It’s been a while

Posted on October 12, 2016 by Peder Erickson — No Comments ↓

Over the last couple of months I have had a bit of … fun. My new computer started restarting randomly more and more often until it suddenly wouldn’t start up, it turned out to be a failed BIOS chip on the motherboard, so I have been going through the RMA Process. Aside from that I haven’t seen anything too newsworthy. On this last Monday, the Oculus Touch controllers went on sale for $199, They should come in December. I hope that Oculus does better this time with their shipping estimates than they did last time. On the upside, only people who already have the Rift should be ordering the Touch controllers, so there should be a reduced number of people ordering the device.

On the Vive side, Valve is talking about bringing SteamVR (And the Vive) over to Mac & Linux/SteamOS, which is very nice for me, I’d love to be able to use Linux to play VR games. Also new motion controllers for the Vive have been showcased, much smaller than the ones that came with the vive, and with a strap that goes around the hand, along with the wrist strap. From what I have been reading, the new design is to keep themselves compeditive with the new Touch controllers for the Rift. I’m looking forward to seeing what is coming down the road for VR.

Windows 10 Upgrade shenanigans

Posted on August 4, 2016 by Peder Erickson — No Comments ↓

From what I’ve been reading, the Windows 10 Anniversary Update has been doing some … odd things to peoples computers. First is the whole thing about switching some group policies to only work on the Enterprise or Education versions, making the ‘Pro’ version less useful for businesses as those settings can’t be centrally managed anymore as of this update. The next issue was a black screen or odd fonts in Steam, Steam has since updated to fix these issues, but it is odd that some features that Steam uses would just suddenly be removed or Locked in Windows 10.

The newest issue so far is an issue with machines with multiple partitions on their main harddrive. It appears that extra partitions may be damaged in some way, making data inaccessible. from what I have been reading, (My main computer hasn’t upgraded to the Anniversary update yet, I have a secondary NTFS partition on my Windows drive) Other NTFS/Windows partitions may be unreadable for a short period of time, but they should start working after a short time. Linux and other partitions? It’s possible that you may need to do a re-install of the Linux system. Hopefully all of your files survived in that situation. If your other operating systems are on different drives they won’t be affected by this issue.

If all of this turns out to really be happening as much as people on Reddit are talking about it, Microsoft is really doing some shady things with their OS. At least it appears that other drives are safe as of now… I have been working on Linux more again as I don’t really feel that I can trust Microsoft to let things work properly. If only SteamVR actually worked on Linux…

Today is the last day of the Windows 10 free upgrade.

Posted on July 28, 2016 by Peder Erickson — No Comments ↓

Interestingly, Microsoft is sticking to their original plan for the Windows 10 Upgrade and ending it today, July 28th. I find it interesting that they decided to not keep it going as they seem to really want people to upgrade, but it’ll be nice to have some of my older computers stop nagging me to upgrade them to Windows 10. If you do decide that you want to upgrade your computer to Windows 10 for free, you will need to do it today, otherwise you will have to stick with Windows 7 or 8.1.

In the end, I have upgraded all of my Windows 8.1 machines to 10, but am keeping Windows 7 as I prefer the customization that I can do on Windows 7, but can’t do on 8.1 or 10

Oculus Rift Release day and Windows Upgrades

Posted on March 28, 2016 by Peder Erickson — No Comments ↓

Some people are having a lot of fun today as the people who Kickstarted Oculus are receiving their Rifts, sadly I wasn’t one of the kickstarters, it had ended shortly before I found out about it. It also appears that I’m a bit farther back in the group than i thought I was, my rift is still in ‘Preorder’ status, and if some of the stuff that I’ve been reading is true, it’ll be a competition between the Oculus and Vive on which will arrive first. April will be an interesting month for myself.

On another note, My laptop did upgrade to Windows 10 today, evidently using sleep mode can screw the upgrade up a bit. On the 16th it did attempt to upgrade to Windows 10, but for some reason the installer failed to start. After that, it stopped for ten days before prompting me again on the 26th. It didn’t upgrade then either as I had put the laptop to sleep mode. When I opened it this morning, the 28th, I used it for a couple of minutes before it restarted automatically. when the screen lit up, I saw this…

I’m not sure if I’ll keep it on 10, or if I may downgrade it back to 8.1. If I had been running Windows 7, I think that I would have cancelled the upgrade long before it attempted to upgrade. I highly prefer the appearance of 7 over 8, 8.1, or 10.

