The next departure leaves in... have you thought about a Microsoft 365 subscription? You can't beat that factory-fresh smell except, it appears, when waiting for both a bus and somebody to finish setting up Windows 10 on a rainy Scottish evening. Today's display in dismay was spotted by a Register reader on an essential journey to Glasgow's Braehead shopping centre. It is usually to be found showing bus times …
Yeap, we've seen it a lot on updates when machines don't have an MS account linked to them.
So any machine running on a local account - "We see you aren't linked to an ms account, if you don't want to do this we won't include a 'no' option, just an 'ask me later' option"
I think the latest Sequential Art cartoon sums up this process very nicely.
https://www.collectedcurios.com/sequentialart.php?s=1183
This one is SFW, but some of the site's other content is probably NSFW.
I followed the certified M$ instructions on how to get rid of that setup screen.....didn't work (as expected)
And of course it blocks everything!
More fuel for my 'Windows is only for Games' bonfire! If Linux played all my games I wouldn't bother with Windows at all due to stuff like this
So, as someone (partly) in charge of a fleet of public-facing machines that currently don't run W10 but are being required to 'upgrade' sometime soon, how do I avoid this? It seems as if only the LTS version of Enterprise can be upgrade-free, which presumably has implications for our licence fees?
Last thing we need is to come in on a Saturday morning to find half our machines have upgraded overnight and need some kind of 'user input' before getting down to their (very simple) day jobs.
M.
Not the solution to everything, but have you tried running your app under Wine on a linux box? I've had some good success over the past few months moving some legacy windows only packages onto embedded linux platforms (pi/raspbian, and Intel nuc's with Mint20), and I by no means regards myself as any sort of expert or penguinista. If the range of functionality of your app is fairly limited it may well work out of the box. I've been impressed by how well it works. Linux platforms have the great advantage that you can just clone the hdd to install in new machines for rollout without going through the pain of registration/activation/licences, etc.
Windows 10 and MS's current attitude is likely to be the downfall of MS in many areas, IMHO, other than conventional desktop/office application, and even there many alternative are readily feasible for much less stress.
Sorry, late. Yes we did try that. Some of the bespoke applications rely on bespoke device drivers for things such as USB dongle "keys" for copy protection and wouldn't even work natively under Windows 7, nor even a Windows XP VM under Windows 7. Under Wine, other applications did work, but with enough "foibles" to be irritating. I need to investigate central administration of Linux clients before recommending Wine as a solution where it does work and I'm no expert either, just a slightly technical "user".
The one thing I would really like to get working properly under Wine is Xara. The basics work, but the thing is extremely laggy (slower under Wine on my Ryzen 7 than it was under Windows 7 on my A10) and out-of-kilter; that is, menus and in particular drag-handles aren't active where you expect them to be. Quite a lot of other minor display issues (wrong colour menu text, things spilling off the toolbar, that sort of thing) mean that I can only run it in a Windows 10 VM on Linux, which sorts most of the display issues out, but does nothing for the speed.
M.
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