Headsup for those managing Windows 10 boxen: Microsoft has tweaked patching rules Administrators dealing with the rollout of Microsoft's latest and greatest Windows 10 were warned last night that some tinkering of their finely tuned setups would be required. Microsoft is desperate for enterprises to update their PC fleets to Windows 10 and, in the face of ongoing indifference, has opted to, er, make life …
Then we were enticed to work for Microsoft with promises of changing the world. Sadly that reality never materialized and we left to go back into the real world.
Microsoft has many smart people working for it, and almost all of them are as perplexed as you as to why they cannot produce products that reflect their abilities.
(Mines the one with the deactivated blue badge in the pocket)
Thalidomide was thoroughly tested on humans as nerve gas anti-dote. During testing they discovered that the subjects experienced a buzz or high.
Hence after the war the scientists tried to reuse the saw it fit to give it to nervous women (without testing on pregnant species) with disastrous effect.
It is still effective against leprosy though..
Having studied the adaptation of the Class 7 and 8 diesel engine class to the phased in standards for diesel emission compliance defined by the EPA/CARB for American truck and engine manufacturers, I can say there was considerably more damage to the environment through cheats and exclusions over the duration of the American 13 and 15 liter engine program from 1998 until I completed my work in 2014 than ever caused by the VW group.
While none of the American engine makers or truck manufacturers attained the same level of duplicity for the same duration of time using the VW method, on a far greater number of liters of diesel fuel, their crimes were either made lesser through government complicity or greater through the allowance of misrepresentation (lying) and obfuscation. For many reasons VW was prosecuted but the crime to the environment was done by American manufacturers.
"You mean a professor from the country that gave Thalidomide to the world? Or the one that cheated on diesel engines emissions? Would you trust those companies too?"
That would be the Thalidomide currently being used as the main line treatment being given to my mother for Multiple Myeloma. A tragically incorrect use case does not somehow automatically negate the value of a discovery.
It was already handily ticked for me in WSUS. More concerning is the way MS are pushing Teams these days; as of June it's going to be automatically installed on all PCs with Office 365 Pro etc. as part of the update process, whether you have or want it. This comes after its recent jump into the startup folder and taking two bites at you logging in ("are you sure you want to cancel log in? Please reconsider. Look, login to Teams damnit"). Eitehr someone's on a bonus for activations or MS are trying to do to Slack what they did to Netscape...
Yes they are trying to kill#Slack
and business Skype if they possibly can...
Given the way Skype (non-business) performs today - the way it's been hacked to bits and cut-down from what it was.. I think they should just put it out of its misery and go on to destroying something else.
Given the way Skype (non-business) performs today - the way it's been hacked to bits and cut-down from what it was.. I think they should just put it out of its misery and go on to destroying something else.
They're both a horrible mess, but Skype for Business and Skype for People Who Used to Use Real Skype are completely different products. Microsoft just renamed Lync to Skype for Business to sow confusion.
What the heck are "feature and quality updates", more junk that no one wants but can't remove from their computers?
Maybe Microsoft should just stop the update program and take a good look at what they are producing before yey more people opt out and move over to other operating systems.
Well in MS terminology "feature" has had a bit of scope creep. "feature" now covers any "desirable" functionality (such as access to your own files, starting up after a reboot, not randomly assigning drive letters with each upgrade) . So that if you desire an OS that functions you need to do things the MS way (no guarantees, YMMV, please sacrifice goats to deity of choice) . "Quality updates" has remained as ambiguous as previous definitions - may be preceded by the words poor, terrible, Deity Awful depending on the release.
HTH
Stop me if you heard this one. They had a table showing Vista's improved RAM requirements, er, I mean-- required RAM improvements. The bare minimum was 512MB, its use case described as something rather like "running Windows, without any programs" while 1GB was basic desktop/web browsing/media consumption stuff, and 2GB was moving toward content creation & workstation stuff, IIRC (though in my thankfully limited experience, 2GB didn't always help the first two use cases, either). Why would MS openly admit that ordinary sub-$800 configurations were basically unusable and keep selling and licensing with a straight face? What are operating systems for, again?
Microsoft wasn't selling those systems... it was OEMs doing that, with Intel pushing MS to keep the requirements low enough to fit one of their chipsets of which they had a huge backstock and wanted to get rid of. Ultimately, it was the OEMs who knowingly put Vista on systems it had no business being on.
