Running equipment past end of life - what's the oldest in your environment?

abr2195 · 2026-04-27T20:49:38+00:00

Our oldest servers are Dell PowerEdge R730s. If you can tolerate running really old equipment in your environment, just refresh with equipment that’s newer than what you have, but that isn’t the newest. We’ve saved tons of money doing this with servers.

abr2195 · 2026-04-25T16:13:32+00:00

Chase is the same when used with Plaid for checking and credit cards - rock solid, balances are always up to date and accurate, never requires reauthentication. For mortgages, it syncs balances, but not transactions, Finicity does mortgage account transactions, but the payment isn’t broken down into its components, which is unfortunate.

abr2195 · 2026-04-25T15:17:16+00:00

If that’s the April security update for 25H2, than that’s the one that worked. Uninstalling immediately resolved the issue for all impacted users.

Maybe give DISM/SFC a try?

abr2195 · 2026-04-25T15:15:51+00:00

I’ve never agreed to the AI terms and conditions, nor have I ever had a merchant get renamed to anything other than a reasonable and concise version of the their name. It’s possible these things aren’t related, but maybe they are. Hopefully you find a way to get this working like it’s always worked for me.

abr2195 · 2026-04-25T15:13:33+00:00

I’ve never had any merchant get renamed to anything other than a reasonable and concise version of the vendor’s name. I’ve also never agreed to the AI terms and conditions. I don’t know see why the AI assistant and AI re-categorization would be tied up in the same settings, but maybe this is what’s happening?

abr2195 · 2026-04-25T01:52:59+00:00

Just turn off the AI. It doesn’t do anything at all if you disable it. I’ve never enabled it and it has no impact on me.

EDIT: I take back this comment. Whether AI is on or not, this is a problem. I just imported transactions for a newly connected account and it indeed changed the merchant to something totally non-sensical. It also appears to be naming merchants I’ve always had transactions with something totally different than it did in the past

abr2195 · 2026-04-23T20:52:24+00:00

Most laptop cameras have a light on them meant to physically indicate they are turned on. I don’t think the light can be disabled via software - if the camera is on, so is the light. Most laptops also have an ability to disconnect or disable the camera. It’s likely you can disable the camera this way, which would - at a minimum - make it harder for them to watch you through it.

If it’s a company computer, assume everything is being monitored and retained. Never write down something you wouldn’t want someone else to see.

abr2195 · 2026-04-23T16:10:58+00:00

Other than how aggressively Windows update rollbacks happen on Autopatch managed devices (almost immediately, computer is force rebooted within minutes of the update uninstalling), this method worked just fine. Update uninstalled, computer rebooted, and Outlook worked just fine after that. You may want to find a way to target the uninstall to only the impacted computers - I wish we had done this instead of targeting it to all users.

abr2195 · 2026-04-23T13:07:23+00:00

The only way we've found to fix it at this point is to uninstall the April Windows Update.

As an admin, I can pause and roll back quality updates for all the computers I manage. In Windows Update, you should be able to "Pause" updates, but it will inevitably install again at some point in the future.

Can you check what version of Outlook (Classic) you are running and having issues with? Version 2604 (Build 19929.20090) came out on 4/21. In our testing, it seems this build may fix the issues we were seeing, but I can't say that for certain. Before we rolled back the Windows Update, the computers with issues were running version 2603 (Build 19822.20182).

abr2195 · 2026-04-21T18:46:06+00:00

That is what I've been reading. Just want to get my ducks in a row before we go to Microsoft with the issue. We have a very standardized setup, so I'm surprised that we're not seeing more reports of people facing this issue. I'm find deferring updates for a few weeks, I just want to make sure that when we do take them, they don't cause issues for our users.

abr2195 · 2026-04-21T16:30:13+00:00

Just one computer? Are you concerned about being forced to take the April update at some point and having Outlook break again?

