Windows Client Guidance against speculative execution vulnerabilities

fdegrove said:

Hi,



Don't worry about it, done that hundreds of times. The main thing that can have it go south is a sudden power outage or "unthoughtful" user interference.
In almost all cases the machine can be revived by reflashing its bios/uefi or like I mentioned, recovery through jumper settings on the mainboard or whatever the OEM has come up with though.
But frankly, I've never had it go wrong. Not even in the 30 years I'm into PC's.

Cheers,

^^^^ This.

I performed my first BIOS upgrade by calling Tandy and purchasing a replacement BIOS Co for my Tandy 1000 EX 30 years ago. I have updated the BIOS on well over 100 different machines since, in various job-related and client-related positions, and have had one go bad on me only once - and that way pretty easily rectified by simply reflashing.

The key is to pay attention to what needs to be done, and best practices are to use an offline flash utility (that reboots your computer and flashes the BIOS), and then reboot again and *go directly onto the BIOS, reset, reboot, then go into BIOS again and set it up the way you head out before / the way you want to.

It is no different than any other firmware flashing technique. And no more prone to mistakes than those either.

Make sure your laptop is plugged into a wall outlet before doing a bios update.
Updating anything is no time to be low on power.

Jack

Cliff S said:

But now you mention it, could the cause be, the script that runs the intro when I start it, where the time and days till my next birthday(a placeholder for important Microsoft event dates), that @Kari taught me.

For some reason I only got your mention notification now. Old post but I want to reply.

No Cliff, you are not running it elevated. When run elevated, both PowerShell and PowerShell ISE show word Administrator in Titlebar:



You might want to edit your PS script. My PS and PS ISE nowadays run this script whenever launched:

Code:

If ([bool](([System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity]::GetCurrent()).groups -match "S-1-5-32-544"))
    {
    $Mode = "elevated."  
    }
    else
    {$Mode = "in normal user mode."}
Set-Location $env:USERPROFILE
$ScriptFolder = "OneDrive\PS-Scripts"
$Scripts = $env:USERPROFILE + '\' + $ScriptFolder
Write-Host
Write-Host ' PowerShell is running'$Mode
Write-Host
Write-Host ' Scripts folder ($Scripts):'
Write-Host ' ' -NoNewline
Write-Host $Scripts
Write-Host

The script checks if I have started an elevated or a normal user mode PS and tells it to me, just to be sure:



... or:

fdegrove said:

Yes, you are running it as Admin.

No, see my reply to Cliff above.

Kari

fdegrove said:

It seems you've missed some of @Cliff S 's earlier postings and screenshots were he clearly shows how he started PS as Admin. The script brings the prompt to his user profile folder, hence the confusion.

It might be. I was referring and replying to Cliff's post here (post #32) and your reply to it in very next post (post #33).

In the post I referred to and your reply to it, Cliff's screenshot clearly shows PS is not elevated. Cliff asked if he is running elevated, the answer is no, not as shown in that post.