matsan

Been away from Windows for some years but just bought a new HP 340S G7 for a non-computer-savvy friend requiring it for studies (statistics course so unfortunately a Windows-based Excel is required for some special plug-ins and other Windows-applications). Nice computer for that price and with additional 8GB of RAM (total 16 GB) and an i7 it's pretty quick as well. Memory upgrade was a nightmare though - that laptop body required many of the iPhone-repair tools and HP's crazy sticker rubber feet just didn't got back 100% right. But... All. This. Cr*p. Starting the computer up and installing the school's EDU Office 365 seemed like an easy task, but... HP's take on Windows 10 is simply terrible! Sooooo much crap was installed. Hardest to remove was McAfee that had loaded up with AV, VPN and a Password Manager - all requiring separate reboots. Second was all the crap Microsoft loaded onto the Start-menu; Mail, Microsoft 365 preview (for ALL Nordic + English languages so it needed to be uninstalled 5 times!), Solitair, Spotify, Groove Music, Films & TV, Play, Adobe Free Trials etc, etc. Granted, with the exception of McAfee and Microsoft 365 they were all easy and quick to uninstall. If my friend didn't need the computer today, I would have gone through the hoops and downloaded a Windows ISO and nuked the machine from orbit and reinstalled everything. However, I am unsure of the Microsoft crap - would it have still been there?

Volunteering as "IT-manager" for a non-profit organization I have been evaluating an Acer Chromebook 314 (intel i3 based) for a couple of weeks and I am blown away with functionality and price/performance ratio. We are using Microsoft 365 Teams and during the years we have been struggling with BYOD but run into constant problems if the users are already in a Microsoft 365 organization - the non-profit E1 tier is not playing nicely with commercial tiers!

We have been limping forward with Chrome profiles it has been the secret sauce to solve this issue. Most of our users are up and running.

Out of curiosity I bought a Chomebook and has been performing my non-profit work to 100% using this Chromebook and I am impressed. The Teams web-client is completely compatible and running meetings and the office applications without a glitch. The only issue I have found so far is that Chrome (the browser) is not supporting multiple profiles in Chrome OS - really convenient as an admin!

The hardware is pretty decent at the price ($480 in Sweden). The keyboard is really nice with a distinct throw and island style that I really like. A bit quirky layout without the Win/Mac-key but it works. The Full-HD screen is really nice but the 16:9 aspect is hard for a long-time Mac user to accept - 16:10 is so much nicer. Battery doesn't leave anything to wish for. Connects like a charm to my iPhone and WiFi. The trackpad could have been a bit nicer, but I like the small size instead of the enormous trackpads these days.

As "IT-manager" is see the big benefit here as a completely hands-off device without any problems with drivers, OS updates or AV/Firewall issues.

So - what is Microsoft's response to this? Will we see any nice Windows-based devices running 10X or something similar with just the Teams client?

Your thoughts greatly appreciated!

/Mattias

According to Macrumors the stupid Siri-remote is up for a redesign!!

Future computers are also rumored to have (drum-roll) - PORTS and SD-reader!

Is the era of Sir Jony "Form-Over-Function" Ive finally over in Cupertino? No a decade too soon.

Just finished The Old Guard from Netflix on our newly bought Sonos Arc (+ 2 * Sonos One as surround, waiting for the Sub to arrive, but we think it will be returned as unneeded) and our 75″ Samsung QLED TV

We … were … blown … away!!!!!

Bought our previous Pioneer receiver back in 2008 with 5.1 and considered it the high standard and enjoyed countless movies on the 120″ HD-projector from PS3 BD-player. We stubbornly sticked with the projector and screen and simple iPads for daily watching. We are glad we skipped a generation or two of home-theater technology and invested in the Samsung and Sonos.

Our movie room is ~250 ft2 and the Sonos Arc is located about 4 in below the TV (not optimum, but all you Americans hang your TVs too high!). The Sonos Ones are 1 ft behind the sofa and spread 3-6 ft left-right. Calibrated the room with TruePlay.

Our thoughts:

Picture: HDR+ on the Samsung is amazing! The lens flares actually stings you in the eyes and lights up the room and the 4K content looks stunning viewed from 18 ft.

Sound: Dolby Atmos is freaking awesome! The spatial location of the sound is uncanny. The sound is actually coming from the actors’ mouths – you are practically THERE!! We expected stunning effects from helicopters flying over your head, but hearing the spent cases from the first scene clinking over the floor stunned us!

Saw Ford and Google just started a JV focusing on connected cars and leaving Microsoft in the dust. After experiencing the lackluster Ford SYNC in multiple rentals during the years I can't say I blame Ford for ditching Microsoft but it makes me wonder how many more areas Microsoft can afford to be left out in.

Wow - the tsunami och M1-ready application is really happening and even obscure tools as VMRC are taking the leap.

Must be pretty easy for Apple developers to port their code.

