Posts by Kiwi

Pause Patch Tuesday downloads, buggy code can kill Outlook

Re: It may just be me--(methinks it is...)

Sorry for the late response - missed this..

However...

Kiwi, sorry, but I think you are generalizing terribly. I personally know of no one whose life has been destroyed by Windows, any version, any time. I guess it could somehow happen (though I've no idea how) but I've never heard of such a thing.

We had a customer who had the update the original article was about hit his work machines. All of them. So for the time they were down (and sadly it took me some time to find the cause since he didn't know which update it was and of course Office updates wouldn't make a machine not boot!) he could not access his data (some special portal software using login data stored only on his work machines, at that time he did not have other backups ("I mean, I have it all on my two office machines and my laptop. Even if the office burnt down I thought I would still be able to get my stuff" - now he has another backup).

He could not work. Therefore he could not earn. Not all of us earn so much that if we are unable to work for a week (not counting the downtime clearing the backlog, and flow-on lost opportunities) we can happily afford to pay the bills and so on. I mean no business and no personal income for a week, still with all the overheads.

I've also seen people who have lost data, and businesses where machines have been totally hosed. Thankfully I am able to fix "clicking" HDD's most of the time.. We had one machine where the drive ceased shortly after first starting 10 (although I have my doubts about that - surely he dropped or spilt or... No signs of damage mind you, machine looks really well cared for...). People have lost data, been taken offline because this MS cloud OS can't handle simple and common network hardware - fracken idjits...

Many people around the world are on borderline earnings. They don't have anything spare to save. Same for most businesses.. A small hiccup can be disaster (yes yes, we should all work harder and save better and bullshitbullshitbullshit - most can't).

MS has created many small disasters. What to you might be "so what, you had no access to your data for a week" to another might be a life-changing job opportunity, or even just an extra job that can put food on their tables for an extra week. It can be even just little unimportant things - a few extra hours at the office stressing over a fucked system when you should be at your son's recital or your daughter's game..

Nothing important.. Maybe no one die.. But a hell of a lot of extra stress and misery, people loosing business opportunities and time with loved ones.. All so they can sell people's private data.

(and to think I normally defend MS update screwups - I understand with the diversity of systems it's pretty hard to cover all possibilities)

Re: It may just be me--(methinks it is...)

Soo... People having lives messed up, massively increased costs (not everyone can get cheap internet), machines inoperative and lost productivity and therefore lost earnings (for many not just lost profits but also the ability to feed their families)..

And you can only say 'your "argument" is what is sad'?

MS's recent behaviour has added a lot of extra pain to the world (MS could've made W10 something you only got if you paid them money instead of quite literally forcing it on people who didn't want it, in many cases couldn't afford the data and in many other cases), and for what?

Many people think it's "just fine" to rape people, destroy lives and so on. That will never make it right even if a number of sickos like it.

There can be no justification for this. MS need to be sued beyond oblivion.

Definitely a windoze problem.

Fuck you MS. Fuck you and all your scummy retarded bullshit. Hate-fuck your arseholes to death.

We have spent some time trying to fix a customer's machine which would get to the point you would see the login screen, then have the screen just start flashing. No safe mode or anything, no way in, no restore (not sure if that's customer stupidity or something else).

Finally found the link at https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/3seu7e/flashing_login_screen_windows_7/t3_3seu7e today after much hunting, and managed to get it to work (replacing the "amd64" with "x86" since it's a 32bit machine).

This has affected their work machines - all of them (small office with no managed IT) but most of them were able to be brought back with restore and turning off updates. For some reason this machine (I note also has the GWX malware on it) has lost all restore points but I will at least try to fix that.

There's work to be done still so I will be late home, but at least the machine is on the way.

How the hell can an update to "fix fonts" cause a machine to become un-bootable? (I would say "unstartable" but startup repair only handles stuff up to the point of the login screen!) And yes, it was fixed by removing 3097877.

MS, your quality control people need dealing with. I suggest you instruct them to line up against the wall over there and handcuff their wrists to their ankles. There's a few people here who want to have some fun with them.

Re: Update stops users from logging in to Windows 7

I cannot help but smile (and shake my head) at those (shills?) who regularly spout some nonsense about arcane commands that must be typed in linux in getting almost anything to work.

Is it just me or.... Have those shills been rather thin on the ground since 10 came out?

(I must archive that line so I can bring it out when I next come across them... If I next come across them, maybe there's some things you can't even pay shills to support!)

