Posts by Dave K

Re: You're nuts

You're being a bit harsh with Windows 7/10 there, although I agree with your comments for 95/XP.

At a previous company I worked at, we had Windows 7 running on some systems with 2GB of RAM. It worked, but was not great if you needed more than a couple of programs open. 4GB however was fine for e-mail, Word, light Excel and a web browser. It only became an issue if you tried to open multiple spreadsheets or run something more heavyweight.

Nowerdays, 8GB of RAM is quite common in many companies. The work laptop I'm typing this on is running Windows 10 with 8GB of RAM. I have Outlook, Teams, OneNote, Adobe Reader, Word and 3 spreadsheets open. Task Manager tells me I have 1.2GB of RAM free. Hence for general office work, 8GB of RAM is just fine. Sorry, but "16GB bare minimum" is not true.

Yeah, that's the bit I don't get. I have a 1st gen Ryzen 7 system (a self-build) and after enabling fTPM in the BIOS, it does pass the TPM part of the check. But of course it then fails on the fact that my CPU isn't on the supported list. Not quite sure why an 8 core 3.4GHz CPU that is under 4 years old is considered to be "unsupported" by MS, maybe they're just being lazy here.

The interesting part will be to see if MS's installer further down the line checks and blocks installation onto such silicon or not.

The daft thing is, plenty of newer systems are pretty screwed as well here. I have an Intel NUC which is under 4 years old. But it runs a 7th gen Kaby Lake CPU, so isn't on the supported list. My main PC is a 1st gen AMD Ryzen system that is only 3.5 years old. It runs everything I need (including modern games as well), but is also not on the supported list.

Thing is with these systems, they're already unsupported by MS for anything less than Windows 10 due to MS blocking updates for 7 and 8.1 on them. What it therefore means is that the *only* supported MS OS on these systems is Windows 10.

Given how much MS were talking up the "green credentials" of Windows 11, this seems like an incredibly short-sighted move on their behalf to block so many perfectly capable and quite recent systems.

Re: As I see it

However 2FA can be considered a failure when mobile apps on my work phone use it. I launch Teams on my phone for example, and as well as my password, I also need to authenticate via the Microsoft Authenticator app. But the app is on the same phone - so zero increase of security there!

Exactly. Some marketdroid or designer probably thought for Windows 10's TIFKAM programs to re-do the icons to make them simple and consistent. Sounds noble! Unfortunately, the result is a load of monochrome icons that all look identical at a glance. Hence the "clean and consistent" approach for them has actually damaged usability. Icons are supposed to look visually distinctive so you can tell them apart at a glance.

Now, now. Maybe he's John Penrose recommending his wife Dido for another top gig...

Lenovo did try to remove them with the dreaded "clickpad" on the T440 (the entire trackpad was a giant, movable button). I had one of these on my previous work machine and it was hands-down the worst trackpad I've ever used. So bad in fact that Lenovo caved into the negative feedback and brought the top buttons back for the T450.

I thought that too. Quite a restrained response knowing how Linus used to respond in the past. Still, he's absolutely spot on here.

(applause)

Most likely response:

"Never mind that, they're broken and I demand you come and fix them NOW".

Either that, or they fib and say "of course I have, I'm not stupid".

Re: End of life

That for me is the biggest issue here. If a manufacturer is going to drop support for a product, they should be required to provide unlock tools for any locked areas of the ROM/bootloader. Of course, no firm will voluntarily do this because they want you to throw it away and buy a new one. Alternatively, locked bootloaders should really be banned on principal. If I've bought a device, why shouldn't I be free to do what I want with it?

Re: Peace and quiet

The place my sister works at is doing this, only they've termed it "agile working" then they get irritated every time someone cuts through the jargon and refers to it (truthfully) as hot-desking.

Re: Focus Assist

Good point, Focussed Inbox is always one of the first things I disable. Once again, instead of gimmicks like this, I'd much rather they stop the damn thing from freezing if there's a delay with server communication. Oh, and pruning some of the god-awful white space they keep adding in as well. Outlook is almost unusable on a small 16:9 laptop screen these days if you have the message pane below the e-mail list.

Re: Ah, warez

Blame lazy DRM devs, not the warez scene for that though. Thankfully in most cases, it's trivial to apply a crack that both allows your virtual drive to work, and ditches the need for the optical media.

