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Avoiding Win 11 and staying with 10

Ron Obvious said:
It is still somewhat simple: just start typing. Of course you have to have individual addresses expand to a known address before starting on the next one. I agree this used to be a lot simpler by using semi-colons (I think)
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If you know the addresses, of course you can enter them, but I've yet to figure out how I can select multiple addresses from the Address Book, and just put them in. And there used to be a way to organize a set of them into a single subfolder in the address book, and just put them all in at once. I must confess that I did not spend a huge amount of time trying to figure it out, as our ISP has a webmail setup in which it's very easy. I like the archiving and subfolder options of Thunderbird better, though.
 
bruto said:
If you know the addresses, of course you can enter them, but I've yet to figure out how I can select multiple addresses from the Address Book, and just put them in. And there used to be a way to organize a set of them into a single subfolder in the address book, and just put them all in at once. I must confess that I did not spend a huge amount of time trying to figure it out, as our ISP has a webmail setup in which it's very easy. I like the archiving and subfolder options of Thunderbird better, though.
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Just open up the new message, with the address book open down the side, and start clicking on the contacts you want to add, they just populate the address bar (click on CC/BCC to populate)
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Normally you can read all the names on the list on the left, I narrowed it down to hide them- don't want to put all my contacts emails up on the net lol
 
I'll have to try that again. That's how it used to work, but I seem to recall that last times I've tried it with updated versions, it opened the contact instead of pasting it. I'm not at that computer at the moment.
 
bruto said:
My win 10 desktop does occasional updates, and what happens there is that it stalls at a blue screen telling me not to shut off the computer. It will stay there forever, so finally I shut it off, and reboot, and the update finishes. My Win 11 laptop seems to be updating without issues.
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I just wait and it seems to complete after a couple of minutes. Although I have done it in the past, turning the computer off in the middle of an update is not something I am comfortable with as that's how I destroyed my last remaining OS/2 Warp system.

I have bought a Win 11 machine but some of the software I've been using for years does not seem to work under 11. I have enrolled in the Extended Security Updates program so maybe I'm good until next October.
 
Gord_in_Toronto said:
I just wait and it seems to complete after a couple of minutes. Although I have done it in the past, turning the computer off in the middle of an update is not something I am comfortable with as that's how I destroyed my last remaining OS/2 Warp system.

I have bought a Win 11 machine but some of the software I've been using for years does not seem to work under 11. I have enrolled in the Extended Security Updates program so maybe I'm good until next October.
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I tried just waiting. I think over night is long enough to guess it's crashed! I'm looking right now at an upgrade to a newer Win 11 machine, which I think might work OK for our purposes. The current one is getting a little slow, and there seems to be a hardware problem that causes the USB to crash from time to time. Not sure yet.
 
bruto said:
I tried just waiting. I think over night is long enough to guess it's crashed! I'm looking right now at an upgrade to a newer Win 11 machine, which I think might work OK for our purposes. The current one is getting a little slow, and there seems to be a hardware problem that causes the USB to crash from time to time. Not sure yet.
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A huge issue here Microsoft's pathological aversion to meaningful progress reporting. One simply cannot tell if a long running process is ongoing but slow, has stalled out completely, or even crashed without taking down the whole system. To add insult to injury, MS doesn't even give you an option to view progress messages by, for example, pressing a key while the stupid rotating dots display is running. The best one can do is review messages after the fact using Event Viewer.

In Linux I can run all updates manually from the command line and actually monitor their progress.

According chat I had with the AI at lumo.proton.me, the following PowerShell commands do much the same, using a community-maintained tool called PSWindowsUpdate:
Code: 
# Install the module (once)
Install-Module -Name PSWindowsUpdate -Scope CurrentUser

# List pending updates with detailed info
Get-WindowsUpdate -MicrosoftUpdate -Verbose

# Install updates while watching progress
Install-WindowsUpdate -AcceptAll -AutoReboot -Verbose
 
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Well whatever problem I was having with Win 10 updates has solved itself forcibly. It crashed and I now have a newer Win 11 machine with a new drive, and fortunately most of the data from the old one salvaged, though none of the programs. It runs at least, and almost as soon as I started running it it decided it needed an update, which took a few minutes. In the next few days I'll be busy scrubbing off some of the Microcrap, and setting it up the way I like it, but I must say Win 11 is not as bad as I had feared, and it looks as if we're running both desk and lap tops in it now.

I have been getting a little more familiar with Linux in the meantime, and might yet become comfortable with the command line, but I must say that the syntax is strange, and, more importantly, the ability of people to explain the simplest and most fundamental things is crazily limited. All the instructions seem to start two steps in. I think I'm going to have to abandon attempts to do it via internet and buy a book!
 
bruto said:
Well whatever problem I was having with Win 10 updates has solved itself forcibly. It crashed and I now have a newer Win 11 machine with a new drive, and fortunately most of the data from the old one salvaged, though none of the programs. It runs at least, and almost as soon as I started running it it decided it needed an update, which took a few minutes. In the next few days I'll be busy scrubbing off some of the Microcrap, and setting it up the way I like it, but I must say Win 11 is not as bad as I had feared, and it looks as if we're running both desk and lap tops in it now.