Re: 100% CPU

Well I know Linux has /several/ splendid package management systems they could copy,

Never ceases to amaze me.. A W7 machine often updated (but not necessarily weekly), can take over an hour to download the updates, 40+ minutes to shut down (and whatever happened to being able to restart WITHOUT having updates get processed - whoever thinks "Machine's running a bit slow and my deadline is close.. I'll restart it and see if that, plus an hour's wait, fixes it..."), another 40+ minutes and 2-3 reboots to restart (as I dual boot and have Linux start by default, I either have to be there to catch it or have to reboot again)...

I can take a relatively old (eg early last year or even a LTS version from a few years back) Linux disk, install it offline (so it doesn't get a chance to do updates - or I can leave it online and let it get many of them as it goes), restart and connect the machine, then start the update process. Finding updates takes seconds. Yes, seconds to check for updates. Let it run in the background.. Maybe notice a performance hit (from high disk activity) when it gets to the the actual job of installing them after downloading. At the end, if I want, I restart the machine, if any updates require it (only kernel ones I believe, ICBW(APA)). When I restart my machine, all the updates are already in place. There is no need of another reboot, and NOT ONE SECOND spent on "configuring updates". It's all done by the time the machine is shut down.

FFS MS, it's 2015. Bout time you updated your updates process isn't it? Get it up to something more like what the rest of the world uses instead of that steaming pile of crapware you have?

Still... This sort of shit from you is paying my staff a hefty Christmas bonus this year.. I guess we should thank you!

Re: The tables have turned

But you have reduced the functionality of your PC in doing so....

Would that be the functionality that gave us a W10 laptop, with a USB3 ext HDD attached (Toshiba), and after copying files for over 24 hours still saying "more than a day remaining"?

(The numbers - ~87,000 files totalling a drivebreakingly 9.5GB! - Yes, winslows 10 took 48 FUCKING HOURS TO COPY LESS THAN 10 G OF DATA ON USB 3!)

What's that about functional again?

Re: It may just be me--(methinks it is...)

What is so terrible about that philosophy?

Maybe you need to have a few more experiences of telling someone that the photos of their children or lost loved ones are gone because of a MS screwup.. Or that they have to re-install every bit of software.. Or de-brick their machine, or sort out "dead" network hardware - because windoze 10 can't see a year-old common-as-shit wireless card despite MS's assuranceslies that it has the best driver support of any OS known to man...

A few of these ought to get you singing the "Windows 10 is fucking shit and MS need to die horribly and slowly" tune.

It's shit. Everything about it is shit. It's brain is shit. It's body is shit....

Sneaky Microsoft renamed its data slurper before sticking it back in Windows 10

Re: System32 CompatTel folder also needs removing

Fuck. Thought I was rid of all of this stuff from my w7 machine.

Thank God for Linux - ignores MS "permissions" issues and happily lets you delete any MS spyware you want to (or move it somewhere safe in case killing it kills windoze and I can be bothered resurrecting/reinstalling it - probably not this time)

Thanks TReko, I had missed that.

Re: Ditch your Windows or shut up

It still feels incomplete and awkward.

Funny, I think that each time MS copies, er sorry, invents some feature that's been in Linux for 10 years or more.

And there's still a ton of usability things they've yet to manage - examples are I use multiple task bars (one per monitor), other bars which Cinamon, Mate, Gnome and KDE (at least) let you add easily (so my most used programs are along a bar on the top NOT cluttering up my taskbar space - which sometimes gets pretty valuable!). Even things as simple as being able to scroll a background window by putting the mouse over it and using the scroll wheel.. that's very useful (you're editing text in one window and referring to something in a browser but not wanting to copy/paste - rather than switch to browser, move browser text. switch back to editor you take mouse cursor to browser, scrollwheel to get browser to where you want, and carry on typing without having to click back and forth - old technology for Linux but likely decades away for MS!)

Win 7 I must say is pretty good. 8, 8.1 and 10 are garbage and getting worse. Win10 is hell for people who have visual impairments, and even I (with well above average eyesight for someone on the wrong side of 40) find it hard to look at. And I only have to suffer it for minutes at a time, I'd hate to try and actually work with it.

Reminds me of a kids drawing of boxes really. When they only have one crayon available. And advanced Parkinsons...

MS products simply do not have the usability of most Linux ones - at least those I've tried.. (not considering 3rd party products here - for my purposes Linux ones work better with a couple of game exceptions)

And I have to echo Dr Syntax on Lazarus. Use it for pretty much all my non-web programming now.

Re: Anyone got a VM config guide for isolating Windows? @ Graham Cobb

I will probably decide that I find Outlook sufficiently useful to be willing to pay Microsoft for a licence for it and for the OS to run it on.

I once pissed off a former boss by showing him that Office versions up to 2010 installed quite happily on Wine without any special effort. Put in the disk/mount the ISO/ double click the MSI. Run through the prompts as normal. Done.

