When I told them fast, they believed me. It’ll be an i7—this is an i5. Win 10, which I will, well, see about. And I have gotten Carbonite straightened out. It took me 2 days to locate the phone number to reach a live person, but when I did he was excellent, and had an explanation. I think that an advisory about some security changes must have come through during the time we were in Chicago seeing to things and in the confusion, I didn’t update. So now we are fixed. When I told him my machine was showing mostly currently backed up and the info online was saying it had been some 6000 days since the last backup, that seemed to say everything. So we are now completely backed up and current and the systems are talking as they should. Which means when I get the new computer I can tell it ‘restore’ the data from the current one to the new one, and that job will be done while I sip coffee. Removing the bloatware and consigning Cortana to the ninth depth of hell is going to take a bit more time.
The new laptop arrives Monday… :)
by CJ | Jun 23, 2018 | Journal | 23 comments
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Wow. Good luck, a new machine… Maybe good, maybe not, here’s hoping.
You’d better have “State” go over it real good to make sure you don’t have any no=no’s on it before you take it over to the mainland. . . Oh, and pull all your ‘sekret stuff’ off onto a zip drive that never leaves your pocket before you hand it over to “State” . . . .
LOL. I haz my own filing system.
So it’s curtains for Cortana, is it? 😉
Be very careful on rolling back those Updates. (I’ve been watching the 1st season of Westworld for the first time.) Oh, my! Very thought-provoking. Sometimes gratuitous in places, but wow, lots of exploration on the nature of humanity / sentience / conscience, and lots of explorations of, what is the nature of good and bad / evil, and of morality. I have not seen the 70’s movie in years, but oh, this reboot, pun intended, is really good. — Between this and the Expanse, Stranger Things, and a few others, I am so glad that video SF&F is much closer to the depth of written SF&F now. — And that would be a partial list of my most favorite video SF&F. Also, I know some fans really like one thing and not another, and CJ’s and Jane’s and Lynn’s opinions may well differ from mine or other fans’ on what and why they like or dislike.
I am only three episodes in so far, of Westworld season 1. Some of it’s fitting together already pretty well (or I think so) and other things, I haven’t figured out yet. It was a treat to see Gina Torres (Zoe from Firefly/Serenity) too.
Good luck with the new computer.
Cortana is one of those horrific parasites that one encounters in darker sci-fi/fantasy. It has been placed on the host and has had time to infest itself thoroughly into the host’s nervous system.
It is a creature of dark intent, that greets you warmly when you first arrive and keeps its master informed about you as it attempts to assert control.
Ach! Too gloomy. Time to go geocaching!
I just replaced my iMac keyboard. I’m back to a pricey but working Mac-branded keyboard, and of course, every keyboard these days is just slightly nutty about how far the keypad sections are from one another, and what the function keys do to your multimedia and gee-whiz settings.
But hurray, all the keys work again, which is a very good thing for a keyboard; sort of the point of the thing.
Also, after a bit of fuss, all the smoke alarms in my apartment have now had their batteries replaced, carefully watching where this and that go, so that, as long as these new batteries are newer than the ones just replaced, I should now be free of the false alarms I’ve been getting for too many days, at random and most inconvenient intervals. (Thankfully, not while in the bathroom, haha.) The batteries were overdue to be replaced, not touched since I moved in, now a year and almost four months ago. There’s no other reason I can figure for the misfires, but if it happens again, I’ll know there’s something untoward going on. One can attest, however, that the alarms are quite shrill enough to get one going, no matter where and what one is doing at the time.
So the cats and I and the neighbors are still OK, and I hope (fervently) to remain so.
Things are very typical in my little corner of the universe; going about as OK as they can be, I guess. Could be better, could be worse, so I’m glad things are OK.
BlueCatShip, I’ve found with the “photoelectric” type of smoke detector that I must vacuum them occasionally (the instructions say monthly), or I get false alarms, presumably from dust. It’s worth a try if you get further false alarms.
I had not thought of that at all. Thanks very much! Next run-through with the vacuum, I’ll do so. Thanks!
(It hasn’t been 12 hours yet, but so far, so good.)
