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Personally, I prefer to wait till all show 100%, but I’ve hit RESTART (on screen, not the START menu) at times with no issue.

How is this strange?  Most times I do WU, it offers to have you reboot before the ‘installation’ hits 100%.  As I understand it, all it really does is shift some of the install work from being done with Windows up to Windows being down and running the remaining parts of the updates.

Now why does MS do this?  I can only guess is that it lets you walk away a bit sooner.

Now the real issue is all about that driver.  And you having a recent version and in only one place is good.  Some of us have it in both places and identical and recent, which seems fine as well.  So anyone, please feel free to correct me, but I’d say that for sahalen, no problem here.

Thanks. So it really is pretty simple on the PC I’m checking – properties in WE show both to be 2251, both dated Dec 8, 2022 (when I ran November updates).  So I need to check these 2 on several other PC’s.

I get that if they are mismatched, then I have a serious risk and I’m trying to understand whether I can fix it before doing the December updates. I have 5 more PC’s to deal with and one is at another location I can’t get to, so I’ll have to deal with that. So, if they are a mismatch, what do I do pre updates?

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DrBonzo

At this point I’m very confused. On one PC we have the file in multiple directories. For the 2 directories at the heart of the discussion, the files have the same size and date. So my question – should that be safe?

On the system I’m on right now, it’s in drivers, and system32, and in several other directories whose name begins with amd64.  The first 2 are dated (modified) Dec 8 and are the same size.  The others are mixed dates.

Plus, after unsetting Incontrol, you have to say NO to Win 11 and that will trigger 10 being offered.  The actual update to 22H2 on Win 10 took about 2 minutes.  Of course, there’s hardly anything in it and what little there is isn’t downloaded, just enabled.

I feel like an idiot.  I’d forgotten about this and had previously used it to lock in 21H2. And since it doesn’t install, it’s easy to forget.

Thanks!

My last employer, one of the top 20 banks in the world, only bought low end junk, already obsolete PC’s, and kept them as long as possible despite the reduction in productivity.  They finally had to upgrade a bit when Win 7 support had ended.  But they had told head office that Win 10 had been fully rolled out before they even started to do so!

Behind me is a 2002 HP that was supposed to, with the help of a special video card, easily digitize analog video. Turned out to be useless, since it had no hardware support for such. Quite a scam at the time. But, the computer still runs, kind of, super slow under Win 7, no idea why it’s so slow except that I put in a hyperthreaded Pentium (with appropriate bios, etc. changes) and it never seemed to like it. Over time I think I did one HD upgrade, but when the PSU died, it was a true PITA to replace it since HP specified one that only it sold, and 99.99% of like PSU’s wouldn’t fit. Finally found one firm with one that did. But 20 years later, it is still alive. Has a floppy drive and DVD writer.

Sitting next to it is an older Dell, which probably would boot, though I don’t remember if it still has Windows or an old Linux distro.

When I built the mini tower I’m typing on, I selected a mobo that was far better than I needed then, added a true hardware digitizing card, very good PSU, large case, so so video card (long since replaced). Only major problem I had hardware wise – the front case fan wore out, and I went through all sorts of grief learning what to replace it with, and how to get the drive cage out of the way.

I do actually keep an external floppy drive, also BD writers on hand. You never know!

Very much enjoyed this article once I found it (my newsletters stopped coming weeks ago).

I’d loved to have gotten one from her, but I’m thinking I would have been silly enough to ask her for a spare computer bug!

I spent a fair amount of time tracking down documentation on LOTUS.  One day their engineers sent me an internal manual / guide to the innards of a 123.WKS file, including its binary format.  Later on they publicly released the same for their .WK1 files, where the main change I recall is reduced storage space needed – somethings stored in variable length fields instead of fixed length, which of course changed the internal format.  The data came to me by magtape from the mainframes, originally blocked at one 80 byte record per block.  I told the IBM engineers to change that to 32k records per block.  They responded that your VAX can’t read that.  Hmm – the coding change took about a minute – just changing the blocking factor.  (I loved how fast the tape went through the drive, spinning almost continuously)  The data was in EBCDIC.  VMS had a one line system call – OUT = function(IN), essentially.  The crazy part was the binary conversion because VMS and DOS had the nibbles reversed, plus the format was a bit complex, especially for the .WK1 files.

Then SMARTTERM to download the spreadsheet to the PC, open Lotus, open the file, work on it.  That project was a lot of fun, though it did take patience.  I never would have tried it if it wasn’t for my BAL training, in understanding how data looks underneath it all.

IOTW, even though I wasn’t using BAL for programming, the training helped me better understand how compilers worked, what my coding was doing.  For instance, buffer overflow is a frequent problem security wise.  It was easy to see in BAL, because BAL didn’t care what you moved from point A to B.  X bytes from Address A to Address B.  You could write a BAL program that changed its own code as it ran.  Nothing was protected except by how the programmer coded something.

We discovered (coworkers and programmers that we encountered) that DEC DCL – Digital Command Language, could demonstrate this easily.  Like BAL, it didn’t have a lot of constraints.  You could code a command line that did very different things than it looked like it could, by assembling bits and pieces of code from multiple sources, including what you typed to answer prompts.  Years later I learned that many computer vulnerabilities came because programmers didn’t understand these openings and protect against them, and neither did OS’s or Compilers.  I’m guessing that few people at MS, for instance, are properly trained the way we were.

Other programmers didn’t think a lot of what I did was possible.  I sure wasn’t going to tell most of them how I did things – though I did do one article in a trade journal on how do do something in VMS in a certain language that DEC had not documented for that language.  A 3rd party vendor had long advertised a utility of theirs that you could embed in a program, but it was very expensive.  My article came out, their ads disappeared!  My only regret – I didn’t make any money from that!  But it was fun, and a satisfying challenge.  Though my bosses didn’t know how much I enjoyed doing it.

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geekdom

I wished I’d met Amazing Grace, AKA Rear Admiral Hopper.  It’s important to understand that COBOL was a game changer, allowing a good programmer to write good procedural code for many purposes, especially business processing.  With a good OS behind it, like VAX/VMS, it became amazingly powerful, yet potentially ‘self documenting’ (when done properly).

My brother programmed in APL and Fortran – which were far more appropriate to his work in crunching numbers.  My programming was about business systems, and crunching data to understand that business, and to get work done.  For instance, taking IBM mainframe data, converting it into Lotus 123 worksheets (all this code in COBOL with VMS services) , which were then downloaded to early PC’s for analysis.  Previous attempts had failed.  My COBOL program described the data, and needed maybe 30 lines of code to do the actual work.  Work that my IBM based counterparts couldn’t do, and which they insisted I could not do on my early VAX.

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AlphaCharlie, Will Fastie

BAL was fun – and those of us taking the BAL classes (with the guy who did the programming for the State College system in PA) really enjoyed it, and knowing that we were much better programmers than those who didn’t get to know and understand it.  Our prof did push us, but he also taught us how to use BAL with COBOL to do things that COBOL couldn’t really do back then – mid 1970’s.  He used that to create a realtime student registration system, around 1974.

 

And what you said about pay – right on the button.  I got my first IT job fall 1979 – officially as a trainee at Manny Hanny in NYC – though I could have taught the class.  The pay was awful, but getting one’s first job in IT in banking in NYC was important.

And then one day came DEC’s VAX line, and later Alpha!  Wonderful programming environment, and properly coded were a lot faster than bad programmers realized.