Microsoft Windows gripes

that's not an ad. that is Microsoft Teams running on your PC, it was added in a recent update. to get rid of it you need to uninstall it *and* the Teams Installer, otherwise it will just reinstall. it does seem to have gone away now I've uninstalled both of them

yikes! thanks for letting me know.

The constant updating when you live in Australia and have shitty internet speeds is a nightmare. Last update for some reason removed my wife's ability to use any Office programs from her account.

Minor innocuous gripe of entitlement: love how when I change the volume it pops up a lovely picture of whatever youtube video i last played, never mind that I'm actually listening to spotify.

my laptop is still running Windows 7 and it seems I missed the boat to upgrade free a long time ago. any tips?

You can install and use win10 without a license if you can live with a watermark on the bottom right of the display and not being able to modify the wallpaper

buy a 5$ license off ebay, works fine

I recently found out that the volume pop-up takes mouse input. I found out because I wanted to click something underneath it.

you can disable it?

my laptop is still running Windows 7 and it seems I missed the boat to upgrade free a long time ago. any tips?

― YOU CALL THIS JOURNALSIM? (dog latin), Monday, November 11, 2019 7:16 AM (twenty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yes: be thankful for your procrastination.

We had a Halloween party weekend before last and I had a whole thing planned to play on my laptop but Microsoft decided that I ABSOLUTELY HAD to install Windows updates thirty minutes prior to the party (I have them scheduled to run overnight but my laptop had been closed) and, well, it took roughly the length of the party to complete so eff the entire way off, Microsoft.

Minor innocuous gripe of entitlement: love how when I change the volume it pops up a lovely picture of whatever youtube video i last played, never mind that I'm actually listening to spotify.

this bugs me too because my laptop has media pause/play buttons which I used to use to control my mp3 player, except now the thing which actually gets paused/played is whatever picture pops up when you press the volume controls, i.e. usually not what I'm actually listening to. so I press the button to pause my mp3 but it keeps going and at the same time unpauses some random youtube tab I've forgotten I've left open and the audio from that plays over the top

apparently you can change that by telling your browser not to respond to the media buttons, and I should do that in the hope that it will go back to how it was, but I'm also playing mp3s less and streaming Spotify web client/Mixcloud more, so maaaybe I should just not have hundreds of tabs open including youtubes I've opened to watch later and forgotten about, but still, I like to grumble

"my laptop is still running Windows 7 and it seems I missed the boat to upgrade free a long time ago. any tips?"

In theory the upgrade period is over, but I have just - well, two days ago, not literally just now - but I have just upgraded a ThinkPad T520 from Windows 7 Pro to Windows 10 Pro. I popped along here:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10/

And clicked "download tool now", and opted to download and install Windows 10 directly from the internet, rather than by making boot media. It worked, and two days later it still seems to be working. The laptop originally had Windows 7 Pro installed via Lenovo's recovery media and now has Windows 10 Pro.

I can't guarantee that at some point in the future Microsoft will deactivate it. At that point the alternatives are (a) continue using unlicensed Windows 10 (b) buy a copy of Windows 10 (c) revert back to Windows 7 (d) hackintosh the laptop into a Hackintosh (e) install Linux in roughly that order. Ordinarily (c) would be a bad option but, in theory, Windows 10 is supposed to have continual upgrades forevermore, or at least until Microsoft changes its mind.

buy a 5$ license off ebay, works fine
― corrs unplugged, Monday, 11 November 2019 13:34 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

^^^^ after running a pirated copy of windows since win95 I got fed up and dropped a fiver on a win10 activation key from ebay and it worked perfectly. no reason not to do it unless a fiver is really too much of an expenditure or if you have a moral objection to giving Microsoft money (fair).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDzAAjzbV5g

Is that the guy who got fired for being a sex creep

Newest version of Windows Update changed the line spacing in menu text, making the space wider between entries. Irritates my father. Couldn't figure out for the life of me how to change it, as changing the font sizes and magnification didn't affect it. Anyone ever run into this?

maybe this? https://superuser.com/questions/975949/how-to-disable-wide-right-click-context-menus-in-windows-10

I'll give that a try, but my problem is more with the "Alt+F" type menus, not the right-click context menus.

