Bryan Roper just laid off

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I can’t believe it. Microsoft’s very best presenter – and one of the best “you won’t beleeeeeeeeive this feature” guys (whether the feature’s worth a
[See the full post at: Bryan Roper just laid off]

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I keep saying that the most effective way to show higher profit and increase the zillions made by top mgmt is to layoff the people who do the actual work. It sure isn’t improving products and services.

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Trot this out along with ZDNut’s latest blog about the uselessness of W7 and you have a clue to the future.

It ain’t about the tool itself, it’s about the add-ons that make it profitable.

If you can inhale and breathe in the loveliness of W10 and it’s in-habitation of your data, then fine. Many companies may be comfortable about that. And that must be the logic behind the data control onslaught.

I want to make at least 10% of the profit of my online persona, and 20% of my business interface. That will pay for my owning/renting important data tools.

Micro**** wants to take all of my profitable data for itself.

Ubuntu!

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Hopefully the one who came up with the idea that the same UI for desktop and mobile was the first one out the door.

But sadly it was probably the one who fought against the data collection and privacy issues that was the first to go

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Clearly, if Win 10 is failing to meet objectives, it is because it is not presented properly, not because the product don’t meet the needs of its users. Maybe insisting more on why previous Windows sucks could help. Maybe pushings “issues” and “slowness” updates to Win 7 could help too. Maybe giving more money to online sites and magazines to say how great Windows 10 is could help too.

This morning, my tech who didn’t believe me we would have issues with the auto-updating was completely shocked to have some users complain Windows restarted during their business “busy” hours to install Anniversary Update and then they couldn’t use their printers anymore, their desktop changed and suddenly a ton of new app craps they never saw before thanks to us appeared. We could have done something to delay it more, but I guess I was perversely curious to see with my own eyes Windows not respecting the busy hours and just seeing it in action wreck the carefully installed stations that were sitting there waiting to be destroyed. That, plus the fact it is not that hard to fix for us and doing something before to help would have required time anyway.

So it seems the technique I’ve used for years to install and forget PCs is much harder to justify using Windows 10. No, those PCs didn’t have the additional delay you can set for big updates as they have been installed before we found out about this, but the problem would only have been delayed, not eliminated. It is not a matter of pushing an update that is not ready for prime time, but the fact that pushing what is clearly a Windows update, CBB or not, is completely disturbing the current flow of operations, changing settings and layout and making some devices not work anymore. There is nothing justifying that the same Windows 10 core installed every 6-8 months imply you need to reinstall the same old driver after because Windows is probably too clueless to keep the one that was working and not replace it with the one shipping with the update. This happened with HP printers, Lexmark printers, Brother printers, not an isolated case.

Please, please Microsoft, stop this nonsense. I ask you for all the small businesses and the home owners that don’t have a domain. Can the train be stopped? I don’t see how they could justify that to hopeful shareholders who believe the mobile desktop/cloud is the future, unless the top executive gets the boot when the issues will be too clearly affecting the bottom line. In the meantime, let’s try some different PR.

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I hope he can go on to something else profitable, like film reviews.

Roper & Roeper, anyone?

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And an additional 700 employees, aimed at reducing staff in a number of business units, such as sales, marketing, and human resources.

Resizing, downsizing, rightsizing = leaner, meaner.

Upper Management should undergo the same process. Replace the guys at the top with temporary workers. See how that works out.

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Amazon should snap him up. Or Google. Facebook. He should have an illustrious future – a great showman.

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Downsizing usually presages the decline of the company. It shows upper mismanagement does not have a clue as to what the real problems are so they cut head count to save a few bucks. Then there is another round as the first one did not work as it will not.

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@Alex Eiffel
I understand form this post and previous posts that your machines are not in a Windows AD Domain.
It is still possible and probably recommended to configure a Windows Server 2016 with WSUS role and point each machine to that WSUS Server via Local Group Policy Editor. This is obviously the case if you use Windows 10 Pro or higher versions.
If WSUS Server is not an option due to the additional expense required, then my suggestion is to use the Group Policy
Computer ConfigurationAdministrative TemplatesWindows ComponentsWindows Update
Configure Automatic Updates set to Disabled.

