A pox on Microsoft!

[kevinlms]

18 minutes ago, Mike Buckner said:

 

in the 1980's/1990's, i.e. before credit cards were managed over the internet, my bank used to mail me printed statements. Included with the statement were various advertisement sheets.

 

I returned the compliment. Along with my cheque, I stuffed the provided return envelope with various leaflets dropped through the letterbox advertising pizzas, taxi services, etc.

 

 

Funny, but did it work?

[Michael Hodgson]

7 hours ago, kevinlms said:

Funny, but did it work?

Try responding to a credit card bill for £0.00 by sending a cheque for nothing and demanding a receipt!

[kevinlms]

2 hours ago, Michael Hodgson said:

Try responding to a credit card bill for £0.00 by sending a cheque for nothing and demanding a receipt!

A what?

 

I've had credit bills for zero and it also said, no need to pay!

 

Conversely, I got told that if you received a motoring fine, the system couldn't conclude the allocation of points, if you sent a cheque for too much. They would send you back a cheque for the overpayment. The trick was if you didn't cash their cheque, the computer couldn't cope. That was a few years ago, no doubt they fixed it.

[Reorte]

11 hours ago, adriank said:

This is the default setting for Office on Windows 10.  MIcrosoft seems to want everything done via the cloud and your Microsoft account. Try changing the settings in Outlook to stop spam, for example, or creating a local user in Windows 10 without setting up a Microsoft account. I think Microsoft regards Windows as a marketing platform rather than an operating system - why else would they display advertising in their weather app? To add insult to injury, the ads were supposedly tailored to my needs. Although I am in my seventies, I certainly do not require incontinence pads!

You can get both 10 and 11 going without an MS account, although it's not at all obvious. I never see ads on either (thank heavens), "tailored" or not.

[Harlequin]

There are different versions of Windows 11 and that probably explains why some people find it more intrusive than others.

 

I'm running Windows 11 Pro and my experience of it (after probably telling it once or twice not to do things) is serene and peaceful. I'm in charge and I never get interrupted or forced to submit to MS products. Even Edge and Bing sit around doing nothing.

 

I guess the "Pro" version is the key...

 

[chuffinghell]

I’m always impressed with those who understand computers and what makes them tick

 

If turning it off and on again doesn’t work it’s a call to the IT guys for me 😳

 

I’ve always said you don’t need to know how something works to use it……but it would help

[Hroth]

4 hours ago, Reorte said:

You can get both 10 and 11 going without an MS account, although it's not at all obvious. I never see ads on either (thank heavens), "tailored" or not.

 

The easiest thing to do, if you've been misled into creating a MS login, is to create a local login with admin rights, log into that and then delete the account with the MS login. 

 

I've got Win11 Home and Pro on different computers.  Both versions dance to my tune, more or less, apart from a sudden insistence on downloading Windows Updates at the drop of a hat.  In Settings->Windows Update you can tell Windows not to update as soon as one is available, to pause updates for a number of weeks and not to update when you're in your busiest working period.  After that, be prepared for occasional system sluggishness as Windows gets fed up of waiting...

 

So far I've also managed to nobble Edge, Bing and Clippie2 (or whatever the AI helper is called).

 

Fingers crossed...

 

Edited January 7 by Hroth
spelin

[Pete the Elaner]

17 hours ago, Cwmtwrch said:

I have used Windows from XP onwards, missing one or two versions on the way. I'm typing this on a machine running Win 10, and have another running Win 11 which is deliberately not internet connected, I am becoming more and more annoyed with Microsoft as they keep dumping stuff on my machine that I DO NOT want [and have absolutely no use for] but can't get rid of. They also managed, in a recent update, to completely block me from using a piece of non-commercial software I use. I did eventually find that there was a way to unblock it in the system, but it was very far from obvious. I feel that they are a) treating me like a captive user, b) acting as though they they think they know better than I do what I want, and c) doing a lot more than suggesting - they're pushing quite hard to get me to go in the direction they want, which is definitely not where I want to go.

 

I can understand where Microsoft is coming from in general.

They used to have a reputation of an insecure system. It was not particularly bad, but some users would be very slack with their security, so MS included & activated it.

MS provided updates for it. These became more regular, but many refused to apply them. Virus writers became good at reverse engineering these updates to create programs which exploited the weaknesses the updates were blocking. MS was effectively telling them how to attack machines which were not quickly protected. MS therefore needed to ensure their updates were applied more quickly.

