Thanks for nothing MS

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Golly look at the time, it's three oh three A.M. Wanting to see what the storms were doing when I woke up a little after twelve I woke my computer to check Oklahoma Doppler Radar. Low and behold the only thing on my screen is new wallpaper and Microsoft edge waiting for me to open it up and get started.
This is NOT the way to win over MS users who already hate MS. I tried to shift to Firefox and edge stayed in the middle of my screen. Trust me I know somewhat on how to control a computer and none of the commands were working. My annoyance was rising into the hate zone. Control Panel remove MS edge and that didn't work. Shift to Administrator and scrub MS edge. no go. I finally bit the bullet and looked for recovery timeline. All my recovery timelines had been removed by the update. CRAP I hate MS. Recover before MS update this morning finally got things moving. A lot of heavy programs on this computer and MS must have messed with all of them. This is NOT a slow computer and it took over an hour of the HD never stopping to build the recovery files back.
I know I turned off MS Update but obviously MS doesn't allow that. Today when my temp finally gets back to normal I'll surf the web to look for a MS Update stop program. My recovery jump drive has been updated so I don't lose PhotoShop and other programs since my last recovery drive was formatted and completed. It will be taped to the side of the computer so it will be readily available if MS is allowed to do this to my computer again. Normally I switch off the WIFI so the computer can't touch the net when I log off at night. I was storm watching and didn't do that so I got caught.
If anyone has any suggestions, I'd love to read them. No I'm not shifting away from MS although I wish I could. To much money is invested in programs which run on MS. Although at times like this I wonder if it's worth it.
Hugs People
always
Barb
Life is a treasure. Spend it wisely.

Comments

MS will reboot Upgrade atomatically

BarbieLee's picture

Okay, after searching the web. I found even when one disables MS Update it will automatically reload itself. Sneaky MS! There are free programs which will go through and clean all the necessary files off MS to keep it from reloading the Update command. Unless one is truly computer geek programmer I can't recommend delving deep into the heart of MS to remove all that when a simple free program will do it.
Hugs people
Barb
Life is meant to be lived. Not worn until it's worn out.

Oklahoma born and raised cowgirl

This is the way of the future

or at least the way that Microsoft in their infinite (sic) wisdom wants all W10 users to have to endure. Yes, endure.
What Barbie has shown us is the latest installment of the old MS mantra

"The day isn't done until {insert 3rd party app name here} won't run."

Add to that...
"You will work our way or not at all..." and {possibly to come}.

"We moved all your files to the cloud for your own safety and security. By the way, that will be $19.99 per month to ensure that we don't accidentally delete them..." (I'm joking here but I hope you get the jist of what nanny MS is trying to do)

Barbie is lucky in that she did all the right things to enable her to recover from their [redacted] up.
Oh, and EDGE is now just a rebadged Google Chrome and I don't trust any lines of code to come from Google.

Well done for resisting their attempt to press gang you into the MS Borg this time but I'm afraid that resistance may well be futile and that at some point in the future they will grab you by the short and curlies and that's it, you will be a gonner.

It does not have to be that way. It is just the way that Nanny MS has decided that they will dictate what happens and when on the computers that we theoretically own. Yes we paid for them but we only 'borrow' the operating system.

The Intel NUC (very small computer) that I run my blog on takes me around 30 mins per month in system maintenance. Log in, run three commands, return 30 mins later and enter one more command. That's it done. But I did spend my working life working on computers. I'll be replacing that server later in the year with a $50 Raspberry Pi. For everything else, I use a five year old MacBook.

Samantha

Not borrow

Patricia Marie Allen's picture

We don't borrow the OS, we rent it month to month.

My Windows 10 upgrade came before MS thought of that little wrinkle so I own my version outright and don't pay the rental fee each month. (BTW once you've got that wrinkle, you can't iron it out.) I've refused all invitations to up grade to the rented version.

