Microsoft finds a new way to irritate Windows 11 users – a backup pop-up Microsoft is always on the lookout for new and exciting ways to annoy Windows users. Its latest wheeze is a full-screen pop-up in Windows 11 to urge the non-initiated to back up their files. First spotted by WindowsLatest, the pop-up looks like something a user might see during the setup of Windows 11. However, in this …
And give MS the finger?
At the moment, it seems that everything that they do is guaranteed to piss off users... big time.
Come on people, vote with your feet and give them the old heave ho.
You know that you want to... The time is now isn't it?
Proudly windows free since Sept 30, 2016.
"If only there were more versions of Linux from which to choose..."
On a slightly more serious note, the vast majority of Windows users have no idea other options even exist other than some may know people with more money who might buy an Apple (but that's just Apple Windows!), and may, just may, have heard of ChromeOS if they have kids of school age at a school that went with Chrome books instead of iPads.
Speaking from personal experience, ChromeOS is almost fantastically limited. Its applications seem to be generally based on the mobile versions rather than the good^H^H^H^H desktop versions, and lots of stuff that I used to take for granted on a windows laptop are beyond it.
I'm not qualified to talk about the actual usability of MacOS and Linux because I've never had cause to give them a shot, but I certainly don't feel that my use-cases can justify giving either a try (Windows specific work applications and legacy gaming).
Or, if you are a Steam gamer, try using Proton option under Linux.
You can even have Steam under Linux launch other gaming platforms using the add non Steam game option.
I managed to get EA App working with a couple of moving files about tricks...though EA tends to ban peoples accounts for being creative....the last holdout for me having Windows at home.
I wonder if you could run all your Windows apps under the Steam Proton option...maybe I should start testing some in my free time to help people out.
Some things may depend on if you have an AMD or Nvidia video card as well
Sorry, but NO SIZE meets my needs. I want an OS that is stable, easy to maintain and update, does not scour everything I do for data to sell, and is cheap - free being actually better of course. And did I mention meets all my drawing office needs easily, while supporting various expensive peripherals which M$ regularly borks / deprecates. M$ fails all these tests, eg by simply saying go out and buy a new A0 size roll feed drawing printer (£3500) because we no longer want to support the older one you currently have. This printer still works perfectly under Linux, by the way, as does all the CAD software etc. that I need ... M$ is genuinely useless to me. I left it behind more than a decade ago
Moved my parents from a windows laptop to an iPad when Windows 7 bailed out of updates and I couldn't upgrade it from the other side of the planet. Worked a treat because touching the screen actually makes sense to old people. The double-click on the home button for app switching a little less so, but they'll get there. Covers their main activities of email, web, family photos, videos. Good battery life, and easy to pick up and use when you need it.
For most users, Windows is synonymous with desktop and laptop PCs. I therefore predict that its demise will be as a result of people no longer using those form factors.
More and more is being done on smartphones and tablets, so PCs are becoming redundant. The future is looking good!
Individuals have never needed a PC. And adding a phone to a PDA with internet access and a camera is pretty much all they need.
Large businesses can use whatever they want and switching to Linux PCs sounds sensible to me.
But SOHO users will stay with Windows for a long time, I reckon.
When our 7 PC started to play up with age related and lack of support, why drop the last decent version of windows, the new PC runs Mint.
Quite well.
But work PC got an 11 infection and still suffering now due to our support teams unable to fix notepad.
Any basic picture editing I drag home and use kolourpaint.
11 is actively hostile.
I've recently had the misfortune to provide and set up a Windows PC for a local charity. They needed a kiosk/Internet cafe-style restricted but useful environment.i opted for Windows 10 mainly for cost reasons, and because '11 is a pile of telemetry-festering, ad-driven sh1te. Unfortunately, the just-about-bearable Windows 10 experience is becoming more like '11 in that each update seems to add another bit of obtrusive, pointless window dressing. The latest affront is the fecking Co-pilot icon which seems to have implanted itself in various places and is colourful enough for users to notice and then get sucked into clicking on. And every time I do an update I get reminded that "this PC is not good enough to run Windows 11", but hey, I'm not about to upgrade it. But what can I do: the typical users have been brought up on Windows so now insist that's what they want?
Linux sucks. My ASUS motherboard emits a constant PCIe error on the bus that Windows silently handles, but Linux freezes to the point where a cold reboot is needed.
