Posts by PCScreenOnly

LG monitors are using Windows 11 feature to serve adware

Logi Download Assistant

Also auto installs which is annoying as for me it serves no purpose.

the unifying software is useful once in a blue moon but that is a manual install

Microsoft cancels Patch Tuesday for some Dell users over surprise shutdowns, overheating devices

Re: Yup

Maybe pop the case off, get the cooking system out and put decent thermal paste on and give the fans good air blast

Re: Lucky here...

Cost is bonkers cheap

Owncloud is a bit of a pain on my Synology nas too

Re: Not a Dell

Recently built 3x identical (new to me) laptops.. One of them would not take a patch last month, so tried this months patches and after hours it fails.

The old reset of Windows Update does nothing. I thought it maybe the efi partition (these all have 200MB, so thought about increasing to 500MB - that ain't fun)

In the end a Recovery patch / repair seems to have worked, but that has been running ALL afternoon and only rebooted about 30 mins ago.

Re: Lucky here...

Why do backups ?

Do not trust the cloud - its not yours

I use OneDrive for me, the misses and her mum - mainly for auto backup of phone pictures - of which they take lots and is generally, hassle free

All the devices we have Onedrive installed, it is configured to download all files to the local device so no matter what MS do I still have local copies (Ok. more a problem now with prices going through the roof, a 2TB NVME is now 4x the cost 18 months ago)

I have a NAS that can also download.the different OneDrive accounts

Microsoft emails Windows 10 holdouts: Fine, keep your old PC another year

Re: Family IT support...

I upgraded my t460 to W11 recently as it has a nice 4tb SSD which is great for our OneDrive backups and a bit of resilio sync for public docs and music (which uses over half of its capacity)

Rufus came to the rescue

Only did it because it has not updated W10 for a while and as the disk is not nvme I could not move to another device

HS2's latest reset ditches autonomous train tech to get project back on track

Fiasco

Just when your think it can't get any bigger, POP, out comes another

How the AI bubble could pop and take down the global economy, according to the BIS

Ford

Already got rid of their QC AI for humans

Microsoft tells Windows users to get ready for 26H2 – unless they're on 26H1

And the damn service

That eats processor and ram for no reason ?

Britain plots digital bedtime after kicking under-16s off social media

Reeally....

VPN to hide location - boom, gone

Kids often know more about the devices than parents and often have to fix, so know their phone details - easy to change account to be "I am over 16"

Kids just lie on creation.

Now where will this all go horrible wrong ?

Blockbuster new Raspberry Pi project turns any screen into old-school VCR

Re: "If you don’t happen to have an old CRT TV"

The MiL has a 32" wide screen in her spare room..... hardly used. She says the same about some old Dell desktop with 15" TFT. I think it is a PII maybe PIII.

wont throw them away as they maybe useful (I am glad about the CRT staying put., It is a huge old bugger and she is on the 2nd floor with no lifts)

NHS prescribes half a million Copilot licenses for its paperwork headache

Worring times

I recall a thread on here about Google Summariser and an example - besides the summary being longer than the original, a comment from a someone in the medical world indicated that the summarised version was dangerous in various area's due to what it had done.

Worried that coPilot will replicate that on someones health record and the consequences will be a little worse than a comment

Home Office ditches legacy asylum database, keeps the spreadsheets

Re: "some Home Office staff continue to maintain their own spreadsheets alongside official systems"

Years ago, I managed to convince users at a company that for some of their data, creating and using Access databases was far easier and more useful. They bought into it. At the time they were stored on a network and they could call a "Scheduler" that would perform the various Access utils on their DB's overnight and at the weekend. Worked well. Once we had a decent SQL server in and running, all were moved upto that and the benefits.

Never understand why IT bods of yesteryear never tried that approach more often.

Another company a guy in one department got so into Access he created an Asset tool - way ahead of the time. The company were happy with what he was doing, but nothing else (they were trying to sell our IT skill to other businesses in our industry as we were, at the time, pretty good). He left and I know he did well and sold it off. All on the back of a simple DB instead of an Excel sheet

Russian oligarch's financial network crashed thanks to a crank and a cleaner

BTDTGTTS

Or the culture where everyone says "It wasn't me". So you resolve the issue, find out what actually happened so that you can try to stop it from happening again, and at the same time find THE "It wasn't me" and point out "Yes it was you, and if you said earlier we could have resolved this in far less time"

HP investigating BIOS updates that leave premium laptop users in boot loop limbo

Do they if via WU ?

I know my lenovos do via their system update, but not sure about the WU - not that I risk any update without being plugged in

Plex appeal fades as Lifetime Pass jumps to $750

Too many

Convert all your old DVD's and store in a single server / NAS and move all the DVD's to the loft or storage.

Access from anywhere, being at home, away for work etc.

Plenty of reasons for me to use Plex, but I only stream my own items.