My MS Office is 2010. Somewhere in the past decade, I thought I would upgrade to a newer version, but when I did, I found out they would only rent it to me. I didn't pay the fee and let it die. Fortunately, the install didn't wipe out 2010. I only up graded from the 2007 version to be able to open docx files.

They've quit supporting 2007 and I assume that at some point, they'll drop support of 2010 as well and 2010 will fail to keep up with the newer versions. At that point, I suppose I'll have to go to Open Office.

My message to MS is, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Hugs
Patricia

Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann

Me too

BarbieLee's picture

Try Win Word 97. It works so why send MS more money? I'm also running MS Office 2000, and MS Publisher 97. My latest extravaganza was Photoshop 2018 before they went to rent by the year software. Zero rental software is on any of my computers. But we are back to MS OS and updates whether we own or rent and that last one they laid on me is the last one they will ever lay on me. I have virus protection, root protection, web protection, keystroke protection, and every other kind of protection. I'm now suspecting MS turned all that off so they can install updates and run their own virus protection software which is tattling back to MS everything. Besides installing that MS Edge which it wouldn't let me touch to move off my screen, it also gave me notice the camera wasn't working. ROFL laughing, no lie MS. Well guess what, it has a cover on it. They wanted to take control of my camera and all they are looking at is a big black screen.
Sometime today I'll crash and cool off where I can reasonably search for an Apple desktop as I kiss MS goodbye. I'll still be using MS but it is going to sit on a second stand alone MS computer and never ever touch the net again. No net hardwire, no WIFI, not a chance in he.. will it be able to get a link to the net. MS personnel can get their jollies watching other girls. Besides, I'm not photogenic.
hugs people
always
Barb
Life is a gift. Don't waste it.

Oklahoma born and raised cowgirl

Alternatives

You do realize that Apple are just as bad as Micros~1?

They have a walled garden which is the only place you can find apps (apps? we used to call them programs) to run on any Apple-condoned device, and the operating systems are regularly updated making your old hardware obsolete - and it isn't cheap to begin with.

Apple hardware is fine if you're a graphic designer with somebody else paying for the toys. Otherwise, use a bargepole.

Me? I was a MS Windows programmer/developer from about the mid-80's to 2002[1]. I got pissed off by them continually changing their "technology of the moment" and shifting the goalposts around.

Eventually I gave up and went for the penguin. Haven't paid a penny for software since then. A lot less problems.

Penny

[1] Among very many other things. I also wrote mainframe OS code, crawled under raised floors dragging cables and developed software for industrial machinery while at the same time writing share dealing services and a multinational pensions administration system. Been there, done that.

Apps & Apple

Yes, for iPhones, iPods (remember them) and iPads the only way to get apps is via the app store.
For Mac's running MacOS, this is not true. I am writing some software that interrogates my car. I'm using Lazarus and it all runs on MacOS. The code goes nowhere near any app store and does not require signing (like MS is starting to mandate).
I did suggest to Barbie that she installs Mint but she has some other software that may well not run on Linux.
If there was a half decent equivalent to Lightroom that ran on Linux then I'd be there like a shot.

Oh, and I'm not a graphic designer but I do take a lot of photographs. I write using Scrivener. After 40+ years of working in IT, MacOS and OSX before it allow me to concentrate on using the frigging computer rather than fighting it which is what Barbie is doing at the moment.
She seems to have tamed the beast but for how long. I'm sure there are people inside MS dreaming up more ways to make Windows upgrades more hostile and gut wrenching to the users. Why can't it be like my CentOS server eh? NIH rules on planet Redmond.
Samantha

Another computer

BarbieLee's picture

Bite the bullet and purchase another computer. Install Umbunta or get a Mac. Set this one off to the side strictly for running all those high end program that only run on MS 64bit OS. Well why not? Old computer with win XP is off to the side because it couldn't run the 64bit programs.
MS is going to cost me a bunch of manhours (female hours) and financial expense, learning a new OS just to get away from them controlling my life as Samantha so succulently put it. But then they know that and people are trapped in their comfort zone of what they are familiar with and hate to change. Haven't installed a block win update software yet nor delved into the registry keys to change the settings. Although I don't think MS is going to let me do that now. I seem to be locked out of registry edit no matter what I do. I guess restore didn't quite restore everything. I'll look into the DOS commands later see of they still control win?
Has to be done, hello Apple, I'm new at this. A little guidance if you please.
My new byline is going to be I HATE MS
hugs people
Barb
Life is meant to be lived, not worn until it's worn out.