Tested on Ubuntu 10.04, Mint 11 and whatever Mint was standard in 2013 (may have been 11, I may've shown it to him twice to piss him off even more by doing it in front of a customer when he was bitching about it)

Re: Why no outrage over Microsoft spying? @RobHib

A Linux boot disk with a once-only utility on board to do just that would solve the problem.

They do. All of them. Usually 3rd or 4th icon on the desktop. They have the added bonus of being a permanent fix for all your registry woes and (nearly) all AV issues.

The name starts with "install".

Re: Great!

Now I'm going to have to learn to love editing config files and piping things to grep.

Actually the last command line I used was¹ :

dism /image:D:\ /remove-package /packagename:Package_for_KB3097877~31bf3856ad364e35~x86~~6.1.1.1 /scratchdir:D:\temp

And it was in Windows, in a recovery environment, to fix a machine where the customer could not log in even in safe mode, because an update (something to do with Orifice and fonts) caused the system to be significantly screwed up.

You can, if you really want to, do Linux with manual edits to config files and use grep and so on. I usually do but then I was using Linux for headless servers long before I started using it for a desktop, so I'm at home with it.

¹not counting the occasional log in to our headless web-facing servers to run basic maintenance.

Re: FTFY @Timmy @Daniel B. Silver

which is a clear sign of corporate shillings.

As is the 2 downvotes you've received at the time of writing this :) Here's a couple to help redress the balance (counting the icon)

@anonymous boring coward

And then they will start releasing updated drivers for Windows 7 that destabilises the system.

I think they're already doing that. We're seeing a number of systems running 7 that with no changes other than updates suddenly become slow and/or unstable. And I do mean suddenly.

No detectable malware (we use several scanners and run a minimum of 2 different offline scans as part of our regular service), no changes to hardware, no new software.

(That's not counting the font update for orifice the other week that made some machines unbootable.....)

Re: FTFY @badvok

It's not a "sign up" for most users.

If you go with the "express" settings during your first run of your machine, all (or at least most) of the slurping stuff is turned on.

Which, BTW, is almost certainly illegal under New Zealand Law. The user is not being given the ability to make an informed consent. And no, expecting the user (generally computer illiterate people who buy a machine at the nearest big box) to know that they need to research this stuff and learn what to turn off does not count.

It has to be "opt in", and to "opt in" requires truly informed consent, not a lack of understanding of what the default settings mean.

MS need to be gone. Badvok, there is nothing to be gained by defending this behaviour. How can someone who has the intelligence to turn a computer on see this as something even close to being OK?

Remember Windows 1.0? It's been 30 years (and you're officially old)

Now this might be a silly question, but which tosser decided that Windows could only be installed on THE ONLY FUCKING DRIVE IN THE MACHINE!!!

I've been able to install XP and 7 on machines with multiple drives before, however I've generally always unplugged the other drives in the system when installing 7 simply to protect my precious data (which could be another OS or just a NTFS partition with music/video/photos on (so I can enjoy my collections in windows or in a real OS).

I've not yet experienced a bad crash from a System Restore. When you think about it, creating the restore point should only be taking a copy of the registry and system files. Aside from adding the restore point details to wherever it keeps them, it should not be making any changes to the system. What the hell is up with essentially backup software making changes to the running system?

I have seen big issues with 7 if you forget which SATA port it's plugged into. That whole lack of drivers thing still plagues even 10 - pretty poor especially when you're talking common AHCI drivers. Which were around for years before the install media was made....

And what's with Linux and I believe OSX having quite functional install media for years (basically a Live system which will let you recover media, use a decent graphical drive manager so you can be sure which partitions to delete for installing on; or indeed which one has the hosed windows system so you maybe can recover data from it).. The install media for most Linux distro's gives you a fully functioning system complete with office suite and browsers and so on (not really needed for the install but if you have something where it takes a really long time for some reason you still have a working machine), which installs these things on your machine for you.. Whereas windows gives you only the basic OS.. After a hugely long time... What's up with that MS? You're still like a decade behind every one else.. Still doing the "took MS 10 years to copy it, and even they they got it wrong" eh?

Oh, and stupidity of stupidity.. Trying to install or "reset" h8... No idea if 10 does this because the only "reset" our customers want with that pile of shit is to put a decent OS back on their machine (thanks MS, Linux install numbers rapidly growing!).. Anyway, trying to reset h8 because it refused to wake up from that stupid enforced hibernation.. So you're resetting it.. You know, basically wiping the disk and restarting... And you get "The drive is locked so you can't install". You can't delete the partition as you need it for the "reset". Thankfully (sometimes) you have the OEM restore partition.

"You cannot delete this partition because the OS you want to obliterate is in hibernation". Stupid.. Stupid to a level only MS can do...