That said, because of how I use it I hate the way it is moving to streaming. I have those already, just serve me MY stuff

Backup script ingested an accidental asterisk and deleted everything

Clustefuck

Had that at a company many years ago, A contractor was in and wrote a quick CMD routine to do some work on some cluster nodes. I had no idea and even less idea why the guy who looked after the clusters had spent the last few weekends in fixing them until I get asked to have a look at a script that is a bit suspect. On initial checking I see nothing obviously wrong. It is just tidying up the folders it was meant to do.

I them take the script and run via in step mode and yup, all good until the last line. It asks me an unexpected question so I stop. I had another look and there was an extra space at the end of the line that made the command want to delete the whole drive - which is what it had done for the last few weekends.

The command runs nicely without quotes around the folders, but did not make this extra space visible and the ramifications it held

To gain root access at this company, all an intruder had to do was ask nicely

Re: common sense needed

I ask them questions which they should have immediate access to. Then they say "I cannot tell you that she to gdpr...". I point out I am the dats object so tell me now

HP stuffed a PC into a keyboard. We took it for a spin

Acer /asus

Been using their usb displays for years as secondary to the laptop when visiting clients or working away from my home serup

Custom PC worked in the lab, failed on site – and so did the angry client

Re: "They were quick shocked, and offended, to discover that web hosting didn't include ISP services

Think we are all the same. I also get moaned at why sites don't work, why is this not working - as if I know (We work in IT so therefore must know everything about any kind of IT)

I love it when her banking app does silly things. She does the usual but at least I can say "I don't work for xxxx you do, so ask someone at work". worryingly, she seems to be the most IT literate at her branch and is her mums IT guru :(

Re: "and a ping to home worked... but nothing outside the box itself was reachable."

I find that so many have to be broken to get the damn things out of the port. Cheap badly made ends or issues with the ports ?

I have some spare ends here and a switch that I can guarantee will be an absolute bugger to get a cable out of and more often or not has meant the clip snaps.

Some of the nicely moulded ones where that is that mould over the clip, they are the spawn of the devil

That old phone in the kitchen drawer could save an industry

Re: Market for devices past firmware EOL date?

But I bet the banking apps all work quiet happily, regardless of the risks

Watch out UK taxpayers: 28,000 HMRC staffers just got an AI copilot

AI and client scamming

OK, seeing that "john doe" is claiming for these, that and the other benefits while claiming to be unable to move etc, then a few snaps on whatever social showing "john doe" skiing, paragliding, etc - fine and I can see it is useful, but other info... leave me alone. As the article says you can find conflicting information on various subjects or policies on their own sites.

BOFH: Arrr, I smell piracy ... and it's comin' from a machine with executive privileges

Torrent backups / replication

I use Resilo Sync which is torrent based. Surprisingly, never had anyone complain when I have taken my laptop to a client and logged onto their guest network. Once site I was in almost every day for 18months and not a thing (we had a guest wifi account which had to have a valid email address and a valid internal sponser address [my own client provided account sufficed as the sponsor], so a double check that my laptop torrenting was me !)

Re: I think most people who torrent use

Ii thought that once when a couple of us from the UK went to a European site to do a data centre migration while they were closed for summer.

We saw some data traffic via the firealls when everyone should have gone home. We waited and it was still going. Said IT boss of the site went around and cofirmed only us 3 were there.

We traced the taffic, go the IP, accessed the machine with our creds and saw a "torrents" folder. Happy days, portable HDD now being removed from the bag in preperation.

Looked at the users folder and said the user was the IT bosses deputy with a huge HDD for those days.

So, we sorted the machine, went into the folder to "gather evidence" for later viewing....... lets just say the names of the folders stopped us dead in our tracks !

Said IT deputy kept their job, but I wouild love to have been a fly on the wall for that meeting.

'Invisible mouse' made a mess of PC rebuild

I switched to Logi ones year ago when I had so much kit and other kit appearing on my desk that any kind of space was an issue.

I had a KVM which helped, but the fact a trackman and obviously a keyboard can use used anywhere, anyhow just suited.

Never gone back even though I no longer have that issue - though at times if I need to use my left hand to drive the mouse for whatever, that is a problem (spare standard mouse out for those occasions)

Waymo's self-driving cars face their toughest test yet: London

Re: Video recording needed

Must depend on what time and where

Travel in from SW into central london during riush hour and you will see it at nearly every set of lights - really really bad around elephant and castle, kennington, london bridge

Break, no fix: Apple and Samsung make repairs hard

Keyboard swap = 96 screws

Teach me to get a T14s and not a T14

Now found the former is 96 screws according to the vids, whereas the T14 is 4 from memory

Ex-Microsoft engineer believes Azure problems stem from talent exodus

Re: Talent exodus?

