 ThinkTecAway. Civil engagement lives here. Aloha. My name is Matt Darnell with Compto.Cloud and normally I'm here joined in person by Greg Jackson but he's going to be joining us from the remote site today. So Greg, happy to have you here today. Thank you. Fantastic. So today what we're going to be talking about is what version of Windows should you be running? There are so many choices, so many options. There's a lot of misconceptions about what supported, which ones are dangerous, which ones are safe and if you have one that's maybe not as safe what can you do to make it more safe and the different levels and and the licensing can get so complex. So we're going to do talk a lot today about how what you can do in your business and how to make it a lot simpler and you know give you some tips about what what you can do. But first as always we're going to be starting with some current events and on our last show Jackson we had talked a bit about right at the end about beer and how do you like your beer? So please let me know. How do you like your beer? I like my beer the way I like it. So there is an interesting article about and ironically most people like the beer the way they like it. That's I'm not sure that you know it isn't but you know what is unique is that sometimes you get you get flavors that you're that you'd like to modify a little bit so sometimes you like it a little bit darker you like a little bit sweeter you'd like a little you know it just depends on what region of the season depends on where the beer is manufactured so there's a couple things that I find really interesting about this intelligent X beer and so what they're doing is they're using a feedback model from people that consume their beer and they're adjusting they're using AI to adjust the way they brew the beer and it's you know the way I look at it it's a very simple concept but artificial intelligence okay so what what's important to know is you know in the functionality of it's kind of like this you go in you drink the beer and then you get a coupon to give feedback on how you like the beer and what they're constantly doing so they don't have a brand per se because their brand is how do you like your beer and what that means is they don't they don't make the same beer twice what they do is they adjust it based on the feedback that they get from the people that are drinking it and what I find really interesting about that is imagine if most businesses operate that way if we took the feedback and adjusted based on we you know we've had traditional ways of managing that through like surveys but having the feedback model closer to the actual delivery of whatever product of service that you're consuming would be extremely useful I just thought it was great and it sounds kind of similar if you go to 7-eleven and you want to get a diet coke from the machine there are buttons you can press and you maybe you want add some cherry into that so does it let you order it live at that point or they're just taking this feedback and as opposed to coke that's had the same recipe for 70 years they're constantly changing their one logger based on the on the feedback that's exactly right so what they're going to take in the feedback they're adjusting and they don't actually pull the levers what's interesting about this they're taking the feedback which is just data they're taking the data feeding in into their manufacturing process and their manufacturing process adjusting the recipe that's interesting because usually you know I've taken tours of beer manufacturers and you know there's like nine different steps where the beer meister will drink some and they're smell it or they'll do some kind of test to test the acidity or that type of thing it's interesting that that they're leaving that up to chance that that you know a small very vocal group of people could you know lead them down a path and lose mass market appeal so I think that's kind of the the you know what what you give away there's a Costco approach that you know when you buy salsa at Costco you never get them you can't get the mild and you can't get the hot they have the medium right so that's what Budweiser does right it's not the fancy Sam Adams summer logger wheat lemon zest ale it's Budweiser right so I guess that that's the I think for a small brew pub type of thing that technology you know could do well and then if you have enough people that like even though it's not mass market if you have enough people that like it and they can shape it to what they want you know they don't want to brew the beer I mean when you brew beer it stinks you know the fermentation all those types of things and I could see something like that working and over time it morphs you know they want more wheat different wheat they might try you know hops from a different country so I can see a lot of different experiments they could run and get the feedback yeah that's it yeah absolutely so you know another one of our stories and I there are some tech stories that I've never understood like for instance that there was one story it was going around that this iPhone had a thousand foot fall and it survived and and so many people were commenting all the iPhone is so great in this and that and and what what I tell people is like hey it's not the fall that's gonna kill you right it's that sudden stop at the end as long as you decelerate at a proper rate you can fall from speak fall from space they parachute down you know they they decelerate so there's so much you know things that sound outstanding and and and it's that spin on all these tech stories whether we talked about Tesla when one Tesla has a crash it's front page news on CNN right I mean there's another hundred thousand crashes that happen in the United States every day but if it's a Tesla and it