So how do they ensure machines are protected? By forcing them to update of course. Users then complain that they were not able to defer the updates.

 

The problem was not just with Windows though. Linux & Mac systems were equally affected but Linux users were typically self-supporting so more clued up about keeping their systems locked down. Mac earned an old wives tale of being more secure but this was only because it was less of a target at the time so there was less disruption to be gained from attacking it. This has changed a lot now but the old wives' tale remains.
A had a Mac laptop in my last job & the updates for that were more of a nuisance than on Windows.

[melmerby]

10 minutes ago, Pete the Elaner said:

Mac earned an old wives tale of being more secure but this was only because it was less of a target at the time so there was less disruption to be gained from attacking it. This has changed a lot now but the old wives' tale remains.

More of a target now because MS based machines have more security than they used to.

 

There are several unwanted programs included in the Windows OS builds but most can be removed.

 

There is nothing wrong with having an MS account, as it is an easy way to change PC components (e.g. hard drive) and keep the machine licensed

I also had to have some direct help once and found their teccy staff quite good.

N.B. I only login via a local account, the MS account only gets used when it is needed on the main PC.

The other Windows machines only have local accounts.

Edited January 7 by melmerby

[John M Upton]

I do have Office 365 (soom to be renamed Microsoft 365 apparently) which I begrudgingly pay an annual fee for but still have copies of Office 2003 and 97 for a couple of older computers I still run (and which IMHO are still better than the current Office apps, I want Visio back though!).

 

I point blank refuse to use Edge (Internet Explorer as was) though, dire unusable rubbish.

[melmerby]

46 minutes ago, John M Upton said:

 

 

I point blank refuse to use Edge (Internet Explorer as was) though, dire unusable rubbish.

Google Chrome by another name

[Cwmtwrch]

2 hours ago, John M Upton said:

I do have Office 365 (soom to be renamed Microsoft 365 apparently) which I begrudgingly pay an annual fee for but still have copies of Office 2003 and 97 for a couple of older computers I still run (and which IMHO are still better than the current Office apps, I want Visio back though!).

 

I point blank refuse to use Edge (Internet Explorer as was) though, dire unusable rubbish.

I'm still running Office 2003/2007 on Windows 10. Renting, though is one of the things MS [and other software providers] are very keen on these days, as it increases their income, but I won't do it because it's uneconomic for me.

 

I use Edge quite happily however :).

 

What does annoy me is the number of apparently 'system' components which I never use and never will, such as Game Bar, Microsoft Store, One Drive, and Phone Link, plus, for example, the 'Wallet' and its content. I want to be able to get rid of them, but I haven't found a way yet; I don't see why MS should arbitrarily inflict them on me [they never ask whether I want the new "improvements" before adding them to my computer].

[57xx]

3 hours ago, melmerby said:

Google Chrome by another name

 

Whilst they both use the Chromium engine, there are more than just cosmetic differences. There are yet more Privacy intruding measures being implemented by Google on Chrome that Ms are not (AFAIK) putting in to Edge. Google were also caught with their pants down last year harvesting user's browsing data from Incognito sessions, despite the claims that nothing is tracked in them.

[Reorte]

17 hours ago, Pete the Elaner said:

 

I can understand where Microsoft is coming from in general.

They used to have a reputation of an insecure system. It was not particularly bad, but some users would be very slack with their security, so MS included & activated it.

MS provided updates for it. These became more regular, but many refused to apply them. Virus writers became good at reverse engineering these updates to create programs which exploited the weaknesses the updates were blocking. MS was effectively telling them how to attack machines which were not quickly protected. MS therefore needed to ensure their updates were applied more quickly.

So how do they ensure machines are protected? By forcing them to update of course. Users then complain that they were not able to defer the updates.

It would be rather less annoying if security and "feature" updates were kept separate. From Microsoft's point of view is obviously far simpler if they're not but in general I want security updates fairly quickly and usually to avoid others as much as possible. Mixing the two is quite possibly one of the reasons people end up putting them off, so it's a bit counter-productive there. And any attempt at taking control of someone's computer away to them to a degree (quite rightly) rubs some people up the wrong way.

[Reorte]

16 hours ago, John M Upton said:

I point blank refuse to use Edge (Internet Explorer as was) though, dire unusable rubbish.

