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It’s still a form of voluntary tracking whether you understand it or not.

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Fred

Well, it still sounds like tracking ‘if’ you voluntarily choose to opt-in for other devices to know you are near. Else how would the public health authorities know to contact everyone to notify that you are near each other? Tracking isn’t just about GPS location, it’s also the person on the other end of the device – which can then be identified. Yes, I know all smart phones can send your personal data back to the service provider. blah blah blah. This still sounds like another form of tracking to me.

Maybe that’s it, Alex. I just know that it showed up on my phone about a week ago in the ‘Settings > General > Google’ section. I checked with a few friends and it happened to them as well. It wasn’t there before and nobody seems to know what it does.

It has appeared in my Android phone as well. I’m in Texas so I’m not sure if that matters, yet.
I looked in the area where you can uninstall apps but it doesn’t show there. Does anyone know if this Covid tracing app can be removed?

As a side service, my company produces training films and uses the .mp4 format. But before 2015 everything was in .flv.

One of our trade groups says that is common for companies like ours. For us alone, we have about 800 unique training videos, about a quarter in .flv. That number is high because we make them in six different languages.

While they can be played through a browser if necessary, most are played through a media player that supports the .flv extension. If that ceases to happen then a lot of companies will have a chore to handle all of that converting. My guess is that it wont get done.

Thanks guys. The reason I asked is that I have updated 12 boxes to Win-10 since New Year’s. Three of those resulted in a completed update, but the resulting profile seemed corrupted. The basic Start Tiles weren’t there, it wouldn’t create an email account, wouldn’t sign into the Store, and a handful of other annoyances. I redid the upgrade process from start on one box and had the same result.
So I tried creating a second Admin profile from the first, same result, but like starting from scratch but without functional connections.
That’s when I started looking for a way to fix the problem, or work around it.
I have been all over the web and it appears my problems are not that uncommon, and nobody – I mean nobody, has an answer, not even Microsoft.
So when I stumbled across ForensiT last week I was interested in getting other’s opinion of it. Even if I move the Win-7 profile to the Win-10 box, I’m not even sure it would solve the problem.
I want to add that there is nothing faulty with the three Win-7 boxes that had erroneous upgrades.

I have seen Transwiz mentioned in other forums as well. Am I to understand that one can transfer Win-7 profiles to a Win-10 system? If that is so I presume the Transwiz Help Files would give instruction how to do so?
-Declan

First, don’t get Windows Media Player confused with Windows Media Center. They are two different animals.
I have a home network with six linked computers, each with a different purpose (three are in my home office/studio). All are Win-10 except the one in my home theater which is Win-7. I keep it Win-7 specifically for the Media Center.
I travel and I use it to record specific shows or movies I won’t get the chance to watch when I’m away. I’m a fan of NOVA, Frontline, Blacklist, Seal Team, and others. For me having that recording ability is worth continuing that one computer on Win-7. I don’t use Media Center for cataloging, or even music, viewing photos or other playback material – just recording OTA programs I like.
I’ve tried Plex and Kodi and while they serve a similar purpose, they just don’t have the clean and easy to use interface that Media Center has.
And since that one computer is not tied to the open Internet, I’m really not concerned.
One day if I find a recording software that I like then maybe I’ll jump to Win-10 there. But for now it stays Win-7.
On a side note, I have seen multiple articles on how to get Media Center to work on Win-10. I haven’t tried a side-door install to see if it works, perhaps someone here has tried it and can give light on the effectiveness of those efforts.

I don’t know if this is a related glitch or not … a month ago I woke up to find my Win 10 Pro-1803 upgraded to 1903 without asking me. It just did it in the middle of the night even though I had all the brakes set to avoid it. From that moment on I cannot have more than two or three browser tabs open without pushing the CPU level to 100% and staying there. I’m using Brave, Firefox, and Chrome, and it happens with all three. Once I back down to one or two tabs, the CPU level drops to 65-90%. With no browser it stays around 25%. Prior to the jump to 1903 it rarely ever pushed past 85-90% unless I was trying to do a lot of things at once. I thought these two issues might be related, but I have no idea. Is anyone else experiencing this problem?

