanted to use the Apple apps that could once be synced with iTunes. The helpers in the forums could not understand what I thought was a simple question.
Here is the Solution
Forget iTunes. It’s not even useful in Windows to manage the placement of your app icons and certainly irrelevant for syncing your iPhone with Outlook. I found a paid program AkrutoSync, which has a free, 7-day trial. I went for the Basic option of a single PC and unlimited devices for US$39.95, a one-time payment. You can get it from Akruto here: https://www.akruto.com/ (no affiliate link there)
Successful transfer of my desktop data to my iPhone.
Configuring AkrutoSync might seem weird if you are like me and only use POP3 or IMAP to fetch email. It requires you to add a dummy Microsoft Exchange account on your phone if you choose syncing at home via Wi-Fi. Follow the instructions carefully and you’ll be syncing automatically in both directions all the time. It is instant – I added a calendar entry on my desktop and it was already on my phone by the time I looked it up.
I suffered a major setback by way of a book manuscript I was writing. It is lost beyond repair. I know what I should have done, but I am documenting this to help others. I use an offline copy of Word 2021, not the online Office 365.
Possible Causes of Word Doc Corruption
The book manuscript was about 283 pages from memory and I had not backed it up for over a month, and the backup copy was 30 pages shorter. I was finding that Word and Excel documents were taking longer than usual to open and I wondered if my hard drive was on its way out. I decided to back up the folder to my backup drive (a separate physical drive) and that was a clue that something was wrong, as the copy failed.
I used O&O Software Disk Defragmenter to defrag my data drive D but it was taking very long, so I thought I should stop it.
I tried to open the manuscript to add some content and found that it would not open. I had last used it last night, so I was puzzled. I remembered that I had done an online repair of Office and wondered if I had installed the 32-bit version of Office instead of the 64-bit version. I had an ISO of the original download, so I reinstalled Office, but it made no improvement. The Word doc refused to open.
The doc would not open.
Still no luck.
Things Tried on the File
chkdsk /f reported no errors.
chkdsk was happy with the drive.
chkdsk was still happy with the drive.
Error checking via File Manager > Properties showed no file errors. (image above)
Open and Repair did not work.
Text recovery tool did not recover any text.
Recover Text from Any File did not work.
Opening in Notepad is a crazy suggestion, as seen in some articles. The contents are not plain text – other than some file names. See below the older, working copy and the corrupted file below.
Corrupt and clean versions viewed in Notepad.
There are no previous versions or unsaved versions.
Importing into Google Docs did not work.
Inserting into an empty document as an object did not work. “Word has encountered a problem.”
Trying to link the corrupt file to a clean doc did not work.
Tools Used
There are many articles with suggestions, but they are rehashes of the things I tried above and sometimes have affiliate links to tools.
Libre Office could not open it.
LibreOffice could not open the corrupt file.
OpenOffice also failed to load it. Its help text says “The most recent versions of OpenOffice can load, but not save, the Microsoft Office Open XML document formats with the extensions docx, xlsx, and pptx.” Note: Both LibreOffice and OpenOffice did open the working copy – but not this corrupt copy.
OpenOffice failed.
Stellar Repair for Word crashed on the file.
Stellar Data Recovery was useful to undelete an earlier version, but 30 pages shorter.
GetData Word Repair couldn’t open it.
Remo Repair announced that it had recovered it, but the file vanished
At the moment I am stumped. The disk and data are fine. The file is difficult to select – clicking it sends File Explorer into a long delay before I can get control, but the file just does not open. Sending it to an online service times out for this reason and downloaded trial tools cannot process it.
If you have any suggestions and have personally solved this problem, please leave a comment. (Comments are moderated)
Update
I managed to open the copy with a paid version of the file recovery tool – Remo Repair Word – but it turned out to be an older version too. In the end, I used a recent PDF copy and exported it to RTF. This has some scrambled tables and some missing images, but it will get me back to sanity, with fewer than 10 lost pages. Many of the lost pages have images, which are safe, so the lost text won’t be too hard to re-create.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider (“SF”) is the favourite tool used by most SEOs I know. We usually use it to do a crawl of a website. I am happy to use SF, but I have seldom looked deep into the Visualisations menu to export one of its reports, known as Body Text Word Cloud.