I've applied many cracks to games I legitimately own over the years - mainly to stop me either having to dig around for the CD each time (just to prove I own the game), or to enable me to take a laptop with a few games on it when I travel.

Re: confused?

I still prefer Snipping tool for grabbing quick and specific grabs of the screen. The keyboard shortcut for S&S is handy, but otherwise I find the tool slower, less user friendly, and it lacks the ability to send the snip directly into an Outlook e-mail (either in-body or as an attachment) whereas Snipping tool can do this.

I get that, but it's still pretty typical for UWP applications unfortunately. All icons completely monochrome and the same size with several of them not demonstrating any obvious link between the icon and the function it is supposed to serve. A quick trawl through Settings or 3D Paint shows the exact same issue.

It looks consistent and clean - sure! But from a usability perspective it's just crap.

Incompetency isn't always a major problem by itself. I get that some users make mistakes and are not computer literate. What I do expect however is that a user will try the steps I suggest over the phone to fix an issue - even if a troubleshooting step sounds basic and/or obvious.

My patience and sympathy disappear when a user insists they've tried something when they haven't, or when they argue with me about "no it cannot be that", despite not having a shred of evidence to support their opinion here. Rocking up in person, doing exactly what I'd told them to do over the phone and watching as the issue magically disappears almost always leads to either a red face, or a burbling and fake excuse - "it wasn't like that before" etc.

Re: Actually no

It also depends on who is monitoring the asset register (if there is one), and if anyone was cross-examining orders with the asset register. Assuming it was the culprits who added the laptops, it's probably not too difficult for them to order 23 laptops, stick 20 in the asset register and siphon off the other three.

Or of course to order 23 laptops, hand 20 over to whoever does add them to the register, etc. etc. It's sad, but all it takes is a gap in the process that can be exploited and an employee who is unscrupulous enough to do so.

Re: Tired of MS

It's the perfect storm isn't it. A version of Windows that force-installs updates, combined with a woeful lack of QA testing for those aforementioned updates.

People with sufficient skill know how to wrestle some control of the update process back from MS so that patches are only installed once we're pretty sure they're trouble free. But for all the normal folk out there, they are left picking up the pieces from yet more crap coding from MS.

Re: Good

It's a step in the right direction. Slowly but surely we are seeing MS moving away from UWP thankfully. Within the last week they've also confirmed that 3D Paint will be stripped from the core of Win 10 (although it'll remain available through the store for now).

I do wonder if part of the general shunning of apps like these is because of how crap they look. Microsoft really went out of their way to make sure that UWP would be as flat, lifeless and bland as possible. I haven't found a single UWP app so far that I'd consider to be pleasing to look at, and the fact that you often have a row of monochrome and minimalist icons for things without any text (at least in earlier versions) also means that they're not actually that user-friendly either.

Tory bashing != Incompetence bashing

Granted they've often gone hand in hand over the past year, but this article is bashing her incompetence and obscene waste of money, not her political affiliation. Try to understand the difference here.

Re: Hats off

Same here. My company used Webex previously and it wasn't great. There was a project underway to migrate to Teams, but full rollout wasn't expected until mid 2020. As lockdown loomed, seeing a seamless and major capacity upgrade to the company's VPN, plus the expedited rollout of Teams handled in such a smooth manner really was a testament to the hard work of all involved!

Re: Old kit

I have an X201 which was in regular use until very recently (never got around to downgrading it from Windows 7 or trying Linux on it). The Core i5 version upgraded to 8GB of RAM and with an SSD popped in is still a nice and capable little machine. It's the spinning rust and lower default RAM which are likely hobbling your family member's system.

The question from me is if the performance of the phone will last. Every Samsung phone I've experienced has run fine for 18-24 months, then the performance has fallen off a cliff. I've experienced this across 5 different Samsung phones over the past number of years (my previous phone, wife's phones and my work phones). Yet in comparison, my current LG phone still feels slick and speedy after 5 years of hammer.

Extending the support is a good move, but I remain apprehensive of buying another Samsung phone after seeing so many turn into sluggish, stuttery lumps after a while - even applying a factory reset didn't help for long with them.

