It was more common in the earlier versions of IE and hopefully you won’t experience it from version 9 onwards. However, if you do, there is a fix you can try that should remedy the problem. At least it did on this end. We were losing connection to certain sites and it was all because of one little setting.

To fix the random logout, you need to adjust the session handling of Internet Explorer. It takes less than a minute to test out, so you can see if if fixes your issues.

Open Tools -> Internet Options -> Privacy -> Advanced

You will see the following window:

To fix the issue, check the box next to “Override automatic cookie handling” and check the box “Always allow session cookies”.

This should fix your random timeout issues. To undo the settings, just uncheck the boxes.

If you want to remove IE 10 and revert back to Internet Explorer 9, this is pretty simple to do and should resolve your issues.

Go to Control Panel -> Programs and Features. Or you can just type it into the start bar and hit enter.

In the programs and features window, click “View installed updates” in the top left. See the screenshot below.

Now just locate Internet Explorer 10 in the list of installed updates. Click on it, then click “Uninstall” located near the top of the window. This will get rid of IE10 and revert back to IE9.

Basically if infected, you will receive a message on your screen (supposedly from the police or FBI) and it will ask for payment of a certain amount. If payment is not made it threatens to lock all data on your computer.  Unfortunately we have seen this happen, even on secure systems with excellent firewalling.

We reccommend that you update your Java immediately to the latest version. Also consider if you need Java on your system. If you do, you can turn off Java in the web browser. To do this, open Java from the Control Panel and click on the Security tab. You can then uncheck the “Enable Java content in the browser”. See the screenshot below.

So to avoid ransomware, keep Java up-to-date. This is very important. You should also run a regular anti-virus scan, keep your Windows up-to-date and use a firewall.

Anyway, if you want to change the duration between automatic checking for emails in Outlook 2010, here is how you can do it. Outlook allows you to specify how often to check for new emails.

Change Send and Receive Options in Outlook 2010

First, click on the “File” menu in the top ribbon.

Click on Options, then click Advanced. Now scroll down to the section called “send and receive”. See the screenshot below. When you find this option, click on the “Send/Receive” button.

After clicking the button, you will see the following window. As you can see below, this set of accounts checks for email every 30 minutes. You can change this value to whatever you want. Just use the arrows or enter your own number.

That will fix up your Outlook send/receive issues. You can also change automatic checking for offline mode. Or if you prefer, you can turn off automatic checking altogether, just uncheck the box.

You might just be happy with a replacement button that gives you access to programs, but for some power users, you might require more advanced functionality and customization. There is something out there that suits both ends of the market, but you may need to pay for the higher end replacements. The app listed below is completely free and is worth trying out.

After installing, you will notice that it is a replacement button. It doesn’t quite blend in like a real Windows start button but we have been quite happy with using this on Windows 8 so far. Below are the list of features:

• Switch to desktop immediately after signing in
• Adds the standard Windows Start menu to Windows 8
• Activate menu with Win key
• ?Log off, lock and turn off buttons
• Standard search field
• Support for silent installation
• ?Multilanguage support
• Option to ignore the lower left Hot corner

Here is a screenshot of the app in action:

It’s free, so go and try it out: Windows 8 Start button

For some users, the search indexing may not be required. If this is the case and you don’t use the search feature often, it is probably worthwhile turning off indexing. The indexing process can consume resources and slow down your computer. So if you find this happening, you can disable the indexing via the services section of the control panel.

However, if you want fast searches, make sure you have it turned on. The service is highlighted in the screenshot below.

Search Indexing Options

Controlling the indexing options in Windows is a good idea, because you probably don’t want to include certain locations in your search. By limiting the indexed files, the search indexing process will run faster and won’t slow down your computer as much while indexing.

To access the indexing options, click the “Indexing Options” icon in the control panel. This will bring up the following screen.

You can then select/deselect locations by clicking the “Modify” button. Here you simply check the boxes next to locations that you want to include in the indexing.

The “Advanced” button will allow you to do things like rebuild the index, set the index location and control file types etc. The advanced options window is below:

You can also control what to index for certain file types. So you might want to index properties only, or you can index properties and file contents for certain file types.

The Windows indexing options allows you to have a lot of control over your searching, check it out.

The hanging occurs on DH77EB boards that have not had their BIOS updated to the latest version. First you need to download the latest version of the BIOS for this board from the intel website. The file is a .bio file and you can save this to a USB drive or a CD.

The intel DH77EB motherboard has a built in BIOS update tool, so flashing the BIOS is very simple. Just download the latest version to your thumb drive, plug it into your computer. During boot there is an option to update BIOS (F7). Select this option then choose the media that contains your BIOS update. Select this and install.

Now when you restart and try installing ESXi, it should go on with no problems at all. The only other issue is that it won’t detect the onboard NIC on this particular motherboard.

Another problem that can cause intermittent errors when connecting to exchange server, is the subnet mask. If all clients are able to connect, except one, try checking the subnet mask. An incorrect subnet mask will cause problems with connecting to the Exchange server. The connection errors may not be consistent and in some cases it may work.

To check the subnet mask of a client computer in Windows 7:

Control Panel -> Network and Sharing Center -> Change Adapter Settings

Right click on your network connection and select “Properties”. Now click the protocol you are using, most likely IPv4 and click “Properties”. here you can configure the subnet mask. This will only be applicable if you are using a fixed IP address.

If you want to get rid of this feature, just do the following:

Firstly, open the Control Panel, Start -> Control Panel.

Click on the “Ease of Access” option in the Control Panel.

Click on “Make the Mouse Easier to Use”

Check the box “Prevent windows from being automatically arranged when moved to the edge of the screen”.

Done!!

If you ever want to turn it back on, just do the same and uncheck the box.

The Google redirect malware is quite tricky so start off with the steps below, but it is most likely that you will need to perform step (3) in order to actually remove it.

1) Check your hosts file

First make sure that your hosts file hasn’t been infected. The hosts file in Windows tells where to direct various URLs. Basically if you don’t see anything in the hosts file, it is clean. There will probably just be one line in there. The modern variations of the Google redirect probably won’t use the hosts file.

Your hosts file is located at:
c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

2) Make sure your browsers aren’t using a proxy

Unless you are wanting to use a proxy, you should not have proxy settings enabled in your browser. The following provides a screenshot of how it should appear:

To view your proxy settings in IE:
Tools -> Internet Options -> Connections -> LAN Settings

You should not have anything in the Proxy server section. Some varations will perform redirects by using the proxy settings.

3) Use Combofix and TDSS killer

The only way we were able to remove this virus was with Combofix. However, the version of Combofix we had installed wasn’t working, possibly because the virus stopped it, so what you need to do is get the latest version of Combofix from a different computer, then load it onto your computer after you boot into safe mode. You will also need to get a download called TDSS killer. These downloads are all completely FREE.

Download Combofix from Bleeping Computer

Download TDSS Killer

Restart your computer and when it is rebooting, press the F8 key (repeatedly). It will boot to a menu, from here select Safe Mode. After it boots into safe mode, run Combofix, then run TDSS Killer. After this, your virus should be gone.

You may also want to investigate the folders that Combofix identifies and double check by searching the Registry to ensure they are removed. These folders and files will generally be in the user profile area and they are given weird random names.

Finally…Double check your user profile

If your infected files were in your user profile area, make sure they are gone. If you connect to a Windows domain, you will need to check that the files were also deleted from your roaming profile, otherwise they can get copied back down again when you login.