Windows

th 23 Sep 2021 Windows 11	The free Windows 11 upgrade is due 5 October. To check compatibility on a maybe five year old HP workstation we downloaded and installed Microsoft's PC Health Check. To download Health Check scroll to the bottom of the bloated Windows 11 page. Our workstation failed on incompatible cpu and even after a BIOS upgrade Secure Boot and TPM 2.0. Isn't necessarily game over though ... we'll wait and see.
we 1 Sep 2021	After a Windows update a while back a new icon appeared on the task bar to the left of the system tray. We found it popped up an annoyingly large window whenever the mouse pointer strayed near the icon. It was surprisingly easy to get rid of, right click on the task bar then News and interests and then Turn off, that'll do it.
mo 15 Feb 2021	Don't know why it's taken us years to trip over this. In Windows 10 photo viewer double click on an image and it zooms up, hold and drag to move the image about, and double click again to zoom back ... l♥ve it.
th 10 Dec 2020	Windows 10 feature update 20H2 this morning had two cracks at installing and prompted a .NET update. Unsurprisingly the feature update suggests using Microsoft's browser, search engine and a free try of 365 so you can pay for it later.
sa 26 Sep 2020	With our Apple devices we often remove the sense when typing by not noticing autosuggest has changed something. Despite this we've turned autosuggest+ on for Windows 10 on a desktop ... we'll let you know how it goes ...
sa 25 Jul 2020	Every two or three months we manually check the Windows update status via Settings. This time we found feature 2004 update hanging since May. When we manually started the upgrade it got stuck around 90%. Running Update Assistant just got a Thanks for updating message. Uninstalling, re-installing and then running Assistant again solved the problem though as so often the update did take forever.
mo 6 Apr 2020	When Windows 10 fired up this morning it offered to make our life better by selling us Office 365 for eighty quid a year and linking our mobile to the pc. We thought it could make our life better by leaving us alone but despite this perhaps foolishly gave it our mobile number for linking. After texts/passwords/verifications we now have Microsoft's Edge browser on our iPhone ... we'll let you know if our life gets any better.
sa 14 Dec 2019	We upgraded an aging laptop to Windows 10 from aging media. It was a bit of a struggle but in the end leaving it alone to sort itself out sorted it out. It then kept failing during update. The Internet thought the problem was an elderly version of Win10 and it should be re-installed from more modern media. We downloaded an install to a USB stick (to make an install disc you need high capacity DL discs) and the re-install kept failing. After three attempts we used the install's advanced options to reformat the destination hard disc, fixed it and the activation remained valid.
su 4 Aug 2019	Recently we've had two admittedly elderly desktops struggle with Window 10 updates significantly slowing the machines. In both cases Windows 10 Assistant fixed the problem. On one machine it pointed out that 8Gig free space was needed on the hard disc and there was only three, a little tidying steamed the broccoli.
tu 23 Oct 2018	A chum complained to us that on the pop up print window (Ctrl + P) in web browser Chrome the Print button had changed to Save. We fixed it by clicking on Change... where Print Destinations was set to Save as PDF and changing the destination to a printer.
tu 11 Sep 2018	Often an extra line at the bottom of the screen would be useful. We sort of created one by setting the taskbar to auto hide (right click on the taskbar/Taskbar settings/Automatically hide the taskbar in desktop mode). We didn't stick with it long, the task bar doesn't respond immediately and you then have to move the mouse to the wanted icon ... but it may suit you.
fr 11 May 2018	Do you recall Windows Millennium Edition? Released in September 2000 (a year before Win XP) it was Windows 98 with some extra goodies like Movie Maker. We always suspected that Lady KRJ thought everybody else's copy said Windows Kate ...
we 22 Nov 2017	It seems that Microscoft have been pratting about with the photo viewer in the latest Win10 upgrade. The slideshow icon has disappeared but user key f5 will do it; and there's now a different response to the magnifying glass zoom so useful to know that Ctrl + mouse wheel will zoom a pic.
th 24 Aug 2017	It worried us for quite a while that the Windows 10 accent system colour kept changing all by itself on a desktop. It was happening because we'd set the background to slide show and when the graphic changed so did the accent colour. Fix it by Windows Key/Settings/Personalisation/Colours and uncheck the Automatically pick an accent colour ... box.
sa 21 Jan 2017	Here's one from 2011; when defining a group click on a file, then click on another whilst holding down the Shift key and all the files in between will be added to the group.
tu 25 Oct 2016	The thing about Windows is it's made mostly by Americans and they don't realise that in their foreign people do strange things like sometimes turn their computer off. The Windows anniversary update has made it even more difficult to turn the bloody thing off. You can still do it from the keyboard but you need to know the shortcut Windows key + X/U/U. We've also added on a desktop the shortcut described at CNet (Option 2: halfway down).

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