Windows 11

[sedrosken]

I have to scale 1080p to 130ish to keep it readable at 14", and I've found a lot of my clients get mileage out of the scaling due to similarly (though usually to a worse degree) poor vision.

 

[mubs]

As usual, you da man, Merc! Thanks a mil! I'm trying Small icons and 100% scaling. Will probably get used to this.

You know, I've searched on Google massively the last few days for various issues. It's amazing how much ignorance and crap there is out there. For the icon size issue, the only solution I found was the scaling adjustment. And here, bingo, you nailed it.

I don't work on PCs as much as I used to, and have forgotten a ton of stuff.

 

[Mercutio]

I have to scale 1080p to 130ish to keep it readable at 14", and I've found a lot of my clients get mileage out of the scaling due to similarly (though usually to a worse degree) poor vision.

I massively regret having a 4k 15" screen on my current laptop so believe me, I understand.

 

[mubs]

I have to scale 1080p to 130ish to keep it readable at 14", and I've found a lot of my clients get mileage out of the scaling due to similarly (though usually to a worse degree) poor vision.

Doesn't the scale go up in steps of 25 starting at 100? How are you setting it at 130? Unless it works differently on laptops.

BTW, Can't remember: who was Hawkeye in SF? The guy who used to scale it down and use tiny fonts on his screen?

 

[Mercutio]

Sounds like dd.

You can set custom scaling if you want. It's a better idea than using nonstandard screen resolutions.

 

[sedrosken]

See, I used to scale DPI lower so I could fit more on a screen, but this was like… fitting 1920x1200 into a 19 inch 1440x900 screen, nothing crazy. This was of course before my vision went completely to shit.

mubs, Windows supports setting an arbirtrary percentage for scaling now, and has at least for a couple years. Surface devices have such high DPI screens they come out of the box at 300% now. Windows will throw up a scare screen and say arbitrary percentages might break for some older applications, but in my experience it’s been fine. And you can override scaling application by application as needed.

 

[mubs]

Do you guys use your systems with Memory Integrity on or off?

 

[mubs]

My W10 build was running with Windows audio drivers. No probs. Now on W11, same machine, I installed Realtek's audio drivers for W11 provided by Asus. Every time I adjust volume up or down, there's a BING! Searched and tried a few suggestions, but they don't work. Any suggestions? Should I uninstall the Realtek audio driver and go back to Windows default driver? It's driving me mad.

 

[ddrueding]

Sounds like dd.

You can set custom scaling if you want. It's a better idea than using nonstandard screen resolutions.

Not me, once I had enough money to choose I started running 40"+ monitors. The last few have been 42" 4k with 150% scale. Before that I ran for a while with 2x 49" 5k ultrawide stacked vertically, still at 150%. That setup was interesting, but not as useful for monotasking. Now I'm considering a 16-21" 4k secondary for reference material.

 

[Mercutio]

Mubs, I've never heard of that. Maybe it is something in the full driver package that nobody bothers to install?

I use 3x 32" displays with the one on my left in portrait mode, plus my Samsung tablet as a drawing tablet/display. My 4k screen is set to 125% scale but the others are just 100%. My eyesight is terrible but I sit very close to my screens, maybe only 15 - 18" from them.

 

[ddrueding]

I'm at least 30" from my screens, I find the eye strain isn't as bad.

 

[Mercutio]

I just found Operese, someone's project to upgrade Windows 10 straight in to Kubuntu. It maintains user data folders, but the install can be kicked off directly from Windows, which seems pretty sweet to me.

There isn't even a working web site for it yet, but the project is interesting enough that I'm definitely going to keep tabs on it.

 

[Mercutio]

Apparently, one of the updates currently being tested in Windows 11 25H2 is an update to the Mixer application that will allow sound output from multiple devices simultaneously. Android has been able to do sound to multiple bluetooth devices or output to both speaker and bluetooth for years, so it's LONG past time for Windows to do this.

 

[Mercutio]

Also in the name of BS no one asked for, MS365 users are getting a bunch of new widgets to do things like Mail and Calendar, replacing the apps that Windows used to ship with, I guess, and a file search tool specifically to deal with all the places where people trapped in Microsoft's ecosystem put files that aren't actually a filesystem.

