Windows 11

[jtr1962]

The latest thing now is that Microsoft is turning on OneDrive backups without asking permission.
Does anyone want a Windows 11 installer image that just doesn't have OneDrive in it?

I generally store my stuff using my own folder system, not the stupid Windows defaults, for lots of reasons. Among them is making it harder for a potential hacker to find stuff I care about. OneDrive and CoPilot are two features any semi-sophisticated computer user just doesn't want or need. MS keeps trying to force them on people. Why I don't know.

It might be time for legislation to put a stop to this, and all the spying without permission. If MS and other companies are going to sell our info, then they should give us their software for free in exchange for the privilege. You should be free to set up an O/S you pay for any way you want.

Windows Recall sounds like another nightmare.

MS may have just set the stage for Linux to go mainstream.

 

[Mercutio]

Windows Recall is out of the picture for now.

OneDrive DOES have a useful function. It can handle file versioning and off-site storage, so it's a form of ransomware mitigation. It's just that it is very invasive in how it operates. Google lets users add arbitrary directories to its sync structure, but Onedrive demands that they live under c:\users\username\onedrive.

The big problem is that almost anyone who saves anything ever will wind up with more than 5GB of data in their user folders. That creates confusion with regard to whether something is contained within Ondrive or if it's in a standard folder somewhere, and whether people will know to look at things that way. It's a big headache.

 

[sedrosken]

Yeah, if they even upped standard storage to 100GB I'd be less annoyed about this. All our 365 subscribers including myself get 1TB free with that subscription, but god forbid I let someone set up a machine with their microsoft account anymore.

 

[jtr1962]

OneDrive DOES have a useful function. It can handle file versioning and off-site storage, so it's a form of ransomware mitigation.

Well, yes, but with only 5GB it's not terribly useful. I'm not a data hog, but even I have well over 500GB of unique data.

 

[LunarMist]

OneDrive DOES have a useful function. It can handle file versioning and off-site storage, so it's a form of ransomware mitigation. It's just that it is very invasive in how it operates. Google lets users add arbitrary directories to its sync structure, but Onedrive demands that they live under c:\users\username\onedrive.

The big problem is that almost anyone who saves anything ever will wind up with more than 5GB of data in their user folders. That creates confusion with regard to whether something is contained within Ondrive or if it's in a standard folder somewhere, and whether people will know to look at things that way. It's a big headache.

But can't the user still save files wherever they want?

 

[Mercutio]

But can't the user still save files wherever they want?

If I had to guess, 95% of people who use Windows don't pay enough attention to directory names to know where things are saved beyond "Documents go in Documents and Pictures go in Pictures" and if they ARE made aware of the difference between c:\users\username\Pictures and c:\users\username\Onedrive\Pictures, they will not retain that information more than a day or two.

You can fight with the OS over where things get saved. You can set a default save location in the libraries (something else no one uses) but you will be CONSTANTLY fighting the OS, for as long as you have Onedrive installed.

I went ahead and made Windows 11 install media that simply doesn't include OneDrive and which has removed the capability to make a Microsoft account during installation. I think this is the correct way to approach the matter.

 

[Santilli]

How do I get rid of OneDrive?
It's turned off, and not syncinig.

 

[Mercutio]

You can uninstall it.
It'll come back with the next major Windows update.

You can also disable it through either a group policy object or registry hack.
I suspect the GPO will be respected. I'm not fully certain that removing the registry setting is.

 

[Mercutio]

I tried Windows 11 on my AM5 PC over the weekend and I had non-stop issues with RDP (Remote Desktop). Remote Desktop had some changes around the time Windows Server 2016 was released, and I know a half dozen registry settings to run on the client and server side to improve connection stability, but I'm talking about a PC that's on my LAN. I saw non-stop disconnects that did not improve from those fixes, nor from the switch between Terminals.exe (my usual RDP client), mstsc.exe (the standard RDP client) or the Windows Store Remote Desktop client, which is usually the one that causes the least headaches, but is also the least flexible.

