The Windows and Windows Software Megathread

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Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

I'm looking at buying a new computer. I have a Home copy of Windows 10, I think it's a complete license, on a USB stick from Amazon.ca. I used it on my current computer. Is it possible to use that license on my new computer? I don't mind deactivating or uninstalling Windows on the old one, and I don't need to transfer the installation, I'm just wondering if I need to buy a new license at all.

# ¿ May 5, 2017 17:10

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 15:58

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

Mak0rz posted:

Okay, but I'm still not replacing the hardware before confirming whether or not it's actually broken.

Get a USB wireless adapter, return it if it doesn't help.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2017 16:32

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

GreenNight posted:

https://tradein.bestbuy.com/client/#/catalog/product-families/laptops

That's still US. This is the Canadian page: http://www.bestbuy.ca/en-CA/trade-in-program.aspx

# ¿ Jul 6, 2017 20:19

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

dont be mean to me posted:

Okay, come on, give us your spontaneous reboot horror stories.

My computer updated last night by itself so I had to wait for iTunes to check file integrity for 10m before I could play music :mad:

It did tell me it was going to do this that night though soooo

# ¿ Jun 14, 2018 04:50

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

Lambert posted:

Well, it works for anything that doesn't depend on shell integration. Not having a dumb "Open in Notepad++" shell extension installed by default would be a positive, if you ask me.

Notepad++ is one of very few things I'd actually want that kind of extension for, to be honest. Lots of things you want to open in a text editor sometimes without it being the default association.

# ¿ Jul 14, 2018 18:09

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

Hi! I've been stuck using iTunes for forever because I like the music library model and I have an iPhone and that's my primary way of listening to music, so I was kind of bought in.

Unfortunately, recently I got stuck by a common bug where iTunes (on Windows and my iPhone) won't fully play through newly added songs, seemingly chosen at random. It's been an open bug for years and Apple seems to have no intention of fixing it, probably because it incentivizes people to switch to streaming and subscription services. Which I can't/won't do for various reasons. This is greatly impeding me listening to new music, and it sucks and I want to be done with it.

I picked up WALTR for transferring music onto my iPhone, and that's fine.

Now I'm wondering about finding a replacement music player for my Windows PC. I need something that can at least import my iTunes library with the metadata, and that features robust music library management. It would be nice if it has cross-platform support in case I ever pick up a Mac again; I'm not picky about playback features. I'd ideally like something a bit polished instead of being the kind of configuration/troubleshooting mess you usually get with OSS community stuff.

Thank you for any suggestions.

e: this is a fairly powerful gaming PC on Windows 10, resource consumption isn't a big issue unless it continually pegs a core/takes like 8GB of RAM for ~23000 songs. I do need M4A support, but don't need support for old encrypted iTunes files.

Arivia fucked around with this message at 14:46 on May 31, 2020

# ¿ May 31, 2020 14:44

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

What is a good email client for Windows 10? I was using the default built-in one, but it's getting worse and worse. I have 3 gmail accounts and will be adding an academic account soon; I'm ideally looking for something that's free or a one-time purchase and doesn't suck?

# ¿ Jun 20, 2020 02:19

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

doctorfrog posted:

one page back

whoops I read that discussion which is what got me to realize Mail wasn't showing gmail attachments in the first place

mailspring looks like it's worth trying out, thanks!

# ¿ Jun 20, 2020 03:08

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

I was thinking of switching to Vivaldi myself. I could use the power user stuff for my 400 odd tabs.

# ¿ Jun 27, 2020 15:25

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

Arivia posted:

I was thinking of switching to Vivaldi myself. I could use the power user stuff for my 400 odd tabs.

Took me 3 hours to make the switch, but I'm down to 543 tabs from 814, and they're all much better organized. Now I can start actually working on reading some of this stuff through and finishing it off, too.

# ¿ Jun 28, 2020 00:38

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

the_lion posted:

Check out what Linus Tech Tips use to benchmark. They do games as well, but I'm fairly certain they use Cinebench, 3dmark and some form of Blender test file.

Might also be worth looking at Puget Systems� benchmarks if those are still a thing.

# ¿ Jul 20, 2020 06:37

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

I just bought DisplayFusion and I'm thoroughly underwhelmed? Like none of it actually seems to do anything super useful, except for maybe the hotkeys to make manipulating focus for games easier?

I have two identical 1080p monitors set up side by side, and none of these features do anything helpful that I couldn't already do with the built-in Windows keys to switch windows from one monitor to the other. And the new taskbar it mandated and I can't even figure out how to turn off is LESS useful and looks like garbage.

What am I missing?

# ¿ Dec 24, 2020 20:39

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

https://youtu.be/f8VBOiPV-_M

this is a fun video about making task manager

# ¿ Dec 30, 2020 01:10

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

TheLawinator posted:

There's probably a big list somewhere that I haven't spent enough time looking for or maybe a better place to ask but do you guys have suggestions for a solid pdf editor? I don't know if I want to spend Adobe level money on it.

What are you looking to do? Markup? Lay out your own desktop publishing works? Affinity Publisher is on 50% off, but that�s the creative end of things, not corporate/commercial use or mass tagging or whatever.