I was checking a website of a US company and felt something was amiss. I ran a partial crawl of a few pages and looked at this Word Cloud, where I noticed that its primary keyword (present on the website in spades) was missing in this report. I questioned SF tech support, who confirmed it as a bug. It was a stopword in some European languages, but not in English. They fixed it within days in the version seen in the image above and it will soon be in the next production release.
As much as I love SF, this post is about this report and not the rest of the tool. If you have it and have a recent crawl of any website, you should open the crawl file, or do a small crawl of your site, or that of a competitor. Note: Many will block crawlers, so do your best human emulation.
Content Analysis
I picked a former client (9 years ago) whose site still shows many well-implemented SEO features. They are doing a great job with content, as I found out with this check.
Now, most people who use Screaming Frog SEO Spider might have looked at the body text word cloud and not given it much thought – well, that was certainly me. In case you did not know, that word cloud is only that of the home page. If your primary keywords are not seen in that cloud, you might want to rethink the make-up of that page.
You can check any crawled text page by right-clicking a page URL and choosing the option in Visualisations for Body Text Word Cloud.
Here’s an example from this site. It’s their eSIM page.
Here is their Network Solutions page.
Those two examples should suffice for the post, but I checked some other pages and observed that they have done a great job giving their primary keywords adequate prominence without overdoing it. I could run a single-page crawl of a competitor page if it happens to be performing better in the SERPs and check its word cloud.
As usual, the usual disclaimers apply. Ranking involves numerous other factors that won’t be picked up by a tool, so I imply nothing other than to encourage SF users to explore this option on their sites.
Reading Time: 2minutesMost professional SEOs I know use Majestic.com for reliable backlink data. Majestic provides a lot of data about the links to a site, including data about the quality of those links. I have used it for many years, from the time it was known as Majestic SEO. I usually enter the URL of the domain of interest and I am given the relevant information.
Sherpa for Majestic
I was one of the early testers of a free Chrome extension known as Sherpa for Majestic, which is made by fastfwd. I could not imagine how a Chrome extension would help me in a way I could not already get from Majestic directly. So I installed it, only to find that it didn’t work with Google Australia. That was quickly resolved by Rishi Lakhani’s team and today we have a mature, released product.
The extension installed correctly and after linking it to my Majestic account, I did a Google Search. The SERP was modified slightly as per the image below.
Sherpa for Majestic adds a control panel on the left and data blocks below each search result. You can also turn off ads and regain some screen space.
I enabled some options to highlight certain words in the URL and in the result, so you are seeing some yellow and green highlights. You can choose to see more than 10 results from a selector in the left margin, that is, without going to the search settings. Each search result is numbered, which becomes more useful when you have more than 10 results.
Benefits
You may have noted from the screen shots that you can do your own ranking analysis for a search term of interest. As per the example above, the #1 ranking page has lower Trust Flow (TF) than the lower-ranking results. It does not have the highest Citation Flow (CF) either. OK, experienced SEOs know that backlinks alone don’t influence ranking positions, but this type of data on a SERP page enables me to look at the top ranking URLs and look for backlink patterns, if any. In this home insurance niche, it seems that the top ranking sites have a similar Topical TF.
The fastfwd page has more details about the data the extension provides. You will want to use it.
Reading Time: 5minutesSometime in 2013 Amazon accidentally allowed people outside the US to order Google Chromecast. Without fully grasping what it did, I ordered mine and it arrived within days. Amazon realised its mistake and emailed me asking me to return it at their expense for a full refund, as it would not be supported outside the US. [Update: It is now sold in Australia.] Continue reading →
Reading Time: 4minutesArguably the most comprehensive SEO tool on the market, Market Samurai is an affordable, must-have research and management aid for the affiliate marketing expert and novice alike.
