Posts by Uncle William

Deutsche Bahn train hits 405 km/h without falling to bits

You may not have a National Express cancelled to London but last month our National Express to Heathrow was cancelled with 20 mins warning. It's not like there wasn't a flight to catch or anything important <sarcasm emojii> Fortunately the 14yr old Ford Focus made a timely journey.

Microsoft slows Windows 11 24H2 Patch Tuesday due to a 'compatibility issue'

I set my updates to defer by 5 days and then wait to see if there are any snafus like this.

The 'End of 10' is nigh, but don't bury your PC just yet

This whole thread exemplifies why this year will also not be the year of Linux despite Microsoft's best endeavours to make it so.

The average Windows user, you know, the one who barely knows what an OS is, will have no understanding of the discussion taking place. I can follow some of it despite having run a couple of flavours of Linux (Mint, Kubuntu) and found software missing that I needed.

I too am a grandad, grown up grandkids who wouldn't know where to start and didn't even know there were alternatives to Microsoft and Apple.

Unless businesses strongly adopt Linux, and until Linux distros stop creating a version for every man and his dog, and professional software follows suite, then Linux will remain the install prerogative of nerds even if you have succeeded in getting your grandmother to use it for browsing and emails.

Having been in or around IT from ticker tape days I despair at the mess it has got itself into both from a home user and enterprise point of view.

Admins can give thanks this November for dollops of Microsoft patches

Re: Unexpected addition of Copilot

I didn't notice when Copilot appeared but I think it was weeks ago for me. But yesterday my Pinned items in File Explorer changed to folders that I did not want pinned and my WiFi no longer connects automatically every time regardless of being told to. But eh - my Win10 Pro desktop is allowing me to post this - for the time being.

Must remember to do a system backup before I Resume the "suspended for 7 days" updates.

Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing

CD upsidedown! Might have only taken me 10s to realise the backup to floppy failed because the PC was upsidedown but as it was it was done over the phone. Turned out they'd had an office move and the desktop computer had been replaced the wrong way round.

You'd have thought the operator might have noted the model number was also upsidedown after 2 years of use.

Sysadmin shock as Windows Server 2025 installs itself after update labeling error

It has just occured to me that there may well be some crossover in the quality assurance departments between Microsoft and Boeing..

50 years ago, CP/M started the microcomputer revolution

Re: CP/M-80 Interoperates With MS-DOS

Ref "MediaMaster": And when all else failed transferring to another format there was software such as BSTAM(?) and an RS232 cable. Still got a break out box to quickly match the pin-out settings.

Re: CP/M Gets AC From Idiot To Mostly Competent!!!!

The Osborne and dBaseII were the start of a business for me. Program and Constants file on Drive A, data on Drive B. Shortly afterwards we made it sort of work on MP/M (which has been mentioned in these responses). A bit of a dog's breakfast especially with the hardware then available. The system was for a newspaper group c1985 and was quickly re-written in RM-Cobol which on NCR's CP/Net Modus system provided proper record locking and the business took off. CP/M had Level 0 to 9 (?). Anything in Level 0 was available to all other levels but the other levels were private to eachother so we could have different routines, utilities, software in different levels.

I've still got the Osborne though it's not been fired up for year or ten.