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I have a Windows machine sitting behind the TV, hooked to two controllers, set up as basically a console for the big TV. It doesn't get a lot of use, and mostly just churns out folding@home work units lately. It's connected by ethernet via a wired connection, and it has a local static IP for the sake of simplicity.
In January, Windows Update started throwing a nonspecific error and failing. After a couple weeks I decided to look up the error, and all the recommendations I found online said to make sure several critical services were running. I did, but it appeared to make no difference.
Yesterday, I finally engaged MS support. Priyank remoted into my machine and attempted all the steps I had already tried. I just let him go, so he could get through his checklist and get to the resolution steps. Well, his checklist began and ended with those steps, and he started rather insistently telling me that I had to reinstall, and that he had to do it for me. I told him no thank you, "I know how to reinstall windows, and I'll do it when I'm ready."
In his investigation though, I did notice that he opened MS Edge and tried to load Bing to search for something. But Edge had no connection. No pages would load. I didn't take any special notice of it at the time though, because of the argument I was having with him about reinstalling. And it was no great loss to me that Edge wasn't working, because that was literally the first time it'd ever been launched on that computer.
We got off the phone and I gave him top marks in the CS survey that was sent, as it appeared there was nothing he could do. It wasn't until a couple hours later that I remembered the connectivity problem. I went back and checked again. Edge couldn't load anything. Firefox, the ping command, Steam, Vivaldi, parsec and RDP all worked fine. The Windows Store couldn't connect either. That was when it occurred to me that its was likely that Windows Update was just unable to reach the internet.
As I have no problem whatsoever with MS services being unable to call home, I began trying to set up an on-demand proxy for use when I want to update, and I noticed that when I fill out the proxy details in Internet Options, or in Windows 10's more windows10-ish UI for a system proxy, the "save" button didn't respond to clicks. So I looked that problem up, and saw that it depends on a service called WinHttpAutoProxySvc, which I found itself depends on something called IP Helper, which led me to the root cause of all my issues: IP Helper now depends on the DHCP Client service, which I have explicitly disabled on non-wifi Windows installs since the '90s.
Just to see, I re-enabled DHCP Client, and boom! Everything came back on. Edge, the MS Store, and Windows Update all worked. So I updated, went through a couple reboots-- because that's the name of the game with windows update --and had a fully updated machine.
It occurred to me then that this is probably how MS sends all its spy data too, and since the things I actually use work just fine, I disabled DHCP Client again. I figure that's easier than navigating an intentionally annoying menu tree of privacy options that changes and resets with every major update.
But holy shit, microsoft! How can you hinge the entire system's OS connectivity on something that not everybody uses?
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That feeling you get when you write an automation package on top of selenium and python that at a press of a button runs through an entire User Checkout process 😍
Oh the hours this is going to save me.
Now to see what else I can automate in my day to day life.3 -
Clicks "Save" button....
Yes, that was the point of clicking the save button, to discard my changes...
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Teaching advanced IT topics like programming or system management has become much harder in only about five years, because many 20 year olds do not know how to effectively work with the file system. I don't blame them: the Microsoft Office applications nudge you strongly towards storing everything in the Cloud (saving files locally requires extra clicks), and on Windows, the folders C:\Users and C:\ are almost hidden in he respective dialogs (open file, save file). Same on macOS. Students also keep loosing files. This used to be an excuse for not doing the work; nowadays, you're able to find the files on their systems by using appropriate tools (e.g. `find`, installed with Git Bash on Windows). And don't get me started on touch-typing... hell, those kids were fast ten years ago with a proper keyboard! Now they're fast with their smartphone, but painstakingly slow on an actual keyboard.8
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In the country where I live the national railway company just replaced their perfectly functional (old looking) site with a new one. It looks very nice until you start using it. Reloading the page logs you out. Adding a saved passenger before was filling two fields and ticking and save now you go to profile then select it using 15 clicks then save and then you can't pick it when buying tickets you must add it all again (used to work before). The list of trains matching your criteria used to be a fairly compresses table so you could see a lot of trains without scrolling also showed info on them. Now it only shows departure arrival and time. Also each table cell has 4x font size padding and is float right with around 20% of left side being taken by a menu. Information about the trains' journey is still shown but not in full detail. After you put the ticket in the cart it only shows you basic information and there is no full info before checkout. Also now you can't pick which seat you want yours next to.
So then what did they fix compared to the old? Now you can buy tickets for trains that are late like if that's gonna make everything easier... They also fixed that now you don't need two accounts if you want to use the mobile app (which by the way broke after the update in every possible way).
So the question is: why the fuck do we need so much eye candy if the product becomes unusable in the end? -
Why is there no feature to save your OS' state across reboots?
Like images or savestates you can load up any time.
Besides the fact dual booting is way more useful this way, you could have huge organized workspaces, leaving your current work open, clicks away.
Even in professional IT this would be a gamechanger.6
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