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TaskForce141

A noisy HDD could be one answer. Loose things that are vibrating could be another. That merely takes a bit of tapping and feeling to find out what it is.

I’d offer another choice, a noisy fan. Then can run fast, vibrate if they’re loose, even make a noise if a chunk of dust or even a little debris has found it’s way into the case.

Protect and clean the vents, that has always been the source of my noises, especially if the laptop gets heated and the fan runs on high speed for a while.

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Elly, BobbyB

Mr. Wavy, I use Firefox as my default browser.
Please tell me the folder where I can go in and create new folders, subfolders and new bookmarks outside of Firefox itself. Which folder can I rearrange the bookmarks manually without having to drag them up and down inside the browser window. That dedicated folder and that ability does not exist.

There isn’t even a Bookmarks folder with individual Bookmark links in it. For someone like me who does a lot of research, and maintains hundreds of bookmarks on many different topics, the IE-11 Favorites management system was as easy as moving individual files around your Windows Explorer. In fact, it WAS an individual folder in the Windows Explorer.

Firefox (and various Chromium versions) use an internal Extensible Storage Engine database to store favorites. It’s buried deep in the Users Folder in a .json format that prevents you from directly controlling your Bookmarks. This database is not designed to be “human readable”, so it takes specialized software to be able to do anything meaningful with it. This means that you can no longer use the File Explorer to manage your favorites. You are limited to make very simple modifications inside the browser’s Bookmarks dropdown while still inside the browser window.

The “native” way to access your Bookmarks in Firefox is, of course, to open Firefox, expose the vertical favorites “pane”, and use Firefox to rename, delete, or rearrange the folders and favorites. Added extensions do not change that. I am one of those who agrees with what I read, and I miss that ability from IE-11 in Firefox. I wish I still had control of my bookmarks like I could in IE-11.

Emmet Gray has developed an little app called, “EdgeManage” that creates a way to manage your bookmarks and regain full control in Edge like you did in IE-11. If one of you coders could make something like that available for Firefox and other Chromium forks, then that would close the gap in Bookmarks usability.

http://www.edgemanage.emmet-gray.com/index.html

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Elly, BobbyB, HiFlyer

I read recently that the main reason so many people are holding on to IE-11 is because of the way it handles Favorites. Instead of hiding them in an inaccessible database, it uses actual links and files that can be kept and organized in a folder. That makes using and controlling Favorites so much easier, especially if you use a lot of them on a regular basis.

Actually, that makes a lot of sense. There is no way to easily access and control your bookmarks in any of the Chromium-based browsers. I’m not commenting on the speed, graphics, or rendering of the browser itself, everyone has their preference. I’m just saying that the ability to control your Favorites was valuable to IE-11 and it’s predecessors. I wish one of the coders for a Chromium-based browser would include that in their release. IE-11 hold outs would jump in a minute.

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Cybertooth

My problem involves the September IE security-only patch, KB 4036586. After installing it, the ‘Sharing” feature in my WordPress hosted blog (TechViews.org) stopped working. Normally the moment I post a new article it will immediately cross post to LinkedIn, Facebook & Twitter. I tried the process with both Chrome and Firefox, and the ‘sharing’ feature worked. So it was an IE-11 Update issue. When I uninstalled KB 4036586, the ‘sharing’ feature worked again. I am not sure if this is an across the board problem with WordPress websites and the IE-11 Security update, or if it’s limited in scope. But the update was certainly the cause of the problem for me.

EDIT: HTML to text

woody wrote:

Interesting. Do you have a WordPress addin that makes the cross-posts possible, or is it a custom job?

It’s a built in function in the version of WordPress that I use. There are two main ways to get to it.

a. Click the My Sites button in the top left, then go down to ‘Sharing’ near the bottom left. From there you can configure one or more other sites to share with.

b. In the quick-editor accessed with the ‘Write” button in the upper right. Then halfway down the panel on the right side is a ‘Sharing’ category. You can turn the individual sites on or off per post after you have made the initial selection in the step above.

c. Another way, which I seldom use, is through the Dashboard. It’s a little confusing so I usually ignore it.

The posts in those other sites appear exactly as they do in WordPress.

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woody