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Sorry … i just had one more observation about one important change on my machine since purchasing it back on March 3rd of this year (2019). I wanted a machine powerful enough to do the quant finance and mathematical work that i do, so i bought an HP Omen 880-030 with an AMD Ryzen 7 8-core processor and a reasonably powerful graphics card (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070) for playing with PyCUDA. [It’s a gaming machine that glows red, and — yes — i am so ashamed to have something like that under my desk.]

I’m a bit anal about specs, so i’ve been keeping an eye on things from the beginning. I was dismayed that steady-state CPU utilization when the machine was basically idle hovered around 6% or 7% before upgrading to 10 64-bit Pro, and then 9% or 10% after the upgrade.

One positive development that i have seen is that that number has dropped over the Windows 10 upgrades, to the point that idle steady-state is now consistently 3% of total CPU.

So despite the hash that Microsoft has made of its releases lately, perhaps some of the developers in the core of the OS have been doing some useful housecleaning.

Good morning from NYC. [Well, it’s raining pretty steadily, but we could use the rain, so it’s a good morning.]

I have seen only one bit of weirdness: On occasion — and it really seems to be intermittent — when i click on the search icon in the lower left and start to type the name of the file or app i want to access, one or two messages appear at the top of the search results, telling me that one or both of my Microsoft accounts need verifying. They don’t. Clicking on the messages doesn’t do anything, by the way, except get rid of them. Not a problem, just clearly a bit of sloppiness somewhere in someone’s code.

I almost wasn’t going to post this, but it does also give me the opportunity to gripe [again] about Microsoft and accounts. I read your very helpful posts about local accounts. I have gone with an online account, but i also am stuck with one of those onmicrosoft.com accounts because of my Office 365 subscriptions. And apparently there is no way to consolidate things easily.

I have problems with Apple, too, but at least their Apple IDs can be consolidated (provided you didn’t create them for overseas stores, as i did in my travels) or deleted fairly easily (as i did with the overseas ones, now that i’m back in the US).

Leave it to Microsoft to make a mess of something as simple as machine logins and accounts.

Good morning! I’m sorry for the delay in replying; I gave myself some downtime yesterday.

Linux wasn’t my choice for our non-tech-team staff because so many of our (especially younger) hires have experience with OS X and required no familiarization with it and were also able to adopt the Microsoft Office tools that we will use alongside other applications on the iMacs.

But Linux is definitely the tool of choice for my tech team; we use it as our platform for development. I don’t force a particular distribution on my developers, because some have favorites, and I like the extra productivity that comes from letting people have their choice.

Me? It’s been Ubuntu for me since it hit the scene, and I continue to like its security. A number of the team like Mint. The youngest seem to go for Debian, because that’s what they had in school. I have separate machines for OS X and Linux [rank hath its privileges]; everyone else is dual boot Mac and their favorite Linux.

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MrJimPhelps

I am CTO for a startup and, while I will continue to have a Windows 10 machine for my own use, I have decided that the company will use iMacs as our desktop platform. Microsoft Windows 10 is simply not fit for purpose.

Sorry. I should have that in a sticky note to be able to copy and paste in these posts. Windows 10 Pro 1903, and the three updates have been KB4524147 [4 Oct install], KB4517211 [2 Oct], and KB4522738 [2 Oct]. These all show under “Quality” updates. I have had no other updates in “Quality” or “Driver” since 12 Sep, and no “Other” updates since 14 Aug required by Microsoft.

My Office products are all on version 1909 [Office 365 Pro Plus subscription, Visio Online Plan 2 sub, Project Online Desktop Client sub — I’ve never understood the naming of these plans], meaning I have applied all Office patches automatically updated by Office on 4 Oct.

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PKCano

I haven’t been with this brilliant site as long as I should have been (only learned about it earlier this year, I think), but I’m pretty sure this is the first “DEFCON-1” I’ve seen.

I have already applied the most recent Office patches and went ahead and updated yesterday and very early this morning (couldn’t sleep) after my daily 02:00 backup to Acronis Cloud.

So far everything seems to be functioning as it should. I’m working three virtual desktops running a variety of web (Firefox) and communication tasks (Office 365 Online, Slack, WhatsApp client for Windows) and have a Jupyter Notebook running with some Python stuff I’m trying out. My Norton 360 and ProtonVPN are functioning normally. No observable glitches yet.

If something drastic happens, I’ll alert the forum with specifics.

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GoneToPlaid, woody

That is hilarious, mostly because having out-of-date tech running a movie screen isn’t exactly threatening. I was a bit bothered on a high-speed train in Europe, where the screens in first class froze on a blue screen. Made me wonder how much of the vehicle was operating on Windows.

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OscarCP

Good morning. I never experienced the redlining problem, but i did have one instance of the search button [i.e. magnifying glass to the right of the Windows icon] doing nothing. I fixed that by ending the Cortana task in task manager; after which it restarted without the problem recurring.

