Poor thing.

Blackberry PRIV for $700 ??? They will never make it.

To remove a wrong driver in windows

Was unable to connect a neighbor's Nook Color as a mass storage drive to a windows computer. Turned out the ClockworkMod universal ADB drivers installed earlier have a priority and won't let the usbstor.sys (the mass storage) to be selected a the primary device driver. Uninstalling the driver for the device in the Device Manager did not help, it appeared again after the device was unpluged and then plugged again.
Knowing the vendor and product IDs (for the Nook Color they are VID_2080&PID_0002), I found the ClockWork's oem##.inf file in the %SystemRoot%\inf folder.
Where ## is a number of the .inf file where the device VID and PID were mentioned.
Tried to delete that oem##.inf and then reboot the PC, did not help.
But what did help, is Window's pnputil utility.
Execute the following command as administrator and then even no need to reboot:
pnputil -d oem##.inf

Also, there is an useful utility to maintain the currently and previously connected USB devices.

Cisco VPN client issue

Windows 8.1 with Bing, came with a netbook computer.
Need to make work the Cisco VPN client which gives the following error on a connect attempt:

Secure VPN Connection terminated locally by the Client, Reason: 440 Driver Failure

Tried this solution to install Citrix DNE. Did not help.

The event viewer shows that the driver signature can not be verified.
Desperatly did the following to make it work:

1. Turned off the BitLocker. Well, why I need a secured notebook which I can not use?
2. Disabled UEFI's Secured Boot. 
3. Executed the following commands:
   bcdedit -set loadoptions DISABLE_INTEGRITY_CHECKS
   bcdedit -set TESTSIGNING ON
4. Reinstalled the Cisco VPN client.

Works now!

Windows backup command line

Windows 8.1 does not have an GUI tool to schedule a regular system image backup.
But there is a command line which could be placed to the task scheduler:

wbAdmin Start Backup -backupTarget:E: -include:C:,D: -allCritical -quiet

Get the description of the wbAdmin command options by typing:

wbAdmin Start Backup /?

To restore the backup, first boot to the recovery partition. To do so on a healthy system (if the system is corrupted it should boot the recovery automatically) hold the Shift key when you click the "Reboot" button.

Cure for IE's paranoia

After the update KB3025390 was installed for IE11, it's stopped to allow access to its internal objects from outside. As it was described in this article, this behaviour could be cured by the following registry changes:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_DISABLE_INTERNAL_SECURITY_MANAGER]
"iexplore.exe"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_DISABLE_INTERNAL_SECURITY_MANAGER]
"iexplore.exe"=dword:00000001

Update: MS has released an update KB 3021952. To be installed to solve the issue instead of hacking the registry.


See also: http://www.inflectra.com/Support/KnowledgeBase/KB105.aspx