This is so beyond-the-pale unacceptable that I wiped and loaded Windows 10 after less than 16 hours.
Needless to say, Windows 10 had zero issues.

 

[LunarMist]

What are enterprise users doing, or they use 3rd party software to avoid the MS?

 

[sedrosken]

I tried Windows 11 on my AM5 PC over the weekend and I had non-stop issues with RDP (Remote Desktop). Remote Desktop had some changes around the time Windows Server 2016 was released, and I know a half dozen registry settings to run on the client and server side to improve connection stability, but I'm talking about a PC that's on my LAN. I saw non-stop disconnects that did not improve from those fixes, nor from the switch between Terminals.exe (my usual RDP client), mstsc.exe (the standard RDP client) or the Windows Store Remote Desktop client, which is usually the one that causes the least headaches, but is also the least flexible.

This is so beyond-the-pale unacceptable that I wiped and loaded Windows 10 after less than 16 hours.
Needless to say, Windows 10 had zero issues.

Is that AM5 specific? I'm running 11 on all my active duty machines including the work PC for right now -- I haven't noticed any of these issues.

 

[Mercutio]

Is that AM5 specific? I'm running 11 on all my active duty machines including the work PC for right now -- I haven't noticed any of these issues.

I truly do not know. It's my first experience with Windows 11 on a desktop at home, and I don't think I ever saw an RDP session last longer than five minutes. At first, I thought it might be a CPU or GPU load issue, or maybe a problem with the wired NIC, but none of the mitigations I've used in the past for poor RDP connections helped and switching back to Windows 10 with all the same hardware most definitely did. I wasn't even getting consistent event logs. Sometimes the connections would just freeze (USUALLY this is from using RDP over UDP instead of TCP, but I applied the known fix for that). Sometimes I'd get blackscreens and sometimes the logged errors would suggest that I initiated the disconnect, which I most emphatically didn't.

I got pretty annoyed about wasting almost a day with it, reimaged with Windows 10 and magically had a well behaved PC again, so I'm placing the blame on squarely on 11.

 

[Mercutio]

I haven't even remotely thought about since about January, but Windows Server 2025 is probably going to be released in ~October. Supposedly, it'll have better security for SMB and drop a lot of legacy netlogin code, plus overall device management features that probably relate to client health monitoring. And hey, it's finally going to offer support for Bluetooth and Wifi by default!

 

[Handruin]

It's been a super long time since I've even deployed a Windows server system. It's wild for me to see server 2025 when the last one I've used was server 2012. They just stopped aligning with my career and work projects that I've not had any need for one in so long.

 

[ddrueding]

Ha, the last MCSE I got was for Win2k

 

[sedrosken]

We're looking at phasing out the last on-prem Windows Server we admin -- they're stuck as VMs on an ESXi server that's out of date with no upgrade path and for whom the licensing costs have just finally gotten to be too bothersome. Their domain controller is being replaced with Entra logins, their file server with Sharepoint. I'm going to keep a copy of their old dispatch software around somewhere just in case they need to reference it, but they haven't ran it in literal years now, and their on-prem Quickbooks server, since it can run on a Windows Pro SKU, will be moved to a repurposed workstation until they finally make the jump to something different.

 

[Mercutio]

I don't have a single customer big enough to justify Azure federation. It's a non-issue for small organizations. That doesn't mean they don't need it deserve management features, but Microsoft sure as hell isn't treating them like they do.

 

[LunarMist]

How many do you need, like 1000?

 

[Mercutio]

How many do you need, like 1000?