Die please MS. Rid the world of your crap... (But maybe employ those behind pukeaudio and systemd first, take them out with you... :( )

(It's "early" sunday morning.. Damn cat woke me up after a late night Tib3 session.. I apologise if this post makes as much sense as MS source code...)

Re: DESQView - for the win!

DESQView - for the win!

I loved DV! I ran my BBS from it.

IIRC you could only do 4 tasks (or maybe I limited it to that?), but that was plenty. Tasks 1&2 were for the two nodes of the BBS. Task 3 was where I did my messages, any other work, and my own time on the BBS (loved Trade Wars).

I found a beaut little utility that let me "spawn" task 4, so with the aid of some flag files I could shunt mail sorting and maintenance tasks out to #4 (flag files being things like "domail.flg" which meant of course if it existed, the running batch file would call the mail sorting batch when it was finished).

Still got the whole BBS on it's original 2x IDE and 5xSCSI HDD's (total space I think was little over 1G!) disks floating around. Wonder where I can find a machine with enough space to fit it all in.. So I can take it to a VM and bring it back to life... :)

How TV ads silently ping commands to phones: Sneaky SilverPush code reverse-engineered

Make the buggers pay...

So.. Ad company charges client $X per screening. Each time this system picks up an ad being played it will generate a bill..

So do some research, find out how to make the phone report you're watching the ad, and then sit your phone in a room with a random but very frequent repeat of this. Enough people doing that would mean the advertiser will either move elsewhere, or sue the bad guys for false billing. And/or go out of business.

Some other ideas.. If you happen to often be somewhere near where a lot of live TV news broadcasts get done from (like near some government or court buildings), wander over and stand nearby (out of shot) with a small audio transmitter built to create these tones.. A few presses of the button and suddenly Apple are being charged for advertising they didn't use. And they don't hesitate to sue people for things that they didn't do (like for "copying" things that were common decades before apple "invented" it)

Re: Audio frequency response of the human ear.

You would've been listening to what is commonly called a "flyback transformer" (don't know why, but it is a transformer used to get the rather high voltages used in CRT's). Modern TV's don't have them so that could be why you can't hear it. IIRC it ran at about 16kHz

Of course, most people take some hearing loss especially of higher frequencies.. I can't even hear 16k now..

'Shut down the parts of internet used by Islamic State masterminds'

Re: He asked the wrong person...

Maybe El Reg needs a small competition as to which country elects the biggest idiots?

On behalf of New Zealand, and our glorius Prim Minister Mr Shonkey, er I mean John key, I accept the prize for Reg Reader with the Stupidest PM.

(I can also accept awards for having one of the most dangerous PM's (think the UK can beat us), having a potential sex offender for PM (look at his history of grabbing little girls' pony tails), having the most ineffective opposition, having the most laws passed "under urgency" per week - including one to address issues with laws being passed under urgency and removing the public right for input....)

Re: Well that's a good solution

The Bible clearly says pi is three

Actually, it doesn't.

http://www.purplemath.com/modules/bibleval.htm gives a good breakdown of the issue (first result of a search for "bible pi=3" on DDG).

"Solving, we get pi = ⁵⁴⁰/₁₇₂ = ¹³⁵/₄₃ = 3.1395348837..., or about 3.14.

Um... Isn't "3.14" the approximation we all use for pi? Perhaps those Phoenicians were fairly accurate after all.

The Edward Snowden guide to practical privacy

Re: Facebook @ DougS

LinkedIn is creepy.

Trolling through your contacts and sending requests on your behalf when you only gave them access to your contacts is one thing. Being able to send things to people you know when you don't give it permission is another.. That stopped after I a) changed my Gmail password (I run my own email server but use the gmail for a couple of things still) and b) started a policy of not using LI in the same browsing session as I use gmail (cookies always cleared when I close browser, AB+ + NS + no third party cookies etc to help).

I seldom check LI now anyway, just due to my part in a thread discussing their actions. Including that they send emails from people on their behalf without asking..

Oh.. And something to note. LI started suggesting I knew the owner of a 5 star hotel in some luxurious tropical resort. Quite insistent. It wasn't for some months that the guy I worked for then let me know what was going on.. this hotel owner was a close friend of one of our customers, the customer and the owner were arranging a surprise trip for the customer's wife, and the customer was using our computers to hide his email from the wife... The only thing in common was the IP address used, but LI used that to link us.

Which makes sense in some other cases.. There's been a few that creep me out even more.. Like some darling people I know I'd never tell mommy and daddy about... Or the first girl I ever kissed (well, she kissed me...) when we were like 5 or 6. Those people, some I have no online association with and some I haven't contacted for over 30 years - those contacts from LI creep me out no end. Or would do if I looked at it..

