Posts by Dave K 1047 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Apr 2008
Agreed, this is definitely the primary fault of the vendor. You could argue that the rookie/trainee should have asked for help instead of pressing the big red button, but the point is if you give a trainee the power/ability to do this then don't provide sufficient support for them, you're asking for disaster to occur sooner or later.
"Your feedback has the greatest impact here ..... "let us know what you think."
Do they *honestly* expect people to say "Great feature, I love seeing all the additional adverts in the Start Menu!"
There's only one thing they're going to get for this - negative feedback. If MS want to "recommend" store apps, what's wrong with having a recommended section in the store people can select? Oh I know, it's not "in your face" enough.
Honestly, Windows development lately just seems to be a case of "keep flinging shit at it to see what sticks".
I can tell you it is truth that our growth in 2023 (0.5% GDP) is lower than the European average (0.7% GDP) - source: Statista.
Also, in Q4 of 2023, our GDP was 1% higher than it had been in Q4 of 2019, whereas the Eurozone GDP was 3% higher than it had been in Q4 of 2019 - source: UK Parliament Commons Library.
We may be outperforming Germany, but the majority of other EU countries are out-performing us. Given that we don't have a crystal ball to see how we would have performed if we hadn't left the EU, it's difficult to say if we would have performed even worse. However looking at the EU as a whole, we are being out-performed by them as far as growth is concerned.
One of the first things I do with Windows 10 is to install WuMgr (Windows Update Manager). It basically gives you control over the update process (like you had in W7), allows you to install updates when you want and gives you the ability to skip problematic updates.
In short it allows me to delay installation and check an update isn't causing problems out in the field before I risk installing it on my machine.
Precisely. Improve choice and out come the paranoid crazies, terrified that the impending death of iOS as a safe platform is nigh, just because there's now a bit more choice for those who explicitly seek it.
Let's get one thing straight for the paranoid: Apple absolutely will make it as difficult, convoluted and hidden as possible to install another app store (and that's fine). You'll only end up with an alternative if you clearly, explicitly and deliberately go looking for it, and I'm sure attempting to install one will result in dire warnings from iOS. The average, simple home-user will just continue to toodle along as always with the official Apple App Store and Safari. The world (and the walled garden) will not come crashing down overnight, turning iOS into a crazed, lawless free-for-all anarchy. It will be just fine.
If it helps, my parents-in-law are in their 70s/80s and are not IT/tech literate in any way. They've both used Android phones for many years now and I have had absolutely zero issues with them "accidentally" getting another app-store installed, even though the capability has been there for years for them. They just install a few apps they know/need from the Play store, and that is that.
In short: Chill out people, take a deep breath - it'll be fine. However for those of us more technically minded to fiddle, this is good news!
Fully agree. 56% market share is hardly "dominant position".
What's the matter Apple? Are you afraid of trying to compete fairly (for example) on price and quality of service offering? If Apple Music is better and cheaper than Spotify, iOS customers should naturally want to use it. However when your only tactic is to block your competitors from telling customers about cheaper prices elsewhere, something is definitely rotten.
I'm fully WFH, with the exception of a maybe once-per-month trip to London for a big team meeting. However I was one of the WHF brigade prior to Covid. I prefer it, but also my nearest company office is 2.5 hours away, so commuting really isn't feasible.
To be honest I've never found it a problem. I have multiple meetings a day with my colleagues, always with video on, we chat a bit and socialise as well as getting on with business, so I've never felt isolated from people at all. Saying that, outside of meetings it is much easier to focus on work without all of the distractions that come with open plan office working.
Long may it continue.
Same here. For work I am forced to use it and it isn't a bad browser if I'm honest, but I refuse to use it on any of my personal machines simply out of principle. I deeply object to MS trying to forcibly ram it down my throat at every available opportunity, so it's also ended up on my "hell no" list as well...
> "No, but you *are* stopping me preventing it"
No, we're not. Apple isn't going to remove the walled garden in its entirety just like that. All we are asking for is that a gate is installed into that wall. Apple will lock that gate by default (and that's fine), but there has to be a way to unlock it if you so wish.
> "I want to know with 100% certainty that if she downloads “the Barclays app” from the App Store, she isn’t downloading a scam."
