Well, that’s a bit naughty

Well, that’s a bit naughty

A tale (actually two tales) of sleight-of-hand verging on duplicity, from our favourite mega-corporation. Microsoft.

Firstly, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Or the opening to a con. Your choice. This affects users of the Microsoft Edge browser – you know, the one that is installed automatically with Microsoft Windows, and spends a lot of time begging you not to switch to another browser. And it concerns ‘Bing‘ which is Microsoft’s massively less-popular alternative to Google. Obviously Microsoft have used their position as the authors of both to try an knit them together. So you have to be pretty alert to search with Google (other search engines are available), because Edge will constantly steer you towards Bing. Up until now, however, it’s been easy to spot. The Microsoft trick is now to format the Bing results page to look suspiciously similar to a Google results page. And more – it slides the page down to hide the ‘Results from Microsoft’ banner at the top. Now I’m absolutely, 100%, really, really sure this isn’t designed to dupe you, the user, into thinking you have Google results. But make up your own mind: there is a good article from The Verge that you can read.


Secondly, and more importantly, Microsoft is playing games with Microsoft365 (Office365) subscriptions. Particularly the ‘Basic’ pack. The ‘Family’ subscription which is/was £80 a year has mysteriously gone up in price to £110. I’m guessing they are hoping most subscribers will simply shrug & cough up. Don’t. What they have done is swapped around the names of the services. ‘Basic’ is now the next tier up (what was named ‘Premium’ and used to cost…. £110). Your current subscription would now be called ‘Family Classic’ – same package, same price. But cunningly hidden, and you can’t ‘downgrade(???)’ without a lot of effort. Back in the day there was a scam called ‘slamming’ when phone operators moved you onto a higher priced contract without discussing it with you. Sound familiar? And, to answer your next question: the difference between ‘Basic’ and ‘Family Classic’ is the inclusion of Microsoft CoPilot (yup, A.I.). To be honest, I’d pay extra to not have my life constantly interfered with by some automated cretin, but that’s me being a luddite. Anyway, there’s an amusing YouTube on this here.

If you need help or advice then get in contact with us.

Can’t upgrade to Windows 11? Maybe you can.

One of the ticking time-bombs we are all sitting on is the scheduled end of Windows 10.

I did an article on what this might mean for you, so I won’t go over that again. This article will deal with who can (or can’t) upgrade to Windows 11.

You will know if you can’t officially upgrade your PC to Windows 11 because your Windows Update window will look a bit like this.

What is happening here is that the Windows installer is checking the inside of your system’s hardware, and comparing it with the list Microsoft have mandated as the minimum required for Windows 11. If it doesn’t match? Well, ‘computer says no‘. But is that the final verdict?

Well, as it happens – no. We have been experimenting over the last couple of weeks to find out exactly what the limits really are. By muzzling the installer’s watchdog it turns out that we can get a perfectly workable installation of Windows 11 onto some older PCs. So, on the face of it, we can move PCs to Windows 11 without the cost of replacing your hardware. And, indeed we can – it’s quick & inexpensive and has – as far as we tell – no downsides.

But (you knew there would be a but!). There are some caveats. Here are some of them.

  • If your PC is too old to ‘officially’ upgrade to Windows 11 then it’s done a few years of service. And some of your hardware might be nearing the end of its service life. Upgrading to Windows 11 will not stop it dying at its allotted time.
  • Some hardware is simply too old for this to be achievable.
  • One of the bits of hardware it checks for is the TPM (Trusted Platform Module). This is a cornerstone of some modern digital security systems. If you don’t have a TPM then these systems will be unavailable to you. And no, you can’t graft a TPM into an existing system.
  • Microsoft might, in the future, take steps to circumvent the steps we take to circumvent the installer’s checklist. And there might be application software that does not (either now, or in the future) play nice.
  • We are only happy doing this as a ‘fresh install’ (i.e. a totally clean installation). We would advocate installing a new hard disk at the same time. This has two benefits: (i) it preserves the existing Windows 10 system intact, in case it all goes wrong (ii) the hard disk is the component most likely to die with age. And, at the end of the day, new hard disks are very cheap!
  • It is highly likely that your existing Windows 10 license would transfer across. It not there are plenty of options to resolve this.