Does Windows 10 use machine learning to determine how to open windows in the most awkward screen position and with the most useless dimensions?

Also the endless variety of places and appearances for the "new folder" icon / menu option keeps things so darn fresh!

New Folder 2

Shift-Control-N my dude

Window placement has always been shit in windows. No idea how anyone thought putting part of a window below the bottom of the screen was ever a good idea.

I hate how they make it hard to make desktop shortcuts now. Smartphone UI is just a huge pile of icons. You'd think windows would follow suit.

Thanks calstars, I can remember that.

I need more screens evidently but whenever I return to the desktop from the screensaver the windows I've carefully placed has moved around and shrunk. I guess there might be some setting to stop this but I can't imagine what purpose it serves.

Microsoft, why do i have to go into the registry to alter the fucking colour of the scroll bars! Madness.

i only just now discovered that if the cursor is in the tool bar area, that if I right click, I could open the task manager that way, as opposed to having to ctl + alt + del

Folders randomly being surrounded by black squares, printers refusing to remember default paper size (A4 not Letter, you motherfuckers), random shortcuts backing up to OneDrive without being asked and getting green ticks on them, Explorer crashing and needing to be killed and restarted because it takes 700 hours to dump something in the Recycling Bin

ctrl+shift+esc is task manager as well btw (xpost) (I happen to do that quite often without thinking and had to look at my hands how I do it: right thumb on the right ctrl, right ring finger on the right shift, left middle finger on esc)

I couldn't remember the password to my microsoft account or any security questions and also having a new phone threw a spanner in the 2fa works so for some reason I had to wait 30 days for them to do something about it. 30 days later I get an email sent to my gmail account saying I can reset all the security info related to the account. So I click the link, enter my gmail address as the microsoft account name, set up a new password, job done right? I try to sign in with the new password. 'This microsoft account doesn't exist'. Ok you twats. I try to create a new one with the same gmail account name. 'This account already exists'. Lol you fucking morons.

So there was a *different* 'create new account' link I had to click - after filling in some details there the page spins endlessly, great job again.

Newest Dev build of Windows 11 finally lets you un-combine taskbar icons. I was surprised by how annoying I found that.

I just bought a new laptop with Windows 11 on it and ^^^ this was the first thing I noticed and couldn't fucking believe they'd removed that. what the fuck is going on at Microsoft, how fucking dumb do you have to be to get a job designing their dogshit operating system? and it took them what 2 years to put it back in? why does everything just get worse

of course that build isn't on general release yet so I still have stupid combined taskbar icons for now.

kind of a niche gripe I guess but every time windows does a major update it disables and hides stereo mix audio input and it really winds me up.

I hate that it shows me my most frequently used programs as a helpful suggestion… like I don’t need to be reminded of this. If I want quick access I will put it in the taskbar… otherwise it’s screenspace best used for something else

I need Microsoft Authenticator to use work apps on my phone, except when I open Authenticator, it asks me to authenticate Authenticator first by using… Authenticator (i.e. itself), which is… impossible?

^^^ you’re not alone

yeah I've been stuck in that nightmarish loop, always authenticate using text messages!

tbh I've got to hand it to Windows after my earlier gripe. at least it's not Debian. just upgraded Debian from 11 to 12 and it's completely fucked my Postgresql database. think I've lost it all. nothing is working to get the data back. most of it I can get from backups but not all of it. what a fucking nightmare

Every time: click on the Windows button, carefully click on the tiny icon for Word or Excel or whatever Office thing I need, realise that it doesn't give a shit which one I clicked and will open up a new panel of bigger icons to click on.

Oh, you'd like an external drive to always have the same letter, the one you assigned to it multiple times, every time you plug it in? Well, fuck you.

I have an external drive which I turn off often. I haven't had that happen. But I found this site which may solve that issue: https://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbdlm_e.html

Cheers!