I installed the latest updates yesterday [being brave], and after 7 or 8 hours of hard use, i have not encountered any problems with these updates.

[relatively new PC; HP Omen with AMD Ryzen 7 8-core processor; NVidia GeForce GTX 1070; in the past, i’ve noticed that update problems become more frequently as my tech ages and hardware components are not updated as often]

I use 1Password. I agree that formulas are essential for those passwords that cannot be used with 1Password — such as the password for 1Password itself, or for my Chromebook. In those cases, i do indeed use a formula to generate a long password.

I agree that web extensions are to be avoided, but the time wasted with forgotten passwords or trying to remember how a formula had to be modified for a site that didn’t allow certain characters, isn’t worth it. Password managers, in my opinion, are absolutely the way to go.

I have NOT been gentle with my Acer Chromebook 15 (15.6″ screen). It is a little heavier than other Chromebooks, so it gets put down harder, and its size means it gets bumped more when i carry it from meeting to meeting. So far not a single problem with it, after 9 months of hard use.

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rc primak, Seff

I can give a rock-solid use case for having a Chromebook, and that’s business travel, especially across problematic borders (where they might ask you to login or even give your password). I have on several occasions used my lightweight Chromebook to conduct business overseas, and before heading to the airport i just do a “power wash” to reset the thing.

[MWmC]

Good morning from hazy, hot, and humid NYC. I helped a young acquaintance (new to Windows, and furious about it) with this very problem over the weekend. In her case, she was working on a metered connection (roaming out of the country the previous week) and basically had the data allowance she purchased consumed by the update. She works on a Microsoft Surface Pro 6, by the way; the i7 version. [Edit; and i forgot to mention that she’s on Win 10 Pro 64-bit 1903 already and was updated to 18362.239; sorry; heat getting to me. Well, that and general decrepitude.]

The only idea i have on the subject is that she was wisely using a VPN to connect to the cellular network.

Are we sure that Microsoft recognizes that a VPN connection on top of a cellular connection is still a cellular/metered connection? It seems like it should. It has an option to “allow VPN over metered connections,” but i’m still not sure. On my desktop machine, for example, connected to a home WiFi, the use of my VPN seems to hide the WiFi connection and make it show as generic Ethernet. (It also frequently tells me that i have no internet connection when i clearly do, so something isn’t quite right with Windows and VPN.)

It’s possible that this topic has been discussed before. I apologize if it has. I’m new to the AskWoody and the forum and am not up on past posts.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 9 months ago by MWmC.
• This reply was modified 5 years, 9 months ago by MWmC.

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Fred

I really appreciate this post. I had noted the new default, but i’ve been too lazy to poke around and find the setting. I’ve set it back to un-grouped. And thank you also for the reminder to clear out my Downloads folder. I *am* guilty of letting it fill up a bit, even when i’ve otherwise handled the files properly, such as copying them into Evernote or into some other, more appropriate directory. I’ve set myself a recurring task in Todoist to keep an eye on Downloads.

Good morning from NYC.

I was feeling brave this morning, so i went to the Windows Update site and clicked “update now” from there. [Windows Update wasn’t making the update available to me yet.] I made no special preparations regarding my hard drives (C: is SSD, D: for ‘data’ is a regular hard drive, G: is another SSD drive that i use for caching). I even left on my Norton 360 anti-virus, DropBox, OneDrive instances (2x), and kept my NordVPN connection on as well. [Like i said: brave.]

Darned if this wasn’t one of the smoothest upgrades i’ve ever experienced with Windows. I’ve even noticed one fix: i was one of a number of people with consistent Windows LAN Extensibility problems. Specifically, wlanext.exe would take from 10% to 12% of my CPU, forcing me to kill it from Task Manager after every reboot. (The situation was worse on my old notebook running Win 10.) The online advice about updating drivers, going into safe mode, reinstalling windows (this was also happening on a brand-new machine by the way), and so on never fixed it. But 1903 has. I am forced to assume that Microsoft finally realized it was THEIR problem, and not someone else’s.

Windows is still re-indexing in the background — (Why? EDB file gets zapped on update? New algorithm for better searching?) — but everything else seems fine, from browser use to my PyCharm IDE to Office 365.

I hope everyone had a great Memorial Day celebration, and i hope everyone’s updates go as smoothly as mine did.

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noblame no gain

I use both. I use Outlook for myself, because i have been with it for so long (the beginning, really), that i have accumulated a long series of archived .pst files that allow me to clean out my folders every couple of years, but still have access to the past. I use Dropbox to sync the current .pst files (i separate personal from business) across machines, so i can use Outlook on my notebooks and desktop machine seamlessly.

I use Google Suite because most of the consulting companies through whom i work use it. I find it does everything we as a team require of it; i just don’t like the idea of archiving my emails in the cloud.

Outlook and Project keep me tied to Microsoft Office, for now. But i never recommend them to newbies. I always point them to Libre Office.