Not a replicant

Looks like Australia will profit. We have a lot of lithium, and some of the others, china’s been undercutting the price for a while.

Panasonic, or some of the European brands are good. Or you buy the largest 4K computer monitor that can afford.

They’re designed and built to run 16/7 or similar. If you have TV on 16 hours a day, a commercial display is worth considering.

No, I’m not joking - I’ve seen folk who turn it on at sunrise, and off at bedtime.

I’ve got a few computers - my daily driver is Win10, there’s a media player still on 8.1 (only accesses music streams and it’s not spotify, it’s URLs like https://das-edge15-live365-dal02.cdnstream.com/a98345), the main pihole machine runs vanilla Debian, the backup pihole on a Raspberry Pi also running Debian, and a couple of older laptops also running Debian.

So no, I don’t plan to upgrade.

That’s all well and good, what happens to your kids when they can’t tick the Windows and MSOffice boxes on job applications?

I’m not having a go at you, I’ll assume you’ve taught your kids how to approach the new and unknown in the IT fields, but if they have limited or zero experience with Microsoft products, they’ll be at a disadvantage.

I’ve still got a windows XP computer that I fire up once in a while for the LOLs. it continues to remind me that support ended in 2014, but it keeps working.

I also have a Windows 8.1 tablet that continues to work, and receive Windows Defender updates.

They won’t disable anything, stop spreading FUD, that’s Microsoft’s job.

Microsoft will sell it as a safety thing - your essential stuff is backed up to your Microsoft account, so in the event that your computer is compromised or damaged, you can wipe and start over with your important stuff restored from your Microsoft account.

Which is not a bad idea in itself, but the rest of the data harvesting and telemetry makes it yuck. I use pihole to block access to Microsoft telemetry servers.

What, as a delimiter? Even some FOSS software uses spaces.

Yes, that works, too.

You know, if you copied those three lines into a text file, then saved it as bypassnro.cmd, you’ll have solved that problem.

I put this in another thread: It’s not a big deal. They’re removing the bypassnro.cmd script, which is just this:

@echo off

reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OOBE /v BypassNRO /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

shutdown /r /t 0

You can still use shift-F10 at the same point, type those two lines (not the @ECHO OFF), and it will achieve the same result.

It’s not a big deal. They’re removing the bypassnro.cmd script, which is just this:

@echo off

reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OOBE /v BypassNRO /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f

shutdown /r /t 0

You can still use shift-F10 at the same point, type those two lines (not the @ECHO OFF), and it will achieve the same result.

Well, if I’ve got no way to bypass it (when setting up for customers), I’ll create an account specifically for this purpose.

And proceed to poison the hell out of any data it sends.

Does it still let you sign in locally if you disable network interfaces in BIOS?

What I like about pihole vs. dedicated ad-blockers, is that a pihole can block telemetry as well. There are lists of Microsoft and other data-gatherers you can import, and even if you can’t stop the data collection, it dead-ends the attempts to upload it.

What, not even an IBM POWER 10 ?

“All I said was ‘that piece of halibut was good enough for luigi’”

“BLASPHEMY”

“Luigi, luigi, luigi”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ5YU_spBw0

I’ve still got the box, CD, and Manual for Aldus Pagemaker, but what I use is InDesign from CS6 - the last non-subscription version.

Neil Young + Crazy Horse Bob Dylan + Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers

You will continue to receive Windows Defender updates. I have a Windows 8.1 tablet that keeps updating Microsoft Defender antivirus. It’s only used to connect to RTSP streams for music.

Ah yes, that’s a concern - but I have a job in Task Scheduler that re-writes my registry tweaks - mostly changing various tasks back to “disabled”. You can trigger it hourly, or on an event. As soon as a selected event - such as a telemetry switch-on - hits the event log, the “disable” script runs.

There’s other ways, like taking ownership of the executables and changing permissions to lock out the “SYSTEM” account.

And pihole blocks DNS resolution of the telemetry harvesters as well. Windows update won’t touch that. It’s not 100% effective, but I couldn’t be bothered to take it further.