This is a 365 thing rather than a Windows thing but I specifically think it's funny because they just took away "lightweight mail and calendar" tools and having to have a tool to deal with files that are attachments in Teams and Outlook and Onedrive is just telling the rest of us not to put things into your ecosystem.

 

[Mercutio]

The newest Windows 11 updates changed the Out of Box Experience to get rid of another workaround to force users to create a Microsoft account. There is still at least one known escape to command prompt that allows for a local account but they're clearly intent on patching out all of them. Autounattend.xml is looking like a fact of life for technicians and hobbyists going forward.

 

[Mercutio]

As fallout from the Windows 11 switchover, I have had a dozen i7-7700k mITX systems inflgifted to me. They're in a chassis that supports 2x 2.5" drives and they support 1x m.2, as well as a giant HSF. These guys were pulled out of an industrial setting of some sort, so they're absolutely filthy, but so far, all of them have booted up just fine into Windows 10 just fine. I can't tell who made the motherboards; they aren't badged as any of the usual suspects, but they do use standard-looking PSU connectors.

I don't know what to do with these things. A 91W 4c8t system with no PCIe or interesting IO options seems like a bit of a non-starter. With only 4GB RAM installed, they're not going to be great Windows PCs for much of anything going forward. ChromeOS? Batocera? Seems like a shame to toss them but an N150 is probably better all around than one of these.

 

[Mercutio]

Do you guys use your systems with Memory Integrity on or off?

On unless I'm using it on unsupported hardware. Older Intel iGPUs won't install their Windows 10 driver with memory integrity turned on. If I'm running Windows 11 on Sky Lake hardware, I'm probably not that worried about that particular level of security anyway.

 

[Mercutio]

Windows 11 25H2 is available for download now. Most everything that makes it different form 24H2 only happens for systems that meet the branding requirements for CoPilot but apparently they HAVE improved the automated system recovery if you manually turn the setting on.

 

[Chewy509]

Fun fact, on Windows 11 Home, if you disable location services in settings (during the initial setup), you cannot manually set the timezone of the system via the Settings UI. (It's greyed out). Setting the timezone is now tied to enablement of location services. There are two workarounds:

• User powershell to set the time zone (see Get-TimeZone and Set-TimeZone).
• Via Settings UI, Enable location services enabling all apps, set a manual location, wait 20 secs for the timezone to change to the zone appropriate for the location automatically, and then disable location services. This will fix the timezone.

 

[Mercutio]

You can also set all the regional options in an autounattend.xml, which is the only way to make Windows 11 acceptable in the first place.

 

[sedrosken]

Fun fact, on Windows 11 Home, if you disable location services in settings (during the initial setup), you cannot manually set the timezone of the system via the Settings UI. (It's greyed out). Setting the timezone is now tied to enablement of location services. There are two workarounds:

• User powershell to set the time zone (see Get-TimeZone and Set-TimeZone).
• Via Settings UI, Enable location services enabling all apps, set a manual location, wait 20 secs for the timezone to change to the zone appropriate for the location automatically, and then disable location services. This will fix the timezone.

Making it visibly unchangable without location services to normal users has to be illegal in some jurisdiction, probably Europe where they actually kind of-sort of have to give a shit about privacy sometimes. But I bet being able to Powershell it probably would keep Microsoft from being fined over it in the end.

 

[Mercutio]

I've used Flyby11 to upgrade Windows 10 on more than 30 PCs so far this week. Most of them were laptops belonging to social workers or retirees from my community center. Have we bitched about how stupid Windows 11 hardware requirements are recently? Almost everything people brought me had either a 4th or 6th generation i3 or i5 with a small number of Pentiums of similar vintage. Almost all of them completed the upgrade in the same amount of time as anything else I've upgraded. There were only a couple systems I declined to work on: an FX 6100 and a Core 2 Duo e7200, both of which had 32 bit Windows 10 installed and neither had an SSD.

An i5-4570 still seems perfectly good to me. I think 8GB RAM is fine for Windows 11, but a lot of those systems had 16GB and those are subjectively practically identical to any other modest Win11 system. It's a genuine shame people are going to throw away hundreds of thousands of them.

