Friday, July 27, 2018

Android Smartphone Custom Email Apps

Email providers such as Gmail and Hotmail would like you to download their custom email app, in order to better track you and target advertising. As a person with multiple email accounts on multiple services, I do not want many individual apps for reading email. One centralized email "Hub" would be useful.

Microsoft is pushing their Outlook app for Hotmail. Using smartphone web browser to access Microsoft's Hotmail results in the following intercept and encouragement to use Microsoft's app:


Then log in to Hotmail (or live.com or outlook.com) and Microsoft has created an email which again encourages the user to download the Microsoft app:

My favorite integrated email reader from BlackBerry and is named "Hub". Link to download BlackBerry Hub.  Hub integrates email, text (SMS) and social media such as Twitter in to one interface in which you can prioritize messaging.

Saturday, June 23, 2018

OneDrive Automatic Update and Autoruns Application

In Microsoft Windows 10 task manager, I noticed the OneDriveStandaloneUpdater task running, and was curious about it. This led me to the excellent Autoruns application by Sysinternals. Autoruns shows everything that is set to start in any way possible.

Download Autoruns. Using File Explorer, uncompress the folder. In the uncompressed folder, run "Autoruns" application.


In the Autoruns filter box, type: one

Uncheck the box on the appropriate line.

You may additionally uninstall the program (command prompt, then: %systemroot%\System32\OneDriveSetup.exe /uninstall), or rename the program at C:\Users\_username_\AppData\Local\Microsoft\OneDrive\OneDriveStandaloneUpdater.exe

Wednesday, April 25, 2018

Security Software on Microsoft Windows 10

These instructions should also work on Microsoft Windows 7 and 8.1.

For home use, I run the following free security products on Microsoft Windows 10:
Microsoft's Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) does not work on Windows 10. Users are directed to Microsoft's Windows Defender Exploit Guard.