I don't like it at all personally (and got very annoyed when some *?!"@ at work decided that Firefox was to be removed from work machines and replaced by Edge), but as someone else has pointed out it's not Internet Explorer - by all accounts it's actually a decent browser, if you get along with the way it works.

 

What I really don't like about it is it being pretty much integrated in to the OS, and the pushing from Windows to use it. A browser is just another application, a very commonly used one admittedly, so I've no issue with bundling one in, but it shouldn't be integrated in to the OS at all.

[Adam88]

Will Microsoft 365 work on Feb 29th?

[whart57]

28 minutes ago, Reorte said:

What I really don't like about it is it being pretty much integrated in to the OS, and the pushing from Windows to use it. A browser is just another application, a very commonly used one admittedly, so I've no issue with bundling one in, but it shouldn't be integrated in to the OS at all.

 

We've been here before. Microsoft's first run in with monopoly and anti-trust law was when it used bundling to try and kill off Netscape, the most popular browser back in the 1990s. Microsoft lost the legal battle but did manage to strangle Netscape. Microsoft then went on to use its OS dominance to squeeze out rivals in the far more lucrative office productivity suites.

[whart57]

18 hours ago, Pete the Elaner said:

The problem was not just with Windows though. Linux & Mac systems were equally affected but Linux users were typically self-supporting so more clued up about keeping their systems locked down.

 

UNIX architectures like Linux were designed from the outset to keep users separated, Windows, which for a long time was really the older DOS with a graphical interface on top, was not. DOS and Windows assumed the "personal" bit of a PC applied and that there would only be one user. Which was fine until people started hooking them up to the internet. UNIX systems however were servers and networked from the outset. That meant Linux offered far fewer vulnerabilities, as did all UNIX systems.

 

As an aside, back in the 1990s, the main competitor to Windows was IBM's OS/2. OS/2 was developed because the engineers at IBM had already twigged that the security holes in MS/DOS were unacceptable for business machines that were networked together. Unfortunately at that time IBM's executives were not very imaginative and wouldn't back the personal computing teams with the funding and marketing they needed to compete with Microsoft's aggressive price points. And if the sales force - and IBM had a much larger sales force than Microsoft - could make more out of one small mainframe software upgrade than out of selling two hundred copies of OS/2 then you know where their focus is going to be.

[whart57]

44 minutes ago, Adam88 said:

Will Microsoft 365 work on Feb 29th?

 

It will call it March 0th

[melmerby]

13 minutes ago, whart57 said:

Windows, which for a long time was really the older DOS with a graphical interface on top, was not.

And hasn't been for a long long time

[melmerby]

1 hour ago, Reorte said:

 

What I really don't like about it is it being pretty much integrated in to the OS, and the pushing from Windows to use it. A browser is just another application, a very commonly used one admittedly, so I've no issue with bundling one in, but it shouldn't be integrated in to the OS at all.

Why is Microsoft considered differently to Apple where Safari is built into iOS?

[Hroth]

1 minute ago, melmerby said:

Why is Microsoft considered differently to Apple where Safari is built into iOS?

 

Or a Chromebook, where the browser IS the primary OS interface?

 

[woodenhead]

Edge is also a Chromium based browser - i.e. the same underpinnings as Google Chrome with a few Microsoft flairs added.

[Harlequin]

1 hour ago, Reorte said:

I don't like it at all personally (and got very annoyed when some *?!"@ at work decided that Firefox was to be removed from work machines and replaced by Edge), but as someone else has pointed out it's not Internet Explorer - by all accounts it's actually a decent browser, if you get along with the way it works.

 

What I really don't like about it is it being pretty much integrated in to the OS, and the pushing from Windows to use it. A browser is just another application, a very commonly used one admittedly, so I've no issue with bundling one in, but it shouldn't be integrated in to the OS at all.

 

3 minutes ago, melmerby said:

Why is Microsoft considered differently to Apple where Safari is built into iOS?

 

 

Lots of desktop applications need to be able to show web content and for them it's very useful that the core parts of a browser are built into the OS. Essentially, Edge is just a wrapper around the built-in browser components in Windows.

 

[melmerby]

2 minutes ago, woodenhead said:

Edge is also a Chromium based browser - i.e. the same underpinnings as Google Chrome with a few Microsoft flairs added.

See my post from 17 hours ago!