Eugene Ware demonstrates Domain Samurai
Yesterday, more than 150 people were privileged to see a presentation of Market Samurai by Eugene Ware of Noble Samurai, the company behind the tool. Speaking at the Affiliate Marketing SIG of the Melbourne PC User Group, Eugene went through the basics of using this tool that is rapidly catching the interest of affiliate marketers everywhere. Continue reading…
Upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate. Windows 7 Ultimate is the most versatile and powerful edition of Windows 7. It combines remarkable ease-of-use with the entertainment features of Home Premium and the business capabilities of (more…)
Microsoft Windows 7 (Win7) is the latest operating system (OS) to come out of the Redmond giant software maker. It follows the less than spectacular Windows Vista, which I installed on my family computers but not on my main PC. This release is different and truly worth the wait. The executive summary is that I use it daily on my personal PC.
Some cynics have said that Win7 is what Vista was meant to be, implying that Vista was released before it was ready. There might be an element of truth in that, but without the worldwide feedback from Vista users, Win7 might not have been much better. Microsoft has listened. I was the first to report one problem and it does not exist in the released version – that pleased me a lot.
I won’t list all the features of Win7 because you can look them up at www.windows7.com. This hands-on report is about what I liked and didn’t like.
Installation
It took nearly 84 minutes to install Win7 on a new 1 TB drive. It took an hour to reach the end of the “Expanding Windows files” phase. At the 80 minute mark I entered my key. Four minutes later, the installation was complete, but it then proceeded to fetch updates. Some Linux lovers have published extraordinarily long times for an in-place Vista-to-Win7 upgrade (e.g. 20 hours) – all I can say is that the method I mention later in this review will save you a lot of time, regardless of what OS you currently use. You will need an external drive.
Out of Box Experience (OOBE)
During the beta test period I noted after installation that I had to dig up the original programs for the motherboard to enable the LAN, audio and optimum video. There was a further hurdle because the Asus drivers came with a hard-coded .INI file containing a string depicting the OS, e.g. “WNT_6.1P_32_MCE = Win7”.
Such a string was not present, so the program would refuse to run. This was annoying (but understandable why it is needed) because I could not connect to the Internet to look for new drivers or to activate the OS without an Internet connection.
Therefore, I had to copy those programs to the Win7 drive, edit the .INI file to add an entry for Win7 by copying one from Vista, then the necessary drivers were installed. I am pleased to report that the final version of Win7 seemed to know my motherboard and its components, and only had a minor problem with the speakers not being seen. My Skype phone was, however, seen as the only audio device. I downloaded the latest version of the Realtek audio drivers and the Win7 version of the Nvidia video drivers (for good measure) and the PC was happy.
Windows Easy Transfer
One of the headaches of a major OS upgrade is how to migrate all the old programs and data to the PC. In my case I was upgrading from Windows XP Pro, not Windows Vista (which will allow an in-place upgrade), so I had to install Windows 7 on a clean drive and reinstall all the applications. Even if you are upgrading from Vista, I recommend a clean install because you are guaranteed that there are no orphan files wasting space.
My data is always kept on two separate physical, internal drives, so that a scrambled C drive won’t lock out access to the data. I keep just the OS and installed programs on the C drive. This makes it easier to reformat the C drive to install a new operating system, but some settings are kept on that drive by some programs, such as browser Favourites/Bookmarks. You have to remember to back them up.
Transferring programs and settings from Windows XP.
I downloaded a free utility program from Microsoft known as Windows Easy Transfer (WET) and connected an external backup drive. This is handy because few people would buy a new PC just to upgrade the OS. WET lets you choose the programs and settings that you wish to move to the Windows 7 drive. This program finds files all over your computer, so I had to use the Advanced settings to deselect files from the migration list, as they lived on drives other than C, so they would still be available after I swapped the C drive.
The desktop is filled with icons as the transfer completes.
The main joy of this OOBE was that all settings, cookies, stored passwords were migrated. For more information about a Windows XP to Windows 7 migration, see technet.microsoft.com/en-us/ee150430.aspx.
