Hi there
Sometimes TOO MUCH security has exactly the opposite effect :

I remember doing a short term contract for a large UK Govt agency (Not MI5 / MI6 I hasten to say!!) and they had a rule that all passwords were to be really silly like xx78GT98bZ or whatever.

OK difficult to guess or crack but they were so silly that people just had to store them on mobile phones / write them on notepads etc etc. -- All so obvious that it was amazing managers even THOUGHT of this policy -- but those at the top just don't have a clue usually.

Secure boot is another imbecellic system -- if you are in IT support you might have hundreds of different PC's to look at and all sorts of "Boot" / Images that you want to use and deploy across an organisation.

(NOT talking about UEFI here -- that's a totally different subject --even now people confuse the two --UEFI does NOT mean secure boot has to be enabled - just that the machine is capable of BOOTING GPT disks).

Ms hosed it up big time by having that in Windows 8 in the first place and by not having proper ISO's for retail customers makes also the whole idea of BYOD now much more difficult as who knows what state the end users machine is in.

If Ms wanted the mobile route they should have separated the two basic OS forms - mobile and desktop -- no problem - probably easily done --Windows 8.1 update 1 is actually quite passable give or take a "Menu" user here or there. Windows 8.1 update 2 or Windows 9 can easily repair the rest of the damage -- but all this kefuffle could have been esily avoided in the first place. JUST SPEAK TO END USERS BEFORE ROLLING OUT major changes.

(I still also wonder if that director of the Govt agency where I did a contract who thought of that stupid password policy ever wrote HIS down anywhere - even though it was against his own rules !!!).


(@lehnerus2000 I re-installed as well -- this time did UPDATES before installing any extra packages -- SAMBA etc all working properly now -- only KONQUREOR browser doesn't play video (some flash plugin not working) -- doesn't matter as FF is OK -- took note also of disabling the FF29 update).

Cheers
jimbo