More on Win10’s Ransomware protection

Wow! What a flood of mail this week! Many, many of you jumped at the opportunity to try Win10’s admittedly funky, off-by-default, Ransomware protection. (See “Have you enabled Win10’s ransomware protection?” — AskWoody Plus 2021-02-01

Alas, many of you also ran into unexpected snags! One note, from subscriber Dal Ferneyhough, stands in for many:

• “I am trying to follow your recent AskWoody advice on ransomware protection. But when I try to get to the ransomware controls, I get the following popup: Your IT administrator has limited access to some areas of this app, and the item you tried to access is not available. Contact IT helpdesk for more information. This is on my personal computer on my home network. There is no IT administrator and no IT helpdesk. What do I do now? Your help is appreciated.”

Aha! You’ve found one of Microsoft’s infamous semi-generic error messages! These display when the operating system knows that something went wrong, but has only a vague idea of what or why. That vagueness gets passed on to you, the lucky user, to figure out on your own. Gee, thanks, Microsoft.

In this case, you don’t have much to go on. All you know is that your actions were blocked and that Windows assumed that the block was some kind of “don’t let the end user change things” setting imposed by an IT department.

But other things besides IT departments can block access to different parts of Windows. In fact, I can think of five main kinds of software restrictions that could keep you from enabling Ransomware protection. Some are relatively easy to fix, such as correcting problematic user-account or Windows security settings; but others involve less familiar issues, such as Win10’s “S mode.”

Read the full story in AskWoody Plus Newsletter 18.5.0 (2021-02-08).

Also in this issue:

• PUBLIC DEFENDER: Surf the Web — even when your ISP is down
• BEST OF THE LOUNGE: .NET preview update triggers reboot
• HARDWARE: Master your printer – not the other way around
• BEST UTILITIES: Freeware Spotlight — Windows Repair Toolbox
• PATCH WATCH: Fixing a misbehaving computer

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