Oh, and when we set up our business my partner and I looked at Google, LI and Facebook's T&Cs. LI is very very nasty about what you put on their site (put your company logo on there? Guess who owns the rights to it now!), Google is not as bad but still bad (also perpetual rights to make money from your material).. But Facebook? Their T&Cs I could surprisingly live with!

Your taxes at work: Three hours driving to turn on politician's PC

Re: push/pull Really - there wasn't a cleaner or anyone else in the building...

The glass doors of my building, seen from outside, have "pull" on then -- but also (effectively) "push" in mirror writing; and I can read mirror-writing pretty fast ...

A great great many years ago, when I was still young and probably about as dumb as I am now (maybe more intelligent even - I hadn't started in the cesspit that is IT back then!), I was drving a truck through town with the boss beside me. He gave me directions for a turn. I started the turn and saw "NO ENTRY" clearly on the road, borked, went over a traffic island to avoid going the wrong way into a one-way system. With the boss swearing considerably..

Only after we'd "talked" some (with me telling him I saw a NO ENTRY sign there) did we go back and look. Sure enough, "NO ENTRY". Upside-down from the angle I saw it at.

I instantly regretted teaching myself to read upside down nearly as fast as I could read normally (hey, I wanted to read whatever notes the teacher had about me...). All my brain saw was "NO ENTRY" in big letters... It was a big truck, first time I had driven it on the road, boss in a not-great mood beside me..

Re: Really - there wasn't a cleaner or anyone else in the building...

Hmm, well for the buildings that I can accurately remember right now, I'd say it works nearly every time for houses and no more than 50% (possibly quite less) for other buildings.

I know a number of retail buildings where the doors open outwards. The reasoning was that someone entering the building would have hands relatively empty whereas people going out could be carrying heavy items, so they could push through.

Of course, why they didn't make the doors swing both ways (little more cost, much customer friendly) or go all-out with automatics....

Linus Torvalds targeted by honeytraps, claims Eric S. Raymond

Re: We men screwed up badly in the 20th century

However, the Germans didn't put women in the munitions factories; they relied on slave labour

And what happened to the women (and children) of those "slaves", hmm? Well.. they went and had a nice shower didn't they...

[Doesn't negate your key point though - and most of the population were not Nazis]

How Microsoft will cram Windows 10 even harder down your PC's throat early next year

Re: ... but what about the T&C ?

@ psychonaut

couldnt disgree more. get disk from machine, put in caddy.

Prefer not to open machines without a damned good reason, especially in the case of some laptops (eg Dell) which require removing the m/b to get the HDD out. If we're doing a fan clean or other work then maybe. Prefer to either clone off to USB HDD or to an image on the network.

2) make backup clone of orignal disk on server just in case theyve put something somewhere stupid

Just in case? I'd say nearly 50% of machines either have bad users or bad software that puts stuff elsewhere.

3) get product keys with produkey

While I don't recall produkey by name (I've tried a number of those sort of tools), a lot of things don't give up their keys easily.

And there's a few packages out there that cannot be re-installed, you need to buy a new license (names don't come to mind atm but I think you may find a few MS products and some rather wonderful[spit] accounting packages are like this - upgrade the OS is fine, re-install the software is not allowable and often not do-able)

takes a little longer, but measure twice cut once, so a proper job. the "issues" you refer to are exactly because you do in place upgrades.

What, having the job done cleanly and smoothly with little fuss or problems, the customer retaining the machine that is configured how they want it with their photos, emails, icons etc where they left them?

sorry, but its a cowboy way to do it.

MS seems to disagree [shudder - am I agreeing with them on something?].. Don't forget that for a while you could only do 8.1 in-place, you could not download an ISO, you could not download it once for several machines, it had to be done for the individual machine.. How could I have done a full clean install of 8.1 on a customers machine when you could not get 8.1 separately? 10 is the same in some cases.

I am doing the job my customers want. Most of the time it goes through cleanly and the customer's experience is better because it was done in place. Most of the time it works well. Yes, this is me saying this.. Most of the time OS upgrades with Windows go fairly smoothly without major issue.. Yes, I, confirmed passionate MS hater, say this.

if customer have lost their keys, thats their problem. 90% of the time i can recover them anyway.

Says the guy who was calling us "cowboys" a paragraph earlier. Sorry, we treat our customers better than that. Yes, can often and easily recover them but not always. And a lot of our customers (the majority, strangely), are not really computer literate and don't necessarily understand the need for keeping such things - they brought the computer/software and own it, right?