I'm not spending an unknown amount of hours researching and finding a fix that handles the error when another operating system is known to work with my motherboard.
I'm not going out to buy a capatible motherboard for Linux for the sake of Linux. Linux needs to handle all existing hardware and every vendors kinky implementations of
standard protocols. That is what Microsoft has accomplished with Windows and why it is lightyears ahead of Linux for the general population.
I like reverse engineering and breaking things, but you get to a point in life where you realize all your really doing is wasting time by reverse engineering somebody elses
toxic schizophrenic psychopathic thinking that they have manifested into software code.
Dear Microsoft.
Fuck off
Fuck off and keep fucking off until you reach escape velocity.
Don't stop fucking off for a single moment. Keep fucking off past Mars, the gas giants, then Neptune, Uranus and Pluto.
Stay with the fucking off theme as you leave, first the solar system, then the galactic arm
Fuck off right out of the whole galaxy, then the local cluster.
Keep on going, on and on until you reach the edge of the universe.
Then fuck off right out of our universe and take your tawdry, ad infested start menu with you.
AND DON'T COME BACK
Capiche?
Yours, with an almost indescribable amount of molten lava prejudice, laced with the contents of my septic tank.
Anyone here old enough to have used MS DOS may remember the BACKUP and RESTORE utilities provided by MS.
These were fine for backing up files within the same MS DOS version, but woe betide migrating to a different version of MS DOS (even point number increases of version). The utilities were not backward compatible, but they had the same filenames. So if you wanted to move to a new pc with a new OS, take a deep breath. You had to use the new BACKUP/RESTORE on your old computer (or vice versa, assuming the old pc was still bootable).
Not so fast though... when you tried to do that it said you can't do this as it was the incorrect version. You had to fiddle around with a utility called SETVER.
TL;DR This is not a new revelation.
That's why one of the first useful things I wrote with Turbo Pascal (ask grampa!) was a "miniback" application, that just read a bunch of files, created a text list of it, and spread the files into several floppies, splitting only files larger than 1.4Mb. Worked in any version of DOS and you could get individual files if needed. The executable was small enough to be added to the file list too.
That was in 1990, if memory serves me right (probably doesn't - 34 years of coding and booze are taking its toll).
And woe betide you if you dared use QIC tapes instead of floppies on early versions of windows. It worked if you used the same tape, on the same drive, with the same version of software (Seagate IIRC), but trying to use that tape as an archive failed miserably.
I actually found some old tapes and a drive and tried to read the backups after a decade or two, and the pinch rollers had turned into a molten sticky mess!
Thankfully it's been CD, DVD and BD-R backups for me for years, and yes they are still readable as I used decent media.
…clicking the X in the corner of the popup (assuming there is one), or pressing Alt-F4, is interpreted as “yes, PLEASE sign me up for this and start slurping my data”?
Can’t let dogmatic adherence to decades-old UI conventions get in the way when there’s cross-brand marketing synergy to be actualized.
Ugh. I just threw up in my mouth a little typing that last sentence.
...OneDrive will start synchronizing their PC, right up until that 5 GB default storage is exhausted.
And it will helpfully prioritize the important files and directories to backup, starting with cache directories, temp directories and Microsoft's OS files. The backup will not be able to save any of your data because you ran out of space...
I don't use OneDrive at all, though I am happy enough to use Windows 10 Pro (carefully) as my user environment. Why would I want Microsoft to have copies of my files, especially confidential work and personal materials? Do you trust them as safekeepers of your private data? For a kid who just plays games and wants to save scores, sure. But for serious work? I don't want to be the product.
Even when you dismiss this festering piece of crap from your screen, it will still be there …taking up disk space and (probably) memory too. Probably a couple of hundred MB at least (a “hello world” program seems to take close that these days - that’s the shitty state of software out there, but I digress). It will sit there lurking. Waiting to be awoken again. It’s probably even consuming clock cycles too with a “check if it should be displayed again” timer. Like a sleeper agent in some post war spy thriller.
Anyway, sleep well
> Probably a couple of hundred MB at least (a “hello world” program seems to take close that these days - ...)
Not so long ago, I tried my hand at coding using the WinUI3 framework, which - supposedly - is Microsoft's recommended framework for Windows 10 & 11 apps (you know - Acrylic Blur, pages, all that good stuff).