was in a time you know semi-autonomous mode it's so new so yeah having that you know that click bait is is is really people they get they got they got a watch out for that especially with with tech stories there's so much spin that can be done yeah so let me ask you what browser what's your go-to browser you're on your desktop you have nothing's open no browsers are open you want to go to CNN or ESPN or or Hawaii news now what what browser are you going for I'm doing Chrome all day okay and it is that new because I remember you used to like Edge a lot it is it did you switch to Chrome or is that is that a new thing so edge I mean I have to have both because sometimes I need multiple sessions going on that are across different browsers so I have to have more than one edge or I tend to be the go-to because that's where the developers focus the energy on but Chrome is my lightweight get-or-done I mean I usually have a lot of tabs open so my my challenge is can I operate 20 Chrome tabs or can I operate 20 IE or edge tabs and those other guys just they suck up a lot of memory yeah and and IE which is short for Internet Explorer was the first browser that feels free like before that when you had Netscape or or some of the browsers for Netscape there there are others but yeah you look at yeah you actually had had to buy them this was back you know pre Windows 99 pre 1995 days and IE came out it was free horrible full of bugs but it worked for Microsoft and Edge is the replacement for that so some people talk about them and their logos are very similar yeah people think they're in Edge but they're actually Internet Explorer and vice versa they really did not do a very good job so you kind of had that on the Microsoft side and I would say for the past at least five or six years I've been 100% Chrome and about three months ago I said forget it and I am it's hard it's like breaking up with the spouse or a girlfriend I mean it's just so easiest to click that Chrome button but I'm trying to move to Firefox and and the reason I didn't do it before was of all the plugins like I have a plug-in is software you can add to a browser that gives you added functionality like it blocks the ads from popping up or if you're on a website and a video is playing a new story you can have one click button to download that that that that would be an add-in or an add-in that tells you the web rank of that particular site that you're on though those are all add-ins and for a long time Chrome was the undisputed king of all these add-ins and plugins and nothing else could come close I mean with the Google back-end natively they would sync passwords between multiple machines and there was just so many things that and from even like before with all the Microsoft browser and every other browser there was a title bar and all the tabs were below that well Chrome put the tabs on the very top and just little small tweaks they made that were revolutionary at the time now multiple browsers have them and so you know so Firefox is now what I'm going to and I found it's as fast or faster than Chrome and I'm like you I mean after a good session of researching something I can literally have 20 plus browsers in tabs open and three three three sessions and when you go to your task manager they're just eating up so much RAM so much memory so much CPU that Firefox is so much better at that so for people that aren't I mean I tell everybody try Firefox give that and they're changing their logo you know they're asking people what kind of logo they want but but I'd say Firefox is in my opinion you know the new go-to browser for that okay the question about that Firefox real quick so with Chrome I really like the ability when I'm on my laptop I have some history I can go to my phone and I can see the same history does Firefox I have that yeah that's interesting I've never actually used Firefox on my on my phone I have a note a Android phone I honestly don't know if there is a fire is there is there a mobile fire yeah there is okay so I you know you did and that's another way where you know it's hard to get away from Chrome I'm just it's so embedded in me for that so so that's a that's a great question I will have to try that because I know you know in my searches if I search something on Google it automatically shows up that search you know I'll start to type a search pretty esoteric search on my on my Android phone and hey what do you know the same thing I searched in Google it shows up there on my phone so I mean they're all talking they're tracking and I'm not a you know tinfoil hat kind of guy but but yeah there is that that type of but I know like between my desktop and my laptop the password sync and the history syncs there so I would imagine they have the same type of back end with that so yeah yeah but but yeah so definitely anybody that hasn't tried Firefox in a while fire it up you know it's probably a bunch of updates since the last time you did but I mean they have all the apps all the all the add-ins the really not a lot of difference between the two except for Firefox is faster and uses a lot less memory so Firefox is definitely something that that folks should should be trying so that's my my my biweekly Firefox plug there so again my name is Matt Darnell here with Greg Jackson remote with support in your tech we will be back in a minute and be talking about all the different versions of windows and what you should use and what you should be sure not to use a lot my name is Stephanie Mock and I'm one of three hosts of think tech Hawaii's Hawaii food and farmer series our other hosts are Matt Johnson and Pomei Weigert and we talked to those who are in the fields and behind the scenes of our local food system we talked to farmers chefs restaurant tours and more to learn more about what goes into