This would resolve all issues, but you would have to instruct your users to click the Check for updates button only when you or your tech decide that all updates in the backlog are cleared. Or otherwise, install manually, but this require some effort, depending on the number of computers in your organisation (about 50 as I understand from a previous post?).

If you only want to install manually, you can configure the policy in the same location as above:
Remove access to all Windows Update features set to Enabled.
From the description:

This setting allows you to remove access to scan Windows Update.

If you enable this setting, Windows Update scan access is removed.

There are few other policies which you may want to configure as standard:

Computer ConfigurationAdministrative TemplatesWindows ComponentsDelivery Optimization
Download Mode set to Bypass

Computer ConfigurationAdministrative TemplatesWindows ComponentsData Collection and Preview Builds
Allow Telemetry set to 0 or 1 (both are “good enough”)
Do not show feedback notifications set to Enabled

Both above can be configured in the GUI except for the Telemetry value to 0

Computer ConfigurationAdministrative TemplatesWindows ComponentsStore
Disable all apps from Windows Store set to Disabled (only if available in Enterprise and Education, counter-intuitive and misleading value, but the correct one to set, NOT Enabled)

Computer ConfigurationAdministrative TemplatesWindows ComponentsCloud Content
and
Computer ConfigurationAdministrative TemplatesWindows ComponentsCloud Content

Configure all values as suitable

The last one useful
Computer ConfigurationAdministrative TemplatesControl PanelRegional and Language Options
Allow input personalization set to Disabled

This one can be configured in GUI too, but the settings are all over the place and difficult to find.

Any other Group Policy is entirely optional and related to the environment.
You may consider the “old” policies under
Computer ConfigurationAdministrative TemplatesSystemInternet Communications ManagementInternet Communications Settings
Turn off CEIP and Turn off Error Reporting

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we all live in hope..

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Actually the buzz word is “restructure”. This was carried out at my workplace a few months ago.

There are several tiers in business, those that won’t be given their marching orders (management and their hangers-on), those that will possibly be canned and those that definitely will be.

The company has to be seen to be doing it by the book (legally) and fairly throughout but it’s all smoke and mirrors. The top tier wasn’t touched at all, only the minion office staff and a great majority of the warehouse staff were. The higher you are up the totem pole the safer you are.

It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth as the ones who should have gone are sitting pretty. And no, I wasn’t one of those that were escorted out the door.

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It’s my opinion that the new inferno that MS has calmly lit is going to put Windows 10 in peril (worse than it is). The release of more free Windows 10 to the public is not going to help MS’s OS or the company. The letting go of top and best publists and creative programmers will only degrade an already degraded Windows 10 OS. The doom of Windows 10 is being set by Microsoft it’s self.

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Le roi et mort, vive le roi! Or in this case Windows 7 is dead, long live Windows 7! lol

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You are underestimating the herd intinct and gullibility of the users.

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Getting rid of all those who do the work so that the parasites can get richer.

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Its worse than that. They dont give ff about the company. The aim is to suck it dry of money fast and retire in luxury.

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Since they are not capable of anything else they demonstrate their “work” by downsizing. This is how they justify themselves.

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@ Brian ……. Some M$-apologists/shills here will certainly disagree with u. To them, M$-Win 10 is a perfect 10 in cptr gymnastics, … eg repair loops, running in circles, stuck landing at 95%, etc.

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+100

… oh yeah, don’t get me started about “them” still receiving their bonuses for all the hard work they do!! :~

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Thanks for the suggestions ch100.

I already prepared a huge registry file and some locally importable GPOs but I had to work on lots of other stuff the last few weeks and didn’t have time to test them yet. I will check all the settings you recommended to verify if I had them already. Those PCs that got upgraded were from our initial install of Win 10 with our standard install procedure from previous Windows versions and a few obvious tweaks like deferring feature upgrades from the GUI, but no exploration of the group policies yet except the ones we already used from old versions of Windows and the ones we had to find to remove the obvious in your face things we hated about Windows 10 (like the lock screen, that unfortunately they made this option to remove it useless in AU).