 

[mubs]

Two Windows vulnerabilities, one a 0-day, are under active exploitation

 

[Gödel]

I've used Flyby11 to upgrade Windows 10 on more than 30 PCs so far this week.

I signed up for the 1-year Win 10 security-update extension.

I'll be interested to see if MS has squashed Flyby11 by the time I try to install it next year.

 

[sedrosken]

I signed up for the 1-year Win 10 security-update extension.

I helped a few friends do this since the big killswitch moment.

I'll be interested to see if MS has squashed Flyby11 by the time I try to install it next year.

I feel like this is a cat and mouse game Microsoft will always lose.

 

[Mercutio]

Flyby11 works by using the Windows Server 2025 installer to unpack and run the Windows 11 .wim file. All the hardware checks are in the Windows 11 setup. You can also use the Windows 10 setups file to do the same thing. Those products are already out in the world, so short of constantly checking for supported hardware, which Microsoft did say is OK for single-version installs of Windows 11, it would be a tough hole to fill.

 

[sedrosken]

I think you should be able to unpack the Win11 WIM with the Win7 or 8 PE from the installer disc, even, though that's a more arcane and obscure process. I know that on one weird issue I had a long time ago where a machine supported 10 but wouldn't boot its installer image, I had to either install 7 and upgrade to 10, or boot from 7/8 media and unpack the Win10 WIM with it.

 

[Mercutio]

Here's a set of directions to switch back to OG notepad, if you don't want the increasingly stupid one Windows 11 is using now.
Also it's

winget install microsoft.edit

If you want a normal-ass text editor and somehow can't be bothered to set up Notepad++.

 

[Mercutio]

Rather than improve overall Windows Explorer performance, it looks like Microsoft is going to set up File Explorer to preload on low-end systems.
Something that actually endlessly pisses me off is that the 9950X I use for a desktop hitches for a couple seconds when I launch an Explorer window while all my mounted network drives are checked, all of which are connected over Infiniband. I don't recall Windows 10 doing that. Windows 10 would generally mark them as disconnected until I tried to open them, if it wasn't sure if they were working or not. There's definitely been a regression, even with extremely fast hardware and fast network connections.

 

[Mercutio]

Since I finally got annoyed enough to deal with it, one actual "improvement" in the latest version of Office (365 or 2024) is that there's now a heading under options specifically for Copilot and generally only a single checkbox to turn it off. Excel has an option that says "Only for highly relevant suggestions" and I imagine that "How do I make this formula?" is a bit more valid than "Write me a cover letter for this job application", so I can see a tolerable compromise.

AI options in Office 2021 are all over the place, depending on the application you're using, so at least Microsoft recognizes that the function needs to be centralized so it can be turned off in an efficient manner.

I've also noticed that Excel (365/2024) keeps trying to save things under \onedrive\documents even though I have OneDrive file sync turned off via a GPO. It finally stopped when I told it to save to Computer by default, but I can't believe it would regress so much to not even look to see if OneDrive is active before putting anything there.

 

[Mercutio]

Apparently, the next version of Windows will be essentially immutable, just as ChromeOS, Android, iOS, MacOS and some versions of Linux are. The idea is that there will be a compatibility layer for software that expects to make changes inside the Windows directory. On one hand, this isn't a terrible idea from a stability standpoint.

On the other hand, the people doing this think OneDrive and Recall should be part of the OS.

Microsoft dropped future support for Windows Deployment Toolkit a couple days ago. It's not the end of the world for me because I can get away with a lot in terms of running automation with an unattend.xml and as much Powershell as I need, but I'm still disappointed because it was a great and useful free tool.

There's a fairly substantial amount of Windows-related functionality I can't access because it's tied to Azure (e.g. Intune), something none of my customers are big enough to want to buy into. Windows does not look like a professional future for me unless something changes drastically about cloud versus on premesis software.