sustainable agriculture here in Hawaii we are on a Thursdays at 4 p.m. and we hope we'll see you next time when I was growing up I was among the one in six American kids who struggle with hunger and hungry mornings make tired days grumpy days that kind of days but with the power of breakfast the kids in your neighborhood can think big and be more we're not hungry for breakfast we're hungry for more more ideas more dreams more fun when kids aren't hungry for breakfast they can be hungry for more go to hunger is dot org and lend your time or your voice to make breakfast happen for kids in your neighborhood Matt Darnell was supporting your tech along here with Greg Jackson from comptel.cloud and through the power of the internet and a little voice in my ear we have confirmed Jackson that you can it will see all of your passwords and your sites to your mobile device so yeah that you know that and I would have been shocked if that wasn't the case and it is a mobile first world we have here so and again and now you've you've emboldened me I am gonna absolutely instead right when we get off the air I'm gonna stall Firefox on my on my phone and work there but okay so now let's switch gears to Windows now there first of all let's kind of engage peoples of what levels there are there's two general levels of Windows and this goes back to like the XP days even before that you've got a home version and you've got a professional slash enterprise version of Windows and can you talk a little bit about some things you can do with the professional enterprise version that we're not able to do with home yeah really the two distinctions I'd say are bit locker which does hard drive encryption and the second is remote desktop so those become really critical obviously with the home edition you're probably gonna have a lot more bloatware and by bloatware I mean if you walked up to say a Costco if you walked into a Costco and you decide you know hey I want to buy one of these devices their their hardware is you know there to support the operating system however it's not designed really for commercial use or enterprise use so the remote desktop becomes really important and for a lot of compliant issues what you really need is that data encryption that's really the biggest biggest thing you want you know 64-bit operating systems they have that in home edition licensing can keep it a little bit different so you can't connect to a domain with a home edition that can become very critical by domain you want to control or manage many devices and let's break though I think those are three great things just talked about there so bit bit locker and what bit locker does is it will encrypt your hard drive but then you think well if my hard drive is encrypted how can I read it and there is hardware on newer computers have hardware in them that has the encryption keys the codes to be able to unlock the hard drive and what that means is if somebody steals your hard drive let's say for HIPAA reasons or just security you don't want if someone steals your hard drive they take it out plug it in their computer there's nothing they'll be able to read off of that hard drive so it's very very secure but then Jackson what how does professional help us what if I steal the entire computer is there any other security that professional will let me use let's say somebody just comes in steals my laptop my hard drive is encrypted with bitlocker how about on my laptop what else is there with with professional you have the I mean you've got TPM the PPM module which offloads that the decryption key so what you want to do is you want to have the pro version and you want in some cases you can you can export the the encryption key and you can carry that with you or you can manage those keys through Active Directory say you had a laptop though and it got stolen there's two ways you want to protect yourself obviously if you have a Windows login and a credentialing is happening at a central location like Active Directory that's one way but if you're and then what you do is you have that password expire over 30 days so depending on how quickly they try to get your password you really want to act fairly quickly if you're going to steal somebody's laptop that's connected to Active Directory but when that you're giving tips now to thieves well you know those kind of hacks have been around for quite a bit of time it's not easy I mean if you do it a few times you get better at it but it's just not that easy so essentially what happens is and there are different encryption methods there are encrypt the file but not the file name encrypt the whole hard drive whole disk encryption or they call it full disk encryption they've got opal drives that if you say had a home version of the home version of the operating system then you can use the drive to encrypt it they have an encryption key on the board and we're gonna have an entire show on BitLocker and how you're able to and actually set that up real time so you're able to see that but I think the key you hit on there is the password so if they have your entire device you want to have a complex password your passwords one two three four five then that that is going to be a problem so it's nice that to know that if they just take the hard drive which is the easy thing to take right right right out right out of the machine or let's say you recycle a PC you donate it to a charity for for a tax write-off if someone was to take that hard drive and try to read the information there they're not at all so having that complex password even though your drive is encrypted is something you certainly want to be able to do and setting expert expiration like you mentioned you said 30 days and and that's that's the hard part right on one side you've got ease of use on the other side you've