Well, apart from the fact that at the time, only 8 months or so ago, there was no sodding visual editor for WinUI3 in Visual Studio, and the recommendation from MS was to build-view-tweak-build-review-tweak-etc until satisfied (!), I do recall that a simple "Hello World" program in a dialog-type window compiled out to something ridiculous like 150MB, and the build process vomited a thousand discrete files into the output directory, all of which were apparently a) vital to the execution of the program, and b) not simply duplicates of existing Windows system library files.
So anyway, I went back to WPF & Winforms. Call me a dinosaur if you wish.
For a long time if you installed ondrive on a mac you could find yourself spending days or weeks trying to figure out why onedrive was failing on a mac. turns out that the macs idea of a valid filenames and onedrives idea of a valid filename weren't the same. Pretty much all the other companies that did backups didn't have these problems, just microsoft. Besides, by default ondrive doesn't do backups, it does an archive by moving data from the computer to the cloud, at least the business defaults done here.
It's not just OneDrive for Mac. It is perfectly possible to have a file stored on a Windows machine and accessed by OneDrive for Windows which has a filename which causes OneDrive for Windows to have palpitations. Guess how I _know_ this for certain.
Best of all, if the organization providing the OneDrive (a prominent local 3try level educational institution, for example) were to have an agreement with MS about certain things ('free' copies of MS Office, with 1 glorious TB of OneDrive storage built-in), then should someone (oh, me, for example) contact MS Support on this matter they don't want to know. I was referred back to school IT support. Exactly what the school's IT people were supposed to do is unclear. I changed the name and the problem went away. Note that all, repeat ALL of the machines involved were running MS software: the desktop assigned to the instructor's podium, Win10 Enterprise; the laptop handed out by the school, Win10Education ; my personal laptop, Win10Pro; the servers the school uses, assorted WinServer 2019/2022 systems, all running ActiveDirectory; whatever the hell MS uses for OneDrive at their end. Note also that DropBox had no problems with the same file using the original name. And putting that file on a Mac also failed to cause problems. Why, it's almost as though MS's left hand doesn't know which bloody county the right hand is in, much less what the right hand is doing.
Often the way I first hear about these things is when one of my customers tries to remote-in to their pc in the office and find that it has been taken over by some mystical entity. Usually the solution is for me to dial-in and see for myself, then explain what to do the next time it arises.
Note to Microsoft:- Not everyone in this world has hours to kill pondering the Shiny New Things you inflict upon us. I know it has been said before, but if MS manufactured cars you would have to have someone on call to do things like "clear the windscreen" or rearrange the seats before you can get in to drive to work. It would be great for people using public transport on the day after Patch Tuesday though... not a car on the road for the first half of the morning. Hmmm, hey Microsoft, why don't you go into the car manufacturing business?
>if MS manufactured cars you would have to have someone on call to do things like "clear the windscreen" ...
You'd be driving along at 60mph, making good time, feeling good about life, when suddenly the entire windscreen would be taken over by a giant advert for Microsoft OneGear, or Radio 365, or an exhortation to use your Microsoft account to unlock & start the car rather than that primitive car-key in your pocket.
I'll stop there because it's like shooting fish in a barrel.
When I was briefly misguided enough to use OneDrive for automatic Backup of some important files it created a folder in my C: drive to put the stuff into, that I had organised on various other drives and partitions , When I got rid of that terrible waste of space ( for starters my C: drive is a fast, but not terribly large, SSD) I found that those files had vanished from the original locations but weren't in OneDrive either.
Almost all of my missing stuff was in a recent backup- locally, where it belongs. So nothing worse than a nuisance.
Would I ever try backing up with OneDrive/Microsoft again? Yeah right, of course, shortly after Hell freezes over.
1. NEVER use a Mickey$oft account to set up 'Doze; always create a local one (there're plenty of references online on how to do this, even with the "Home" flavour thereof).
2. ALWAYS use a reputable de-bloating script and third-party uninstaller to get rid of the bloatware, both at installation and after every forced update.
On my own computers, yes... On my family's computers, yes...
On my customers' computers though, which run proprietary software that will only work on a recent version of Windows, the only choice is to get a massive mallet and knock it into submission.
To make things even more interesting, the specialised test equipment they use only runs on old (<= XP) versions of Windows (insert facepalm icon here).