Unless pricing is better than the last time I looked, the sales pitch is usually to tell people to just sign up for 365 Business Premium (which includes Sharepoint for file sharing and Intune for device management) for the low, low price of $22/user/month from now until the end of time, so about $60k/year in software rental for 15 people, which is pretty typical for the size of organization that I'm dealing with. Even if we're paying full-fat MSRP for Windows Server + CALs + Office (some of my customers use Google Workspace, which is cheaper for folks who can go without MS Office), we're talking about $2k for Server licensing and $3750 for Office. I'll advise anyone who asks against putting things in Sharepoint all the live-long day because shit is impossible to get out of it and I usually bill $125/hour for my time (my biggest PITA pays triple, but his long-suffering bookkeeper told him to just fucking pay it and he does) and I have templates for most of what needs to be done plus I already have a datacenter infrastructure in place.

I'd also like to point out that Azure has large scale outages a lot more often than either Google or AWS. Microsoft can't even keep Xbox services fully online; it had a multi-hour outage last week.

 

[ddrueding]

It is shocking how much the Danes love Microsoft. Every company runs 365 including Sharepoint, even to the point of using Teams. One of the jobs I was interviewing for was managing the implementation of Dynamics for a medium size company. On top of that, they run iPhones with different levels of policy and middleware. Crazy.

 

[LunarMist]

We are expected to use the TEAMS for unofficial, unregulated file storage. It's kind of like SharePoints, but worse. Too often nobody can find anything or they do not have access. Then we are expected to use the OneDrives for personal work files, which is another stupidly designed MS system. The OneDrive lasts for 30 days or something like that after the user dies and does not access, after which the files are gone. We must also constantly use 2FA through the MS and smartphone to access all kinds of unrelated applications. And don't get me started about the formal document control systems, ERP/finance systems, quality systems, computer validation systems, etc. Every one has CBT that takes hours and they are often changing. Sometimes my MS programs switched to French-Canadian for no good reason.

 

[sedrosken]

In this case, Merc, they'd been paying for 365 Premium for a while, so moving to Entra and Sharepoint is literally free for them apart from paying the rate for my time in migrating them -- in fact they might well save money on power costs. And it's a very, very small business, they'd need to balloon to approximately 10x their current size for it to make sense to shunt them back to a real-steel domain controller/fileserver again. I'm not saying you're wrong about the uptime, but I am saying that, for my region at least, it has always been up when I've needed it. You know I don't like to give Microsoft credit even when they deserve it -- I can honestly say that the biggest problem I've had with Sharepoint thus far is training people in how to handle permissions.

 

[LunarMist]

Unless pricing is better than the last time I looked, the sales pitch is usually to tell people to just sign up for 365 Business Premium (which includes Sharepoint for file sharing and Intune for device management) for the low, low price of $22/user/month from now until the end of time, so about $60k/year in software rental for 15 people, which is pretty typical for the size of organization that I'm dealing with.

$22*12*15=$3960 per year, so I'm not seeing where that $60K/year comes from.

 

[Mercutio]

$22*12*15=$3960 per year, so I'm not seeing where that $60K/year comes from.

Guessing I fat fingered something when I ran it through my calculator.

To be completely clear, though, you'll get ~3 to 4 years of use for on-prem* licenses and possibly longer for Windows Server, versus a fairly large recurring cost from the Azure nonsense.

* "on-prem" in my case generally refers to a VM that runs on hardware in my colo. If it's a local server, at this point it's probably because some stupid vendor-specific software doesn't support running anything else.

Sometimes my MS programs switched to French-Canadian for no good reason.

You might have a race condition in a group policy object somewhere. Which is still kind of funny, but those things can be a royal PITA for any kind of large active directory, especially for users that are expected to move between sites. I thought those were fixed so that doesn't happen any more but that doesn't mean it's impossible.

It is shocking how much the Danes love Microsoft. Every company runs 365 including Sharepoint, even to the point of using Teams. One of the jobs I was interviewing for was managing the implementation of Dynamics for a medium size company. On top of that, they run iPhones with different levels of policy and middleware. Crazy.

The Microsoft stuff is at least consistent. If an organization has followed the typical progression of Windows client software, they've probably been using Sharepoint for around 15 years and hopefully by now they are well and truly used to it. They probably have specialists on hand to deal with whatever issues come up. My experiences with early versions often involved databases shitting themselves and downtime that led me not to trust it and I've never been willing to entertain it since.

