My newish laptop is eligible for the Microsoft OS upgrade.

Has anyone bit on the MS free upgrade? Any war stories? Curious...

1 year old lg gram laptop. upgrade took about 30 minutes.  no issues. not much of a big deal unless you like windows with rounded corners.

Some UI regression if you are used to certain features ( e.g. right click task bar for task manager, clock (with seconds) on multiple monitors, etc) 

But MS may address them 

"Microsoft tweaks Windows 11 Start Menu for Insiders • The Register" https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/02/windows_11_start/

 

 

On the plus side, there is now WSLg out of the box (after updates)

"WSLg will ships with Windows 11. At this time there are no plan to enable WSLg in Windows 10."

"shipping with windows 10 21h2 or windows 11 · Issue #347 · microsoft/wslg · GitHub" https://github.com/microsoft/wslg/issues/347

 

 

 

 

I like it! Nice to see all the security features too. 

Upgraded awhile ago. No issues. Same thing without the sharp edges and menu In center rather than left corner. 

Edited December 3, 20214 yr by robm321

Any application incompatibilities?

None so far. 

Upgrade done. Thanks for the input gents.

Things seem to be running quite smoothly...snappier even, under Win11. When the MS updates aren't downloading in the background, that is 😕

 

This is not directly related to the original topic, but ...the tiny Windows box I bought from BozosPenisRocketFund.com arrived today and I don't feel like making a general bitching about Winders thread.  

So this is my first experience with Windows 10.  It's been updating off and on for two hours now.  By Gaben's Grizzled Grin, this is why we pay The Mac Tax.  For all of the questionable decisions and bizarre choices that Tim Apple makes, I cannot for the life of me understand how people use Windows as their primary OS.  If I didn't have Mac hardware, I'd probably grow out a neckbeard and attempt to learn some flavor of linux.

I agree that MS Windows is a PITA in general, Windows Server included. The updates my wife's MacBook gets are far less frequent, albeit much larger downloads. But they usually don't hose the system afterward. I do have to say that Win11 has been solid for me, with far fewer updates than Win10. 

I don't any experience with Linux on the desktop (not a practical option), but our work servers based on various flavors of Unix/Linux are pretty much "set it & forget it" solid.

Thread necro again.  The second, slightly less smol Windows box I bought from MyEmployeesDontsGetBathroomBreaks.com arrived today.  It's the newest model so of course it's running Windows 11.  UGH.  The good news: ShutUp10 beats many of the worst aspects of the OS into submission.  The bad news: every other irritation about that that ShutUp10 can't fix.  I've had W10 for about 4 months now.  I don't rely on it for much except for gaming and the tasks that require Windows.  With that said, I've grown to mostly get along with the OS.

Windows 11 is like a drunken knight from chess.  Three steps backwards and two steps wait where are you going?  I repeat what I said in my previous post.  I could write a book about Tim Apple's Infinite Bad Decisions, but one evening wih the new Redmond OS and I'm again vewing the Mac Tax as the price of salvation.  At least the 8 core 5900HX CPU is quite peppy.  Everything is so responsive as it does ...something I don't like.

My son designs and project manages some of the largest and most sophisticated display systems around. He is my go-to IT guru. He was responsible for my last two desk tops - built from the ground up, and neither has missed a beat.

For recreation he is a gamer. Two ridiculous joysticks, a pair of foot pedals and two screens. He has fiber to the house so has a ton of bandwidth.

His take on W11 is don't do anything until you have to pay for it. If you go for the free roll out, you are essentially doing free beta development for them.

I use Win10 on my work laptop (was going to go Mac the last update until I discovered that it won't do OLE embedded pdfs in Office files, which is a must have for me.
I normally sign out each night instead of shutting down. Once a week, at least, I find that the Explorer doesn't refresh itself, as in

1. create a new folder
2. it doesn't show up
3. nav back, the back to where you were. Now it shows up as "new folder"
4. Rename it. Still shows as "new folder"
5. nav back...
6. Now it appears with the correct name.

