Copilot invades Microsoft 365 Personal and Family for an extra three bucks a month Copilot is coming to Microsoft 365 Personal and Family, and Vulture Central has had some hands-on experience with the generative AI assistant's attempts to be helpful. There is a price to be paid to have the generative AI assistant shoved into the personal productivity apps – an extra $3 per month. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella …
I rolled back my version of Word as soon as the piss-poor and fucking annoying "modern comments" feature was thrust on me without warning, totally breaking my workflow. Since then, I've prevented it from updating at all, just in case. While I'm aware that this may expose me to potential vulnerabilities, the alternative certainly will expose me to shit like this. I use my desktop as the prod environment, and my laptop is the canary for this sort of thing. So far, the changes I've seen through the upgrades are nothing but shit on a stick.
There's so much demand from customers for the AI cruft they have to force it on them, then hope they can't work out how to not pay for it by swapping to the alternative plans.
Doubly annoying if the feature you didn't ask for actively gets in the way of normal use and can't be turned off.
Sooner or later the high running costs & lack of actual customer demand will kill this but there'll be a lot more desperate attempts at forcing it before then.
I suspect not as for the majority of users they will not even notice.
The subscription just renews, as long as what is included does not drop below what they actually use of consume they just keep paying.
The individual amount is low enough for most to not even notice.
I would also surmise some nasty surprises if you are using a custom email domain. Change your plan and suddenly what you have configured no longer works. I do wonder how long this is going to function as it is. You cannot make any changes since 2023 or setup a new one.
The Microsoft response is "buy a business subscription".
Now wherever you get that from it is a heck of a lot more expensive than the Personal or Family subscriptions.
Yes I know load on here will say that you should not use O365, use Libra Office or something, run your own mail servers etc. For 99% of the population this is not an option. Microsoft provides a convenient solution that people are familiar with.
I agree that MS provides a convenient option, but I can't understand how people didn't jump ship when they "modernized" the UI at some point while LibreOffice had an actually familiar interface.
Granted, MS fought very hard by making docx files hard to work with, but 90% of the population never used the features that didn't work.
MS users are doing it to themselves, even if alternatives are free, easy to find and better.
I regularly get docx files of posters to open in LO, turn into a PDF & then into a JPEG. They pose no problem except that she usually seems to add sufficient newlines to run over the page... The odd thing about this is that although they come from a Windows user she actually uses LO to create them. Maybe LO just creates better docx files. And can't LO on Windows create its own PDFs?
Not true.
I am fairly tech savvy. I needed to get a new laptop because the old one has a screen faulty about 3 years.
I wanted to get a fairly recent AMD processor to stop by balls burning. I hunted high and low for a laptop WITHOUT Windows. I could not get one. Dell was supposed to sell non windows machine for I spend hours on their web site and could not find one.
There IS NO way the general public can get anything BUT WINDOWS. I got a Lenovo that has soldered RAM and soldered SSD even though I did want them AND windows.
Here are some sensible options with current hardware, usually from Tongfang or Clevo factories re-branded.
I'm on my second XMG so far and I had no problems with a failed drive that needed replacement - I'd only recommend them to tech-savvy folk because you may have to replace components yourself.
I particularly like being able to choose premium components rather than accepting the defaults.
https://bestware.com/en/xmg-evo-15-m24-ultrabook.html
And also
https://laptopwithlinux.com/
To those downvoting - I am talking about the majority of users - not people on El Reg who hate Microsoft.
There is a huge user base out there who simply use M365 because they are familiar with it and in most cases are paying £79 annually for a family subscription. hey cannot be bothered or do not have the understanding to setup other stuff. The cost is lost in the noise.
I’ve only just (re)installed Libreoffice for Mac having a (now) read-only MS Word. And… it’s totally fine, actually easier to find things on the menu bar, and that’s after using ‘ribbon’ UI for years.
And, no subscription, no telemetry, no annoying MS pop ups. It’s totally fine - and that’s just great!
At this point, I don't think even the fires of Mordor can properly kill the unhelpful, unwanted, unloved copilot
I'm wondering about the fires of Brussels instead. No, not roast sprouts, but Net Zero.
So I recently got a 'smart' meter to test the theory that it would save me money. This, of course turned out to be a lie.. Sort of. I also had to build a couple of PCs over Xmas and now have the 'smart' meter sitting on the desk with my own PC. Then I amused my self attempting to de-cruft my copy of Win11 to see what difference that made to the power load. Getting rid of garbage like Copilot, MyPhone, Xbox and all the other stuff I don't need or want. Which reduced the basic power drain by around 50-75W.
It's always amazed me just how badly behaved and unoptimised Windows actually is for something claiming to be an OS. Things like hitting the close button not actually closing apps, but just shunting them to background where they still consume resources and energy. Or why it periodically spins up the DVD drive, even though the same DVD's been there for over a week. But MS simply must scan it for.. reasons.
