Unable to login to ZyXEL NAS542 after firmware upgrade

HW

Today I upgraded our ZyXEL NAS to firmware V5.21(ABAG.7). After the upgrade, I was unable to into the web interface. SSH login for admin worked fine.

Because of Zyxel security advisory for the remote code execution vulnerability of NAS products — Zyxel Community the password no longer may contain special characters. If you used those special character in your admin password before update, you will need to reset it.

You should be able to reset admin password using the RESET button as stated in the documentation. But that did not worked for me.

If you have admin SSH access to the NAS, you may change the password by executing smbpasswd command. Web interface uses Samba for the authentication. As soon as you change the password using smbpasswd you should be able to login to web interface. Finally change the password in the web interface to make it permanent.

Windows Vista hangs on “Checking for updates”

Windows

Process svchost.exe is taking up the CPU and it looks like it will run forever (in days).
In my case I had a fresh install of Vista SP2. I was able to get rid of this by manually installing some of the updates.
First of all disable Windows Update and restart PC, so that the svchost.exe was in sleep state (no CPU usage).

After that it is required to manually install the following Windows updates:

As soon as the updates are installed and the PC is restarted, you should be able to check and install all updates as usual.

Easy migrate your current Windows OS to SSD

Windows

If you plan to migrate your current OS to SSD you will need a tool which will help you move the system to the new the disk. In most cases SSD will be smaller then your current disk, so the tool should be able to shrink partitions during the operation.
There is a lot of tools available, but most of them are not free. I have used EaseUS Todo Backup Free which includes this functionality. In my case the disk had 5 partitions, but the OS partition was the third one, but even that was not problem for the EaseUS Todo Backup. It automatically shrunk the third partition, great job!
After you install the software, just click Clone button on the top and start migration in a few seconds.
EaseUS Todo Backup