I have been getting a little more familiar with Linux in the meantime, and might yet become comfortable with the command line, but I must say that the syntax is strange, and, more importantly, the ability of people to explain the simplest and most fundamental things is crazily limited. All the instructions seem to start two steps in. I think I'm going to have to abandon attempts to do it via internet and buy a book!
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Command line??? you still hand crank your car to start it too???

I haven't had to touch the command line in Ubuntu in a couple of decades.....

Oh sure I 'could' do things from it if I WANTED to..... (same as I could in Windows too)

But NEED to learn it- why??????
 
Dabop said:
Command line??? you still hand crank your car to start it too???

I haven't had to touch the command line in Ubuntu in a couple of decades.....

Oh sure I 'could' do things from it if I WANTED to..... (same as I could in Windows too)

But NEED to learn it- why??????
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Yeah. I mainly use the command line for stuff my fingers can type without me thinking. This is true for both Linux and Windows.
 
Bollocks. I bought a refurbished desktop with Win 11 installed. The latest updates won't install due to a lack of TMP 2.0. Research suggests I might as well avoid future pain by converting it to Linux rather than ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ around
 
Wudang said:
Bollocks. I bought a refurbished desktop with Win 11 installed. The latest updates won't install due to a lack of TMP 2.0. Research suggests I might as well avoid future pain by converting it to Linux rather than ◊◊◊◊◊◊◊ around
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Do you know which motherboard it has? Worth checking to see if it just needs to be enabled in the BIOS.
 
ohms said:
Do you know which motherboard it has? Worth checking to see if it just needs to be enabled in the BIOS.
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I don't have access at the moment (it's in the study and SWMBO is working) but googling it probably has TMP 1.2 and needs a firmware update. Just venting really.
Anyway giving serious thought to install a Linux server edition on there as I use it almost as a server anyway. And I don't think I have anything running that doesn't run fine on Linux, apart from maybe a few games I never seem to play much these days.
 
Dabop said:
Command line??? you still hand crank your car to start it too???

I haven't had to touch the command line in Ubuntu in a couple of decades.....

Oh sure I 'could' do things from it if I WANTED to..... (same as I could in Windows too)

But NEED to learn it- why??????
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Because there is a documented and difficult glitch in the process for getting Dosbox to get into the "installed apps" group. Ideally, if you install an app such as this, it will get into that group, and you can activate, configure, etc. from there. But for reasons difficult to explain and more difficult to deal with, Doxbox does not end up there in Ubuntu. So I go on line and get various attempts to tell me how to accomplish this using command line commands to get it there. None work. Either the command doesn't exist or the destination doesn't exist or something else doesn't exist. Water over dam now, except for the challenge, which is going to have to wait.

I accidentally overwrote a Mozilla thunderbird profile, and lost some data there and am now trying to recover it, with limited success! I've done so well so far getting the new computer set up, but I pushed one button at the wrong moment and poof! A whole set of folders containing saved emails regarding upcoming trips has disappeared utterly, and not just deleted but overwritten by a new profile which is, of course, empty!
 
It took me a good part of the day to un-mess-up the loss of the Thunderbird files. When I first started it up it was not connecting yet, and I found the files there, in a default profile, waiting for some smart person not present to load the whole old profile back. Instead I set Tbird up to get mail,and it immediately overwrote the whole thing. Too long a saga to go into here, but I found some more copies of the files, found a way to trick Tbird into putting them back, which it is cleverly engineered never to do without an extension they don't tell you about. And on and on, but in the end the thing is looking pretty good, and at least it boots up without stalling and the mouse doesn't keep freezing up, and other stuff like that.
 
Wudang said:
Wtf? Microsoft warns Copilot AI might install malware.
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At least it's being upfront about it. The issue I have is that you don't need to be that crafty, you can "trick" the "agentic AIs" by simply directing them to a webpage that looks 100% OK - but has some text that isn't immediately visible to a human - the simplest being white text on a white background. The AI will "read" that and can be directed to be naughty. As they say it ain't rocket science.
 
Darat said:
At least it's being upfront about it. The issue I have is that you don't need to be that crafty, you can "trick" the "agentic AIs" by simply directing them to a webpage that looks 100% OK - but has some text that isn't immediately visible to a human - the simplest being white text on a white background. The AI will "read" that and can be directed to be naughty. As they say it ain't rocket science.
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So once again we have computers being enabled to make mistakes we are trying to stop people making?
 
Microsoft has a history of a disjointed approach to security. I truly believe the OS guys are committed to making their OS as secure as they can, PHB permitting. The problem is that other teams seem determined to get their features in regardless of implications to the underlying security model and the OS guys don't seem to be allowed a "hard NO". You can find a few posts from me discussing the Windows isWindowVisible() function which for me is a symptom of MS's haphazard approach to consistency among other traits I consider desirable in an OS provider. The above is another instance of chasing features over security. YMMV.
 
Wudang said:
So once again we have computers being enabled to make mistakes we are trying to stop people making?
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Yep. It's a scary scenario given how people are now using the AIs, I am astonished how many people are using them for advice, in all areas of their lives. It would be bad enough if your "AI assistant" was "hacked" to tell you that your bank account has been compromised and you need to transfer your money to a new safe account... but now the AI will do that for you...phew thank goodness my AI caught that and kept my money safe by transfering it into a crypto wallet...
 
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