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One trivial issue turned up in updating my 23H2 Windows 11 laptop. Somehow the little bell for systems notifications disappeared from the systems tray. When I checked all the notification settings, the check box for showing the bell was off, so I turned it on. I don’t remember if this setting was there before, but if so, it certainly wasn’t off. Maybe more Microsoft messing around, assuming of course that anyone else noticed this. If not, the paws of my 15 pound cat walking across the keyboard have found yet another mysterious keyboard shortcut for changing system settings.

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Cybertooth

Thanks for the trip down memory lane! I was working in Silicon Valley at that time (though it certainly wasn’t called that) and developing commercial control systems based on MODCOMP (remember them) and later PDP hardware. One of my engineers bought and kept a PDP-8 in his bedroom as a hobby (a lot more expensive than the Altair), but most of us never saw the leap coming to the small personal computers that so dominate life now. Somewhat over 10 years later as a graduate student in a different field, I bought my first 8086 computer–a Tandon clone of the IBM PC, to use for word processing and data analysis, and like most, have acquired innumerable ones since then. They are as common as the coffee cup on my desk, and sometimes not a lot larger. Contrast that with the first computer I programmed in 1964, which filled a large room and generated enough heat from its vacuum tubes that only A/C was needed in the building, regardless of the outside temperature. Somehow the step towards AI that requires a server farm to work seems to be headed back there.

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wavy, GeeBeeDee, Will Fastie, Cybertooth, Elly, TechTango

No mention of KB5046400 in the master patch list, but Microsoft has presented it to several of my W10 22H2 computers a few days after the October updates were released. It appears to be another stab at the recovery partition based on Microsoft documentation that gives no clues to what it is trying to fix. I’ve blocked it for the time being, but does anyone know the point of this one? The previous KB5034441 installed successfully on two of the computers back in January. Apparently, that fix wasn’t enough?

I still have W10 on 4 desktops that are not upgradable, so I’ll have to decide what path to take next October, extend coverage or buy new desktops. One desktop is cranky enough that I’m clear I’ll replace it but so far the others (all 10 years old by then) are doing fine. For all I replaced their original hard drives with SSDs, which means there won’t be much gain with new computers, given the moderate use that all of them get. Office 21 going out of support may be as large a factor in deciding what to do.

Update on TurnItIn false positives for AI–we were seeing 100% ratings on some papers earlier in the summer, but looking at the same papers now, the ones we thought likely weren’t AI-generated now get scores like 15% probability, so they apparently have adjusted their algorithms for better discrimination. Maybe they sense an AI business use if they get it right.

Did you generate any estimate of possible false positives? We have noticed that TurnItIn gave very high probabilities for AI generation when other scanners didn’t and wondered if its algorithm might lean toward the false positive side of things. In challenging student work, that’s not an minor consideration.

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MHCLV941

It depends on the nature of the trip–if purely vacation, phone plus good camera (phone doesn’t cut it in the backcountry, both for lack of mechanical zoom lens and battery needs over week plus). If some work is involved and no wilderness, drop the camera and add a surface laptop plus multi-way power socket (can defuse tense situation in airports with limited power capabilities)

Both, in their place. Laptops are good for commuting and travel whereas a tower is much better for price/performance and maintenance. So we usually end up with a few laptops around and more towers, which with occasional upgrades last much longer than the laptops.

Never on laptops or desktops, always on phone and Kindle. I also try to do as little as possible on the phone given the error rate one gets in touching things including the tiny keyboard. The goofs by Microsoft on this parallel their other interface goofs (the 2007 revision to Office comes instantly to mind). I attribute it to most of their ideas coming from bright young engineers with little to no experience in the usages their designs are suppose to improve. In the early days of assembly lines and other human-machine interfaces, the intelligent designers did time-motion studies to figure out what would work best and most efficiently. Windows 11 interface design is just the latest in the Microsoft approach to never having heard/considered that.

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windbg

When I tried the fake email address a week or two ago, it stopped with an invalid email address message and didn’t give the next option. Maybe there was something unique about my fake email, but I couldn’t bypass it and so went on with the Microsoft account, which was also needed to activate Office 2021. After all of that, I added local administrative and regular user accounts, stripped the administrative rights from the Microsoft one, and logged out of it. Unless I have to activate something depending on it sometime in the future, it will just remain an inactive account. Not sure if that keeps any snooping away, but it seems like a reasonable path. I considered deleting the Microsoft account, but wasn’t sure that would affect the Office activation.

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teuhasn2, Norio

Thanks, that is what I was planning, though I’m a bit leery about deleting the MS account. I have no real objection to logging out of it and not logging into it again unless needed, assuming that doesn’t screw up the local account function. I’ll update with what I find out.

Others might have run into this too but in trying this approach on a new Windows 11 Home laptop, I could find no technique (unplugging as above, alt f4, etc.) that would bypass the Microsoft account. It would detect the dropped internet and stick waiting on it to come back. It appears that Microsoft has been actively closing these loopholes. I’m hoping I can disable the Microsoft account after establishing my other accounts on the laptop. I’ve upgraded it to 11 Pro, so maybe that will make it more flexible? Will have to see.

Installed December updates without problems on four Windows 10 21H2 computers, two of which had the duplicated hidparse.sys file in the Windows\System32 directory and two that didn’t. That file was last updated with the November updates and didn’t change for December. Afterwards was able to apply the 22H2 feature update to all computers without incident-much less involved than the monthly update as has been the case recently with feature releases.
It’s not obvious from a hardware/software view what leads to the duplicated hidparse.sys file. Three of the four computers were Dell desktops and a laptop, and the fourth was a Surface laptop. The Surface laptop and one of the desktops were the ones without the duplication. I had previously reinstalled 21H2 (not replacing apps and data files) on the desktop last summer to resolve update problems stemming from some corrupted files-maybe that knocked out whatever was doing the duplication? I have two more Dell desktops to update and will see what holds for them, but clearly, the reported December update problems are not driven solely by the presence of that file in the System32 folder, and previous monthly updates appear to have been updating it.

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Chris B, J9438

Successful installation of KB5012170 on 4 Windows 10 21H2 machines, mostly Dell with legacy boots, but a Surface LT 2 with UEFI boot also had no problem. No Bitlocker activation on any of them; all booting from SSDs if that could make a difference. Caution might be indicated with some configurations, but many are not likely to notice anything given this mix.

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jburk07, MrToad28

Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind when I next run Support Assistant. It has its quirks, but it has been working OK throughout the lifetime of these machines, so it it stops, voila.