After twenty four years Adobe Flash today reached end-of-life, and the product is no longer supported. If you're using Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome or most other browsers, their respective developers have already released updates that disabled it.

However if Adobe Flash has been installed manually, or pre-installed by your PC manufacturer its possible you'll get this prompt appear:

It's probably worth checking in Settings -> Apps and seaching in there for Adobe Flash and uninstalling it.

Adobe Flash was pretty popular back in the olden days, being installed on most computers connected on the internet, being required to handle animations, and media playback on the web.

But it was also a common source of exploits and vulnerabilities - and annoyance for end-users with its constant pop-ups and required installs, this was remedied a bit later with browser manufacturers building in the plug-in in out of the box (and distributing updates), but with the development of HTML5 video and WebGL it essentially became unnecessary for most users.

The Internet Archive is archiving a lot of the old Flash content, and a lot of it is playable in their emulator.

Back in November my aging i7 6700K system built back in 2016 PC got updated, the new system is built around:

AMD Ryzen 9 5900X CPU
Asus ROG Strix B550-F motherboard
Crucial Ballistix MAX 32GB DDR 4000 RAM*
Artic Liquid Freezer II 280 CPU All-in-One watercooler
MSI GeForce RTX 3080 GAMING X TRIO
NZXT H710 case
NZXT C850 PSU
It used my existing Sabrent 2TB NVME drive.

*this was purchased prior to general availability and before difficulty in overclocking the FCLK became apparent.

Review: It is fast, and now plays Minecraft with raytracing enabled, well enough (for now).

Back in May of this year I retired my old home server that I put together back in 2009. It was built around a small form factor Asus T3-P5G31 system with an Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5200 and 4GB of RAM. Running Microsoft's original Windows Home Server and Small Business Server (running in a VM for Exchange), before being later upgraded to Windows Server 2012 Essentials.

I decided this time I'd rather go for a more standard case for the new server, but I still wanted it small and compact, so I opted for a mini-ITX case (with 6 drive bays!) made up of the following:

• Fractal Design Node 304 case
• AMD Ryzen 5 3600 CPU
• MSI B450I Gaming Plus AC mini-ITX motherboard
• 16GB of Crucial Ballistix 3200 MHz RAM
• Asus GeForce GT 710
• Noctua NH-U12S cooler

The system is running Windows Server 2016 Essentials on an old 256GB SSD I had lying around, with 3x 3TB mechanical hard drives that I moved from the old server, two in a mirrored Storage Space for data, and one for server and client backups. Handles the Essentials role of Windows Server brilliantly. Runs dedicated servers for the games; Ark Survival Evolved, Minecraft and Terraria without a hiccup too, as well as a bunch of various test VMs.

Despite being pretty jammed in there, the two 90mm intake fans, 140mm exhaust and the tower cooler on the CPU keep the system quiet and cool. Let's hope it last 11 years like the last system! If I have a spare modular PSU at some point that'll replace the cheap thing I threw in there so I can at least reduce the cable mess slightly, the PSU is actually the loudest thing in the case - so it will get swapped out when I have a better one. Any questions? Drop a comment below.

One of the issues I ran into this week involved Windows Server Essentials 2016, and the websites it creates as part of the Essentials role in IIS. All of which started returning an HTTP Error 501.19. This can also manifest as the connector software failing to connect, with the error "Cannot get information from 'servername'. Please contact your system administrator."

This also coincided with WSUS being temporarily installed and removed from the server for unrelated testing. It seems however that removing the WSUS role doesn't quite put the IIS configuration back to how the Essentials role sets it up, annoyingly the repair tool also fails to repair it.

Checking the file structure and permissions seemed to reveal nothing unusual, upon checking the IIS config however it looks like WSUS turns on Xpress HTTP compression, which in turn seems to break many if not all of the Essentials features. Running the following command on the server will remove it from IIS config, and after restarting IIS the Essentials roles are working properly again.

%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe set config -section:system.webServer/httpCompression /-[name='xpress']

An issue I've run into earlier this week involved the Chromium-based new Edge version 84 in this case, failing to launch when running via any shortcuts with the error message:

The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incomplete. Please see the application event log or use the command-line sxstrace.exe tool for more detail.

If you navigate to the Edge install folder, on my system this is: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Edge\Application\ and check for a new-msedge.exe, and try running that. This seems to have resolved the issue. It looks like Edge was partially through updating itself when this was caused, possibly due to a crash or the system turning off while the update was being performed. Running new-msedge.exe seems to finish the update, it replaced the existing msedge.exe and removed itself.

A number of people have messaged me asking why the Windows 10 May 2019 update is not being shown on Windows Update, despite a lot of the technology press saying its been available for several weeks.

It's being gradually rolled out, so not everyone can get it straight away. Learning lessons from the 1809 update which was broadly made available very rapidly and was actively being pushed to machines far faster than previous updates. Which some argued was too aggressive especially considering there were a number of critical issues with the update around data loss in very specific scenarios.

In the past clicking on Check for updates in Windows Update would generally make a feature update install, Microsoft referred to these users as "seekers" as they were actively seeking for the update by clicking on Check for updates in Windows Update. For the May 2019 update (also referred to as 1903 or 19H1) this method doesn't seem to be as effective as in the past.

If you're keen to get the update installed now you can however use the Windows 10 Update Assistant to grab the update for you now and install it.