Oklahoma born and raised cowgirl

One step back

One step back to w7pro64 and all other soft runs smoothly.

There are days when I want to

Aylesea Malcolm's picture

There are days when I want to switch out to the Surface but then I read stories like this and...I’m okay staying with iOS

MS has their own MS Edge blocker

BarbieLee's picture

I've been working on this since one o'clock last night and ran across this little gem. MS puts out a blocker to stop the upgrade on MS Edge. Obviously they were pissing a whole bunch of people off. Probably developers and geeks and rather than letting it get out of hand blocking any win upgrade they brought out the MS Edge blocker.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/microsoft-edge-b...

As to why MS wants to keep upgrading your OS? Very simple. They get to look at your machine and what you are doing with it. Then they market that knowledge for money.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3326059/microsoft-gets...

Maybe the night wasn't wasted. It has enlightened me to a lot of what MS is doing besides selling me a bunch of BS about my needing them to protect from the ugly out there. What a load of propaganda. LOL and I thought that was why I spent a bunch on virus protection software. Only it doesn't protect me from the worst virus. Microsoft itself. Thanks MS you drove the final nail into my toughest decision. Pushing my MS OS computers to the side for doing what I must have but taking them offline permanently. In the mean time a decent freeware MS update blocker will do.
hugs people, I hope those of you who have the need learn from my mistakes.
always
Barb
Life is meant to be lived, not worn until it's worn out.

Oklahoma born and raised cowgirl

BarbieLee, you are awesome.

WillowD's picture

I used to be really computer literate like you are. I ran a BBS. Played with a variety of operating systems including Linux. Did regular backups and all that. But over the years my computer skills have gone way down and so has my abilities to get basic stuff done. I haven't done a proper backup in way too long. And when I did a scratch reinstall last year, which I like to do once or twice a decade to clean up my system, I never got around to installing a decent operating system. Computer safely wise, I really suck these days at doing the basics.

I use Microsoft Word 2002, of which I own two copies of, each of which is licensed for two computers. Alas, when I did the last scratch reinstall I discovered that Microsoft removed all of the updating capability of MS Word 2002 so I can no longer use the .docx format. I can live with that.

I lucked out on the OS. I upgraded an illegal copy of Windows 8 Pro to get a legal copy of Windows 10. Amazingly, I haven't had any serious problems with it ever since.

I really need to get around to reinstalling Avast, or whatever antivirus program I decide to use this time. And to do a backup. I have the spare hard drives. I have the capability to my first decent back up ages. Now if I could just find that round tuit it lost...

Libre Office

will read and write .docx files. Free of course.
Samantha

All you girls are super intelligent

BarbieLee's picture

Willow, you and I both know you just got complacent. Easier to go along with the flow instead of wasting one's life tilting at windmills. MS wouldn't have bothered me with their upgrade except for that stupid trick with MS Edge. They have dumped upgrades on me in the past. This one hit a raw nerve when they locked up my computer with that MS Edge unless I accepted it. And as they say, the rest is history. So don't go trying to sell me you forgot story. You haven't had the right buttons pushed yet and if it happens you will take out all that past programming knowledge and dust it off. Pity those who set you off.
Hugs Willow stay away from Samantha. She told me she's snacking on ice cream. Can you believe it? I gain pounds if I look at ice cream. Then the bitch had the nerve to tell me she topped it with berries. With my mad on at MS this was not a good time to be telling me she's enjoying life.
always
Barb
Life is meant to be lived, not worn until it's worn out.