Re: LG phones

I'd also be sad to see LG depart. My trusty old G4 has been the best Android phone I've ever owned.

What I have noticed lately is that LG's naming scheme is all over the place, so it's difficult to tell where each of their phones fit in the market place. They also seem to have struggled with some of the basics such as decent support, and I often struggle to see what the USP of many of their recent handsets it (outside of gimmicks such as the dual-display thing they've recently been pushing, and which I have no interest in).

I'd love to see LG go back to basics and try to fill some of the gaps that have emerged in the marketplace. I recently had a look at new phones and I could not find a single high-end Android phone that had an SD-card slot, headphone jack and decent camera in the same device. If LG could go back to basics and make a decent and expandable phone with a guarantee of at least 3-years of OS support, there's definitely a market for such a device IMO. Adding in a removable battery would also be a stand-out feature in this day and age, although I appreciate that's difficult to do if you're wanting something water & dust resistant.

Re: Stability. Who wants that...

The only experience I usually get from Windows 10 is that of a product in permanent beta status.

6 years on from the original release, Windows 10 still feels rough and unfinished to me. The UI is flat, lifeless and uninspiring, there's still the strange mis-mash between Settings and Control Panel, the Start Menu is still an ugly mess, the "busy" animation still feels like a placeholder as the rotating balls disappear then reappear every second revolution, the sounds still have that whiff of having been created in a hurry by an intern with a Casio keyboard.

Quite simply, it doesn't feel like a finished and polished product. Too many bits feel as if they're quick and temporary mock-ups that were intended to be replaced with the finished article in due course. Age is generally irrelevant to me, I simply expect my OS to feel well designed and finished. Ironically to me, Windows 7 still feels like the last OS that Microsoft actually finished properly.

Flexible for me too. Prior to lockdown I already worked from home most of the time, but I did used to travel every few weeks to meet customer contacts, team members and the likes. After almost a year, I do miss that to some degree, but I wouldn't want to lose the WFH aspect of my job.

Re: Who's the audience?

Nobody is saying that right-wingers aren't allowed to express a point of view.

However, when you degenerate things down to blatant threats of violence, this is going beyond simply expressing a "point of view". Companies are under no obligation to give you a platform from which to threaten violence against other people.

Parler were given numerous warnings about unacceptable conduct before having their hosting pulled. This isn't "bullying", it's simply enforcing your T&Cs - terms that Parler were well aware of when they signed up with AWS in the first place.

Re: The secret to intelligent tinkering ....

Yep, it's the curse of the young and over-confident sysadmin. Nothing like a trashed file system or major outage to bring someone down to earth with a bump. I was fortunate when much younger in that I witnessed someone else at my first place of work cock things up and bring down half the network. Seeing the panic unfold around the place as people tried to coax an entire rack of servers back to life taught me an important lesson about backups and testing before doing anything to a live environment...

Although she had the right message with "Don't Leave Home"...

Re: Vile

You go and stick with your shiny-shiny then. Some of us care more about actually using our equipment than just looking at it.

Re: Bloody meetings

I did that once. An issue on a council IT meeting went on and on as people on both sides couldn't agree. As the newb at the time, I was assigned the task of taking the minutes.

This issue ultimately descended into quite a fiery argument that continued to run for some time and was quite difficult to follow. My minutes reflected this as simply: "A heated debate ensued".

I wasn't asked to take the minutes again...

Yes, I need a memory card slot. I regularly travel (well, I did regularly travel when it was permitted), and when you're onboard a flight, on the tube, or somewhere where data costs extortionate amounts of money, having a decent on-board supply of music, films and TV shows is essential for me. I also like how easily I can sync those up by simply plugging the SD card into my PC and accessing it far more natively than when my phone is plugged into my PC and operating as a "media transfer device".

Being able to transfer 120GB of data from my old phone to my new one in a matter of seconds is also pretty handy!

For batteries, I used to think this wasn't a big deal, until a combination of having an older phone with a dying battery (cost me peanuts to replace the battery - no third parties required), and again some long travel where a flat phone battery could simply be swapped out mid-flight to bring my device back to life. And a spare battery is much smaller and lighter to carry than a power bank.

I'm less bothered about root access, but there's my reasoning for SD cards and batteries anyway...