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I wish I could find a good step-by-step how to port my Skype-In telephone number:

First, to a mobile 30-day burner phone, and

Second, to my existing GoogleVoice account.

(It has to be in two steps, because the first port must be to a mobile account and the Google Voice account does not count as a mobile account.)

Interesting because my wife is moving her small office from three PCs to three iMacs (three employees), and we plan to reinstall our existing MS 365 Family (Office) sub-accounts for those three on the iMacs.

Questions:

1. Will the three MS 365 Office installations re-connect automatically with their existing OneDrive storage accounts?
2. Does anyone have that experience (moving existing MS 365 accounts with existing docs from PC to Apple), and how well did it go?
3. Do you have any tips for any needed advance prep work for this move, specifically for re-installing the MS 365 onto each iMac and getting the right connections to each user’s existing OneDrive?
4. And how do you all feel about OneDrive being there to continue to do backup, now from the iMacs?
5. But more – my wife would prefer to use iCloud for the document storage.  So what do you recommend?
6. Finally, would it be possible for all the MS 365 users to share a larger iCloud account (for at least their common work docs) so the documents are stored in a single place that each can access?

Thanks!!!

If we start with existing Win 10 Pro machines that were set up WITHOUT MS accounts and let them upgrade themselves to Win 11 by setting their TRV permitted upgrade versions to Win 11 23H2, will the Win 11 OSes demand MS accounts?

If yes, what steps then to make them skip the requirement?

Thanks.

Follow-up Q to my post above ( https://www.askwoody.com/forums/topic/where-do-i-get-a-copy-of-win-11-23h2/#post-2749974 ) and your great answers so far:

If I use TRV to let my wife’s business’s three Win 10 Pro PCs update themselves to Win 11 23H2 AND keep all their apps and data (right?), will the new Win 11 prompt me to set up a MS account?  (I’m pretty sure I avoided MS accounts when I got the Win 10 Pro PCs and started them up three years ago.)

If I get bugged to set up a MS account in the new Win 11, how can I force Win 11 to skip that step, in this particular context, so I can stay local?

Detail – there are two users on each of the three PCs, the second user on each PC if one of my wife’s employees, and that user has her own share of a MS 365 Family subscription (five or six users) with an outlook.com email name that was created specifically for that share of MS 365 Family (different outlook.com emails for each of the three PC users).  Does this change your advice above?

Thanks.

 

Alex -thanks!!

And for those like me who forget this stuff, one reaches Group Edit via Win + R and then type gpedit.msc .

 

Alex – this may be exactly what I’m looking for.

Looks like this will upgrade the two or three Win 10 Pro PCs in my wife’s small business office to Win 11 Pro 23H2 while keeping all apps, files etc., yes?

1. Has anyone here actually done this since the advent of 24H2, and does it work?
2. Please point me to the links for “InControl (or TRV in GPEdit on Pro version)”
3. Isn’t there a way to specify Win 11 Pro 23H2 manually in Group Policy Edit?  I’ve forgotten how to get there – what is the forum page here for that?

Thanks!

 

Very Basic Q – does Brian expect to run the Mac Mini with these PC-style accessories as a Mac (with an Apple OS) or as a PC (with Windows)?

I ask because the keyboard seems to be for a PC, not a Mac.

And what will we end up seeing on the display?

Would be good to know, because my wife is about to lease three Apple iMacs for her employees in her small business, and I wonder whether Brian’s experiment will result in the same end-experience as iMac (Apple world, not PC) but at less cost.  (Detail – even on the three planned iMacs, we will continue to use M365 Family for Excel and Word, to run in the Apple OS.)

TechTango – I have done that – no help.  I really need to identify the process that steals “focus” on my PC.

Again, is there a sysinternals app that would help?  And then how should we use it so as not to be overwhelmed by a million lines in the report?

