Some more mini-posts glued together as a “short take”…
Windows 10 download location – no need to wait for a notification
As a “Windows Insider” (yeah, right, me and several million others…) I’ve been patiently waiting for the notification icon on my Family PC to tell me that Windows 10 is ready for me to download and install. I didn’t expect it immediately on July 29th – anyway, I was on holiday last week so I could wait a few days – but I did hope I’d get it over the weekend (especially as I had a new PC to set up for my wife… more on that in a future post).
Well, after tweeting my frustration, I received multiple replies asking me why I didn’t download it directly. It seems you don’t need to wait for a notification icon, just download from the Microsoft website (either for a direct update, or to create media for other PCs). Just take note that this will not work for enterprise editions.
Incidentally (and thanks to Garry Martin for this tip), Rufus is a handy app for creating USB media from an .ISO image.
btvstack.exe wants to use Skype
When I launched Skype yesterday, it told me that btvstack.exe wants to use Skype and presented two options – allow or deny access. How do I know which to chose? What is btvstack.exe? Is it a piece of malware that will start running up huge Skype bills for me? Should I allow it.
Well, Rob Schmuecker (@robschmuecker) has already done the legwork and written a post that tells us “What is BtvStack.exe and why is Skype asking me to allow it?“. If the Skype developers were being a little less cryptic they might have said “Skype wants to use your computer’s Bluetooth radio to connect to a device – is that OK?”. You probably don’t need to allow access but if you use a Bluetooth headset, then maybe you will…
Awesome, many thanks for the pointer to Rufus. I’ll keep that particular gem in my toolbox! Such a shame he doesn’t also build it for Linux ;)
I’ve installed 10, and it’s been promptly resigned back to the “In Case Something Needs To Run Windows” drawer, and gone back to booting my Ubuntu system. Oh well, it was a fun 2 days (I had to restore my malware infested Win7 partition back to factory settings and then installed all the system updates just to get the “Would you consider upgrading” icon!
“Malware-infested Win7 partition” doesn’t sound good. No excuse for malware if you have Windows Defender running (I guess that would be Microsoft Security Essentials on Windows 7)!
Let me phrase that differently, I had a large number of clear icons in the system tray which I couldn’t identify, and I couldn’t be bothered to find out what they were, so I reinstalled thinking it would be quicker… And then had to windows update 200 ish packages. D’oh. I’ve enabled the windows security thing from Microsoft as I’ve heard good things about it, and besides, a re-install is just a USB stick away :)
Only 200 updates ;-)