How To Reset Your PC

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Reset Your PC

You can Reset your PC if you’re experiencing problems and want to start afresh

  1. Click on ‘Start’
  2. Choose ‘Settings’ – the cog image near the ‘Start’ button
  3. In the ‘Windows Settings’ screen, choose ‘Update & Security’
  4. In the left menu options, choose ‘Recovery’
  5. Under ‘Reset this PC’ choose the ‘Get started’ button

Applies To: Windows 10

Resetting your Windows 10 computer is an easy task to do these days. Going through the above options will trigger the Reset this PC wizard.

If you don’t have administrative access to the device, you’ll first be prompted for those credentials.

Once you have access, you’ll be presented with two choices:

Keep my files – this will leave your files on the device. You ‘should’ be using something like OneDrive to back up all your personal files, and you should back up everything you care about before running a ‘Reset your PC’, but if you’re not sure, and you’re keeping the device for yourself, then this is the safe option.

Remove everything – this is good if you want to start from scratch, or are giving the device to somebody else, as nothing is saved beyond Windows 10 itself.

The wizard will then confirm the option you chose, and after clicking ‘Next’, the process will start. This can take a while depending on the speed of the hardware; but at the end of it, you’ll have a fresh Windows 10 to set up again!

How To Log Off Using Windows 10

Posted on by Adam Fowler

How To Log Off Using Windows 10

  1. Click on the ‘Start’ button in the bottom left of your screen.
  2. Click the ‘Account’ button (which might be your own logo or picture. or just a grey circle with a circle and half circle inside it).
  3. Click ‘Sign Out’.
  4. You’ll now log off and be back on the Windows 10 login screen. Note that this isn’t rebooting your computer.

Applies To: Windows 10

Log Off

It can be a bit hard to find the ‘Sign out’ option in Windows 10 if you don’t know where to look.

The regular ‘Start’ > ‘Power’ option by default doesn’t present a ‘Sign out’ or ‘Log off’ option which people may be used to from older versions of Windows:

There’s also another trick; you can right click on the Start button (or press Win key + X) to bring up the Quick Access menu, which includes a ‘Shut down or sign out’ option, and within that, you can Sign out, Sleep, Shut down or Restart:

You can even open the Run window by using Win key + R, and type the command ‘Shutdown /r /t 0’ to Shut down the computer and restart (/r), and do it now (/t 0 is time, zero seconds):

First Contact Safety Tips in Exchange Online

Posted on by Adam Fowler

I spotted a mysterious note while reading Microsoft Documentation about Anti-Phishing policies with an important note of a configuring a header to enable a message on certain emails that will say:

‘You don’t often get email from [email protected]. Learn why this is important at http://aka.ms/LearnAboutSenderIdentification‘

or

‘Some people who received this message don’t often get email from [email protected]’

When I discovered this, I couldn’t find a google search result on X-MS-Exchange-EnableFirstContactSafetyTip beyond this single tip above. No instructions or details anywhere. It sounded like something I wanted though, and after some basic testing I couldn’t get it to work.

After raising it with Microsoft, it’s been clarified that this value needs to be set to ‘Enabled‘ – not ‘True’ or ‘Yes’. It was also recommended to only apply to emails coming from outside the organisation. This is fairly easily achieved via a Transport Rule, and you can narrow it down to certain recipients if you’d like to test it first:

At this stage I’m getting mixed results with it. In my Australian Microsoft 365 tenant, it’s adding the warning to the body of the email rather than a safety tip – I first thought this was probably an Outlook 2016 thing:

but the same happened in Outlook for the Web:

On my US tenant, it worked a bit differently in both Outlook 2016 and Outlook for the Web:

The tip appears at the top of the email but in a grey box, more closely resembling how it would look as a Safety Tip.

I’ve also seen the Safety Tip work on Outlook for the Web but only in a threaded email, and not at the top of the email – some weird things going on.

Anyway, it may be something worth playing with, but until we see more information about this feature, I’d leave it in testing mode only.