BlueCatShip, good sign that your alarms have been silent for 12 hours 🙂 One thing that can also set them off is a florescent light that starts to go … maybe not noticeable, or just the slightest flicker, but the alarm picks up the odor of the ballast going bad. Not a chemist, nor a scientist so I don’t know what it’s called … just a lady who had to call the security alarm company in a warehouse on a regular basis to stop them from sending the automatic call resulting in fire trucks …
By the way, we had a very successful Boy Birthday a couple weeks ago. There was a big book shopping expedition a few days ago; I really dislike big box book stores, but it was all I had time for. To my great surpise, the lady at the “Help” desk (which in the past I have found to be NOT), took my list, knew most of the books, where they were in the store, which is a trick and a half with youth books, and got them for me … I couldn’t keep up with her LOL. I was astonished! Four big bags of books, out of which 3 got wrapped for the birthday. Camping weekend, with a picnic in the best amusement park in the US. Presents doled out over a couple days, including a few of the books on the lists you all gave me. He was most happy with a Lego model set to build a big Star Wars ship … he LOVES to build … and really loved the books too. A great moment was when he unwrapped a big anthology of Jules Verne, gold edges, ribbon bookmark etc. and his cousin jumped up and yelled “Wow, that is SCIENCE FICTION, Walter !!!!!!!!!!!!! You will love that 🙂 ” Walter looked at the list of stories, and replied “Oh, I know about that “Journey to the Center of the Earth” story … I saw the movie … I bet the book is BETTER.” Yay my plan is working … and my ongoing thanks to you all. He’s coming to visit for a few days and I’ll dole out a few more books 🙂
It’s here. Setting up Win 10 is even worse than trying to use it.But I silenced Cortana within 3 seconds of her blather. I have gotten my mail across intact, and I have gotten McAfee pried out of my system—almost. There’s one remnant harder to get at. A new protection installed. And I managed to toss Edge into next week—it was all but lying on the floor kicking and screaming over being replaced.
Silencing Cortana and Edge may remove the annoyance, but it’s not “enough”. The issue is the “attack surface”, that is the entire (system and application) external interface that opens up to a direct penetration attack, and all the internal interfaces that enable something that did come in (carried by a malicious webpage most likely) to attack a weak interface. Many of those internal interfaces are deliberately “weak” so they can be used by various applications, e.g. third-party security tools.
Some years ago M$ was sued by the EU over bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. Their response was to use much of IE, e.g. the image rendering, for all of Windows and then claiming IE couldn’t be removed, it was an integral part of the operating system.
So the question is, can one completely remove Cortana and Edge, thereby removing them as attack surfaces. I don’t have an answer to that, but I suspect not.
I remember the Win98 debacle, especially after a teen in Europe found a hack to remove IE, thus creating Win98 Lite. About all you can do is try to remove as many of the hooks as possible so there are fewer things for malware to exploit. Maybe eventually we’ll get a Win10 workaround to make Win10 Lite.
Linux Mint
Sounds like you’re well on the way. Kill Metro, Cortana and Edge and you’re well on the way. McAfee is presumably a (poison) gift from the laptop manufacturer, and may be harder.
I changed from XP to Win10 over a year ago on this desktop and 2 laptops. Generally a step up in my opinion. My hardest problem was finding a driver for a USB modem which I use for dialing (and recording my calls)
A couple of friends are still trying to hang on to XP and Win7 – the amount of time and money they waste is amazing to watch. Although XP & Win7 are reliable, they often don’t support newer hardware and software, and there’s no easy way round it.
BTW, you’ll find that Edge is impossible to totally avoid, and I suspect this is intentional. I use a couple of excellent commercial apps for viewing pdfs and graphics using MDI (multiple documents in the same window), and regardless of how often I set my preference for these, Edge eventually pops up. What makes it so much worse is that Edge is really limited for this (or anything else AFAICS).
I doubt you’ll notice much difference between i5 & i7 from what I’ve read. I’m running a Latitude for my tax preparation that I’ve had since 2012 and it’s beginning to throw error messages at me, but so far it’s still working. While it was still under warranty a few years back the hard drive failed, and Dell replaced the motherboard at the same time, so I’ve been able to get some extra years out of it. I’d like to get one more tax season out of it then buy another Latitude. Fingers crossed.