 

Actual model supplied will vary

So practiced are we at this that we offer an all-in-one price: Installing Windows 11 with a new 240Gb solid state drive (2.5″ or NVMe as appropriate) into a standard PC or laptop is £145 all-in (including VAT!). If, despite the caveats, you are interested please contact us for a formal quotation.

So, there it is. A quick and inexpensive way to keep your existing PC viable for another couple of years, saving you the cost of replacing the whole lot next October. As usual, contact us on 01905 426364 to discuss your requirements.

Bitlocker – what is it & should I do it?

Bitlocker is Microsoft’s preferred hard disk encryption system. Which makes it as clear as mud…

Let’s start from the beginning. Your laptop (or PC or similar device) stores all your stuff on a “hard disk”. And your laptop gets lost/stolen. Apart from the annoyance & cost of replacing  your laptop, your personal data is now in the hands of some unknown third party

But you set a password to log in to Windows, so it’s all safe, right? No – very, very wrong! Because accessing all your stuff is trivially simple. All the bad guy has to do is physically remove the hard disk, drop it into his own PC and request access. His system will warn him that the files are password-protected – along with the helpful option to proceed anyway. And bingo – your personal data laid bare.

An encrypted hard drive (see the padlock?)

This is where hard disk encryption comes in. When you turn on this feature your laptop encodes all your data with a special key. When you want to read anything it decodes it with (a different) special key – which it remembers. So you go on using your laptop exactly as normal. If, however, the drive detects a significant change in the hardware (like being plugged into another computer) it will insist on you entering the decryption key. No key, no data. So your data is now pretty safe from prying eyes.

Is there a downside? Well, yes – as you’d expect. The technology has been around for ages. But in the past there’s been a considerable performance hit, what with all that encrypting and decrypting. Now, however, modern solid-state drives have the encryption capability baked-in: so the performance hit is minimal. Of more concern is storing your keys. If you make changes to your laptop (something breaks & is repaired) this may trigger the key request.

Bitlocker demanding a key

And, if you can’t find it, no data. If you are a Microsoft365 customer the system can backup your keys into your cloud account, where you can retrieve it by logging in from another computer. Or you can save it to, say, a USB stick (which you then store in a safe place – and we know how that goes!). So, in general, we’d recommend turning it on: just make sure you keep tabs on where the key is, so you can lay hands on if it all goes bad!

It still works – don’t panic!

 

 

One of our pet hates is pop-ups. They are intrusive, annoying and catastrophic to productivity. Not to mention that they are (nearly always) irrelevant. So here’s an annoying one you might need to circumvent.
For years the Microsoft Office apps (other office suites are available!) have had the ability to export their content direct to an Adobe Acrobat file (a PDF in the jargon).

Microsoft Excel exporting to PDF in the good old-fashioned way.

This is a very useful tool. Right back at the beginning, Adobe made the strategic decision to make the software required to read their PDF files freely available. The result (as is always the case when a technology is made free-to-use) it rapidly became the de-facto standard for exchanging documents. And everybody did well out of this, including Adobe – who have built an empire on the back of the universality of their file format.

Things change, which often entails the bean-counters getting into positions of management.

Let’s bamboozle our users.

At which point they starting making strategic decisions based on short-term & irrelevant cash considerations, ignoring the fundamental underpinnings of their business (looking at you Boeing!). And so. If you have the ‘free’ Acrobat Reader software installed on your PC, Adobe will now try to hijack the Office ‘export’ function to try to bamboozle you into signing up for their premium service.

What to do? There are three main options.

  1. You can click the second link down, and it’ll all work as before.
  2. You can uninstall your Acrobat Reader (there are perfectly decent alternatives, serves ’em right).
  3. You can disable the ‘COM Add-In‘ for Acrobat in your Office apps.
Meanwhile, make a cup of tea & enjoy the beauty of Autumn.

Patches and updates. What are they & why do we need them?

Updates. Why?