We sometimes have to tell a customer that something is lost, but..

in place upgrade is asking for trouble, as you have discovered - as haver lots of win 10 customers

Yup, but that's more the fault of the release of W10 than anything else. It seems to have the worst driver support (today had to tell a customer that he could have W10 or bluetooth, but not both for the time being - his year old HP doesn't get bluetooth W10 drivers and the 8.1 drivers aren't compatible). I've done XP-7 in place upgrades (easy to do if you use a Vista disk ;) ), Vista-7 and 8, 7-8 [should be posting anonymous to admit that!], and lots of Linux ones (sometimes covering several years in one jump) with an over 90% success rate. That is a small sample of only a few hundred machines, but it's enough for me.

Many of those that failed would not run the new OS anyway. Incompatible or faulty hardware, missing critical drivers.. Some could be fixed with a small hardware change, some couldn't.

Sometimes they get a completely new (or refurbished) machine with their old stuff in a VM, with as much of it on the new machine as possible.

But I stand by the end result. The machine is clean (always the 2nd stage after cloning), running properly, and everything is as close to what the customer knows and is used to as can possibly be done with a new OS - sometimes includes things like Classic Shell to help.

As I said earlier - a lot of our customers are older and/or largely computer illiterate. Many use computers as a basic communication tool and have little other interest in it or desire to use it. They don't want "new", they want familiar. They want what they know. They don't want change, they want their machine to function in a way they know - faster and more stable, but familiar. A changed interface is often a failure on my part.

Re: 28 times faster than Windows 7?

Now now, be fair... It takes time for it to check what bits of your personal data it hasn't yet sent off to HQ, the NSA etc etc....

I've been advising customers to send the bill to them. I don't know if they would ever pay someone (their EULA basically states that is their code is crap and costs you, well that's your tough luck for running their shitware), but a few million cases of people sending in bills for repairs to them would at least cause them some cost in trying to deal with the mountains of paper.

Always worth a shot. Although .22 to the head is more the sort of shot I would like with W10.. Or some C4 - make sure it's really dead.

Re: Bah!

I'm already trying to source a Linux lappy for my next machine, but amazingly, although there are a shirt-ton of sites, none are selling at the time of writing.

Try https://www.system76.com for one (I have only visited their site once, a few mins ago. I am not affiliated with them nor promote them nor even know if their product is good (looks good), and only found them on http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/three-awesome-linux-laptops-can-buy-right-now after a quick look).

Re: Ah the MS hatred alive and well

(or at least download it that many times)

An interesting metric... I tried installing it several times on a test machine. If they're counting downloads then I have at least a dozen personally, and every single time it failed to install...

I took that as am omen and have since had to fight to keep it off the machine.

Re: Ah the MS hatred alive and well

As another poster pointed out Apple have had their fair share of upgrade pain recently,

That goes with the territory. If you create enough updates you will at some stage have something break. Linux, MS, Apple, whoever. It will happen. The key is handling it gracefully, and having a good way to undo it. And yes, even the best will totally screw up some machines some times. There is to much variety in hardware and software out there.

as for Linux yes its free however we all know the advocates here are charging well for their services (as they are well entitled to) so it’s not FREE really.

In my shop, I charge. For friends or family of other people (ie not directly my friend or family) I charge. For those who are friend/family/cute enough I do the work for free (except hardware usually). Not for 10. If you want an upgrade from 7 or 8 then you will get an upgrade - most likely Mint or Zorin. Otherwise, you can pay someone to do it (and note that you from then on must not come to me for support!)

But note that this applies "equally"¹ to Windows and Linux. Actually I think from now on I might only do free support for Linux. Anything else and you can pay. Thanks actually, that'll probably save me a lot of headaches.

Orderly queue please for the down votes…

I notice that not even the other MS shills could bother to give you an upvote!

¹ Actually unfairly. Seldom do I get support calls for Linux machines, and seldom do I need more than shell access to fix something if it can't be fixed over the phone. Linux users I support have an average age over 65, all love it, although one had some niggles with the changes to the look and feel of Free Cell - quickly overcome by the realisation that it could have more than just 1 undo). I get constant support calls for MS products however, usually malware related, most usually these days that malware is in the form of borked updates.

Re: Devil's advocate

But how does this differ from Google's and Apple's OSes?

With them, you have a choice if and when you download them, and if and when you install them. and if you decide you don't want to download them, you don't get constantly nagged to do so.

Re: NO! It doesn't start faster!!!

"Boot" doesn't equal "ready to do some work".

Ah yes, the old "race to the desktop, crawl to usability" that MS loves so much.

Had a mate who used to harp on about how quick his XP was compared to Ubu 10.04.. I made the race a little more interesting, from power button being pressed (similar BIOS times thankfully) to finishing downloading a specific web page. Test was run more than once to be sure (he was impressed in the sub 10 seconds shut down for Linux, compared to the time XP took (which is nothing compared to 8!)