> the specialised test equipment they use only runs on old (<= XP) versions of Windows
May I respectfully suggest that they update their test equipment? It's probably well out of calibration by now :P (and, if it goes 'bang' one day, it's unlikely to be serviceable)
Also, I wouldn't be at all surprised if, under layers upon layers of proprietary drivers and cruft, that the interface boils down to a text-mode serial port with SCPI commands. Perhaps with an interrupt pin to reduce the polling, but nothing that an Arduino couldn't be bodged up to translate it into something that a modern OS could pass to a more open piece of software e.g. Octave or Python to aggregate the data
If it's GPIB, then Linux has a driver for that, and USB-GPIB adapters are available.
May I respectfully suggest that they update their test equipment? It's probably well out of calibration by now :P (and, if it goes 'bang' one day, it's unlikely to be serviceable)
Previous orkplace we built stuff. And the machines that built said stuff were controlled by a Compaq 386 with an ISA-bus card that had been custom designed. The company that made said card (and wrote the drivers) had long sinec disappeared and hadn't left us with either the design of the card nor the driver source.
Attempting to put the card into anything more powerful would result in the PC freezing solid..
I had a cupboard full of old Compaq 386 units and spares and precisely 1 (one!) spare ISA card.
When I left they were talking about commissioning someone to do a modern design for the card but hadn't got the money to do it. That company no longer exists..
Upgraded a real old lenovo Amd AIO running windows 10 for a relie to linux mint few weeks ago with a cheap £20 ssd added as well
was a slow as mollases pain in the arse to use before
using it yesterday... silky smooth and fast, a joy to use
iwhen i installed it picked up everything including brother scanner printer combo, no complicated config to do
new mint 22, has ubuntu hardware enablement... easier installments now on even newer hardware
for 90% plus home users its all they will ever need
Windows is the abusive partner I've been trying to leave for years, but can't because we've been together so long and only they seem to do some of the things I like.
I didn't even know my PC was being backed up until I created a VM for testing and logged in with my MS account. It offered to restore from my main Windows PC so I did to see what the deal was. It installed placeholders for a lot of the software installed on the "old" PC which might be useful if you're migrating to a new one.
BUT - I didn't opt-in to this and don't want or need it, I've 3rd party software that does a full backup every day. I turned PC backup off straight away and am now getting the unskippables with the "choice" of "join us" or "join us in 3 days".
The old main PC is now an Ubuntu server and the gaming PC multiboots between Windows and different Linux distros to see which tickles enough of my fancies for a long-term commitment.
Open source alternatives and WINE are a lot better than when I first tried them, so the shackles are getting weaker...
Why not run those few apps in a VM? I use Virtualbox as my Epson scanner does 35mm negatives, and no driver was ever ported / reverse engineered to Linux. Sure it's a bit slower, but works well enough.
In my experience, I used VMs for several apps I thought I couldn't do without, but eventually found alternatives that worked well enough for my needs. Soon enough, those VMs were used less and less, leaving me with the scanner as my only use case. Even that will end when I replace the scanner for a supported one.
My other piece of advice is to put a new SSD into your PC and install Linux onto it. The old HDD can be mounted to copy data across, and even reinserted if you ever need to go back to Windows. It takes a bit of effort, but it's pretty straightforward. Good luck.
I got it on my Win10 garage PC over the weekend. It was probably part of a minor Windows Update though. It'll be a relief when Win10 goes EOS. No more updates so no more garbage. :-)
What is it with software manufacturers these days? They seem to want to Notify you of everything with a popup that you have to click away accompanied by an annoying beep, and it's not just on Windows either. My Android phone keeps on finding ways to re-enable Notifications I have switched off and family members who are of the Fruity phone persuasion are getting the same. I remember when I got this phone it had EVERY single Notification enabled. It took me quite a while to disable them all, and even then I missed a few that kept on rearing their irritating heads over the following few weeks. Most of originates from Bloatware that NOBODY wants anyways.
When I retire I may well go Linux as I'll have time. Then again, I may not.
Because every bloody damn brogrammer strongly believes his program has your entire, undivided attention to do what ever he pleases with it.
I keep getting "Enable Google Play services, Android setup won't work unless you enable Google Play services" notification on my Android phone. I already know it, I did it myself, I'm aware of the implication now can you please f**k off ? What angers me is that out there, a developer is pretty proud of this achievement and would really love me to love his work. I can't, I really can't.
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