Irritating, and something I never have on a Mac. Restart and move on. PITA.

Last night I had to do something I hadn't done in decades: extract a multi volume ARJ file.  Back in the floppy disk era it was commn to break up archives into 1.4MB chunks.  ARJ did this by making file.arj file.a01 file.02 etc.  I had four such files (dated May 12, 1993) containing an install of Dune II, the first RTS game.  It took me several hours to get them open.  The ARJ utility's website is still online, but many of the links are broken.  None of their binaries run correctly on W10.  I dug up several modern unarchivers for OS X that purported to work with ARJ files, but none worked correctly.  I eventually got 7Zip working on my W10 box.  It took some futzing, but it cheerfully extracted the split archive.  I now have some savegames going back to Jan, 1993.  Dune II runs ...decently in DOSBox, but in the course of my adventure I discovered Dune Legacy, which is a FLOSSy remake of Dune II that runs on modern OSes.  It requires assets from the original game (which I had in the ARJ archive) but it doesn't look like it loads old savegames.  I might pine for a lot of aspects of the 90s, but I don't miss the computer technology.

Saw this article on Ars Technica today... seems to be relevant:

Discmaster, a website archive of floppy discs and CD-ROMs files, etc. that includes automatic media playback: 

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/10/lost-something-search-through-91-7-million-files-from-the-80s-90s-and-2000s/

On 9/27/2022 at 6:58 PM, Knuckledragger said:

Last night I had to do something I hadn't done in decades: extract a multi volume ARJ file. 

Oh god. An academic project partner decided to give me hundreds of gigs of video in a multi-part zip recently. Who even does that? It's not the 1990s any more. Suffice it to say that the standard OOTB tooling for unpacking zips on MacOS failed a) miserably b) silently to extract all the files, and for ages it looked like key shots were missing.

In a variety of ways, they managed to to choose the worst solutions to every aspect of the data moving problem and make it take several days of bodging to get the data out of their terrible HTTP file transfer system. A lot of view source/browser dev tools and wget abuse was needed, as it was clearly never designed to cope with this much data- hence the size limit that they were trying to sidestep with a multi-part zip. Doing that was less tiring than trying to get to do it properly, alarmingly.

This was after I told them that there was a dedicated ftp server VM spun up for them on one of the public-facing network segments of our network. Sigh.

Edited February 26, 20233 yr by Kattefjaes

I use multipart zips quite a bit actually. I would use 7zip via macports or brew.

Yeah, multipart zips aren't any big thing (literally (ahem)), but I have also said, "who even does that any more?", so I hear both sides of the story.

Windows 11 is removing support for Dolby Digital AC-3 in new installations of upcoming 24H2 this fall:

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2349721/dolby-digital-support-disappears-in-windows-11.html

Good thing I use almost no Microsoft products on my Windows 11 machine. (save Defender) 

The less Microsoft, the better.

I installed Ubuntu 24.04 and it is working well so far. Still very buggy, though.

On 5/30/2024 at 2:11 PM, HiWire said:

The less Microsoft, the better.

I installed Ubuntu 24.04 and it is working well so far. Still very buggy, though.

A-them to that!

Installing Windows 11 without a Microsoft Account - they make it annoying as usual (Windows 11 Pro only):
 

 

I just upgraded my mom's mini-PC to Win 11 today, with Win 10 ending support this week.  You can pay $30 for one more year of security updates, which was my original plan.

But then you NEED to create an MS account, and use it to login to your machine.  That was a no-go for my tech-scared mom.  Upgrade went fine, though.  Machine is a bit slower, but it'll hold for a while.

I had a little fun with Ubuntu.  I got a Celeron-based Chromebox for $25 from a used Electronics store in Maine a few weeks ago.  I was able to download & install a new BIOS for it, upped memory and SDD drive ($50 total), and loaded Ubuntu on it.  Still a tiny bit slow, so TBD if I'll keep it like that.  It was just fun to play with the innards and BIOS of a computer again.....

Or you could move to the EU ...