He found that XP+IE really is no machine for Ubuntu and Firefox.

Re: ... but what about the T&C ?

i mean who would ever do an in place upgrade on an OS?

Me. Every time I do an OS upgrade.

I have a ton of stuff installed that I am way too lazy to re-install.

When it comes to customers, we have things like Office they may no longer have install media or keys for, all sorts of other software they want kept, data inc emails, a hell of a lot of stuff they want working with the new system.

Most people don't want new or different, they want working, and from time to time improvements but still working.

So the normal process is 1) backup the drive at least twice (1 or more clones and a copy of the home folders), 2) run the upgrade.

Most of the time it works beautifully on Linux. Often it works fine on Windows (XP-Vista-7 generally went trouble-free, anything to 8.1 and just about everything > 10 seems to break).

If it doesn't go, revert to clone and see if you can fix things, try again, or talk with the customer about options..

besides, clean-installing windows is such a long and painful process. 1st there's the incredibly long waits with an unusable machine while it does the "expanding files" (which it copied a while before - why not expand as it gets them off the disk, saving at least one lot of file handling??), then the 40+ minute "getting things ready" stage, and various other bits inbetween. Then the hunt for drivers as windows is pretty slack in driver support (and gets worse the more MS tells you how good it is), so maybe a few hours trying to find something..

At least Linux lets you use the machine during the 5-10 minutes installation, and it has good driver support :).

Re: Idiots

and she says "you're not allowed to touch this one"..

Your wife, your life but... I suggest when it all goes to shite and she finds WOW doesn't work on 10 (or 10 does wonderful things like randomly dropping out the network hardware as we're seeing with some customers) you simply remind her that you were not allowed to touch it, and you're just following her wishes.

Fix it at a huge price to.. Should be good for some interesting nights ;)

Re: Enterprise? @ x 7

This decision by Microsoft is going to cause a lot of problems for them

The one that should be the end of MS due to an insurmountable shitload of sueballs is where W10 automatically sends ramdumps to MS :...including any documents you may currently be working on...", and with no way to stop it from what I am aware of (short of physically removing any internet access).

These are doctors surgeries. They may not deal with sensitive commercial data where a few billion of profit is concerned, but they do deal with sensitive data - and in this case data that the dicslouse of could have a serious impact on someone's life.

I know it's not money, so MS may not care... But it is marketing - MS is getting a bad name, and "any publicity is good publicity" only really works so far. When the whole world hates you, you're gonna die alone and miserable (or mentally retarded...hmm...)

Any IT people who deal with medical sites of any sort need to be planning ways to a) prevent W7 and later from accessing the internet (should be done anyway but given some of the nice things about 10 like bypassing hosts files, bypassing DNS, sharing network passwords etc you may need to seriously re-think your network security). Looking at any of a number of Linux or other *nix flavours would be a good idea (preferably none with windux10 aka "SystemD" which may yet be as bad as W10).. And making sure your network firewalls lock out everything you DON'T fully know of including any MS sites (whitelist rather than blacklist)

If your client deals with sensitive data, warn them not to let W7 or later machines get near the internet without going over the top on preventative security. Imagine how you would feel seeing your client's name listed in the local rag for sending sensitive medical records to MS and their unnamed "partners".

Re: a looming disaster

"If that doesn’t work then the only solution is to turn off updates for ever. ideas to help mitigate this please"

No more ideas. Turning off updates forever seems to be the solution to MS malware, really ...

Well, there is this one idea.... :) >>>>>>>

Re: Windows will make your PC purr ( from the Piccy in the article) @ FozzyBear

If only we could upvote twice..

(Sent from a true cat lover)

Re: Evil

How the hell was I supposed to fix the touchpad problem without a touchpad

I dunno, plug in a $4 USB mouse?

Perhaps he did, and is still waiting for windows to install the driver... Or maybe he can't remember which USB port he had it in last time so has to wait while windows reboots because you moved a USB mouse to a different port...

(Which I have seen 8.1 do in the last 72 hours)

Re: Evil @James O'Shea

You'd almost think that Apple wants to sabotage Microsoft...

I think MS saw Apple's forces approaching, panicked, and hit the Self Destruct.

Re: We are thankful

Aside: Can you picture the lawyers sharks circling Redmond?

Yep.. One of the greatest joys in my life ATM is watching the flood of shit headed their way.

I'm soooo looking forward to a MS free world! No more crap AV, no more odly trashed systems, no more nice people at the point of tears over MS's latest stuffup.

