Groundhog Day comes early as Intel Display Drivers give Windows 10 the silent treatment The Windows 10 October 2018 Update woes continued for Microsoft last night with the announcement that Redmond had slammed the brakes for users of certain Intel display drivers. Microsoft appears to have confused Groundhog Day with Thanksgiving, as issues with Intel drivers contributed to the fiasco that was the original …
I have a win 10 laptop that hasn't been updated in 2 years. I rarely use it, when I do it's as a db server, there is nothing confidential on it and the whole thing doesn't venture outside its LAN. The biggest safety risk is my gmail login is saved in Firefox's password manager, password protected. FF is patched regularly and carries NoScript.
I do play games on it, it's originally a gaming laptop (very good choice for workstations profiles, IMHO. they're beefy, gamers value quality and they love modularity).
I'd say I don't really want to touch it much and 1809 is doing very little to motivate to think otherwise. I may actually install 1809 later, once all they've whack-a-moled at it sufficiently, it might actually be safer than betting on MS next build to be any better.
For my limited expectations of it, sure, leave it as is. If it was confidential, then that'd be different, but my biggest take on Windows and confidential is that they're best kept on different computers.
You know, this actually brings something to mind. OK, we get MS is "thinking outside of the box", QA-wise. We also get that the Insiders, whatever their (few) merits, sucks at doing QA. Or being a meaningful force for user feedback. We get that bugs were filed throughout at 1809, but no one in MS bothered to really follow those through. There's a crisis brewing at MS and they don't know to make things right.
But... wasn't that the whole point of telemetry?????? Avoiding all the crap like 1809 because we are so instrumented that MS will KNOW something is wrong? With no need for insiders or followed-through bug reports.
Wasn't that what - most unwillingly - giving up our privacy was all about?
"But... wasn't that the whole point of telemetry??????"
Why do you asume that it's for quality control? Why would Microsoft care about quality at all? I mean they had a short time when they cared about quality and every developer had to fix bugs before writing new code. That happened in the early 2000s, just after Windows XP. Although it was most likely a coincidence (Vista) managers probably see that as the reason why sales slowed down afterwards, so they do a U-turn.
Why do you asume that it's for quality control?
Microsoft have always claimed that quality control was part of the reason for having telemetry in the first place -- it's their excuse.
While most people recognize that Microsoft may have other reasons for spying on their users, it's reasonable to hope -- not assume -- that there may be a bit of quality control going on as well.
How do you keep a Windows 10 system from auto-updating itself? I thought it didn't let you block updates. I am sticking with Windows 7 Pro, which lets me decide when, and if, to update. I leave tasks up overnight, a lot of things on my machine, and an update would bork the work I have left open (not everything wants to be saved all the time, especially if you are still working on it, and some applications don't auto-checkpoint). So I don't want an OS that would break my work because it has decided that a new version is out there. If I could tame Windows 10 that way, a newer machine would look more attractive.
"How do you keep a Windows 10 system from auto-updating itself? I thought it didn't let you block updates."
There is no official way to stop feature updates installing themselves on Home/Pro versions. But you can set your internet connection to metered. This stops it downloading the feature updates automatically but still downloads security updates. I think you will only get security updates for 18 months from whenever the version your currently on was released doing this though, then you will have to update to a new feature update to carry on getting security patches.
I have also found that it won't install feature updates automatically if you have less than 10GB of free space on your device. Which bearing in mind some entry level Win10 tablets only come with 32GB of internal storage which about 12GB is taken up with just the Windows OS. So once you have put on a few programs you can find you have less than 10GB of storage available quite easily.
It's hard to blame MS for trying to force updates on non-Enterprise users. The overlap between those who would disable automatic updates and those who would complain about something not working on their systems is pretty much a 1-to-1.
If you want to have managed updates, that's really an enterprise thing.
not sure what version of exchange like functionality Office 365 has but I have outlook 2010 on windows 7 connected to office 365 no issues., have been since at least 2013 I think, prior to that the company I am at was using hosted Exchange at Rackspace and it worked fine there too.
official support looks to conclude in Oct 2020 (updates etc). Haven't heard/seen anything saying when or if outlook 2010 will stop working with office 365 exchange.
Most of my email is done via Outlook web access from Linux but I do keep outlook running 24/7 in my windows VM sometimes it is useful.
>> Office 2003 was last decent version
I agree, I still use version 2003 on my personal workstation.
While I do use newer versions at various sites I work with.... so far I have not been not impressed by most of the new features. No compelling reason to upgrade here.
In fact I wonder if there is any room for Office products to change in any significant way?
I use it, simply because I paid real money for a however many licence many years ago. I see no reason to throw more money at Microsoft when we only use Word/Excel maybe a couple of times a month, and other parts way less. It still works, does its job, and the family are familiar with it.
None of these alternatives have email client - the only reason we have Office 2010 on our machines is because we all use email and occasionally need to open a word document or excel spreadsheet - that's very occasionally, we use email all the time but there's no alternative to Outlook.
exchange 2019 doesnt support outlook 2010 but 2016 does. We are now actively looking at transitioning from MS office to libreoffice and using OWA for email with our exchange server. Afterall, if you use office 365 then it is browser based anyway so why not just use OWA? Apart from additional CALs it will be significantly cheaper for us in the longer run.