Never going to happen, not least because scam apps do make it past the Apple/Google police and onto the official stores from time-to-time anyway. Saying that however, even with a relaxation in rules, if you mother goes to the App store and downloads the Barclays app, she is still 100% getting an app that has been approved by Apple because the app is still coming from within Apple's walled garden. I'm sure Apple can add the ability to PIN/password protect an "enable sideloading" option, so it'd be perfectly possible and simple to lock a device to App-Store only installs. They'd have to do this anyway so that parents could lock their kid's devices to avoid the ability to accidentally sideload malware.
> "The question is - legally, what gives you the right to force a company who wants to provide the service I want, and I want that service, to stop doing so?"
Simple, competition law. For small companies, this isn't an issue, but as companies grow larger and their power and influence grows, so too does the scrutiny that they are subjected to - particularly around abusing their position for their own gain. As the largest phone-maker in the world (they overtook Samsung this year), Apple is a large and powerful company. Developers that write apps for mobile devices effectively *have* to provide an iOS version unless they're willing to forego a significant section of the market and the sales that come with that. Because developers pretty-much have to support iOS to succeed, this means scrutiny to ensure Apple isn't abusing their position. The EU have decided that Apple is abusing its position, hence this ruling about opening up the platform to some degree.
TLDR: The walled garden isn't going to disappear and you will still be able to lock an iOS device to only work with the App Store if you so wish. However this shouldn't mean that everyone else with an Apple device has be subjected to Apple's whim and rules.
XP (and Vista if I'm honest) also had options to revert to the classic Start Menu. It's one of the reasons XP was well liked. Yes, they'd gone a bit Teletubby with the default theme, but you could pick several others, or boot it down to classic mode - same with many other elements of it. So much was tweakable without having to resort to 3rd party utilities, so if you didn't like the default look, you could usually tweak it to suit your needs.
Recently, MS are increasingly stripping out customisation and resorting to a very rigid OS with very few options to tweak it. This will inevitably polarise a lot of people against the OS who do not (for whatever reason) like the "Microsoft default".
My complaints:
1) The full app list insists on putting entries for all the letters, you cannot turn this off. I can see where I'm up to via the first letter of the application without 26 blocks of space being wasted with the alphabet.
2) The flashy shortcut area either get messy very quickly, or take a lot more effort to drag around, re-size, categorise etc. Win 7's simple idea of pinning to a list at the top left was much simpler IMO
3) The same-old Win10 issue of monochrome and samey icons down the far left that are not easily distinguishable from each other
4) Shutdown/Sleep via keyboard requires way more key-presses than it did in Windows 7
5) It looks really quite ugly and boring
6) As a "Metro" app, it doesn't obey Windows Accessibility settings, so cannot turn off smooth scrolling for instance (it gives me motion sickness)
7) "Search" doesn't just search the menu like it did in Windows 7, by default it searches your PC, the internet and so often returns way more junk than search in Windows 7. Hence opening the menu and typing a few letters isn't as useful as it used to be
8) No "Computer" entry in there which I regularly used for Right Click > Manage to get into Computer Management for event logs etc.
Don't get me wrong, I do pin my daily apps to my taskbar, but none-daily-but-frequently-used get pinned to the start menu, and it's just more messy and ugly to do it with Windows 10. On the odd case I need to go into the full list, it's even messier.
It's certainly prettier and more consistent than Windows 10 (although that's not a high bar to overcome if we're honest). But I've not really seen any functional ways in which it is better - and I do dual-boot it here.
The start menu is worse, the task bar is worse (albeit a bit better with recent updates), the context menu is worse for power users, the forced requirement for a Microsoft account is worse, the adverts everywhere for OneDrive and Office 365 are worse, the system requirements are *way* worse.
I want to like Windows 11 (I've never really liked the ugly and inconsistent W10), and with a few simple tweaks MS could easily turn it into a well-liked OS. They just don't seem bothered and seem to prefer using W10's EOL as a stick to get people to move instead.
I expect there will be, unless Microsoft tighten things up. For Windows 7, a simple script would do it. After all, Microsoft made the ESU updates freely downloadable to all via the Microsoft Update Catalogue, it's just that they'd fail to install if you didn't have an ESU key (the installation failed part way through then rolled-back). Didn't take long for people to work around that.
