Just when you thought Windows 10 was the last version of Window ever...

[Clive]

When I worked for BP we bought a Macintosh 128K that was the pride and joy of the lab.  But nobody could use it and the IT department washed their hands of it because they hadn't been involved with the purchase.  But we did have an Anita electronic calculator which was the size of a 32" TV.  It was a wonderful toy.

[zappaDPJ]

I bought a Macintosh II which I think came after the 128K while I worked in the NHS and that did get used a lot for desktop publishing but that was dead easy learn.

I vaguely remember the Anita, I think it ran on valves!

[zappaDPJ]

I've just wasted two hours of my life trying to get Windows 11 to discover a directory containing 150,000 files via my network on my old PC. I had it there momentarily after an hour but it then wanted 'credentials' that I simply don't have and after attempting to circumvent that hurdle my old PC vanished off the network forever.

I was in the process of trying to work out which physical drive I need to swap to the new PC when it dawned on me to check if my old PC could see my new PC and there it was. I suspect it was sitting there taunting me from the moment I powered both computers up and I really have wasted two hour of my life.

Windows 11... just don't

And just to rub it in... https://www.techadvisor.com/article/745965/will-there-be-a-windows-12.html

[Simon]

[Clive]

Microsoft know from take-up and feedback that 11 is unpopular and will want to ditch it sooner rather than later.  Maybe 12 will be better.   

[Postal]

As we all know, good versions of Windows are always followed by bad ones.  I was stupid enough to use Windows Me and learnt my lesson.  Gosh, I suppose that was not much short of 25 years ago when I was paying £1,600 for a desktop from Time Computers.   

You can see from the progress of Windows whether the tecchies or the customer facing executives hold the levers of power in Microsoft.  The tecchies keep inventing stuff and saying that this is good and we'll force the customers to have it so that they will learn to like it (Vista or Windows 8, anyone).  Then there is a customer backlash and those in Microsoft who aren't hiding in the tecchie silo manage to persuade the powers that be that forcing innovation they don't want on to a customer base gives the brand a bad reputation.  The tecchies have to row back from some of their "improvements" and the whole customer experience is improved (Windows 7 or Windows 10 perhaps).  Where is there anyone in a customer facing environment who would think that for example removing the capability to show seconds in the system clock or have small icons on the taskbar would not aggravate a vocal part of the customer base - and who in the tecchie silo would even hear that discontent?

[zappaDPJ]

What annoys me even more than the poor UI, the bloat and the general lack of innovation is when I find things that I've been doing easily for years now requires a degree in astrophysics e.g.

The command line in Windows 10 to perform a recursive delete, i.e. removing all text files from the current directory and every sub-directory below it: del /s /q *.txt
The all new command line in Windows 11 to do the same thing: Get-ChildItem * -Include *.txt -Recurse | Remove-Item

It took me all afternoon to get something that would work and the working string of commands makes little sense on any level whereas the old command prompt line by comparison is captain obvious.

[zappaDPJ]

I just ran a command line batch job on the new PC that used to take four and a half days to complete on the old one. It was done in just under four hours on the new PC. It's amazing to think that USB specs are now faster than RAM speeds where when I built my old PC.

The only thing I don't like is modern PC tech has no hard drive activity LED. That will take some getting used to.

[nowster]

Windows 10 really hammers the hard drive, and the most noticeable speed up is from changing its system drive from spinning rust to solid state.

[zappaDPJ]

Windows 10 really hammers the hard drive, and the most noticeable speed up is from changing its system drive from spinning rust to solid state.

Very true and stepping up a gear, SATA (III) to NVMe PCIe gets you a theoretical max speed upgrade from 600MB/s to 64,000MB/s. Where will it all end!

I just had a bit of luck with Windows. I've been trying and failing to use one of my legitimately purchased Windows licenses on my new PC. After hovering on Microsoft's buy button for while (£219.99 for 11 PRO) I Googled and found a company, Ecokeys selling the same license for £9.49. I bought one, fed it into the infernal machine and it's genuine. That was a very pleasant surprise and a saving of over £210.

[robinc]

Windows 10 really hammers the hard drive, and the most noticeable speed up is from changing its system drive from spinning rust to solid state.

........however, it is still hammering the drive, it's just that the speed of the SSD masks it. My guess is that SSDs running Windows 10 are running out of life faster than with other less aggressive operating systems.

[nowster]

........however, it is still hammering the drive, it's just that the speed of the SSD masks it. My guess is that SSDs running Windows 10 are running out of life faster than with other less aggressive operating systems.

If it's just reads, there's no extra wear to the SSD. The head seeking time is the biggest slowdown.

[zappaDPJ]

Here's a funny story... 

Since I built my new PC last June I've spent months on and off copying everything across from the old PC. All I had left to do was import thousands of emails and copy across a huge directory of documents, photos and random bits of work I've collected over the last 25+ years, a job that should have taken less than an hour.

So my old PC wouldn't boot. The motherboard error code suggested a dead C: drive but I was also unable to enter the BIOS. I thought, wrongly as it turned out, that the CMOS battery was dud which required dismantling the majority of the PC to get it replaced. To cut a long story short it became apparent that the motherboard was partially fried. That was Monday done and dusted until the early hours.

Today I took apart the new PC in order to connect the old C: drive which took some doing because it's old tech but was able to breathe a sigh of relief when I found it could be read. I copied over the monster directory, imported a bazillion emails and put the everything back together. I then spent the rest of the day today deleting all my unwanted emails working forwards from the oldest mail. One of the last (new) emails received was a 95% quota warning from IDNet which I thought strange because I'm paranoid about losing mail and always leave my email client open.

I logged into webmail and did a bulk delete. Award yourself 10 points if you know what's coming next All the email on all my devices had gone and being a completely dim idiot I couldn't for the life of me work out why.

It did finally dawn on me Outlook 365 had automatically set the account to IMAP and to be fair in the past it has always defaulted to POP3 but... I'm now leaning towards joining an Amish community and spending the rest of my life milking cows

[Postal]

In the unlikely event that the same sort of thing happens in the future it might be easier to take the HDD out of the old machine, strap it into a HDD caddy (less than £10 from Amazon), plug it into the USB on the new machine and just do a drag and drop.  I've done that the last couple of times I've had to transfer from a dead laptop to a new machine.

[peasblossom]

Oh zappa. Who among us, eh?    

[Simon]

Oh no!  So have you still got all the old emails on the old drive?  Or another backup somewhere?

[zappaDPJ]

I do have a backup but I don't know which of the eight physical drives I pulled out of the evil machine it would be on. However I was able to read the .pst file from the old C: drive and found a way to import it directly rather than use export/import. I just need to go through the lot for the second time and delete what's no longer relevant.

In the unlikely event that the same sort of thing happens in the future it might be easier to take the HDD out of the old machine, strap it into a HDD caddy (less than £10 from Amazon), plug it into the USB on the new machine and just do a drag and drop.  I've done that the last couple of times I've had to transfer from a dead laptop to a new machine.

I really should have done that but panic mode kicked in and I couldn't wait to find out if I'd had a drive failure.

[Simon]

It's strange how panic mode often seems to override normal brain functions.

[zappaDPJ]

Yeah and it's whole new experience for me. I'm thinking of standing as a candidate at the next General Election. I'm pretty sure I've become stupid enough to get elected

[Simon]