Windows 10 April 2018 Update

At least it wasn't called Windows 10 Spring Creators Update.

Anyway...

Woody Leonhard of Computerworld is kind of a "Chicken Little" of Windows 10. To him, the Windows sky is always falling. I guess it gets him clicks.

My experience doesn't align with his and his readers. I've had nothing but success with Windows 10 April 2018 Update. I have it installed on 5 laptop systems of various vendors and 1 Dell desktop.

The only problem I had was that I built a USB drive from the Microsoft Insiders resources and installed the April 2018 Update from that hand-built USB drive. This triggered Controlled Folder Access and the update failed. Subsequently I've been turning off Controlled Folder Access before I update. Probably not necessary if you're using Windows Update.

But still you need to consider what Woody Leonhard observes and act prudently.

He recently posted that many people running Avast antivirus are having blue screens after the upgrade.

Reason enough to just run Windows Defender.

Zoolz

That title is not a typo. When CrashPlan withdrew home support I investigated a number of alternatives.

You know I'm cheap frugal.

Zoolz for $40 for life was on my short list so I installed it and started backing up the files/folders I had targeted with CrashPlan.

The first set was about 40,000 files and just over 300 GB. I set the upload speed to 256 Kbps.

The upload went smoothly taking just over 4 months. I suspended it a couple of times and rebooted several times. Zoolz never complained.

I have tested restoring from Zoolz's Cold Storage and that went fine. It took about 2 hours as expected.

I haven't tried the Instant Vault storage yet and don't know if I will.

Macrium Reflect

I've been using Macrium Reflect for almost 2 years since I built Trump.

Recently LifeHacker ran an article on it and I thought I should talk about how it's been working for me.

Great.

It treats the Resilient File System (ReFS) like a fully used GPT volume. With Reflect's compression and differential backups this has been acceptable.

I've been taking a full backup once a year and then differentials about monthly.

I have a 5 TB external drive. I created a TruCrypt volume for almost the entire drive and backup to that volume.

I have a Reflect "schedule" that takes a differential so I just run that manually.

It takes 3-4 hours to create the differential for my 2 TB data drives.

You can mount the differential backup as a virtual drive and drag and drop files for restoring.

Nice. And the price is right. Free.

Windows Defender Browser Protection

I'm a fan of Windows Defender. I've written about it several times.

In April 2018 Microsoft introduced Windows Defender Browser Protection for Chrome.

Yeah, you read that right: For Chrome

It's a Chrome extension. In less than a month it had more than 64,000 users and a 4 1/2 star rating in the Chrome store.

Here's (archive.is) Microsoft's product page.

Here's the description from the Chrome store:

The Windows Defender Browser Protection extension helps protect you against online threats, such as links in phishing emails and websites designed to trick you into downloading and installing malicious software that can harm your computer.

If you click a malicious link in an email or navigate to a site designed to trick you into disclosing financial, personal or other sensitive information, or a website that hosts malware, Windows Defender Browser Protection will check it against a constantly updated list of malicious URLs known to Microsoft.

If the malicious link matches one on the list, Windows Defender Browser Protection will show a red warning screen letting you know that the web page you are about to visit is known to be harmful, giving you a clear path back to safety with one click.

It doesn't seem to take up much memory.

Why not?

Oh, don't look for their privacy policy. But you're running Windows 10, aren't you?