 

At work on my Dell Optiplex SFF Plus 7010 (the newer 7010, not the 12-year old 7010), I have Win 10 Pro and MS Office Professional Plus 2016 (and I use its Word and Outlook more than the other apps).  The company runs Bitdefender and MS Defender on my PC, and there may be more security that I don’t know about.

In general, something steals the “focus” of my PC very frequently every day.  For example, when I open a Word document from any source and I start typing, the doc appears in Word in the “front” but the “focus” is never in the doc, if I type nothing happens, it is not apparent where the PC’s “focus” is, and I have to ALT+TAB+release twice to get the “focus” back into the Word doc.  Sometimes, I see a fast-spinning tiny light-blue washer-doughnut and my PC is frozen while it spins.

I never see anything in Task Manager that would indicate what process is running that steals the “focus”.

So – which sysinternals tool might tell me and my IT team what is running that steals the focus so frequently?  Ideally, my IT team could run this sysinternal tool on my PC in the background and we could check it at the end of the day for some clues.  Or maybe after the end of an hour or so, if necessary.

But I and IT would NOT want to see a million lines of process history for the day or hour.  No one has time to review anything like that.

Also, I personally have never run a sysinternals tool, so I would appreciate some basic guidance on whatever tool you recommend.

Thanks!

Thumbs up for AnyDesk Free

Has any of you actually used “Microsoft Defender for Individuals“?  (See the second bullet point in Brian’s article.)

We already have a single MS 365 Family subscription that we use on my home PC (and my iPad and iPhone), my wife’s numerous Apple Devices, and three PCs in my wife’s small business.  All the PCs already run normal Windows Defender.  Wondering whether adding “Microsoft Defender for Individuals” is a net plus or just a bother.

Thanks.

but what about this warning ? —

https://apple.news/AjMeHNmQeRQOlB4dlpvCsRQ

Surprised no one has mentioned AnyDesk, which has a free version and is pretty good.

Before you do the above, BEFORE YOU TURN ON YOUR NEW PC FOR THE FIRST TIME, you might want take a preliminary step to give you the option of going all the way back to zero (virgin computer) should you hit a snag:

First (or zeroth) – and note that you don’t turn on your new PC normally for the first time until step d) below –

a)  On a different computer, use Macrium Reflect Free to “Create Rescue Media” on a USB stick.  Also get an external drive that you will use later to save a backup image of the new PC.  If your new PC doesn’t have enough USB slots for both the Macrium USB stick and the external drive at the same time, get a USB hub.

b)  On that different computer, research how you can boot your new PC directly into the USB stick when you turn on your new PC.  In my case, I needed to hit F12 (or F2 to re-sort the boot list) repeatedly (but not like a machine gun) immediately upon the first turn-on.

c)  On your new PC while still off and never turned on, connect the Macrium Reflect USB stick and the external drive.

d)  On your new PC, using the technique you found in step b), boot into the Macrium Reflect PE app on the USB stick and make a complete “image” of your new PC’s hard drive onto the external drive.  (Image, not clone.)  In my case, before starting the image, I first set the Macrium Reflect PE to “verify” the image to be 100% sure it would be a good image should I need to restore it.  Be patient to be sure Macrium Reflect completes and verifies.  Takes a while.  In my case, I made dinner.

e)  Shut down your new PC, disconnect the Macrium USB stick and the external hard drive.

f)  Now boot up your PC normally for the first time and try the local account setup tips in this thread.  If they work, great.  If they don’t and you get stuck, you can now use the Macrium USB stick to Restore the Macrium image from the external hard drive onto your new PC’s drive to try again from zero.

I did this just recently, not because I wanted a local account for the new Win 11 laptop but because I needed to convert its Windows 11 Home S Mode to plain Windows 11 Home.  The first time, the conversion failed, and an internet fix didn’t work.   But I was then able to Restore the virgin image onto the new laptop and try again, and the second time the conversion worked.

Happy Labor Day weekend, all!

3 users thanked author for this post.

windbg, Cybertooth, opti1

Kurt – when you say “worked”, what do you mean?  That it was pasting unformatted?  And now that no longer happens?