It also opened an interesting ethical question - is it wrong/illegal to use a 3rd party script to allow a freely downloadable file to install correctly on your PC? Certainly the ethics were a bit easier as MS refused to sell ESU keys to ordinary people. Not sure what approach they'll take with W10.
And for good reason. It can ruin a Lithium-Ion battery to be completely 100% depleted. Indeed the best way of ruining a spare phone/laptop battery (back when they were changeable) was to keep it in a drawer for 2 years and never connect it to replenish any charge that has leaked away.
Worst ones I've come across were PCs on a factory floor near dozens of CNC machines. These were leased Dell Optiplex machines, and after 3 years of sitting there in that environment, they were completely coated - outside and in with a thick layer of oil. Every single surface and component had a sticky, slimy coating to it. Before boxing them up for return to the lease company, we used to wrap them in a couple of bin-liners, just to protect our hands and clothes.
The thing is, we had a full list of all the various issues with a return PC that could incur a penalty charge from the lease company. You know, the usual deep scratches, broken casing, faulty/missing components and all that. Yet there was nothing in the list that covered dirt or oil. Hence the lease company used to receive PCs that were bordering on being a biohazard, yet we never received any form of penalty payments for sending back the machines in that state...
Hear, hear!
Even if I do speak to someone in person or over the phone for anything like this, I will always request a written follow-up. On the off-chance anyone complains, the standard answer is "It's procedure that we must have written approval for audit purposes".
Every time you hear someone complaining about the incompetency of IT, you can pretty much guarantee two things:
1) Said complainer is not a competent/proficient user of IT devices.
2) Said complainer is utterly unable to admit and accept their own shortcomings.
End result: "It doesn't work, and I'm going to blame everyone but myself"...
Elon Musk announces he is buying Microsoft. He promptly announces plans to re-release Windows XP - mainly because it has an "X" in the name and has therefore always been his favourite version. He then decides to drop the "P", thus resulting in Windows X.
A few days later, Musk announces that Windows isn't a recognisable enough brand name, and re-brands the operating system as X, before announcing that Microsoft will also be re-branded as X, because it just makes more sense that way.
Delightedly, he posts on X about X's upcoming release of X X, before triumphantly sharing the new X logo for X X. "It has these right-angle swishes half-way down the X in recognition of supersonic performance of X X!" Elon happily announces.
The rest of the world buries their heads in their hands as the giant flashing swastika logo is hoisted into place over Redmond, whilst Elon looks on, totally oblivious...
I think they're actually on to something. I would very much like my PC to have a "Mehbe" option for things, particularly where you've been worn down by years of being asked the same questions and just don't care any more.
"Windows needs to install updates", hrmph, mehbe. I just don't care any more to explicitly click OK.
"Do you want Excel to show you a list of auto-recover files, even though you usually save everything regularly?" <shrug>, mehbe - I'll let the PC decide, I really can't be arsed with it any more.
"A fractionally improved GeForce driver has been released. Do you want to install it?" Whatever, mehbe.
One advantage of additional RAM that Apple overlooks is caching of data to speed up operation. My newish work laptop has 16GB of RAM, and whilst my previous 8GB laptop performed OK, the additional RAM in my newer machine means more regularly used applications and data are cached by the OS into spare RAM. You do notice the difference when launching applications that have been cached by the OS as they start considerably faster than having to load from disk/SSD.
Put simply, more RAM is good and will benefit performance. It's a shame Apple are penny-pinching on a $1,600 laptop, then desperately trying to come up with excuses for it. In reality, we all know why they're doing this - to gouge customers by charging $200 more for a 16GB model.
The second issue is that most laptops that use touchscreens adopt a glossy coating for them, hence they're far more prone to annoying reflections. If you want a matte coating, more often than not it means none-touch. Speaking personally, I'd take matte none-touch over a glossy touchscreen any day.
Except that having everything in a flat, smorgasborg mess made it a lot harder to find things IMO. And it didn't look a bit different, it looked a lot different. And none of it in any way that was positive.
>> "All it really takes is an ability to get over yourself and realize that life is change. You can resist it and be left behind, or you can embrace it."
Or there's a third option: Accept that not all change is beneficial and avoid it. Use an alternative OS/Product a much more user-friendly interface. That's what I did. Windows 7 was only 3 years old at the time and had tons of support left, so I stuck with that. Lots of people did. Then, slowly but surely, MS became increasingly aware of the low adoption figures and lousy reception that Windows 8 was getting. The result? They backpeddled. Firstly with Windows 8.1 which restored the Start button, then further with Windows 10.