got security if you want very very high security your ease of use is going to be very low if you want low security your ease of use is is is going to be high so it's like one or the other so finding that happy medium between ease of use and security is always a difficult a difficult thing to do like you that's where two factor authentication will help you with that what does that mean two factor authentication can you can you give me an example what you have and what you yeah the real quick the real quick example is what you have and what you know so in some cases you could have a very long password say on a key fob and then you can marry it with something that you know that's what you have and what you know that enables you to have very complex passwords without the difficulty I mean it's not bulletproof but it's much better than you know naming you having your password the same name as your username or same name same password as your device name or you know something that you can guess there's libraries out there right yeah it's like for instance on our payroll system when I try to log in from I know my username I know my password that's one factor authentication I log in but I've never logged in from this computer before I it'll send me a text to my cell phone and I've got to read that text and input that in that's the second factor of authentication so I log in then it asks me do you want to you know if I'm on a public I would never do payroll public computer but if I was logged into my Gmail or something you know if you log into then Gmail is a great example if you log into Gmail from a strange account or you log in for the first time from your cell phone you're going to get an email saying hey we got a new log in from from this device and if it's not click this link now and you know and that that that type of thing so yeah that two factor authentication it's gonna it's gonna validate you another way and it might be a USB stick that you carry on your keychain that you've got to insert it might be RFID it might be a fingerprint but having that second factor of authentication so definitely that's a huge thing that BitLocker and having that in professional is something that is is really should be mandatory for any business it doesn't cost anything it doesn't make it harder to back up it doesn't make it harder to restore files any modern computer that a business buys you should definitely do that BitLocker. Okay the other thing you mentioned was remote desktop and remote desktop is the ability that if I want to take over that computer and do things on it somebody could help me with it with tech support or I could just be you know going to someone else it's a very easy built-in wait wait to do that and there are the services team viewer or log me in that you know you can sign up for and pay but again that remote desktop if as soon as you take that away from a user all of that let me remote into your computer and fix this for you it can be very very painful to do that so and and home so why doesn't everybody buy professional well Microsoft knows that there are a lot of features at professional and they price it higher and even so and it's very easy to tell if you have professional if you right-click on your start button and you go to system it'll say home or professional and and what what we found like if you're on Windows 10 home it's about a hundred bucks to to upgrade to professional and then it just downloads the software the changes and then voila now you have all all of these features and another reason home can be less expensive and and you mentioned Costco you know I bought computers at Costco for home and and for other people that they're doing home types of things a way that they are that Dell can sell that computer so cheap is they'll sell space on the desktop like McAfee antivirus you get 12 months free or you know it's a 30-day you know trial of their of their enhanced package and then after that you know they'll share the revenue with Dell if someone signs up for the enhanced package or the so definitely you know they offset the cost of the computer with the software that that gets installed exactly okay so big difference between home and a professional and in every business computer should be running professional okay so now let's talk about Windows itself and and no I really beside if you have an absolute application that cannot run on anything newer I can you think of a reason a business should have Windows XP I mean the legitimate reasons that we've seen in other businesses that they have old software that can't be they don't have either companies gone out of business or they don't want to renew the licensing or they don't have anybody to help them migrate a lot of businesses that's just you know there's effort involved and when you've got a transition over can you do can you do it with the least amount of pain yeah and that that pain is really as financial as well as the time that takes there and so if you're if you're on Windows 95 if you're on I have seen people it within the last six months using Windows 95 Windows 95 Windows 98 hopefully no is using Windows ME or XP I mean there's no more support there's no more patches there's none of none of that so definitely Windows 7 should be the absolute bottom level of where businesses need to be not Vista they even skip Windows 8 like 7 or 10 professional should be where a business should be you've got support you've got patches you've got all those things you have for for your computer so again my name is Matt Darnell I want to thank Greg Jackson for for for coming in and helping us with this very complicated very complex topic of Windows and different versions but hopefully this cleared up for you a little bit my name is Matt Darnell with Comptile.cloud with supporting your tech. Aloha