If anyone wants to know how to cancel the upgrade, follow these steps:

First, on the screen above, click on ‘I need more time’

Next click on ‘Reschedule’

And then you can click on ‘Cancel scheduled upgrade’. I didn’t do that as I wanted to see if it really did what people have been complaining about on Reddit. Yes it does just reboot the computer, weather you were using it or not, had any documents open or not… it’s really not nice how they go about pushing the upgrade out. On the other hand, you would *really* need to not be paying attention to not notice the screen that covers everything up for an hour before it upgrades, if you were using it. If it upgraded during the night while you weren’t using it, then that would be a bit more difficult to notice and stop.

Windows 7 machines reportedly upgrading to Windows 10

Posted on March 13, 2016 by Peder Erickson — No Comments ↓

There have been several threads on Reddit over the last few days about Windows 7, and in some instances, Windows 8.1 upgrading to Windows 10 automatically. From what people are saying, Windows will restart suddenly and the Windows 10 install will start almost immidatley. I have taken a look at my Windows 8.1 laptop and it appears that the upgrade to Windows 10 is listed as an ‘Important’ Update, not an ‘Optional’, or ‘Recommended’ update. Interestingly when I was checking that on my Laptop, I got this message at the bottom of my screen…

Once I clicked on it, here’s what I saw:

So, evidently, my Laptop will be upgraded to Windows 10 on the 16th, weather I like it or not, well probably the 17th as the laptop should be in sleep mode at 11 at night… I have nothing against Windows 10 itself, It’s better than Windows 8.1 and faster than Windows 7. (Though I still like the appearance of 7 far more than 8, 8.1, or 10) I really don’t like how Microsoft is pushing Windows 10 out though, tons of nag prompts are not nice, and people don’t like having their machines change abruptly.

Also from what I’ve been reading, some businesses are seeing their machines upgrading as well, often breaking their POS machines, and machines that have software that doesn’t work properly on Windows 10. The unexpected downtime can also cause issues as well. At my workplace we’ve done the steps to make sure that this doesn’t happen to us, but I don’t hold much hope for our Windows 7 domain to stay on Windows 7 for much longer, weather we like it or not.

I can see why Microsoft wants Windows 10 pushed out, it’ll make it much easier for them when they only have to patch one OS, but they can’t stop patching Windows Vista, 7, and 8.1 until their End of Life dates come. Vista will be at EOL soon, but 7 will still be around until 2020 and 8.1 will be around until 2022. If they try to kill those OSes before the EOL dates, I’m sure that there will be some lawsuits. Businesses and some people don’t like change, or can’t upgrade yet thanks to older programs which may not work on Windows 10.

Oh, and one sidenote, Daylight Saving time is starting tonight, we all have lost an hour of sleep. Good thing I shouldn’t have to run much tomorrow/today.

iPhone Date crash, Windows 10 update history, and Intel overclocking

Posted on February 13, 2016 by Peder Erickson — No Comments ↓

This has been a fairly interesting week in computer news, first of all, a number of articles about Intel stopping motherboard manufactuers from allowing overclocking on their non K series CPUs. I can certainly see why Intel would want to stop people from overclocking their cheaper lines of CPUs, They want people to buy the higher-end K series or X series. This only appears to apply to the Skylake line of CPUs, older CPUs cannot be overclocked unless their in intels K or X series. There are also some articles talking about Intel and Microsoft pushing ‘microcode’ updates to the CPUs via Windows Update to make sure that they can’t be overclocked. In the end it would be best to purchase the more expensive CPU if you want to overclock. Here’s a more in-depth article about this, though the title could be a bit … misleading. The mircocode update hasn’t been pushed out yet.

On more Windows Update related news, Microsoft has started posting the full changelogs for Windows 10 updates. This is a very good change, as it will allow IT Staff to see what MSFT is pushing out before they deploy it to their orginizations. I wonder why they thought that not showing people what has been changed was a good idea, every previous version of Windows has had a site where you can see their update history.

The site looks a bit spartan, but here is the link if you want to see the changelogs.

And finally, Apples 64 bit IOS devices have a very huge bug…

Microsoft has released the first major update to Windows 10

Posted on November 12, 2015 by Peder Erickson — No Comments ↓

I already have applied the update to all but one of my Windows 10 machines, and I can say that this update has returned a feature that I really wanted to have back. Window border colors are back, of course you could have had them in the offical release of Windows 10 before, but it required some messing around with system files, and was generally a bit too difficult to re-add a minimal level of customization. I really wish that they’d add a simple way to customize the OS a bit more without special software, but at least they’ve returned some level of that. Also Microsoft has brought in some more ways for Businesses to manage Windows 10 machines. Thanks to the new ‘Universal Apps’ it has become a bit more difficult to manage Windows 8/8.1/10 as there aren’t as many controls put on those for IT Admins to work with. I hope to see more of these features rolled out in the future.