Heat is the killer of electronics. That’s the “Achilles Heel” of laptops–no room for cooling airflow and what is there is too easily clogged with dust and lint. With “industry standard” desktops, and many destops are not, air flow is good, and in the event of failure of a part access is good and virtually any part can be individually replaced with relative ease, not least because industry standards establish functional equivalences.
Laptops are convenient, but when work must get done come hell or high water, a desktop will save the day.
I do hope the new computer migration continues to go well, CJ … thats real work and worry every time.
Nasty bits to watch out for are “Update Orchestrator”, “Update Assistant” and “Windows Update” which show up in the “Services” tab of “Windows Task Manager”. I have not been successful at de-scheduling and fully shutting down Update Orchestrator which I highly suspect is at the root of the forced update issue.
For me, forced updates usually happen monthly from around the 13th to about the 20th. I don’t know how localized this event is, though.
“Patch Tuesday (also known as Update Tuesday) is an unofficial term used to refer to when Microsoft regularly releases security patches for its software products. It is widely referred to in this way by the industry. Microsoft formalized Patch Tuesday in October 2003.”
“Patch Tuesday occurs on the second, and sometimes fourth, Tuesday of each month in North America. As far as the integrated Windows Update (WU) function is concerned, Patch Tuesday begins at 18:00 or 17:00 UTC (10:00 PST (UTC−8) or 10:00 PDT (UTC−7)).” [Wikipedia]
Settings / Windows Update / Change active hours
(You can block out 18 hours where reboots are forbidden. Of course, if your computer is off the other six hours, well….)
“Set active hours to let us know when you typically use this device. We won’t automatically restart it during active hours and we won’t restart without checking if you’re using it.”
(I haven’t had a problem yet, but the last update appears to have changed things.)
(Off-Topic)
Two items on tonight’s local news were good news for a change. Man, given how contentious and dismal so much of the national / global news has been, it’s sure good to see good news. Also, I’m typing with a cat in y lap, intent on getting attention, while the other wants to nap on my arm after supper. LOL. So my typing and punctuation may be impaired. I’m too far away from the screen in this position to read what Im typing, lol. Only a few inches may a world of difference.
(1) A local business entrepreneur has been busy since the 1980’s or earlier. For years, he’s also done other things to her p the community, like contributing to scholarships for FFA/4H kids at the rodeo, furniture and food to needy people at the holidays and during/after hurricanes, etc. He has always given back to the community.
So tonight’s news says that “Mattress Mac” Jim Mcinvale is going to remove two of his Gallery Furniture locations, so that 20% to 50% of the floor space will be turned into community space for conferences, for training in community skills, and for education / classes, cooperating with colleges and others. His reasoning is that he no longer needs as much space in his showrooms, due to internet sales, so he wants to repurpose the space to help out the community. with education and training and meeting space. This is a big deal. One is in Houston, the other is in Richmond, TX. It’s interesting that he’s doing this, rather than opening new stores and using the ld space entirely. But that he’d do this to help the public and get people retrained is big, rather than to use it for warehouse or office spacer his own business. Potentially, he can help a lot of people each semester this way. He was talking about trade/craft skills for community college and vocational training, but also other professional skills, and ESL (English as a Second Language) classes too. This could be big.
(2) In Galveston, they are starting to replace plastic drinking straws with biodegradable and paper alternatives, and plastic bags replaced at one business. So Moody Gardens and two other businesses are going green, rather than putting plastics into the ecosystem and ocean. One of the business owners said what prompted him was seeing a news article on a sea turtle that had a plastic straw wedged in its nostril. This goes to the point that many people along the Gulf Coast are there because they love the ocean, sealife, and the swimming and surfing and lifestyle with it, and many of them want to keep the beaches and oceans in tip-top shape, because their business, their home life, their fun, and their food, all depend on their local environment being clean. The article raised the point that waste plastics remain around for decades, and particles make their way even into the food we eat, going right through the food chain.
So. it was nice to see a little good news happening.
LOL, auto-incorrect struck again. In the above,
[quote]is going to remove two of his Gallery Furniture locations, so that 20% to 50% of the floor space [/quote]
Please replace [s]remove[/s] with [u]renovate[/u]. Aha, meaning is restored.