It sometimes seems these days that everything you touch needs to ‘update’ before it will do what you purchased it for. It is one of life’s endless irritations. So what is going on, why do we need them and are they important?

Modern software consists of thousands – maybe millions – of lines of computer code. The reputable suppliers take a huge amount of care to try to get this code as fault-free as possible. But to get the system 100% perfect would be (even assuming such a thing is possible) so time consuming that the product might never make it to the shelf. It’s generally accepted that there will be imperfections hidden in there somewhere.

We also have to accept that technology develops over time – and this might require changes to the software in you PC.

For these (And other) reasons software suppliers create & release ‘updates’ or ‘patches’.

We can therefore group the drivers for these updates as:

  • Fixing faults in the software code.
  • Desire to add features.
  • Updates to meet more recent standards
  • Remediate security flaws discovered by researchers (or scammers!)

How?

Responsible software companies will support their software for a specified time after release. During that time they will research problems & create solutions. These solutions will normally be in the form of ‘patches’ that are download from the Internet and applied in the relevant place. Hence you will hear the expression ‘fully patched’ to indicate that the software in question has been fully updated with these remedials.

Out of support.

Once the end of the specified support period is reached the company will cease these efforts. This is often called ‘end of life’. The expectation is that the user will UPGRADE to a new version of the software, which will have its own support period off into the future. The catch is, of course, that getting a new version often costs money. The risk of NOT doing so is that, should any flaws remain in the system at the end of the support period, you are vulnerable to whatever effects those flaws allow. Which, in the worst case, may be to allow miscreants to access and exploit your system.

Should I?

That depends on usage.

Businesses should not, as a rule, continue to run ‘end of life’ systems. Especially if your system holds sensitive data of any sort. It puts that data at preventable risk. It might well invalidate your ‘cyber insurance’. It will be looked on askance by regulatory bodies like The Law Society & The Financial Conduct Authority.

Private users are no less at risk, but are not driven by the same imperatives that business users are. Additionally they are less of a target. So running your system a couple of years beyond it’s end-of-life date is probably a risk they are willing to run.

Why tell us know?

The driver behind this article being written now is the imminent demise of Windows 10. Microsoft will end support in October 2025. From that point on they will only support Windows 11. They announced this is the summer giving users – particularly businesses – 18 months to migrate their fleets onto Windows 11.

As a professional support company we strongly recommend you look into this in a rigorous manner, the sooner the better. Please don’t leave it until the last minute when (a) it’ll be a terrible rush (b) your IT support staff will be on holiday (c) hardware will be in short supply as everybody rushes to replace their kit at the same time (d) prices will be inflated due to the scarcity (e) all your systems will be being replaced together, so productivity will plummet. You’ve got 12 months, migrate 10% of your systems every month & spread the pain!

So you have WiFi broadband? Probably not…

It’s a common misconception that we hear a lot. So what and why? To explain I need to go into some brief details on how you actually use ‘The Internet’.

‘The Internet’ (at least the bit you use) is best thought of as a long chain of separate links. They all have to work in harmony, or you won’t be able to use the system. Let’s look at a (very simplified) example: you want to look at the BBC website.

 

  1. You type ‘bbc.co.uk’ into your web browser.
  2. Your laptop processes this and works out you need an Internet connection.
  3. According to it’s rules the laptop passes the request onto your LAN (Local Area Network) connection.
  4. Your LAN connection contacts your router/hub and forwards the request.
  5. Your router/hub acts according to it’s rules and sends your request to its WAN (Wide Area Network) connection.
  6. The WAN connection sends this request down the cable(?) that connects your house to your provider’s exchange unit.
  7. The exchange unit takes your message (along with many other customers’ requests) and relays them along the (increasingly high capacity) web of transmission systems that is the backbone of The Internet.
  8. At the appropriate point your message exits the Internet backbone and passes up the local cable to the BBC’s server facility.
  9. In this facility it passes through the appropriate firewalls & routers until it arrives at the server hosting the BBC website.
  10. This web server looks at your request, chooses the appropriate content. And them sends this back – essentially reversing down the path I have just described above.

