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I do; I used to work at DEC from 1987 through 1998. I remember the orange wall of manuals that were in the engineer’s office. I also remember the Office 95 manual set; I learned Word and Access with those.

On the other hand, the best user manuals in existence are the laptop maintenance and service manuals from Hewlett Packard. There are none better. Wonderfully clear illustrations, full parts lists for every country in the world, they tell you where every single screw goes, and what size and length of screw to use in each place.

Dell manuals are starting to get better but they’re also mostly online. Lenovo ThinkPad manuals are adequate, but they could be better. You will never find an ASUS service manual in the wild because if you found one somebody is going to get fired.

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windbg, Cybertooth, amiawitch

[sgtaylor50]

First time client; he called me after the update locked his ssd.

For my business clients where FDE is mandated (for instance, insurance agents) I have their BitLocker keys and identifiers in an encrypted file.

• This reply was modified 10 months, 2 weeks ago by sgtaylor50. Reason: added context

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rc primak

I had a client this week that had this problem. He had no idea that Bitlocker had been turned on; many of my clients don’t know because Microsoft never tells them that it’s been applied.

Microsoft also didn’t save the Bitlocker recovery key into his Microsoft account. Therefore, after some struggles and much discussion, I had to blank his boot drive and reinstall Windows 11. Luckily, most, but not all of his files were in OneDrive.

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ibe98765, rc primak, TechTango

I’ve seen this before: ACT! insists on installing to Documents. Synced databases do NOT like being synced by two different sync mechanisms at the same time (Hamachi (native) and OneDrive). I’ve had to make a local Documents folder for my clients that use ACT! and reinstall ACT! there.

With Windows 10, one can turn OneDrive off entirely; with Windows 11, I’m not going to anymore. I’ve had too many problems. In fact, I’m going the other way and recommending Windows Backup and paying for a little more OneDrive storage. As you have found, it’s just too integrated to mess with.

Once you’ve relocated those folders that you want to be local-only, you might have to use the web interface of OneDrive to remove those cloud-only files and folders to OneDrive’s cloud Recycle Bin and  delete the contents of OneDrive’s cloud Recycle Bin.

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pmbinc, Will Fastie