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To block Chrome from allowing websites to access your clipboard, Perplexity lists steps including turning off a specific permission under Privacy and Security –> Site Settings –> Additional Permissions –> Clipboard –> “Don’t allow sites to see text or images on your clipboard.”

I’m running Chrome Version 135.0.7049.115 (Official Build) (64-bit), “Chrome is up to date,” and this setting does not appear in that version.

Perplexity derived this recommendation from a one-year old YouTube video that I checked because I do not trust any AI recommendation without checking sources first, as, by definition, results are otherwise suspect.  (Research in AI is currently just a mindless web scraper, useful but requiring verification.)

Any other perspectives on this Chrome setting?

— AWRon

Woody told it like it is ever since Woody’s Windows Watch, and basically never stopped.

He made a difference.  We won’t forget him.

— AWRon

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LongTimer, AJNorth

Thank the genius who cracked the code.

Invaluable.

— AWRon

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SupremeLaW

So is one of the changes that what you just said about Word and the document no longer the case?

Surely, that is a very big deal, and warrants further discussion.  Maybe we need you to do a Part 2, and discuss what the substance of the changes really are?

Or ask Max Oppenheimer to do it.

— AWRon

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WCHS, Cybertooth

Typo:  beginning of third paragraph from the end, you mean “right pane” not “left pane” don’t you?

And yes, why should I care about anything in this document, since I have no choices if I use Windows (other than to ignore it and do whatever the hell I want or can get away with, the way many people have done since Microsoft was founded, given how one-sided any bargain with Microsoft is)?

— AWRon

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Cybertooth, Will Fastie

Thank you for a very good article!

Please give us a link to

“detailed description of Google’s history, strategy, and innovation, including how its competitors saw and responded (and is well worth reading for that.)”

— AWRon

Hi Susan:

In your experience, have there ever been real problems with SSUs such that one wishes they could have been uninstalled?

(And then of course do we know if rolling back to a Restore Point uninstalls them?)

I should state that I create a Restore Point before installing ANYTHING in Windows, and try to only install one thing at a time, so poor is installation testing by software developers these days (or so prohibitively expensive is it because of the complexity of Windows and/or the incompetence of Microsoft.)

— AWRon

Yes, but with a 1 TB drive, an image backup will take longer than creating a Restore Point.

My question really is, are Restore Points still good, or has Microsoft deprecated them?

— AWRon

Hi Will:

I found this to be just horrific:

“If you look at the fine print, you’ll quickly see that Microsoft is taking the path of greatest benefit to itself. It’s true that those folders will no longer be synced, but they will still remain in the cloud, eating up my quota of OneDrive space. And their contents will be deleted from my local PC. So by Microsoft’s definition, “sync” means keeping stuff in both places. Of the two other logical options — keep locally only or keep in the cloud only — you get to choose only the latter.”  (Emphasis supplied.)

To me, this is just additional evidence that Microsoft cannot be trusted.  Those of us with long experience of Microsoft know to be suspicious of Microsoft doublespeak, but it is just appalling that it continues unchecked in this way.

Instructive to see in this very same issue of AskWoody, that Apple is taking direct aim at this kind of deception by Microsoft (although how trusting can we be in Apple?).

How on earth does Microsoft expect us to trust it on anything important like a real AI-based personal assistant (as per Bill Gates’ vision in this article,

https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-still-pulling-strings-microsoft-ai-copilot-chatgpt-2024-4)

if it continues to be deceptive in every statement it makes about the Windows ecosystem?

Glad that OneDrive and OneNote can be turned off/uninstalled in Windows 10.

Somebody in this forum please come up with a registry hack or other means to banish them from Windows 11.

Users need to be able to control where their data is, and who has access to it, at all times.

— AWRon

 

 

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rizzquery, windbg, Cybertooth, Will Fastie

But aren’t there some updates that cannot be uninstalled?   Or was that only in the old days?

And, if an update cannot be uninstalled, will a Restore Point effectively uninstall it?

And what about updates to Office?

— AWRon

Does System Restore work to roll back to the status prior to the installation of a patch?

Or does Microsoft make an exception for anything related to Windows Update, so you can only rely upon a full image backup?

— AWRon

 

 

Steeviebops is quite correct about there being “all sorts of issues” with attempts to install multiple versions of recent Office releases on a single machine.

I wanted to take a peek at the installer for 2021 that I had downloaded to a machine currently running Office 2019,  before installing it on another machine that doesn’t have any version of Office already on it.

As soon as I clicked setup.exe on Office 2021, it started to run all sorts of click-to-run files and immediately tried to wipe out my earlier Product Key for 2019.

Fortunately, I was able to quickly disconnect from the Internet and open Task Manager to kill the active click-to-run process, before too much damage was done.  (I was able to reject the offer to activate Microsoft 365, and instead continued with my activated Office 2019.)

However, I took the precaution of checking “background processes” before congratulating myself.  There I found five active c2r processes lurking, and sucking up power and memory, which I had to stamp out using End Task, before I was done.

I keep forgetting the Golden Rule:  Create a Restore Point before ever clicking on ANY file labeled “setup.exe.” 

In this case I escaped, but the aggressiveness of the way those files started to run made me think:  Is System Restore still an effective tool?

If I had let the 2021 Office destroy my 2019 installation, would I have been able to unwind that using a Restore Point?

Microsoft has downplayed mention of System Restore ever since Windows 7, and I imagine could find a way to install its Office products whatever way it damn likes without leaving you an out with system Restore.

What do people think?

— AWRon

 

Brian, great work on this Public Defender article, full of useful insights, as usual.

However:

“Perhaps artificial intelligence will soon be able to predict the scams being planned by these lowlifes and get them thrown into the pokey before they can ruin our lives on a global scale.”

Nice thought.

More likely,  before that ever happens, the lowlifes will be using AI to make their activities even harder to detect.  That’s the way it always is.

— AWRon

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rc primak

Please tell us where to get a Win 10 Pro license for $20!

Well, it worked, but not without some haggling.

Entering the Pro key produced an error, characterizing the key as invalid.  But I knew it was good because it came in a sealed box from Microsoft (even though it was dated 2019), and the actual key card had a scratch-off authenticity label on it, partially obscuring one set of 5 characters of the key, presumably to prevent photocopying.  Suffice to say, very high likelihood of authenticity.

Using setup.exe in the enclosed USB stick took us as far as being ready to install… Windows 10 Home.  Windows 10 Pro key, Windows 10 Home already on the machine, machine offline — no upgrade.  Abort.  Connected the machine online, same result.

Bottom line, would not upgrade until I had fully updated the 21H1 Home machine to 22H2 Home with all non-optional patches (and it still installed an optional driver, even though I had not checked that option).  And it reset some privacy preferences that I had previously turned off.

When it did the upgrade (after confirming that it was really going to install Pro), it briefly flashed on screen that it was going to install Enterprise,  but then it reverted to, and installed, Pro.  Phew.

Interesting side diversions:

1.    I read online that sometimes the upgrade hangs at the “Enterprise” stage.  Didn’t happen to me.
2.    There were online references to an alleged “Generic” key,

VK7JG-NPHTM-C97JM-9MPGT-3V66T

which would supposedly enable the upgrade, but then require subsequent entry of a valid Pro key.  This did not work for me — although I did find this key in another Win 10 Pro machine that reports as Activated.

I suspect this was some rogue volume license key, since blocked, but am curious if anyone knows anything more about this.

Thanks for any input.

— AWRon