Then there's more obvious stuff. Like yes, my PC runs Crysis, and when it does with the graphics cranked up, it'll go over 500W. But then other oddities, like so does ARA: History Untold, which is a Civ-alike and wasn't expecting to be so power hungry. Especially when good'ol Factorio is handling 4 factories spread across 4 planets, with many cthulhu-belts, bots and biters zooming around. So whether that means Factorio is just much better optimised than ARA.
But many articles written about AI datacentre power drain, fewer about the power drain thanks to unwanted feature creep across millions of Win11 PCs in Europe. Regulators might be able to do something about that, especially when Win11's power settings has an 'Energy recommendaations' section that doesn't give the option to create a bare-bones OS with all the power hungry garbage turned off until needed.
We took out a couple of subscriptions to Copilot for testing purposes - they have not been renewed!
If you could have it in Word as and when you wanted it I could see some possible benefits, although I'm not convinced that overall it would save any time I did find it useful once or twice for giving a starting outline to a document, however to have it take up a significant part of the screen all the time and interfere with general work was just annoying.
I'm a bit pi**ed off about this. My kids have to use Word to do school homework. I don't know if it's just the desktop version or the web version as well (my kids have to use the web version to prepare homework submissions), but I really don't want Word offering to do their homework for them.
As much as I love LLMs/AI (and my kids' school encourages the use of AI as a learning tool), I do need my kids to be required to use their own brains.
:(
I was going to post the same thing
MS really do live in a parallel universe. People want to switch this crap off? REALLY? Are you sure? Well if they must, I suppose…
It just proves what we knew already - they really don’t take a blind bit of notice to their user’s comments. If they did then we wouldn’t see quotes like this
This post has been deleted by its author
"Air?" Something more excretory I should think.
"The most interesting piece of feedback we learned is that there are times where our users want to turn off Copilot."
I suspect the chap was being a tad modest... "the most interesting piece of feedback" was likely what the users would like to do with copilot to disable the blight.
A previous comment "shit on a stick" is clue I imagine.
"Do you change your car when the old one runs out of fuel?"
The problem is that Microsoft Office is so integrated with Windows that it's like having to change the engine oil every time you run out of fuel, because the fuel tank and oil sump are the same part and every Tuesday an update that you never asked for causes the fuel filler flap to be welded shut again.
I just made the switch last month. I haven't needed to open Libre yet but have used it in the past. It was not quite as polished as Word was then, but since then Word's polish has been stripped off by a sand blaster after being soaked in chemicals. If Libre is at least as good as it was 20 years ago, it'll be way better than today's Word which I must use on the job.
You can install it as a dual boot just in case it doesn't work out for you.
> Press Alt + I
I see what you did there! High-five to the marketing team for coming-up with that: I hope you awarded yourselves Friday off for being so awesome!
Could I also suggest adding "Alt + R" for removing it? Even better would be Alt-R bringing a remove feature option for all of the items you've added over the years. Advertising in the task bar would be a good first candidate.
Blasted Generative AI. Worse than useless. We asked it to generate a picture of a pole-dancing Donald Trump having dollar bills slipped into his thong by MAGA-hat wearing men.
It refused. Guard rails or some safeguards or whatever. These tech companies have spent billions on this stuff and it refuses to co-operate. We want to mock!
Wednesday I saw that "what's that ai.exe running here? From the office installation folder? Oh no..." on my work Laptop.
I've already added a few Applocker rules to block various MS-things from running, works quite well. But I did not have the time yet to test on that one, how much office will complain or fail.
If you want to play with Applocker: Let it add the default allow rules before you activate "enforce". And then block. Block overrides allow, but if the default allow rules are missing everything you try to start gets blocked. Your OS is done for if you are not lucky to have a powershell with admin rights open and your browser still running to find out how to recover from that. Guess how I know. (Yes, there are other way to revert that :D, which require reboot and/or boot from external drive).
Apart from the obvious annoyance at having something you don't want, the response Microsoft gave that they will be introducing a feature to turn off the bloody thing is TYPICAL. It is exactly how that shitshow of a company do things: Introduce something half-baked with the most obvious features missing. They do this with just about every product at the moment. Never mind the monopolistic way of waving their massive penis around acting like their in charge of our computers, what about some oversight into the quality of the 'apps' they peddle?
Our users (customers) are sick and tired of these seemingly never-ending changes invading our working lives. It's frustrating enough when you're doing something for yourself, but when you're trying to run a business and suddenly there's a new thing, it's a total waste of time. Microsoft pays lip service to productivity gains that their software gives you, and what little there is is eroded by having to learn about new changes every other month.
