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I worked at the IBM Research Lab when the PC came out. And I wanted one just as Will did. So I proposed a project to develop a program to provide remote access over a telephone modem to the lab computers. And I got my machine to take home!

We did get remote access working, which was a very early taste of the work at home phenomenon.

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lanshark, jburk07, Will Fastie

I’m avoiding 11 so far.  As for the task bar, I want mine on top!  After all, all the other task bar like things are on the top of windows, and the mouse is normally near the top of the screen, a short trip up and a long trip down.

As for pinned tab positions, they must stay constant so windows-key-number will open/close a tab.  I haven’t seen a discussion of what the 11 task bar does to position stability.

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technic

One think you didn’t mention was re-flashing with a known good bios.

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Carl

Head up – if you have your task bar on top, you’ll wind up with a blank space where news and weather “should” be.  It’s unresponsive.  I got rid of it by moving the taskbar to the bottom, turning off news and weather, and then moving back where i want it.

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wavy, Morty

Please be sure to explain what happens when the clock runs out.  Does the update process just start updating, and if so when?  Thanks.

Thanks all.  I want to be able to run the updates when I like so I set the delay as far out as is allowed, and then start the updates when safe.  I thought about trying to changing the delay date to start the process but that doesn’t work – you can’t set it sooner than tomorrow.  Sigh.

One problem I have with the defer updates approach recommended, which I use, is that when I resume updates it usually includes a .net update preview, which I can’t stop from installing.  So far this hasn’t broken anything but it is worrying.

I resume by clicking on check for updates, if that makes any difference.

You left out what I find the best way.  That is – run an XServer on windows and run X clients on the linux system.  cygwin is the way I do it, but there are probably others.

This takes some X fiddling to get working correctly but serious Linux users should be able to figure it out.

I’ve been following the simple defer updates till near the next patch Tuesday.  But when I resume, the updates include a .NET preview with no choice about installing it.  I have not messed with any settings.  What am doing wrong?

I new (to me) trick in Windows Update makes it harder to control my, and my wife’s, updates. When running in notify mode, if there are updates queued, the shutdown button changes from your default (restart for me) to shutdown with an update icon. Shutdown and you’ve accepted all the updates!

In response to the questioned need for more memory, my experience and diagnosis may be instructive. I had a 4Gig Thinkpad. It seemed slow at times in ways I couldn’t debug even though the memory usage reports (process explorer) never showed memory hitting the limit. Since it was cheap, i upped the system to 8 Gig anyhow. And the speed increase was dramatic!

I believe this is about the entry called standby. Windows caches disk files in spare memory. And providing a large cache makes a tremendous difference, at least for my use. For example, the first time after a boot that I open my 75meg quicken file, it takes a bit. After that – essentially instantaneous. Of course this applies to program and dll files as well as data files.

More memory really helps.

The forced patch installation is pretty scary to me if Microsoft continues to send driver patches. I have always hidden them and used the manufacturer’s update mechanism for drivers.

Anything known about this issue?

I’m slightly confused by your all or nothing approach. DEP lets you list programs to be ignored. Or does that not work in practice?

Thanks. The issue I see here is that the number of users who will do this is essentially zero!

It would be better if Microsoft supported this by having it on, with really good feedback when a problem was detected to the user could add an exception easily.

Which leads to the obvious question – how valuable is DEP in practice for detecting attacks?

Recently, traveling in Ankara Turkey, I found the the hotel’s system was clearly messing with my http traffic. I suspect it was an incompetent attempt to inject are modify adds. The obvious symptom that they broke any site that needed cookies.

I’ve now gone to my home made VPN like approach and feel much safer.

(I run a socks sever on my home linux machine and establish an ssh tunnel for socks, then configure firefox and thunderbird, the only online apps I use, to use socks for everything including DNS. Yes, it’s geeky, but its free and all under my control. I could set up true VPN but that’s more (manual reading) work than I’m ready for)