As long as you’re ok using 3rd party tools, you can easily create an installation flash drive that will allow you to easily upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11, regardless if your PC contains all the required features required by Windows 11. This video will walk you through the process of getting Rufus and using it to make your requirements-bypassing flash drive!
I figured out how to find and delete bad or incompatible drivers that may stop you from enabling Memory Integrity in Windows 11. It’s very easy to find and delete incompatible drivers, once you know where to look. Watch the video to learn how!
WingetUI is a very easy-to-use tool for installing and updating Windows software. Winget is a great package manager included with Windows, but it requires use of the Command Line, which many people find very intimidating. WingetUI provides a Graphical User Interface that allows user to point and click to accomplish the same things without typing a bunch of cryptic commands. WingetUI can be downloaded for free at https://github.com/marticliment/WingetUI
Using some drivers from an Intel NUC and the Group Policy Editor, it is definitely possible to use your Erying mATX motherboard with just the integrated graphics.
In this video, I detail the eight things I wish Microsoft would fix about Windows 11.
Even though many UEFI BIOSs have a virtual TPM, not all do. If your motherboard has a TPM 2.0 header, this video will show you how to install a TPM 2.0 module so you can install or upgrade Windows 11.
After several hours of trying and failing to upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11 22H2, the fix was super easy!
After doing some testing using a Lenovo T14 with a 12th Gen p-core and e-core CPU, Windows 11 is still slower than Windows 10 with a few minuscule exceptions even after the 22H2 update.
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.”
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.
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.
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!
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:
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).