The equivalent today might be all of those low-end laptops with 32GB of eMMC flash storage and Windows 10. Windows 10 itself needs more than 32GB to update itself to the latest couple of builds, and now it won't even update if there are USB drives plugged in. So what good are these things if they don't even come with enough storage to run the OS they came with, let alone any actual programs?
(The answer is to repurpose them as Linux machines, where the OS takes up a small fraction of that 32GB space, but most people won't do that).
Or maybe they are supposed to download the .iso for each new build, stick it on a thumb drive, then wipe the eMMC storage and install cleanly. Every six months!
Those machines are unfit for purpose as they're sold. I don't blame MS as the main offender, though; they didn't choose for the OEMs to saddle the machines with ridiculously small drives, then stick the most bloated version of Windows to date on there, a fact that the OEMs knew beforehand.
These machines were probably designed as Chromebooks... stick a conventional firmware on there instead of the Chrome one, put Windows on it, and call it a day... and they don't even cost any more, despite the Microsoft tax. To be fair, when these OEMs put these models into production, 32GB was probably enough for Windows and a whole 7 GB of programs and data, so while it would have been a bad choice, it wasn't as bad as one that can't even update itself. That's the bit where I blame Microsoft... they pushed this ridiculous update schedule, made it mandatory, and then didn't take care to make sure each new version fits into the same space as the one preceding.
After finally getting a laptop to successfully update from Win7 to Win10 earlier this year (many aborted attempts, crashes, freezing, rolling back to Win 7), I managed to find a fix to stop it freezing when shutting down but have never found a successful fix to stop it freezing when rebooting or installing updates and shutting down. Most of them I couldn't understand and came with warnings they could erase vital files. I love you Windows!
"feature and quality updates" is a euphemism Microsoft coined as in their campaign to reveal progressively less information about each update, which was part of the overall plan to make updates mandatory. Microsoft is, of course, a major proponent of black boxes; the less their customers know, the better it is for them.
Can't even update my small collection of Windows 10 Pro x64 1809 PCs to 1903.
First it complained about external USB drives being connected, so I removed them.
Now the update assistant tells me it can't do it due to a service that isn't compatible.
Of course it doesn't TELL me what service. That would be too easy.
Who writes these stupid scripts? (!)
I've just spent a week trying to update 1803 to 1903. Eventually I discovered that the service that was preventing it from working was .... Windows Defender.
Yes, Microsoft's own Antivirus refused to let me install Microsoft's own update.
Disabled all Windows Defender features and the upgrade happened.
> I've just spent a week trying to update 1803 to 1903
Hey, be happy. I can't even SEE the 1903 upgrade in my main Windows 10 1809 machine (perhaps it is for the best lol).
Ironically, a Windows 10 VM running under that same machine got offered the 1903 upgrade. I guess the main machine does not see it because I have two external USB drives connected I use for automated daily backups and so the update has been disabled - one has to wonder though: if MS is aware of the USB drive letter issue and has been for quite some time, why hasn't it fixed it already?!
The people at Microsoft responsible for their rubbish debug errors and error codes have been doing this since the company was founded. They're either inept (likely) or they have a sadistic love of sending victims on the debug equivalent of hunt the thimble.
If it was possible to count the cost of collective hours wasted chasing unknown errors since the 80s, it would cover the cost of a human Mars mission, fix all hunger and poverty etc
I am Soooo glad that I'm still running XP64 Pro. My friend "upgraded" his desktop to Win10 some time ago, and it still doesn't work properly. He can't get drivers for some of his legacy machines, so he has to keep his XP32 laptop awake on his network to intercept print jobs and pass them to his HP LaserJet and the (newish) 3D printer he bought _after_ Win10 was released. Downvote me if you wish, but I have absolutely no intention of going anywhere near the abortion that is Win10.
It's getting to the point where I've had it. My powerful home gaming PC fails to update multiple times. I downgraded to Windows 8.1 just to get higher hardware support than Windows 7. I finally had stable Windows updates and not get these updates that bricks my system from booting up requiring boot up repair with Win10. At work I get paid to manage system patches but I'm not risking my home PC to MS patch testing.
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