Don't care if we ever have a "year of the Linux desktop", all I really want is "Day MS dies"

Re: We are thankful @ Captain DaFt Silver badge

Plus many, many computer repair shop owners the World over

I almost downvoted you for this!

Not because of the massive pre-Christmas rush we are getting (when normally work would be starting to tail off as people plan to spend money on presents for their kids, not fixing the computer the kids broke), but because as I said a wee while ago, I am so sick of cleaning up the mess from this fuckup. I am sick to fucking death of seeing customers who I have come to know and like being upset because their machines are stuffed, and in some cases they're looking at the possibility that their data is gone (yes, they are sadly human and as much as we try to help them over the condition they generally all suffer from dontbackupitis).

But, for the first year in our not-quite-2-years in operation, I can give a holiday bonus to my staff - all because of W10. So you still get the upvote :)

The story of .Gay: This bid is too gay! This bid is not gay enough! This bid is just right?

Re: Gay as slang

Hands up all those who didnt know that "Brilliant" used to be used as slang for homosexual.

That could explain a few things.. People always used to say I was "brilliant" but I never felt that my actual intelligence met their acclaim...

That said, I have had some very brilliant friends... ;)

Microsoft scares the bejesus out of Skype users with x12 price hike

Re: Every single new update of Skype...

>Pulse Audio only. Which isn't capable of things like splitting the sound.

Are you sure? I was messing with Pulse last night and I had "simultaneous output options" available. My main issue is that kmix doesn't cover all the pulse options and some of the pulse software doesn't get installed by default on Suse.

Well, when I last tried it we had lost the ability to split things as described. That was a while back so maybe it's back - and kudos to those who did it (I can't recall the location but there was a message thread on a Skype or MS site related to this). Might have to set up a VM sometime to play (have since changed machines and are currently PA free, don't want to accidentally install it if we don't have to)

On the other hand, I plugged my laptop (with DVD Drive) into my big screen's spare video port and ran the audio over the network to my desktop which pushed it out through my main stereo. That was quite cool, though you have to remember to turn it off (or at least the stereo) when you leave, or you get surprise audio in another room.

I've not quite done that, but I do love being able to push sound all over the place with generally simple tools in Linux :)

Re: Alternatives that work?

So not Firefox Hello!

They've got the "Hell" part right.. Just give them a little longer to work on the "Oh!" (as in "Oh wow, this is great". It'll come.. Some day.. Hopefully.. )

Could be worse.. MS took a pretty good system and turned it into the dying crapfest it is today. Had they done nothing with it at all it would be really great. Now, I use it for.. Erm.. Hang on.. Oh, 0 contacts.. that's right.. No one I know uses it any more...

Another fine and proven product that MS embraced, then they "extended" (not sure how you call a reduction in functionality "extend" but this is MS we're talking about!) and now are well on their way to "Extinguish"

Re: Every single new update of Skype...

The Linux version works quite well, bizarrely.

The Linux version used to work great... For our shop we had a few Skype accounts, and machines where you could have ring tone come through the PC's speakers but the actual call go through the attached headset - that way someone not at their desk (most of us most of the time) could hear a call coming in and answer it.

Then MS downgraded it (claims about "new features" - none ever appeared) and made it work with Pulse Audio only. Which isn't capable of things like splitting the sound.

We found we pretty quickly dumped it after that. Since MS took over it's been another race to the bottom.. I wonder if MS are in this competition with someone else, or is it an internal thing to see which department can cause the most harm, the most spectacular self-destruction, the most...?

Pop-up Kiwi CERT a shepherd for helpless hacked SMB flock

Re: Bout fecken TIME!

See it the country over.. All sorts of things that really could help people out that are completely ignored..

Much they could do with motorcyclist safety - some simply ideas (a mate down Wellington way has some great ones on that, and there's the Megarider guys over in Masterton), but they whack up the registration prices instead.. There's stuff with housing, and the whole shambles with quakes in Christchurch (was I the only one to notice something of a correlation between Brownlee visiting CC and them having another round of aftershocks?)

And so many other places they could improve.

But they don't get immediate votes or put money in the hands of Shonkey's rich chums...

(Ok.. Spot the guy who hates national almost as much as MS, for almost the same reasons!)

New Forum Wishlist - but read roadmap first

A voting indicator and change vote...

For an odd change I am reading a topic as the comments are fresh, and that means a fair bit of going back through the thread.

Lots of posts to vote on for me tonight..

I'd love to have a marker on the posts I have voted on so I don't try to tick them again. This could eg green text for up and red for down.. I realise there could be some interesting backend work to achieve this of course :)

Also, I accidentally ticked the opposite of what I wanted on a vote. Can we get an option to change a vote? Perhaps like the post edit - only if within X minutes

Thanks El Reg