My company tried Teams for a minute because a couple of our big customers use it but most of us like Google Meet better as a video conference tool, where Teams has a kind of weird file management and sometimes custom UI as well, which generally isn't as useful for people outside one's organization. The one person who doesn't like Meet actually uses Amazon Chime instead and I can't even begin to guess why.

 

[LunarMist]

All of the larger companies we use have TEAMS, though other stuff as well if customers need it. If you work with a small company that has maybe only $50M gross, and they get a contract for a $20M project from a large multibillion organization, don't you implement whatever TEAMS or the Google, etc.?

 

[Mercutio]

My company has contracts with two multibillion dollar companies but we don't operate on a level where we deal with their corporate systems at all. The rest of our business involves not for profits and exactly zero of them do anything the same way ever. Almost all of them do things the way we ask. My private contracting is generally set up in the way that makes things easy for me.

 

[Santilli]

Hi What FAX programs do you use for faxing off your computers?

 

[Mercutio]

I guess Brother Control Center? I haven't sent a fax in almost two decades.

 

[ddrueding]

Hi What FAX programs do you use for faxing off your computers?

I haven't had to do that in 5+ years, but I just used an online service? Can't remember the name, but I didn't want to be bothered with software or an analog phone line I had no use for.

The service allowed me to send an email to them, with the destination number in the subject, and just about anything in the body or attached. They'd send it for less than a dollar a page, and if you are only doing 2 pages a month, it was more than worth it.

 

[LunarMist]

Wow that is old school. Do you have a phone modem to even connect to the computer?
I would go to the Fedex office. https://www.office.fedex.com/default/fax-services

 

[Santilli]

I haven't had to do that in 5+ years, but I just used an online service? Can't remember the name, but I didn't want to be bothered with software or an analog phone line I had no use for.

The service allowed me to send an email to them, with the destination number in the subject, and just about anything in the body or attached. They'd send it for less than a dollar a page, and if you are only doing 2 pages a month, it was more than worth it.

If you remember which one, let me know.
Medical stuff here is an all time s....hole.
takes a 1/2 hour, at least, to get through the answering machines on all most all the major hospitals, Scripps, Kaiser in particular, my PCP, and in particular, referrals to companies that provide services after the fact, such as physical therapists, pain specialists, etc.
It can take 6 months to get into see a specialist, with a referral length of 6 months.
For example, tomorrow I have a pain specialist appointment, but, the referral runs out today.
No way my PCP's company is going to respond in a timely fashion to a message in their system, or get the referral to the Pain person in a timely manner.

Plus, thanks to Covid, we can actually fax motions to the endless list of people we have to notify, maybe even email, but I doubt it.

 

[LunarMist]

I hope it works out, but I doubt anyone reviews a fax particularly faster than electronic communication.

 

[ddrueding]

Found it!

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www.efax.com

 

[Mercutio]

Microsoft had a massive Azure outage today that made international news for the amount of fucking over it caused governments and infrastructure services like airlines.

Worldwide, outages like this happen multiple times per year.

 

[Newtun]

It wasn't MicroSoft's fault (this time); it was due to CrowdStrike, the cyber"security" company, and their buggy software update.

 

[LunarMist]

Does it impact 11, but not 10?

 

[LunarMist]

It wasn't MicroSoft's fault (this time); it was due to CrowdStrike, the cyber"security" company, and their buggy software update.

If MS is using the Clowns for security then it sure is MS's fault. You are almost always responsible for your suppliers actions. Of course MS's laywers are probably checking all their contracts to see if they can be compensated.

 

[Mercutio]

Does it impact 11, but not 10?

Apparently loss of access to Office 365 was a major issue. So I'd say that it impacts Office.

 

[ddrueding]

Yup, the lines at the airport this morning were....significant.

 

[LunarMist]

So the airports use 11 or do you mean office?