Simulate Attacks in Attack Simulator Requires MFA But I Already Have It?

Posted on by Adam Fowler

“You must enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) to schedule or terminate attacks. Learn more about enabling MFA.“

I wanted to play with the Attack Simulator in the Office 365 Security & Compliance Admin Portal – but with the enabling MFA warning, none of the ‘Launch Attack’ buttons were available to use. I’ve already set up MFA via Conditional Access though, so why am I seeing this?

At a guess, I wondered if it was actually detecting if MFA was used to log in. It wasn’t because the request was coming from a trusted IP address, which I’d configured in my test tenant to make it a bit less painful.

My hunch was right, I signed in elsewhere, went through MFA and look, the buttons now work:

Bit of a misleading warning – your MFA rules might be completely fine, so try signing in with MFA first before going to the Simulate Attacks page.

Microsoft Edge 87 Enterprise Considerations

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Microsoft Edge 87 has now been fully released. There’s a few options in this that Business and Enterprises should consider:

Shopping

Microsoft by default, are enabling a bunch of shopping options in Edge. As per the article above, there’ll be coupons that’ll pop up, detections when there might be the same item you’re looking at cheaper elsewhere, and tab page enhancements to add extra shopping info about items.

I can already hear some of you saying you don’t want this in your place of business, so to disable it you’ll need to find the ‘Shopping in Microsoft Edge Enabled‘ GPO, located under User Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Microsoft Edge default settings (users can override) / Microsoft Edge:

If you’re missing this setting, make sure you update your ADMX files by downloading from here and updating your central repository.

It’s good that this is under both force disable, as well as disable but let a user turn it on if they want. It’s not good that it’s on by default.

Friendly URLs

If you’re on Edge, you may have noticed this already. Copying a URL link from Edge, then pasting it somewhere that supports HTML code results in this:

AdamFowlerIT.com

instead of this:

https://www.adamfowlerit.com/

It’s another ‘on by default’ and although I can see certain use cases where this would be preferable, I’m fairly against changing the default copy/paste behavior that has been in place for decades.

If you copy a link and want to paste it as the link itself, you can use Ctrl + Shift + V instead of Ctrl + V … except right now, this doesn’t work in Office apps like Outlook or Word, and I’ve tested in both 2016 and 365.

Edge itself also has a new right click menu for pasting showing the options, but right click > mouse to menu, mouse to submenu, choose ‘Plain text’ is a bit clunky.

You can turn this off in the Edge settings, but again businesses and enterprises may not want this new feature in place, since some would more frequently be copying a link because they want the link itself, rather than a nice way to share it.

Again, Group Policy has a setting for this but this time it’s just a forced setting, rather than user changeable. If you want that, you’d need to deploy the registry setting as per the above article with a ‘apply once and don’t reapply’ option ticked.

The GPO is under User Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Microsoft Edge > Configure the default paste format of URLs copied from Microsoft Edge, and determine if additional formats will be available to users

That’s a doozy of a name, and a doozy of a long dropdown menu with a ‘coming soon’ dropdown – none of these dropdowns actually match the description given.

I am a big fan of Edge, but it’s pretty obvious that the normal care that goes into updates just hasn’t happened in this instance. There’s already a fair bit of noise about this change, so who knows, maybe they’ll at least change the default behavior and not have it on?

My Feed

This one actually sounds really useful and lets both users and admins modify and present different sets of data arounds news and the organisation.

It has to be enabled in the Microsoft 365 admin center, which it was already on for me:

But, I’m missing some of the options selected in my Australian tenant. I checked my U.S. tenant and I see different things:

I’m not actually seeing the My Feed in my Australian tenant’s accounts, so I’d be guessing it’s either a US only thing at this stage, or it’s still rolling out. A bit annoying that this isn’t mentioned in the ‘My Feed‘ article or the original article mentioning the features that are now out, so hopefully the rest of us get it soon!

For the US tenant account though, it’s all there!