December 8 and yet another update pushed out to (Cr)Edge! The morning routine seems to be open up the computer, allow the update to process while you fetch a cup of coffee.

Good that Microsoft is now able to update their browser (and soon other parts as discussed in WW#701) but do they really have to do that daily!?! Is "ship early, patch daily" the new mantra?

Just installed the latest batch of updates for my Mac office. When starting Outlook again, I was greeted with an invitation to try the new Outlook - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/outlook-blog/enhanced-performance-designed-for-simplicity-the-new-outlook-for/ba-p/1675505

When accepting it warned me about my Amazon WorkMail account not being supported (even though it is Exchange compatible)!!

Is the new Outlook only for Office 365 users?

As admin of a modest Office 365 organization I came a cross the following message when adding a new user:

"Due to increased demand, it might take up to 24 hours to fully set up ‎user‎ in Teams. Until then, you won't be able to assign Teams policies to them, and they might not have access to Teams features like calling and audio conferencing."

Come on guys - do you have to send a person to the server-room to install a new license or what?!?

Sigh!

Just got a notice from Microsoft that my Office 365 Home subscription now allows six persons to use it, up from five. https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/important-news-about-your-office-365-subscription-06828297-4f1d-4059-8748-365d8e658968?wt.mc_id=email&ui=en-US&rs=en-GB&ad=GB

Is this the first step towards a price-hike?

Bring on all anecdotal data you may have.

I go first:

I run Ubuntu 17.10 on a HP EliteBook 840 G3 (i7-6500U 2.5GHz / 16GB RAM).

As a software developer I have some IDEs, VMs and git as my daily applications. After updating to kernel 4.13.0-25 (fixing most of the vulnerabilities I understand) I see a 100% slow-down in git operations (stuff that previously took 2 seconds now take 4-5 seconds, most notably checking out from the server) and some file-indexing operations in the IDEs are slow to complete but not much else.

Seems like disk and network took the most punishment.

Anyone else noticed any major slow-downs?

Just read the article about the Intel microcode flaw - https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/02/intel_cpu_design_flaw/

Nice to take a 5-30% performance hit on your hardware... Is this the dawn of a new throttle-gate...? Sigh...

Just home from a developer get-together in London. We were 30 independent consultants developing for mainly the win32-platform enjoying a day of showcasing our projects and discussing. Many of us have been burnt by Microsoft’s promises of the new platforms – Silverlight, DNA, J#, XNA and Windows Phone, to name a few.

When discussing, we found that most of us are still developing for the win32-platform. Why? Simple answer is – to support Windows 7!

Windows 7 will be supported until 2020. Major business and most of the world (46% as of this writing) are still running it. Lowest common-denominator is win32! Why should anyone write for anything else? Microsoft is now muddling the waters with the UWP to PWA shift, so why should I look at UWP?

Please Microsoft – allow us to develop for UWP and PWA platforms and deploy those applications on Windows 7. Create a wrapper or something (steal Electron runtime?) because developing and deploying win32 apps is not the way forward. It will make the life hard for us developers and you will have a even more fragmented platform since developers will turn their back on you.

Normally, each Microsoft report is scrutinized here on thurrott.com. However, I haven't found a trace of the Q3 FY2017 report (released on April 27) on this site. Why? I hate to think it is due to the 25% drop in revenue reported for the Surface line...

The most fragile thing in the Known Universe must be Microsoft updates.

We have spent most of the day in the office trying to get the Office 365 update to install. Every time opening an office document, sending an email or while away from the computer for a couple of minutes the Office 365 upgrade window pops up.

Trying to upgrade and it fails with "Something went wrong" on all our machines with the error code 30088-28 (1715). Only reference we could find was to "Network connection error. New code no info" on answers.microsoft.com.

The solution was on another webpage - where this could be due to "an already existing installation of office". Hmmm, checked and we actually have two Office 365 installed - one in English and one in Swedish. Both looks like full installation, but the Swedish is actually only the language pack and dictionary. Uninstalling the Swedish language pack and the update could start and completed successfully. After reinstalling the Swedish Language pack, another "installation" of Office (with the "sv-se" extension in the name) shows up with the exact same version and install size...

"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created." - Einstein

Sorry for the rant - just needed to vent!

Anyone else seen this?

After the Windows 10 updates that were rolled out last Tuesday I have started to get hot-bag problems on two laptops that have been working flawlessly sence they were reinstalled with Windows 10 about a year ago.

It has now happened a couple of times on my primary laptop (HP EliteBook 640) and now on my secondary (EliteBook 850) after applying the November updates.

Since the updates are now only distributed as one large file I'll try uninstall KB3200970 and see if it fixes this.

Hi,

just noticed (2016-10-04 15:05 UTC) that all Premium articles are displayed too wide on my iPhone SE. All open articles show up fine (i.e. scaling to the device width).

/Mattias