Here’s Microsofts’ blog post about the new upgrade: http://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2015/11/12/first-major-update-for-windows-10-available-today/

In other news, it sounds like Microsoft released a botched windows update to Windows 7/8/8.1 machines on Tuesday. I haven’t seen anything come of it yet myself… From what I’ve read, a large number of people on Reddit appear to have been having issues with MS Outlook, and network logins since the update was applied on their machines. I hope that MS fixes those issues quickly, and that this doesn’t become the norm for older versions of Windows.

Microsoft is planning on reducing Onedrive Storage limits

Posted on November 3, 2015 by Peder Erickson — No Comments ↓

Well, here’s another post about Microsoft doing … strange things. They really did seem to be on an upswing during the Windows 10 Tech previews, but now…

Microsoft is going to remove the unlimited storage for Office 365 users, reducing it to 1TB of storage, Which could be a decent idea, some people will put a lot up if they get that ability, but they are also reducing free storage. Their free storage will be dropping from 15GB to 5 GB, and they’re removing the 15 GB bonus for using OneDrive for your ‘Camera Roll’. From what they’re saying all of those will take effect in 2016 for all users.

They’re also going to be removing their paid 100 and 200GB Plans for new users, reducing the maximum one to 50 GB. People who are currently on the 200 and 100GB Plans will be able to keep their storage. Which is good, I guess.

It’s possible that they’re having issues with making a profit off of OneDrive, similar to Canonicals’ Ubuntu One cloud file storage which shut down back in 2014 which appears to be because it didn’t make enough money. This is also a good reason against using cloud storage, as it could just go away at any time. From what I’ve heard in the past, some cloud storage have providers just vanished. For now, I’m going to stick with my ownCloud, which I can run off of my own server, which I have full control over. I’ve also been hearing some people talking about ‘Syncthing‘, which I might take a look at soon as well.

That’s it for today, have a nice day.

If you want to read more about the changes to OneDrive, you can read it on the OneDrive Blog.

Windows 10 will be a ‘Reccomended’ update in 2016

Posted on November 2, 2015 by Peder Erickson — No Comments ↓

A few days ago, another article about those random Windows 10 Autoupdates came up, this time saying that there was a mistake which caused some peoples machines to upgrade to Windows 10. From what they’re saying it did need some level of human interaction before the machine would restart to do the upgrade. Now they’re saying that at some point next year they’re going to change it from ‘Optional’ to ‘Reccomended’, which will cause machines that have Windows Update set up with the default settings to download and attempt to install Windows 10. They say that it’ll still need the owner of the machine to click through a few prompts first. Part of me wonders if they’ll set Windows 10 to be an important or critical update before their ‘upgrade for free during the first year’ time is over, it looks like they may go that way… I wonder how many people would get angry if they did that.

Here’s some other interesting articles that I’ve found on this subject…

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2015/10/29/making-it-easier-to-upgrade-to-windows-10/

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/10/windows-10-will-be-made-an-automatic-recommended-update-early-next-year/

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/10/windows-10-upgrade-installing-automatically-on-some-windows-7-8-systems/

Microsoft appears to be forcing Windows 10 Upgrades

Posted on October 15, 2015 by Peder Erickson — No Comments ↓

Evidently, Microsoft has started making Windows 7/8.1 machines upgrade to Windows 10 without any input from the user, even showing the update on domain-connected computers, according to one redditor (As far as I know, this hasn’t appeared on any machines at my workplace, so I’m not going to say anything about that…)

Part of me thinks that Microsoft is pushing Windows 10 onto people who have disabled or removed the ‘GWX.exe’ which displays the ads for Windows 10, as those people appear to be the ones getting the forced upgrades. If that is the case, I wonder if Windows 10 will be pushed on everyone around the time that the ‘Free Year’ is up.

From what I’ve seen, Microsoft *REALLY* wants everyone on Windows 10, the messages on my Windows 8 laptop have been becoming a bit more… pushy?… essentially telling me that I have to upgrade soon, but so far it hasn’t forced anything on me. The constant ‘Upgrade now!” messages have begun to leave a bad taste in my mouth though.

For now, I plan on keeping Windows 7 and 8 around, as both are still useful. Also I miss some of the customization options that Windows 7 (and older) had. No decent transparency, and no color customization beyond titlebars isn’t nice. At least Windows 10 will have titlebar customization again soon… yay… At least the windows won’t need to be pure white any more.

Click here to see an interesting article about this issue.

Windows