 

[Santilli]

I have a section 8, mentally challenged nieghbor. She was gifted a Vostro 230 Dell. Intel Duo CPU E7500 @ 2.93Ghz
Dell Inc. 1.3.0 11/17/2010.
Windows 7 Pro
SIX gigs of ram

Should she upgrade to 10 or 11?
What kind of Ram works for that motherboard, and, how much should she get, regardless if she upgrades?
I'm wondering if with adequate ram, she might use this for the rest of her life? I don't see her doing much but browsing...and maybe watching video, from the software I saw on the computer. Plus, she may been a black and white printer.
She has an Epson 2700e I can't get to work. Won't print the printer information page, at all...
Color ink appears to be empty, and the black and white is 1/2 full.
SUGGESTIONS?

 

[Santilli]

Information

 

[ddrueding]

Modern printers won't print even just black if any of the cartridges are empty. It is also possible that it hasn't been used in long enough that ink has dried on the end of the printhead and needs to be cleaned. Check YouTube for the specific make/model. 7 Pro might be the best for that machine. I know it isn't supported, but that wouldn't bother me as much as the performance penalty of going to 10 or 11.

 

[Mercutio]

Greg, that is some bigly e-waste right there.

it'll technically run Windows 10 but that's G41 chipset that PROBABLY uses DDR2, although I think there were some hybrid boards that had DDR3 as well. Belarc advisor will tell you for sure. Either way, you're not getting over 8GB RAM on it and it has an HDD old enough to drive.

Upgrading it to 10 will get it a supported web browser and if you're serious about making it usable, buy her a 250GB SSD as well.

As far as video watching, I'm not sure she'll get H.265 or AV1 decompression support from that hardware, so it's possible that anything other than YouTube will become an issue in the near future.

A $150 Chromebook or cheapo N150 box might be a better alternative. They're out there.

 

[sedrosken]

7 is your best bet. 10 will probably work but be a trainwreck -- 11 will need Rufus shenanigans to get it to even install, maybe, though on Core2 I honestly don't know if you'll run into some illegal instruction messages.

I second Merc on this. Their money is better spent on a Chromebook or an N150 box... or even one of those eBay special enterprise mini-desktops rocking an 8th gen i5 or whatever. For how much you'd spend on an SSD, RAM and low-power GPU to make that Vostro semi-workable, plus the power it'd take to run, you'd break even on an N150 box or OptiPlex Micro after, like... maybe two months?

 

[sedrosken]

Something like this is what I have in mind. I don't LOVE giving anyone a machine with less than 16GB of RAM anymore, but it sounds like her needs are pretty basic, and this will satisfy basic needs pretty well especially for the money. If she plans to do anything but update Windows and a web browser, though, she'll probably need a bigger SSD, too.

 

[Mercutio]

For purpose of comparison, an N150 has approximately the same amount of computing power as an i7-7700 at a tiny fraction of the power budget. I can't find any of the $150 N150s with 16GB RAM that I was able to buy any day of the week last year, but I did find this guy for $190.

 

[Santilli]

Greg, that is some bigly e-waste right there.

it'll technically run Windows 10 but that's G41 chipset that PROBABLY uses DDR2, although I think there were some hybrid boards that had DDR3 as well. Belarc advisor will tell you for sure. Either way, you're not getting over 8GB RAM on it and it has an HDD old enough to drive.

Upgrading it to 10 will get it a supported web browser and if you're serious about making it usable, buy her a 250GB SSD as well.

As far as video watching, I'm not sure she'll get H.265 or AV1 decompression support from that hardware, so it's possible that anything other than YouTube will become an issue in the near future.

A $150 Chromebook or cheapo N150 box might be a better alternative. They're out there.

Thank you. Got enough bills, rather then building a computer for a sec 8 woman...originally this was about getting a HP 2700e printer to work.
I'm NOT going to get sucked into hours on a relic. I am having enough problems getting my legal copy of a CD work on my phone, and computer.
The CD works...Exact Audio Copy we will see.. I will say, I REALLY miss Win 7 Pro;-(

 

[Santilli]

For purpose of comparison, an N150 has approximately the same amount of computing power as an i7-7700 at a tiny fraction of the power budget. I can't find any of the $150 N150s with 16GB RAM that I was able to buy any day of the week last year, but I did find this guy for $190.

WOW! i'VE NEVER seen anything like that....Thank you