Oklahoma born and raised cowgirl

Still finding out more what MS Update did to me last night

BarbieLee's picture

People, if MS hit you like it did me, it turned off all the restore points in Windows. All those dates you had saved to go back to in case your computer went wonka on you? Windows removed them and turned off restore. You will need to go back in and turn it on and configure it to add restore points along the way.
I finished installing Win Update blocker and turned it on. I don't care what MS does, if I can help it, never again will it get a hold of this computer. I've spent twelve hours doing research and getting my computer back. I'm not fully back to where it once was but what I have, I can live with. A lot of the little icons changed. Where I manually connect and disconnect to the web icon has changed. The big difference there is the icon where "automatically connect" takes up three times the screen it did before. They really want control of this computer. All I need to do is accidentally tap that puppy when I connect.
Oh well, life goes on and I think I'm going to eat a late dinner and go to bed and dream about a perfect world. HA!
hugs people, maybe this is my last post today?
always
Barb
Life is a gift. Don't waste it.

Oklahoma born and raised cowgirl

Restore points

Make some restore points you control.

Use Clonezilla to make a complete bit-for-bit image of your system onto an old spare disk - or even buy a new one or two, they are so cheap now dollars/gigabyte.

If you get pwned again then just restore using Clonezilla from your backup disk. Like nothing happened at all.

Penny

Even The Heavy Hitters Suffer.

With reservations, I use Google Chrome, just because I'm lazy. One of my health care providers, OHSU, sweetly nagged me into using Internet Explorer to access their video visit facility, but that was a problem for them, so they switched to Zoom for that, and it didn't work last week.

I'm old and not impressed by the powerful. My only hope is that I will die before it all gets too dystopian.

my experience with windows

you have to keep taskmanager up and stop certain programs from running everyone once and awhile and go directly into services to click on update and click never run to get dang thing to not run every boot up. There is also some schost files that love to run in background. Some are nessary but should not be taking up more that ten or twenty k memory if its 50 or more k end program...wait for it as it will try three more times.

Its a manual way of also knowing what is going on your system. Windows ten sounded like a nightmare when it first came out and I still dont want it.

Update is under control

BarbieLee's picture

I could have gone into registry and modified the command to update. A simple, ad free, non invasive program handled that very well. The one problem I have with MS is using up resources. Every file, every program one opens uses up resources. MS is like an old time PostOffice with mailboxes. Open a file and MS shoves it into one of the mailboxes for use. Open a program, again shoved into a mailbox for use. There are only so many "mailboxes" and when most are filled the computer begins lagging. It now shoves data between memory mailboxes and HD mailboxes and can really bring the computer to a crawl. Even though one has shut down a bunch of files and or programs the "mailbox" is never emptied that file or program occupied. It can't be used again until the computer it kicked into a restart which empties all mailboxes and the MS resources dance begins all over again until the next cycle.
Over time MS has increased the size of the Resources PostOffice from local to central. For some ungodly reason they never wrote the program to empty one of those resource mailboxes when the file or program was ended on one's computer. They just increased the resource storage bank. At one time I had a program that did the simple trick MS refused to do, empty the resource mailbox when the program and or file was closed. Have no idea what I did with it after MS Win 3.

Oh well, now you know why your computer starts crawling after it has been on for days and you been using a lot of heavy programs with a lot of built in files. This is one of the reasons Apple handles heavy graphics so much better than MS. They don't hold onto resources for closed programs or files no matter how long the computer is on.
One of the many reasons I hate MS among so many other reasons is MS is truly a really piss poor OS ridding on top of DOS which Gates and crew pushed out in haste to get ahead of every other programmer writing basic code. I spent the first couple of years when Win first came out rewriting a lot of their code until it became so bloated I gave up and like everyone else, went with the flow. We became the first On Demand book publisher when I rewrote MS Publisher code to print a "book" instead of pamphlets. And life goes on. And if anyone tells MS I was messing with their code, I'll deny it! It's all lies.
Hugs People
always
Barb
Life is a gift. Treasure it!

