Manni wrote: ↑Wed Aug 09, 2023 1:03 pm
Is the $50 per year, or does it keep working even if you don't renew? I could just about justify a one off purchase, but not a yearly fee.
The Deep Freeze license is a one-time purchase. Note, they do offer a web based solution, which incurs a subscription fee - do NOT get that one. Get the standalone option.
The license I bought for my mother's PC was easily 4 years ago. Still working great. She actually called me this morning to report that her PC was showing warning messages about being infected and not to turn it off. She was quite worried, though obviously she had just wandered onto some scam pages trying to trick her into calling for help. I've noticed when she searches for stuff, she just randomly clicks links and doesn't really understand what she's clicking on, or how to verify a site is legit. And she's way beyond the point of being able to learn this.
Luckily she called me, and I had her reboot - problem solved. Love it.
A couple years ago she was trying to fix a paper jam on her Dell printer on her own, and whatever she searched and clicked on resulted in a scammer calling her on the phone, and she gave him a remote connection to her PC, where he messed around a bit, installing crap and trying make her think her PC was really messed up. She finally asked if all of this "help" was going to cost anything, and he quoted her several hundred dollars. She got cold feet, called me, and I had her reboot - problem solved. Well, except for the printer, but that was a different matter. The scammer called her a few more times, but by then she was happy to call him a scammer to his face and hang up on him.
Manni wrote: ↑Wed Aug 09, 2023 1:03 pm
Re our other discussion, I couldn't get auto-login to work with Windows 11 (At least not on a multi account machine with windows hello enabled, which I want to keep) and I wasn't successful in trying various methods to auto-lauch CMC with the registry.
All the more reason to have a dedicated HTPC without any of these hurdles set up.
Manni wrote: ↑Wed Aug 09, 2023 1:03 pm
However, this is moot, because my ASRock MB doesn't seem to be able to respond to WOL from power off. As it only works from standby, it's just as easy to put the CMC PC on stadnby instead of power off and send the WOL then. No need for auto-launch or auto-login that way
Typical integrated NIC limitation. I've had luck in the past with ASRock support adding BIOS features when I opened a ticket, so that may be worth a shot.
But standby is a great option too, much quicker start up and more like a regular set-top.
Manni wrote: ↑Wed Aug 09, 2023 1:03 pm
Re GUI, the only changes I made were to auto-hide the taskbar and select the only high-contrast theme with a true black screen (I think it's called nigth star).
Thanks for mentioning this. I'd never looked into Accessibility/Contrast themes before, and I thought modern Windows was much less functional - now I see some of the settings moved into Contrast options. I see a Night Sky option, probably the one you used.