Ask Paul: May 3 (Premium)

I'm traveling tomorrow, so "Ask Paul" is a day early, and a bit shorter than usual, this week.
This week's site issues
Before getting to your questions, I just wanted to briefly address the site issues we experienced over Tuesday and Wednesday. Put simply, these issues were triggered by us switching over to a new back-end billing system that I mentioned in my Thurrott Premium pricing announcement. Tim did an incredible amount of testing on our production server ahead of moving it to the public site, but real-world is real-world and, as you know, $#it happens.

Regardless, the issues were unexpected, and as part of the fixes we made on the back-end, we ended up removing the featured posts graphics that used to be at the top of the site because that widget was consuming an inordinate amount of resources. Plus, the site looks better without it. So that's nice. But this ties into a fundamental desire we all have at BWW to make the Thurrott.com site simpler across the board.

And on that note, our original plan was to tie the Thurrott Premium pricing change to a number of functional site changes. One of them, regarding Thurrott Now, you know about because I teased it in an earlier "Ask Paul." But based on the feedback, we're going to rethink our plans for that. More to the point, we're also going to let the dust settle on this week's site issues---which we think are fixed now---before we start moving on to the new stuff we have planned.

Speaking of which, from what I can tell, Thurrott.com is faster right now than it's ever been. That's pretty cool.

Sorry about the issues. Hopefully, it's all settled now.

--Paul
"Suggestions" in Windows 10
compunut asks:
On both of my Windows 10 computers (Pro, 1709), I started getting 'Suggested' entries in notifications with advertisements this past week. I am looking at one now with a picture of two kids and the text 'No more surprise spending: use Ask a parent on Windows 10.' Where did these come from? Is this just the latest in the slippery slope of advertising by Microsoft under the false pretense that Windows 10 is 'free'? (I'm pretty sure I paid for it on both computers at purchase!)
These have actually been popping up in Windows 10 for quite some time, I'm surprised this is the first time you've seen them. But, yes, they are part of the advertising push to help better monetize each Windows user.

Fortunately, you can turn this off.

To do so, navigate to Settings > System > Notifications & actions and then scroll down to the Notifications section. Here, you will see two options to disable: "Show me the Windows welcome experience after updates and occasionally when I sign in to highlight what's new and suggested" and "Get tips, tricks, and suggestions as you use Windows."

BTW: This is a tip from my Windows 10 Field Guide. :)
Nokia 6.1
AnOldAmigaUser asks:
Any thoughts on the Nokia 6.1? The US version is in at B&H Photo, but they only have the 3Gb/32Gb version.
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