My goal has always been to provide autonomous workstations without any central management for various reasons and it worked great until Win 10 came along.

In my post, I wanted to highlight two issues:
1) The fact that a not that careful and not that clueless person can install a PC and have his work disturbed in the middle of the day by a forced update. Yes, putting updates to manual would solve that, but from experience, I can’t ask the kind of users I have or people I help for free to be responsible for updates. I want as much as possible autonomous stations, which means autonomous from us or the users (that unfortunately can’t be relied upon to follow IT’s instructions because IT is always too worried about imaginary threats and you know, Y2K was just a joke and they made such a big deal out of it, right?).

2) The main issue I wanted to show was that regardless that you control the updates or not, when you allow a big feature update to happen, it breaks important stuff like printers. This is totally unacceptable. Yes, we could update at the time we want manually, then fix it by reinstalling the old driver, but it goes completely contrary to the idea of set it and forget it approach I’ve been using for years, hoping it is less expensive to fix whatever issue will arise from automatic updates than to constantly monitor updates. I’ve been following this approach for more than 20 years and it has served me well. I wouldn’t advise it for everyone, but with a small company with tech people busy doing development, we can afford to fix issues when they arise while spending most of our time doing something more profitable than maintenance and not have the learning curve associated with managing Windows Server and all of associated central management. Maybe I will have to convert now if MS don’t reverse course at some point and I don’t find a better alternative.

My problem is with the idea that you can push an OS upgrade, let’s call those builds what they are, every few months and cause huge disturbances to work flow to home and small business users. The days where you learn an OS and then just patch it to be secure for a good number of years until you change the computer seem over until they fix that problem. And now I get calls from all the people I help outside my organization, small SMBs and home users, that get updated automatically and their devices don’t work anymore. They are not even aware they got AU installed. To them, it is just a long normal update after which their PC don’t look at all like I have configured it for them, cleaning it a bit “à la Noel”.

Oh, also about some other posts I saw from you today talking about running Windows offline, I wanted to say I have been running Win 10 for a good amount of time offline in one of my internal “no Internet access” networks with lots of users. You might remember I had a big issue with offline Win 10 PCs freezing when on for a long time due to the way MS changed the time synchronization in Win 10. That was my first problem with running offline. There is a bug that makes the PC freezes if offline for a long time. Every week the PC was freezing at about the same time and its clock would be reset to the install date of Windows 10. That was when I started coming here and thanks to the help of people here, I was able to figure out the issue and fix it by reverting to previous Windows behavior using a registry setting. I’ve been running those stations for a very long time now offline and I didn’t experience any issue with them. I also ran Windows XPs to 8.1 on this offline network where about half of the computers I manage are for years without any issue. In fact, not being online, those PCs never slowed down, got bloated or anything. I even have an old 98 station that is still running fast for what it is doing. Again, running unpatched offline PCs is not something I would advise anybody doing unless they know exactly what they are doing and what they need to do to reduce their risks of security issues, but I just wanted to point out from my experience I was able to run offline without any reliability concern, in fact clearly less than with online stations. The only reason I put a machine off on this network is when it breaks. Using creative firewalling and bastion hosts for limited transfer of information, my offline network has been able to run fast and reliable for years and those PCs don’t have any Internet access. I didn’t experience any timeout issues, but maybe it is because I tweak the stations and reduce unnecessary services or features.

The only timeout issue I had ever is not related to being online or not and it has to do with the Webclient service making access to Unix shares very slow when Win Vista was out (and later versions too). Disabling this weird useless (to me) service on every install we do since then have solved the issue without any perceptible side effect.

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Constant Microsoft whiners and FUD generators are pretty annoying as well…

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Oh. For a second, I thought you were talking about moi….

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Didn’t know you could speak Low German…

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HARRRRRR! Gott im himmel!

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