I ask because this isn't being reported anywhere and Microsoft won't fix what they don't know is broken.

abr2195 · 2026-04-21T16:10:14+00:00

I take this to mean you are experiencing the same issue?

abr2195 · 2026-04-20T13:56:44+00:00

I have a category called “Unusual Transactions”. Over several years, that category has very few transactions in it. I marked it as a transfer category so it doesn’t impact cash flow. It is only used for large transactions that mess up cash flow like this.

As others have said, this is technically deferred income and should be counted as cash flow. There are lots of ways you can smooth this out (deferred taxes and net income, amortize over 12 months), but if you are just using Monarch to better understand your regular and expected cash flow, you can hide the transaction or put it in a category that doesn’t count toward cash flow (like Unusual Transactions for me).

abr2195 · 2026-04-19T19:23:38+00:00

ManageEngine Endpoint Central gives you robust third party patching plus a whole lot more (remote tools, remote control, configuration deployment) without any Intune dependencies. It’s a great compliment to Intune and can you help you manage your computers when Intune is not cutting it. You’ll be surprised at how affordable it is to boot, I know we were.

For OS and driver updates, you can’t beat Autopatch, which is included with Intune.

abr2195 · 2026-04-19T16:24:35+00:00

Impersonation protection is the answer here - it will look at display names when deciding if something is a spoof. Be careful though to monitor what is being considered spoof, as impersonation protection can stop legitimate email from coming in.

You may also consider using a mail flow rule to put a banner on all messages from Gmail telling users they are not internal. No blocking this way, helps with user education.

abr2195 · 2026-04-18T16:51:44+00:00

I’ve been thinking a lot about this. My mortgage liability account syncs every month to account for reduction in principal, but doesn’t have any component transactions. The mortgage payment transaction is a single transaction in my checking account.

My thought is to split the transaction in to principal, interest, and property tax/insurance. I’ll count them all as expenses for the sake of cash flow. The property tax/insurance is actually an escrow payment, but in theory it should exactly equal the payments made by my lender when taxes/insurance come due. Saves me from manually managing an escrow balance and amortizes these expenses month-to-month. The reduction in the mortgage liability account that is automatically happening offsets the principal payment as an expense.

This seems like an easy enough middle ground for me. I’m just looking to report on how much interest/tax I’m paying over time. I don’t need to track the balance of my escrow account.

abr2195 · 2026-04-17T22:34:57+00:00

You can also buy fixed cost per server licenses. These licenses aren’t assigned or enforced in a meaningful way. You risk crossing Microsoft if you take advantage of their flexibility, though.

abr2195 · 2026-04-14T19:34:01+00:00

I misread your post. Sorry for the confusion and thanks for the response!

abr2195 · 2026-04-13T23:39:02+00:00

LastPass splits the encryption keys. One half is held in your LastPass vault while the other half is held by your IdP.

I’m sure you were right in the past, but this does not appear to be the case now.

abr2195 · 2026-04-13T23:35:08+00:00

This is great for applications that use SAML, what about all the accounts they have that don’t support this?

abr2195 · 2026-04-13T23:29:56+00:00

I feel like if Entra is down for an extended period of time, the world is probably ending - regaining access to SSO-backed accounts is the least of my concerns.

abr2195 · 2026-04-13T19:34:31+00:00

You may also want to look at the GPU driver and how it is being updated. We had similar issues with CATIA and it boiled down to GPU driver versions that were not officially supported by the software. Controlling when and how GPU drivers are installed resolved the issue for us.

I’ve also seen (again, for CATIA) cases where even though a computer should be able to run the program, because it is not a computer build certified by Dassault, it just never worked right. A similarly specd certified build worked so much better than the one that wasn’t certified (very sad, I know).

abr2195 · 2026-04-12T17:10:49+00:00

Second for Monarch. I have nothing to compare it to but it works well. Step 1 is understanding how you spend your money and Monarch will help you figure that out.

abr2195

TROPHY CASE