Desktop
The Windows desktop is less cluttered than before, showing only the Recycle Bin at top left and, of course, any shortcut icons or files you choose to place there. As in Vista, the icons are larger than they were in XP Pro, which helps those using a touch-screen PC. At the bottom, the Quick Launch area has gone (you can get it back with a hack) and the Taskbar shows you thumbnails of multiple windows you have opened. If you hover on a thumbnail, you can preview it full-screen. You can pin your favourite programs to the Taskbar for rapid access.
Windows 7 Desktop. Note the green progress bar on two of the Taskbar icons.
Backup
The supplied Backup tool is basic but better than the XP version, as you can set a schedule for automatic backups. I use it to back up important files and a system image. It does an incremental backup only and I have chosen the Non-Stop method to silently back up to a separate internal drive. For a complete image backup I use Acronis TrueImage Home 2010.
You also get the opportunity to create a System Repair Disc in case the system image in the backup set is damaged.
Applications
So far I have installed the following applications without any issues:
I had no choice but to set a password for Windows XP Mode, the virtual environment for running old programs that won’t run under Win7. I wasn’t able to run the beta or RC version of XP Mode for some reason, but the RTM version (the one you can buy) works fine.
Windows XP Mode
It didn’t surprise me to learn that this is a copy of Windows XP inside Win7, so it too has to download updates. You have to find a separate Anti Virus program for it. So far I haven’t found any of my regular programs that needs XP Mode, but it’s there if needed. The Security Center interface did not point me to Microsoft Security Essentials, its latest, free antivirus offering. No problem – I grabbed it from http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/ .
Security
The Action Center replaces Security Center, which is now part of the former. Its presence is a small pennant icon in the System Tray at the bottom right of the screen. You can open it to see your security and computer maintenance task status, as well as adjust the UAC settings.
The UAC (user account control) feature was one of the most annoying in Vista. Win7 gives you a four-step setting, with the top one being the Vista setting. Win7 defaults to the second highest level (notify me when programs are trying to change the OS settings but not when I make changes; and dim the desktop). The next setting is identical but the desktop is not dimmed, thus you are more likely to click OK without thinking. The lowest setting is Never Notify, which is not a good idea.
Win7 has a feature known as ASLR (address space layout randomisation), which means that working data in memory is placed in random locations, so that malware doesn’t know where to find it and tamper with it. ASLR has to be enabled by the software developer, so don’t expect old programs to have this benefit.
It also features DEP (data execution prevention), which came in a basic form in Windows XP SP2 but was improved in Windows Vista. This prevents buffer overflow exploits by not allowing memory that is reserved for data to be used to execute code.
BitLocker To Go (in Win7 Ultimate) now enables you to encrypt USB flash drives. In Vista SP1 you could only encrypt hard disks, which are less likely to be lost or stolen than flash drives.
Corporate users can take advantage of DirectAccess, which does away with the need to open a VPN (virtual private network) tunnel.
Also for the corporate users in a Windows Server 2008 R2 environment, AppLocker provides finer access control over designated applications. Windows 7 Ultimate and Enterprise PCs can be managed fully with AppLocker.
Biometric fingerprint reading is now part of the OS, unlike Vista, where a third-party application was needed to enable it.
Internet Explorer (IE) 8 has several security improvements, but the one I like the most is Domain Name Highlighting, which helps avoid clicking phishing emails. A common trick is to have a long URL such as www.anz.com.some. gibberish.malware.cn. The email program might display a truncated URL showing the beginning of the URL and you might be tricked into trusting the website. IE8 in this example would highlight the real domain at the end of the URL.
There are many other security features that can’t be listed for reasons of space. We used to say that Windows XP Pro was the most secure OS from Microsoft, but now Win7 takes it to a new level.
Reliability
The OS is loaded with peace-of-mind features such as the Action Center, which alerts you if there is a security or maintenance problem. Some tools are new, while others are more accessible now. The Reliability Monitor keeps a log of application failures, warnings and informational events such as installations and updates. Should there be a problem during startup of the PC, the Startup Repair Tool launches automatically.
Devices
Windows 7 works with many devices in many clever ways. One that I can relate to is Location Aware Printing. When I travelled a lot to my US company headquarters, there was always a problem remembering to change the default printer, otherwise my document would be printed 8,000 miles away. A more common situation is bringing the work laptop home and needing to connect with the home network. You don’t need to do anything – Windows 7 just finds the network.