Oklahoma born and raised cowgirl

wish all you programmers were closer

BarbieLee's picture

We would rock the world and set computing on fire. We would need a couple chip designers on board to handle the processing code we fed into it. I've looked at the idea of linear code instead of binary for years. Code processed in stream instead of bytes. Guessing the data flow would be at least a thousand times faster than binary for two reasons. One there is no limit to having to check code every 64 bytes. And two the processor wouldn't need to analyze every byte. Binary will limit out where it can't go any further no matter how fast they run the processor cycle. Quad core, eight core, they all have to handshake to know what the other is doing. 4.3 mhz? How fast can they run the chip before it tangles up in it's own interconnected highway?
We'll leave it to the future to figure out. My bet is linear code will come eventually.
hugs people
Barb

Oklahoma born and raised cowgirl

Base code?

I've heard there are only 10 types of people in the world, those that understand binary and those that don't :)

Something I've read that was experimented with many years ago was trinary coding, but this lost out to binary. If one thinks about the two states of binary as yes/no, trinary three states would be yes/no/maybe.

It would seem to me that trinary would be a closer simulation to the way human intelligence works and therefore could be the key to creating true sentient artificial intelligence?

The problem with trinary and your idea of streaming is that both would be so alien to our current computer systems neither would be able to communicate with our current networking and computer system and would require some type of translating device essentially losing the gains of the better system.

We the willing, led by the unsure. Have been doing so much with so little for so long,
We are now qualified to do anything with nothing.

We can still ride horses, drive wagons

BarbieLee's picture

But do you want to? In the coldest part of winter when the wind is howling at twenty mph and the temp is around zero with blowing snow, I think of what my parents when they were kids and what my grandparents had to do in that kind of weather. We can still do that but why? It's why God gave us enclosed vehicles with heaters. Computers will eventually go the same way. I know they want to control everyone and everything. Eventually it will happen and they will be the ones with the horse and buggy.
The future is fluid, it can and does change from one outcome to another constantly. Have you ever precoged, seen the future, know exactly what the outcome is going to be, changed some detail and experienced a different outcome? And probably wished you hadn't done that as the first outcome was the better one. What you are using now for computing isn't what the future will be using. If we were there, we wouldn't even recognize it or understand it. You can keep your MS stock, it isn't going to collapse that soon.
Hugs doll, now about that brown pantsuit with the tan brocade and your white silk blouse with the embroidery you wore to the Virginia Bluegrass Festival last month? And oh yes, the tan cowgirl boots with the three inch heel. I'm so jealous and I want to borrow. I also want to borrow the dobro and your twelve string guitar. You sang and played, I'll screech and make racket but I'll look good doing it.
always
Barb
Life is meant to be lived, not worn until it's worn out.

Oklahoma born and raised cowgirl

You'll have to be a bit more specific :)

Which 12 string guitar? The acoustic Epiphone strung in the older Rickenbacker style or the blue colored Yamaha acoustic/electric cut away?

You may have to fight the youngest over the Yamaha as it has become her go to guitar when she wants to pluck the guitar.

Pulled a good one on her yesterday. I printed off some sheet music without the name of the song on it. She kept asking me what it was and I told her if she wanted to know she would have to play it. She finally got out one of the violins and began playing it and about 5 or 6 bars into the song she realized what it was and a huge grin spread across her face. She's a fan of Queen and the song was Bohemian Rhapsody.

Oh if you know anyone that has, or someplace that I can get it, She really wants the sheet music for a bluegrass song called "The Barber's fiddle"

EDIT: Should have added The little one's main instrument is the Violin, so of course the sheet music should be for that instrument :)

We the willing, led by the unsure. Have been doing so much with so little for so long,
We are now qualified to do anything with nothing.