Until DOS 6.0, MS-DOS = PC-DOS

Welsh government used Copilot for review to justify closing organization

<cough>

"The use of Copilot during the review of Industry Wales was limited to producing full, accurate and unbiased transcripts of interviews, analyzing and grouping comments into common themes,"

Unbiased ? Did it know what you were thinking or asking it for, if it did then you know it is already biased into that idea.

Transport for London says 2024 breach affected 7M customers, not 5,000

Make 'em pay

If you drive your car and are about to get into the lane after a bus lane has finished and your rear left wheel touches that fat bus lane line - fine - no getting off

you go to a box junction, when at the time you start you can get your car across and then another on the wrong lane races in and cuts in front leaving you in the box junction - fine. And even if you have the dashcam footage to show that - Fine.

Let them have some of their own medicine

One vendor doesn't mind high RAM prices: VMware

Really

Windows does paging and while most of us have decent amount of RAM these days and reduce paging, I can see that with so many NVME it can become useful

However, a 2TB NVME ssd I got just over a year ago is now 4x its cost

Memory scalpers hunt scarce DRAM with bot blitz

Re: damage done already

Same with some NVME drives. currently 8x since I last bought them around 1yr ago

Re: OK they are bastards, but

They often begin with a C

OK they are bastards, but

"Fraudsters will combine various tooling and commodities to perform fraud at scale, but it's not always obvious what they are using, or for which purpose," said Jérôme Segura, VP of threat research at DataDome, in an email to The Register.

I do not see how they are fraudsters. Bastards - yes, but they are seeing an area and exploiting. Not fraud

If they got some dodgy 1GB RAM and fudged it to say it was a 16GB stick - fair enough, but using a tool to buy low so you can sell high,

Hardly anybody bought Samsung's last smartphones for AI. It hopes this year's models change that

Re: No thanks

Even more so if you have a shared calendar and who you share the calendar with still has not quite got to grips with putting the meeting in at the right time.

Forget how many meetings I get a stupid o'clock (2am) with a title like "Night with the girls - 19:30 at AB1"

Customer feedback

Yeah, we ignore it

Hardly anyone wants AI

They do want

Better battery life

Better camera

maybe microSD slot

Easy ways to disable / remove bloat

Recycling biz reckons AI features are destroying smartphone resale values

Re: "destroying smartphone resale values"

For me the main driver of a new phone is the camera and that it has a microsd slot

Most camera's have not improved over the years. I only got the phone i have now is down to the S9 Edge and the green screen issue and not being able to trust it on a holiday

Re: "destroying smartphone resale values"

Pity no Samsung has a memory slot.

useful for music

Re: "destroying smartphone resale values"

Hopefully via ADB you can disable the crap AI

Used to do that to Bixby and so on

Hotel's rotary switchboard so retro it predates the concept of crashing

There are 2 worse hotels in lisbon

It is #21 or 23 !

Capita taps Microsoft Copilot to dig it out from UK pensions backlog

Lets see

I send in a document saying I have a £5m pension pot and work on that, will Clippy decide I do and update things to say that, then some twat in Crapita goes and amends my records for that ?

better still, do the usual ghosting that only clippy can see

DVSA seeks £95K digital chief to steer test booking system out of the ditch

Proud !

from Becky Thomas, who is retiring. "I'm incredibly proud of what we've achieved together as an agency,"

Lets see, you provide an app that lets people learn the answers to just those few questions which is enough for them to pass the practical, but ensures they do not know the Highway Code (bit like the muppet in "The Apprentice" who besides having a maths degree was struggling with basic maths)

A system where any tom, dick or harry can book driving test slots and then sell them on. even a couple of basic questions could elimnate a lot of that

I guess proud is only when you compare to other government projects... at least this is not billions over budget, late and crap.... just crap

If Microsoft made a car... what would it be?

Re: It's a fleet, not one car

Escort RS Turbo by the sounds of it

Re: It's a fleet, not one car

Yup, I had the 2.0efi Montego and that could trash the Escort 1.6 turbo's and a golf gti around the roads of Cobham/weybrdige/Byfleet

Microsoft dials up the nagging in Windows, calls it security

Re: Crawl

Not spending £10k on a machine with that much RAM

Brussels eyes crowbar for Meta's WhatsApp AI lockout

Re: What'sCrapp is the problem

With me he may get FPL tips

SpaceX back to Falcon 9 launches as Musk blathers about Moon city

Didn't he just put all his eggs into a different basket

The basket case idea of data centres in orbit ?

Azure power hiccup gives Windows admins a rare break from updates

SLA/OLA

Hope they have a good set of those.

I mean, its cloud, never goes down, roll over to another Data centre blah blah and whatever other crap the marketing droids come up with

Amazon can't build AI capacity fast enough, throws another $200B at the problem

Aws, F1, overtake

Will this improve the aws ai predictor in F1

Always made me laugh at how bad it is