Come back clippy, all is... no actually it isn't.
The one good thing about 365 Copilot is semi-automated knowledge management. It knows how to find that document you wrote 3 years ago thats buried somewhere on Sharepoint and copy it forward and update it as a draft for your new use case.
Thats really quite powerful - and utterly irrelevant to the average home use as for some reason OneDrive on Personal accounts isn't integrated in the MS Graph API that does all the hard work for the AI in the same way Sharepoint is on Enterprise accounts.
In summary - 365 Copilot without Sharepoint is pants....
This is the ultimate information steal operation yet. Opt-in everybody to have their data sent to an opaque "AI" to spew bullshit at the users and copy"learn" from everything the user uploads, types and otherwise does.
It is any and all TLA agency's wet dream to be part of that game!
So I've just noticed that my Family MS359 subscription just went up from GBP 80 to GBP 110 because MS now want to claw back investment on a tool nobody wants. And in fact if you want to know how to write documents and slide decks, effing learn because you'll get zero respect in an office enviroment for relying on AI.
Fortunately I followed the advice to cancel the subscription and it went oh don't go, have this cheaper one instead which is what you already had.
So once again, they increase the price, then change the contents of your current subscription.
You're now opted into something you didn't want and didn't want to pay for and, it's you're fault for not noticing there will now be a classic version without the ai garbage and exactly what you originally subscribed to.
Ohh M$ loves that bottom line, having to find a way to pay for it all.
Infinitely. Apparently.
I was complaining about some other MS shitware the other day at work (can’t remember which particular pile of steaming turd was the subject of my wrath) and a colleague of mine gave me a withering look and said something doing the lines of “oh it’s not that bad…”
The thing is, it IS that bad. It’s just that there are STILL many many people who think this kind of shit is “normal” and “acceptable”. Someone else a few weeks ago even pointed out to me that “Windows is good”. What can you do with that? Compared to what? An actual turd? Could you tell the difference?
There's that concept that was brought up around the time of the Twitter move called the trust thermocline, where the drop in customers happened not gradually, but suddenly, often irreversibly and without warning, or perhaps, insufficient warning.
Now, granted, with Microsoft there's plenty of structural advantage it can be leverage to slow that defection, but it does point out a way it's decline will occur — slowly, and then suddenly and without warning.
At the moment in Office 365 Word its File - (More, if needed) - Options - Copilot. Untick Enable Copilot.
To get the Copilot icon out of the Home ribbon, right-click on the ribbon, select Customise the Ribbon and remove the section containing Copilot (you can't remove it individually).
Until it's re-enabled by an update.
It appeared on my PC and I don't even have Orifice 365 installed, I just randomly noticed the logo on the start menu. Henceforth Patch Tuesday shall be known as Copilot Uninstall Tuesday.
Now, where did I put my Linux migration plan...
If you have a family Office 365 subscription in the UK Microsoft will charge you an extra £25 pa for their unwanted AI.
To prevent this you need to go to your accounts - subscription page and choose to end recurring billing. You will then get an option to renew with a classic subscription without AI at the current amount (£80). (This only becomes visible once MS have dumped copilot on your PC.) Microsoft will put through a £0.00 credit card transaction to verify this then actually bill you at your next renewal date.
More help possibly at:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/account-billing/turn-recurring-billing-on-or-off-for-a-microsoft-subscription-66f40aee-2317-f74b-40f9-2be7e92f0167
For the rare occasions I need to use a word processor it's Libre Office but for tortuous and ultimately futile reasons I also have legitimate Office 2016 installation media and keys, so I am wondering whether it could run under Wine (specifically Codeweavers Crossover.)
I imagine running Windows applications under Wine on Unix/Linux platforms might evade MS AI crap completely and the dreaded monthly Tuesday (inexplicably the blighted autocorrect on my tablet corrected to Turday - if AI develops a sense of humour I shall be worried.)
Fyi, I just contacted Microsoft support about switching to a Personal Classic subscription, as the article says is possible. I was told that it's not possible to switch right now, but that 30 days before my subscription renewal, I'll be sent an email informing me of the change, and given the option of agreeing to the new price or switching at that point. At the moment, it's not possible to switch, or opt out of the copilot features at the subscription level.
Based on advice from other users, it is possible to turn off the copilot features temporarily at the level of the account or Word (there are some relatively easy-to-find boxes in settings).
Shut up and listen, dont argue, you're lucky I give you feedback. I am complaining.
* I didnt ask for this
* You seem kind of desperate
* This isnt a convenience, or an upgrade, at all. You are uploading all my content. It doesnt add any value.
* You are not good at being me. Instead you want me to be you.
* If you had 100% of the data in the world, you would still face the same hurdles. My data is not going to fix your implementation problems. Do your investors really buy that it will?
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