• Why Did Chrome on My Personal Laptop say “Managed by your organization”

    A few minutes ago, I decided to see if I could cast Chrome to a TV. When I clicked the Chrome menu button, I spied something I hadn’t seen before at the bottom of the menu: “Managed by your organization.”

    My Chrome browser suddenly said "Managed by your organization"...Except, it shouldn't have been
    My Chrome browser suddenly said “Managed by your organization”…Except, it shouldn’t have been

    The thing is, this laptop has never been managed by an organization, nor is my Google account. Both are, and have always been, mine to do with as I please. And if there’s one thing I don’t like is for my my technology to start telling me I’m not the boss. 😡

    So, I started searching around to see what may be the cause of this. After scouring several forums and tech press posts about this, I was able to piece together why Chrome was saying this, and more importantly, how to make it stop sayng my browser was managed by someone other than me.

    Why Did My Chrome Start Saying This? If any of the available policies are set for your Chrome browser, it will show the “Managed by an organization” message. Apparently, up until a certain version (I read conflicting reports of the exact version that started it), only certain policies would trigger the warning. Now, however, any set policies will cause it to show up.

    How Can I Check What Policies I Have Enabled? I learned there’s a handy Chrome URL that will show you all managed policies that are enabled. If you type chrome://policy into your address bar, it will show you all the policies applied and what the value of each policy is.

    Type chrome://policy into your address bar to see all enabled policies
    Type chrome://policy into your address bar to see all enabled policies

    What Policies Did I Have Enabled? I only had one policy enabled: ExtensionInstallSources and it had no value set. According to some of the stuff I read, malware can set policies to allow malicious extensions to be installed, but ExtensionInstallSources is not one of the bad ones (or so one poster said). And since there was no value set, this policy had zero effect. So I left it at that and didn’t try to remove it, right? OF COURSE NOT.

    How’d I Get Rid of the ExtensionInstallSources Policy? You would think there’d be a delete option within the chrome://policy page since I am the one who installed Chrome on this machine, but alas, there isn’t. Luckily, I figured out where the Windows registry key was to banish this foul beast (er…the menu item I don’t want to see anymore).

    Launch regedit and navigate to the key:

    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome\

    There will be one key in here for each policy enabled. As you can see in my case, the only subkey I had was ExtensionInstallSources and it was empty with no values.

    The Windows registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome\ will show you all the enabled policies.
    The Windows registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome\ will show you all the enabled policies.

    I right clicked the ExtensionInstallSources subkey and deleted it. When I restarted Chrome…HURRAY! The “Managed by your organization” message was gone! I will now be able to sleep peacefully tonight.

    I’m assuming you can delete any Chrome policy using this method, but this is the only one I’ve actually tested out. Good luck!

  • Fantastic New Local Pizza

    My good friend Kelly Clibern has started Kel’s Patriot Pizza in Campton, KY. It really is fantastic pizza. He’s using some sort of sauce that has a very unique flavor. On top of the food being great, I really like that it’s a family-owned business being run by his wife, kids, and himself. Having your own business is one of the original American Dreams, and I’m happy that Kel and his crew are chasing it with all they have!

  • Checking Out the IBM 5150 I Got for Christmas!

    Bec got me an IBM 5150 PC for Christmas! In this video, I swap out the MDA video adapter for a VGA adapter and test it out.

    Here’s some details discussed/discovered in the video:

    Video Card

    Since I don’t have an MDA monitor, I install an 8-bit Western Digital PVGA1A-JK based video card. (Thanks to user KD5VMF for his/her knowledge of the video card dip switches posted here on the Vintage Computer Forum: http://www.vcfed.org/forum/archive/in…) Also of note and not shown in the video is that I had to set SW1 switches 5 and 6 to “On” in order for the VGA card to work.

    CPU

    I also discover the computer has an NEC D8088D CPU installed instead of the stock Intel CPU. This is odd because the two are functionally identical. The original CPU may have went bad but I guess we’ll never know.

    IBM DOS and the 5.25″ Floppy Drives

    I boot the machine with IBM DOS 3.21 and IBM DOS 3.3. The IBM-branded “A:” drive works. The “B:” drive does not. An attempted repair video will be forthcoming.

  • Driver Disk Image for Network Anywhere 10/100 PCI Ethernet Adapter

    Just in case anyone needs it, here is a driver floppy disk image for the Network Anywhere 10/100 PCI Ethernet Adapter. The original floppy I made this from came with a card I bought on a sweltering July night in 2003 at my local Wal-Mart to satisfy some crazed nerd project I was working on.

    You will need 7-Zip to extract the image and something like WinImage to write it to disk.

  • How to Upgrade from Windows 10 Home to Windows 10 Pro Using a Cheap OEM Key

    I just bought a Lenovo Yoga 720-13ikb laptop to replace a broken laptop that wasn’t worth fixing. It’s a great machine, but it came with Windows 10 Home edition. That’s fine for most people, but as a Windows nerd, I need Hyper-V support, the Group Policy editor, the packaged app controls, etc. What to do?

    Instead of paying Microsoft’s war price of $99 for the upgrade, I headed on over to Kinguin.net and bought a Windows 10 Pro OEM Key (with buyer protection) for $35. (Note: I was leery of Kinguin.net for years because the prices were too good to be true, but I have since bought four OEM keys from them in the last year and they all worked just fine. Kinguin just exploits the fact that Microsoft sells OEM keys in other countries dirt cheap and it is legal to activate said keys anywhere in the world.)

    With this new machine, I did have a problem using this cheap OEM key, but it turns out it wasn’t the key but rather how Microsoft handles upgrades from an OEM version of Windows 10 Home (in this case from Lenovo) to a generic OEM Windows 10 Pro key. When I went to Settings > Activation > Change Product Key, the key simply wouldn’t work and I got error code 0xC004F050 which was no help at all.

    After a lot of Googling, I figured out what to do to get my cheap Windows 10 Pro OEM key to work:

    1. Go to Settings > Activation > Change Product Key
    2. Enter the following generic Windows 10 Pro key: VK7JG-NPHTM-C97JM-9MPGT-3V66T
      Note:       that there is nothing nefarious or illegal about this product key and it IS NOT any sort of piracy to use it. This key is what is known as a Release to Manufacturing (RTM) key and is used to install Windows 10 Pro for a trial period. Very importantly (and I’m not responsible if you don’t heed this caveat), this key DOES NOT and WILL NOT activate Windows 10 Pro, it will merely allow you to a) install Windows 10 Pro from scratch for testing purposes or b) allow you to force Windows 10 Home to upgrade to Pro (and then supply your own key when the upgrade is complete).
    3. After entering the key and clicking Accept, Windows will spring into action and do the upgrade process. (Basically, it just enables a bunch of features that are disabled in the install.) My new machine took less than 5 minutes to upgrade, but every machine is different.
    4. After Windows restarts, Windows 10 Pro is installed but not activated. To activate it, once again go to Settings > Activation > Change Product Key. This time, enter your valid Windows 10 Pro OEM code (from Kinguin or elsewhere), and click Activate Windows.
    5. Enjoy all the enhanced nerdy goodness at a very discounted price.

    Bonus Tip: For anyone who wants to build a computer from scratch, these cheap OEM keys can also be used for totally fresh installs of Windows 10 (i.e. they’re not just for upgrades).

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