If you live in the real world, of course you have to accept that change happens. But that doesn't mean that all change is good. Sometimes, companies screw up and make changes that have negative impacts. Should we all just accept them like mindless sheep? Or should people push back against negative change to encourage the developer to try and fix things? As far as Windows 8 goes, people did push back and Microsoft ended up distancing themselves from the mess they had created and came up with a successor that fixed a lot of the complaints.
I think Windows 8 was intended to help Microsoft popularise the interface and hence force their way into mobile phones and tablets. MS also dropped the ball by believing that touch screens would rapidly take over on laptops as the primary method of input, replacing the mouse/trackpad. I think MS knew it would be a tough sell on business machines, but then Windows 7 was still being rolled out and they knew they could gamble with Windows 8 for home users.
Honestly I think MS saw a vision where touch-screens were all the rage, Windows tablets would take off and the UI would become accepted by the average home user. Then of course they walk into a mobile phone store, see a phone running Windows Mobile and feel a sense of familiarity - "hey, it's just like my laptop at home!"
Of course, so many things went wrong. Touchscreens for user input remain niche on laptops - they have their uses, but a sizeable chunk of the population prefers mouse/trackpad/trackpoint - and indeed plenty of laptops available now shun touchscreens because many people don't like controlling their laptops by jabbing at the screen. The fact that a majority of computers were using Metro without touch meant the user experience was rubbish. Add onto that, Windows tablets never achieved mainstream success because of limited software that actually was designed for touch.
So the result was the opposite of what MS planned. A punter walks into a mobile phone store, sees a phone running Windows Mobile and thinks "Urgh, it's just like my laptop. I *hate* that interface" and dismisses it automatically before moving onto the Android handsets and iPhones.
TLDR: It was a gamble to force the Windows Mobile interface on everyone and get them to accept Windows Mobile, and it backfired. Badly.
Yep, a dumb move. Businesses don't care how pretty a device looks, they want it to offer decent performance, survive several years of daily hammer and be easy and quick to fix if anything breaks. In a previous job I was Dell certified and have lost count of the number of keyboards I swapped out in under 10 minutes. Un-clip the top bezel, 3 screws and a cable and off it came. Most other components (RAM, SSD, even the fan) could be changed in a few minutes as well.
I'm very glad I don't have to fix them these days when you have to dismantle the entire thing to replace a simple part, just because it "looks a bit sleeker". It's the same thing with batteries, when they clipped into the back/bottom of the laptop, replacing a failed one could even be handled by the user at a remote site with a few basic over-the-phone instructions. Now? Replacing them involves screwdrivers, tiny cables, an IT visit and a whole heap of work.
I don't think XP Embedded was ever released in anything other than a 32bit version, so anything over 4GB of RAM would be pointless.
Besides, why would an ATM require more than 4GB of RAM? I'm old enough to remember numerous ATMs running OS2 quite happily with a fraction of that amount of RAM. I'm assuming a bit of confusion here. Still a decent On Call, this aside.
Hmm, I never really noticed any of that. I thought 7 still had plenty of colour and definition. Don't get me wrong, I hate the drab experience MS ushered in with Windows 8 and then 10, the bland and samey monochrome icons and all the rest of it. 7 for me was beautiful, clean and well designed.
And you are correct about Glass, my bad :-)
Hmm, have to disagree. Aero was a nice theme, but the Vista version was burdened with too much UI clutter. I consider Windows 7 the highlight here as it retained all the 3D effects, transparency and everything else that was good about Aero, but gave the interface a much-needed tidy. It was from Windows 8 when it all went downhill with Microsoft ditching all the effects and going for flat and bland instead.
When I was at college many years ago, it was common practice to scrunch up sheets of newspaper, then jam them into the pockets of the pool table in the common room. Hence every time someone potted a ball, the ball could be freely retrieved, thus allowing multiple games of pool without paying all the time. Needless to say, the college wasn't impressed after a member of staff eventually spotted what was happening and an edict was sent out informing all the students that tampering with the pool tables would result in a ban from the common room.
Still, was fun whilst it lasted...
