Windows 11

[Santilli]

I can't believe this Windows Media Player Legacy actually made it easier to rip a CD to mp3 then using Exact Audio Copy!!!!
God is amazing sometimes...

 

[Santilli]

Sidebar: Went back to a full sized NuPHY V6 D3 Too much time on the old full sized keyboards, but, need the stiff switches, and the lights. Used the same, big letter caps...

 

[Santilli]

WHY, sometimes, does Win 11 take forever to boot?
Then goes back to loading quickly, when no changes have been made?????

 

[Mercutio]

WHY, sometimes, does Win 11 take forever to boot?
Then goes back to loading quickly, when no changes have been made?????

It might be making a boot optimization pass. Either that or you got some updates that installed silently and it did more than usual back-end work during your next startup.

With regard to low cost, reasonably powerful systems, I can't recall seeing mini PCs with Ryzen 3550H CPUs before, but Amazon has several of them today, 16GB/500GB systems that are around 40% faster than an N150 and prices around $210. I wonder if this is a response to the cost per unit for newer but much more common Ryzen 5500 and 5800 mini PCs going up.

 

[Mercutio]

One of my customers had an issue that it took me a couple days to find and deal with. They had a bunch of weird, invalid text in a database they're using, starting a couple weeks ago. Turned out that one of their employees has turned on an AI translation feature in Edge, such that it was taking their text input and translating it into Polish. The text looked right on their screen as they typed, but it was being translated before it was sent.

So that's a new thing we all have to look out for.

 

[fb]

Interesting with AI auto translate, especially on the database side if you don't store the input as unicode (or do not store it properly as unicode).

 

[Mercutio]

What my customer actually noticed was "funny characters" and partial nonsense, which they assumed were data corruption, showing up in a daily report. I was terrified I had bad RAM in a server until my customer let me know that one of his employees had a bunch of the same weird characters and nonsense in emails they were sending.

The user swears they have no idea how the translation software got turned on. The only non-English language I even occasionally encounter here in the US Midwest is Spanish.

 

[mubs]

Apparently, the next version of Windows will be essentially immutable, just as ChromeOS, Android, iOS, MacOS and some versions of Linux are. The idea is that there will be a compatibility layer for software that expects to make changes inside the Windows directory. On one hand, this isn't a terrible idea from a stability standpoint.

On the other hand, the people doing this think OneDrive and Recall should be part of the OS.

Microsoft dropped future support for Windows Deployment Toolkit a couple days ago. It's not the end of the world for me because I can get away with a lot in terms of running automation with an unattend.xml and as much Powershell as I need, but I'm still disappointed because it was a great and useful free tool.

There's a fairly substantial amount of Windows-related functionality I can't access because it's tied to Azure (e.g. Intune), something none of my customers are big enough to want to buy into. Windows does not look like a professional future for me unless something changes drastically about cloud versus on premesis software.

Time to install Linux in a VM and start getting used to it??