Now, in all of this, your ‘Broadband’ or ‘Internet connection’ is just Step 6 – the bit that connects the router in your house to the exchange of your ISP (Internet Service Provider. And, overwhelmingly, this is delivered via a cable: either copper or – increasingly – optical fibre. The only people who have “Wireless Broadband” are cu

stomers of specialist services, like AirBand or Elon Musk’s StarLink. Otherwise you don’t have ‘wireless broadband’!

There is other alternative. You can use the mobile phone data network (a.k.a. 4G or 5G) to provide the link between your

router and the Internet. This is also a form of ‘wireless broadband’. We use this quite often to provide backup Internet connections where the cabled connection is unreliable or undergoing maintenance.

So where does this misconception come from? The answer is straightforward. Most devices these days (smartphones, tablets, many laptops) make the connection to your router (Step 4) using WiFi. And so users use the shorthand ‘WiFi broadband’.

And another thing. Look at the list above (which is somewhat shortened for simplicity!). It’s a sequential chain, and it only moves as fast as the slowest link. So when a user says “my broadband is slow” it could be any one (or more) of these links – most of which neither they (nor us) have any influence over. King Canute had it right, and I bow to his wisdom!

Deco WiFi7 MESH units. Very nice. Very expensive.

Wi-Fi 7 is here

WiFi 7 is here. The latest & greatest standard, offering lots of wondefulness.

Should you upgrade? Probably not. If that sounds a bit killjoy, let me explain. For most people (at home or in the office) their perception of computer speed is governed primarily by the responsiveness of their PC when accessing the Internet. Websites, email, social media – it’s all delivered via ‘The Internet’. And the thing is that the delivery pipeline is a chain – and it’s only as fast as the slowest link. I know people are going to say ‘it’s not all about speed’. And they’re correct. Thing is though that – for 99% of the people 99% of the time – it IS all about speed. And here’s the inconvenient truth: it’s great that the new WiFi7 has a data-rate of 46Gbps (which it does) – but if your broadband feed is only 0.5Gbps. then 45.5Gbps of your WiFi capacity is going unused. In addition it’s unlikely that any of your current equipment (laptops / PCs) support WiFi7, so it’s a complete waste of time.

Or is it?

There are, of course, people for whom this upgrade does make sense. One of the most useful improvements is the increased performance when sharing the WiFi with many devices in the office. Generally the performance for everyone degrades rapidly when the bandwith cake starts getting sliced too thin. WiFi7 promises to be more generous here.

And there are a bunch of intereting & usefull – if somewhat technical – improvements here as well But (and it’s a big but) – it’s expensive. The 3-pack in the image is £1000. Yes, a grand. You have got to be really sure it’s going to enhance your life before splashing that much cash!

I’m not joking. OK, a little bit.

Logitech mouse

A Logitech mouse – just like mine!

I’m really not sure what to make of this. I’m keeping an eye on a seemingly preposterous story centred on Logitech. These are the people who make mice & keyboards (amongst other stuff generically known as ‘peripherals’). We like their mice & keyboards a lot – we use practically nothing else.

The story kicks off with the Logitech CEO being interviewed by a tech YouTuber. During which the idea of a “forever mouse” came up. After a bit of digging it transpired that the concept was that you’d never need to replace your mouse because it would be kept up-to-date with constant software updates. After a LOT more digging the CEO finally admitted to the idea being based on a subscription model – yes, that’s right! A monthly charge to use your mouse.

The mind boggles. Gamers might disagree, but a mouse is a mouse. I have never, ever, thought “oh, I wonder if there is a software update for my mouse?”. If I replace my mouse it’s because a button has broken, or the thing is so filthy I can’t stand it any longer. Not, ever, because it’s software is out-of-date! Even the improvements sought by gamers are likely to be mechanical (sensors & stuff) which isn’t remediated by a software update.

Oh great! More stuff to update – just want to send a quick email? Oh no, the mouse is updating. And we now have to pay for this inconvenience!

But now comes the frantic back-pedalling. Logitech now say that the ‘Forever Mouse’ was never a thing. Which is nice. So, what gives? No idea. Maybe we look no further than the old saw ‘all publicity is good publicity’.