Problems
I noted a few permission problems when working on files created on the Windows XP Pro system. Their owner (in Properties > Security) was shown as some long alphanumeric string (a Registry key). I had to make my new identity the owner of such files by giving them full control. I should say that this might not have been a problem if I had allowed WET to copy all my data files, but then the whole process could have taken many hours. Instead, I am using a registry hack that lets me give full control with a single click.
Account Unknown?
Task Manager is occasionally not as responsive as it used to be in XP. It takes its sweet time to show up. I have an occasional bout of complete unusability owing to slowness. This is somehow tied with Firefox 3.5 (and 3.0) and it comes and goes. At first a very high I/O Read count for csrss.exe was fixed by turning off the Superfetch service (thus negating one of the “benefits”). However, when the PC is unusably slow, Task Manager isn’t showing high CPU, high memory use, or high anything, which makes the problem hard to diagnose. My graphics card isn’t particularly fast, so that is a possible suspect.
Advice from others to turn off indexing wasn’t a solution. I also checked whether my SATA drives were set to IDE or AHCI – they were set to IDE, which is meant to help with speed. I improved disk performance by moving the contents of the C drive from a 1 TB disk to a 320 GB disk. Both are 7200 RPM, so it seems that having an unnecessarily large C drive isn’t a good idea. The Windows Experience Index (WEI) improved from 3.4 to 5.9 for the primary hard disk. My graphics card has a WEI of 4.8, it is the weakest link and, therefore, my overall WEI is also 4.8. Since office tasks only need a minimum WEI of 2.0 and gaming needs a score of 3.0, I don’t feel deprived by not having a higher score.
Fix: I cured the responsiveness problem by removing a couple of obscure Firefox add-ons that I wasn’t using, but they were always loaded.
At the time of writing, Windows Live Sync (a free, online service from Microsoft that lets you sync files between two or more PCs) could not recognise Windows 7 PCs whose names were previously associated with the libraries set up on Live Sync. This wastes time, as you have to set them up as new machines on the sync list.
Reading Time: 2minutesI made a shocking discovery today. I was going to uninstall Adobe Web Suite Premium CS3 from my hard drive to move to another PC when I got this message upon clicking the Deactivate option:
I knew there was a problem with CS3 when I had installed Windows 7. Over the years I had installed CS3 on many of my PCs but I had never noticed “Deactivation”. This time I could not install and the error message told me to deactivate it on another PC. I dutifully did so, thankful that I hadn’t overwritten that drive.
Today I was about to take CS3 off this PC and move it to another that I was planning to use just for web work. The damn thing would not deactivate. I looked around the Adobe forums and there were a few people with this problem and others were just telling them to call Adobe Support (the same as the advice on the error dialog). I am usually doing these things on a weekend and I doubt if Adobe Support is available on a Sunday evening. Surely the solution must exist somewhere.
I found it: CS3 Activation Limits – a post by Bob Levine over a year ago. To my amazement I am informed that CS3 has only 20 activation/deactivation cycles!When you hit the 20th activation, you can’t deactivate it. You have to call Adobe Support and they give you five more activations. I have yet to do that.
To think of the CS3 activations I have lost over the years on dead or reformatted disks. It’s never been on more than one PC at the same time. Silly me, thinking that Adobe activation was like Microsoft Office’s, which has a sensible mechanism that works out whether you are sharing your licence or using it on your own PC. If I hadn’t been a Macromedia casualty back in 2002 and was still at Adobe, I’d have given the product manager and the anti-piracy chap my opinion of this idea. It doesn’t stop people using cracked copies and only inconveniences the legitimate owners.
I have no idea about CS4 activation/deactivation restrictions but if you have either versions, be sure to deactivate before uninstalling.
I knew there was a problem with CS3 when I had installed Windows 7. Over the years I had installed CS3 on many of my PCs but I had never noticed “Deactivation”. This time I could not install and the error message told me to deactivate it on another PC. I dutifully did so, thankful that I hadn’t overwritten that drive.