Typical Microsoft these days unfortunately. Ignore the piles of feedback on areas of the OS that most need improvement and instead waste it on idiotic and annoying gimmicks that nobody is asking for.
I mean seriously, how many people are leaving feedback of "I really wish file explorer would recommend random cloud files for me to open"? Saying that, how many people honestly open File Explorer and think "I don't know what to open, I wish my OS would recommend some files for me to click on"...
Should also add that the free version apparently cannot remove anything. So you run SpyHunter, it claims to find malware, then pushes you to buy a copy - even if the computer may be clean in reality.
I should add that these are the claims floating around, what we really need is some independent verification of them - something that seems to be lacking from what I've seen. Either way, SpyHunter does currently have a decidedly fishy reputation, so it is understandable why it may be flagged as a PUP.
Every discerning tech should have a TBFOOTYSPHTOBKJIC. In fact, when supporting oddball kit, many may even have a TRFOOTYSPHTOBKJIC (That Room Full Of Old Tech You Should Probably Have Thrown Out But Kept Just In Case).
Many years back, working at a University with numerous odd labs of experimental kit to support, I had a TRFOOTYSPHTOBKJIC which came in very handy from time to time. One example was that we had two motion tracking systems (Optotrak 3020s - a £35k piece of kit). One of them was all set up with a Windows XP control PC running Matlab and worked a treat. A colleague was asked if they could get the other one working in the same way for an important experiment: "Of course, not a problem".
At least, until it turned out the second Optotrak was an older system with an ISA controller card, yet the version of Matlab we had required Windows XP. A problem given that ISA had become pretty much obsolete in the late 90s, yet XP hadn't been released until 2001. Yet, in my TRFOOTYSPHTOBKJIC, I'd retained various odd PCs of different specs, and soon managed to find an early Pentium III system that still had a lone ISA slot, yet had the performance to cope with Windows XP. Swap a bit of RAM around as well, and the motion tracker fired up just fine.
Part of the problem can be when multiple services are set up to require 2FA approval. When they first introduced it where I work, there was 2FA for logging into Windows, 2FA for connecting to VPN, 2FA for Outlook, 2FA for Yammer, etc. In short, staff were used to being hit with numerous 2FA approval requests, so if another one comes through its easy to assume it must be for Sharepoint or something and just tap "approve".
Now, my workplace has largely fixed the mass of 2FA approvals thankfully, but it does show that someone can approve a nefarious request quite innocently, depending when it arrives and how their organisation's security is set up.
Anyway, the addition of the code makes a lot of sense here - I certainly agree with you there!
It's a tough one. There have been changes in the past which haven't been negative, for example Intel relegating "Pentium" to lower-end CPUs and introducing the "Core" brand back in 2006.
The main point I've noticed is that it only tends to work if the new product is a significant improvement over the old one. Core 2 Duo was a huge step forwards from the Pentium 4, so people didn't care about the rebrand. On the flip side, AMD relegating "Athlon" when they introduced "Phenom" wasn't exactly a success - especially as Phenoms didn't exactly deliver the "Phenomenal" performance they were named after.
If Intel's next range of CPUs are significant developments, many people won't care about the name change. If they're not that much of an improvement, it'll be seen more negatively as an empty marketing ploy.
It could be the greatest browser the world has ever seen, however after spending years of having Microsoft trying to ram it down my throat at every possible opportunity, I refuse to use it on principle.
It's a bit like dealing with an overly-pushy salesman. He may be selling a great product at a fantastic price, but if he's excessively and aggressively pushing the product on you come-what-may, you simply walk away...
It works fine, but with one major caveat - Windows Update won't show feature updates for you because it sees your hardware as unsupported. On one hand, a good way of avoiding them, but on the downside it means using a flash drive and ISO to "upgrade" the OS every couple of years so you don't stop receiving security updates.
Maybe time for someone creative to release another utility like wufuc that unblocks the updates?
If you pop Windows 10 LTSC 1809 onto it, you'll get security updates until late 2028 - one option to consider anyway. Or wait until the LTSC version of Windows 11 lands and install that with tweaks to bypass the requirements checks. My VM testing shows that Windows 11 on unsupported hardware will download security updates just fine, but not feature updates - which makes it a royal pain to use if you use a standard version as you have to do an ISO upgrade install every time your build runs out of support.
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