I've never used Outlook on my own machines.
In my experience, Thunderbird is more useful than Outlook, even though we have a bunch of people to support email at work. There are features with Thunderbird that are not available from our enterprise outlook solution, at least in our not small (thousands of users) organization... like standard end to end encryption that can be used with people outside our system.
Add a cleaner interface, a raft of optional configurations, high speed, trivial setup for multiple offline mail backups, easy setup for multiple email accounts and servers... I wouldn't use Outlook if it were free.
Why is anyone still using Office 2010 anyway? It's not like it'll even connect to Exchange servers anymore...
It *does*, but you have to install at the very least a service pack for Office 2010 along with a handful of patches. At least that's what I spent 9 long, painful, stress-filled months trying to tell our in-house support team, whose primary action for anything outlook related is "escalate the ticket to the Exchange admin". (which is me.)
Outlook not connecting? send it to the exchange admin. User can't connect to exchange through outlook because their account's been locked out in AD? Send it to the Exchange admin. User can't send an email with an attachment that's 523246871454233154 Mbytes? Exchange admin. User can't send or receive email because they've used 5 GB of their 1.5 GB mailbox quota? Exchange admin. Computer on fire? Exchange admin. Computer spewing neon green slime and asking for the Keymaster of Gozer? Exchange admin!
(Yeah, I'm more than a little sick and tired of the 'it MUST be a problem with the exchange server' excuse.)
This has gone way beyond a joke now. Their cockups are causing people all over the place to spend hours (often uselessly) fixing their problems and MS does not care one little bit.
If this was Apple their stock price would have dropped by 5% at least but as this is MS people who decide these sort of things just shrug their shoulders and give them the benefit if the doubt yet again.
What we need is a large business to issue a profit warning or worse due to thee issues caused by the frankly shoddy stuff that MS calls software they shove over the wall with them saying 'there you go' while they run for the hills.
Yes. After THIS many failures, it has stopped being funny, and has NOW graduated to PATHETIC. And, PITIFUL. And, SAD.
Micro-shaft, GET A CLUE, will ya? Stop 'majoring in the minors' and GET BACK TO BASICS.
You know, like it was with 7. And XP. All of that 'feature creep' in Win-10-nic, and you can't even get the BASIC FEATURES (intel drivers) right. *FACEPALM* "Ay,yay,yay,yay,yay..." (like Desi Arnaz used to do on 'I Love Lucy')
An updated version of 7 (just tweeks for new hardware), with an extended support period. That'd be worth purchasing. Hint.
"What we need is a large business to issue a profit warning or worse due to thee issues caused by the frankly shoddy stuff that MS calls software they shove over the wall with them saying 'there you go' while they run for the hills."
Not going to happen. Large businesses are often way behind the home-user peons that MS uses for testing. By the time most of them look to roll out 1809, many months will have passed and the bugs will probably have been patched by then. The "very large" company I work for are still on 1703 for most users - those that have Windows 10 that is. I very fortunately had my laptop refreshed one month before they rolled out Windows 10, so I've still got another good 15 months of reliable Windows 7 on my work laptop.
This will only happen when one of the nasties hammers an major company. This would need to be a nasty that would not be caught by alpha/beta testers aka home users. This is a scenario that will almost certainly happen as alpha testers will not be testing most enterprise features. When it does watch for a nasty, noisy lawsuit that will be widely covered.
"If this was Apple their stock price would have dropped by 5% at least"
Actually Apple's share price has dropped 20% in the last month, 2.5% just today.
Why didn't Hitler ever travel on the Hindenburg? Because nobody wanted to let a prick near a balloon. Unfortunately several pricks in Silicon Valley seem to have combined to burst a bubble.
It was the Intel/MS Mobo audio driver in a major windows 10 update. I solved it eventually by deleting device and pointing installer at windows.old
None of MS remedies worked.
Also had problems on Win7 & Win10 with Wacom tablet, Brother printers and Epson scanner.
All worked fine on Linux Mint. I did have to download the Brother driver from Brother, easy to find and their Debian installer tool worked perfectly. Recently added a new Brother MFC colour laser and was amazed that the scanner works on LAN to Linux Mint too (in GIMP via SANE). Mate Desktop, Traditional OK theme and some mods.
99.9% of what I do is on Linux now. Sadly some other people I know only use Win7 or Win 10.
One would think it is time M$ called a halt to the 'development' of 10. It was a nice try but doesn't really work, and start afresh with a completely fresh slate. Dump all the old bug ridden code from the days of 3.1 and the tacked on patches over bugs that are themselves patches for prior bugs, remove all the backdoors and telemetry code and produce a real UI that looks good and is practical.
If they managed that more people that have left the windows fold might think of returning. They could even consider calling the new OS 'doors' to remove the stigma of windows.
Please... NO! Not with *THIS* group of "developers". Look what they did to 8 and 10, when they had a perfectly good 7 that they could've just MAINTAINED.
I'll take a service pack 2 for windows 7; it beats having to dink around with putting USB3 support in using tools normally intended for OEMs and enterprises.
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