Lenovo Yoga 13 + Comodo Firewall ≠ <3



Until today, I did not believe that software, especially not knowingly malicious, could somehow critically affect the hardware, in the worst case, expecting the operating system to fail. But it happens: you install a firewall, and your laptop stops working. To my joy, this time this is a story with a happy ending.

Briefly about the main thing

This problem also occurs on other laptops Lenovo, HP and possibly other manufacturers. At the same time, do not discount Comodo Firewall Free and Internet Security (both programs run on the same core) as they are obviously objectionable: it is enough to check in advance if any problems arise on your particular laptop model. Unfortunately, I was not able to appreciate the merits of these products, no matter how much I wanted to.

Lyrical digression

With something like that I have encountered before in the experiments with Hackintosh on a PC: separate kekstov (. English kext - ! Ke rnel the ext ension) changed CMOS settings so that these values are recommended to recover when you restart the computer, otherwise the BIOS will not boot. Such failures can frighten, however, protection from a fool in this case works flawlessly (as a rule).

Problem

In principle, Windows 8.1 has a good built-in firewall, but at some point I thought it would be nice to monitor and monitor all traffic as much as possible and see which applications are breaking into the network. I decided to start my searches with the first link to a free firewall from third-party developers: I haven’t known about Comodo for the first day, so I did not expect any problems. However, after installing and rebooting the ultrabook, everything went wrong: a blue screen with the “DPC Watchdog Violation” error, and after rebooting - an idle keyboard and Windows endlessly loading (both the installed system and the recovery partition). Having connected an external keyboard and looked into the BIOS, I saw instead of the normal value of the EC version (embedded controller, usually corresponds to the BIOS version) characters similar to Latin y.My worst fears were confirmed: the installed program did something very unacceptable. Roughly speaking, she climbed the wrong way. A quick search of the firewall developer forums showed that the problem is not so rare and is indirectly related to UEFI (without going into details). In this situation, it is strange that the developers do not take responsibility, despite the large number of complaints.

Possible Solution

The forum posts from Comodo were not encouraging - in most cases, only contacting the service center helped. But it was clear that somehow you need to restore the EC firmware, if it really is. At this moment, I was already running to an important meeting in completely frustrated feelings, but did not let the smartphone out of my hands. My perseverance was rewarded: I found a solution: in short, to reset the EC, it is enough to either discharge the ultrabook battery “to zero” or disassemble it and disconnect the battery connector for a few seconds. The first option is good for everyone, but it takes a long time to wait for a full discharge.

Disassembly

If you are not interested in the process of disassembling an ultrabook, you can safely skip this section.
A detailed disassembly manual, from which I took pictures, is here .
WARNING: if you are not confident in your abilities to work with disassembled equipment, you should contact a service center.

I admit, disassembling "yoga" is a pleasure: only the screws for the star torx screwdriver are a little upset. First of all, you can unscrew all the torx screws located at the bottom of the base of the laptop, but we can’t remove the back cover. Next, we turn the laptop into its normal position and remove the keyboard: it rests on the latches and double-sided tape, the first disconnection must be done carefully:



Then disconnect the keyboard cable and set it aside:



Unscrew the indicated screws: It



remains to disconnect two more loops - on the left it is connected to the power button, and on the right of the touchpad (the most capricious of all loops, in my opinion - be careful with it):



The thing remains small: the cover is the same as the keyboard , rests on latches, carefully remove it.



Now the most crucial step remains: disconnecting the battery connector. It is necessary to do this very carefully, my nails and the usual plastic card helped me. In no case do you need to pull on the wire.



Voila! We connect the connector back, and connect the power button cable. I prudently suspended further assembly, and used an external mouse and keyboard as input devices.

Delete

After the operations, everything fell into place, but the cause of the trouble did not go away - it still needs to be somehow removed. The logical and expected action is to uninstall the program, loading in safe mode. But it’s not so simple: the Comodo Firewall Installation and Removal Wizard is happy to report that it does not work in safe mode. Therefore, I had to delete the folder with the firewall in the Program Files directory, and the uninstaller should be started in normal mode. It helped: the laptop now works as if nothing had happened.

conclusions

The conclusions are obvious: when installing programs that take root deep in the OS (firewalls, antiviruses, tweakers), you need to be careful and look for cases of severe incompatibility with this particular laptop / hardware model of your PC.

UPD Links to the relevant topic on the Comodo forum:
1. Compatibility problems between CIS and Windows 8?
2. CIS / Antivirus corrupts Windows 8, requiring a factory reset
3. I cannot boot after installing Comodo Security Suite

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