# ¿ Feb 5, 2021 13:55

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

ufarn posted:

There's Greenshot, but I don't really trust it.

But give it a shot, and make sure to do some testing to see whether you got your screenshots.

Idk why you don�t trust Greenshot but I�ve been using it for years with no trouble at all.

Another option is nvidia�s overlay, that�s JUST recording/screenshots.

# ¿ Feb 26, 2021 21:56

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

Every Mac these days comes with Pages, which has pretty great compatibility with DOCX files. It's more likely you'd be running into missing fonts at that point more than anything else.

Pages and the other parts of iWork make buying Microsoft Office on a Mac pretty superfluous unless you're a power user or need it for institutional purposes.

e: also if you're at a university, especially a large one, they likely have a program with Microsoft to offer discounted or free copies of MS Office to students.

Arivia fucked around with this message at 20:16 on May 29, 2021

# ¿ May 29, 2021 20:12

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

The Lord Bude posted:

The whole avoiding a Microsoft account thing is 99% neckbeard bullshit. Just use your computer. Log in with a Microsoft account. When you do things the way Microsoft intended instead of going to heroic lengths to break your computer things just work better and you can get on with your life without worrying about nonsense.

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

The Lord Bude did not abide, sayeth 2007 GBS.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2021 07:18

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

I don't know what it's like in the US but up here in Canada I've never had a phone call to a teleworker/call center that wasn't "recorded for quality control and training purposes" or something to that effect. If it's spying on people's work-from-home environments that's loving vile though (just generally speaking, not talking specifically about the goon tasked with doing this).

# ¿ Sep 18, 2021 23:22

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

Fantastic Foreskin posted:

After spending a week away from home I'm locked out of my desktop; my muscle memory isn't working and I'm not sure what the password is exactly. I tried booting into the long-disused linux partition to see if I could tell if the password was changed at some point or if I could circumvent it, and all I got was a nice reminder why I don't mess around with Linux anymore. At the point I'm about to just reinstall, most of the files I care about aren't on the system drive and I could move whatever off using said linux partition. Part of me is concerned its been compromised but its a million times more likely I'm just loving up the entry. This is more a rant than anything, I'm just frustrated.

if it's at all possible to just take a break and relax about the password, that will probably help a lot. i had a similar occasion once and my frustration and stress lead me to gently caress up my password all night long. slept on it and nailed it the next morning.

# ¿ Oct 17, 2021 06:43

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

DerekSmartymans posted:

I have a 10+ y/o saitek USB keyboard with three buttons: volume up, volume down, & mute. No software or drivers needed. It works the same if I get an interruption while speakers or headset are being used. I do have a very small widget (SoundSwitch, maybe free in MS�s store now? Idk) to switch between the two when I press Right CTRL+NumPad 0. Keyboard�s Mute works on either.

I think tuyop is meaning muting/unmuting your microphone, media keys on keyboards are for muting your sound output not input.

# ¿ Oct 24, 2021 23:33

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

LRADIKAL posted:

A very sensitive mouse can pick up vibrations quite easily. try flipping it on it's back.

Okay, now it's saying "uguu~" and is making doe eyes at me and it's creeping me out. Please help.

# ¿ Nov 2, 2021 05:42

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

Computer viking posted:

I kind of like diskpart - it allows you to interactively work your way up to what you want to do inside one self-contained tool, and it's fairly easy to use.

I may be weird, though.

Different tools work better for different people depending upon the mental model they use. The one time I ever did a hardware programming project in high school the teacher was about to fail my group because the binary input to turn on LEDs wasn't working at all for him, then I asked him what he was trying to do. He had expected the input to be flipped so he was sending signals directly to each light, but he taught us to send it as a single binary string so I coded it as inputting a binary number in my interface (with leading 0s). My version worked perfectly, but it wasn't what he thought it should be - I showed him how it worked, quickly recoded the input to work the way he "expected" it to, and we did fine.

# ¿ Nov 16, 2021 13:10

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

Blue Footed Booby posted:

Am I crazy or is this exactly the kind of thing that gets companies slapped in the EU?

Microsoft literally lost an antitrust case about this (using Windows to lock people into using IE) in the mid-2000s, yes. However, the market has significantly changed since then and Edge is not the market leader by a long shot, so there�d need to be another investigation by a regulatory body to stop it now.

# ¿ Dec 16, 2021 07:19

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

Chumbawumba4ever97 posted:

With the VHS CNN thing I bet it's because the person recording knows that no one is bothering to archive that stuff so they probably felt it was their obligation. You never know if someone would ever need the 11 o clock hour from June 23rd, 2022 and the crafty recorder can pull it up from their archives. Sounds ridiculous but they you remember stuff like that kid who almost went to jail for murder except they proved he wasn't there because unused b roll footage that someone stored for some reason of a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode proved he was at a baseball stadium at the time of the murder.

the funny thing is that if you actually know how to look at actual archives there are tons of recordings of every major american news network already, that stuff is research gold so every archives with a video collection takes their own recordings and has been doing it for decades, let alone stuff they're sent from their local news stations or the broadcasters themselves. archivists know people will need that b-roll or the 11 o'clock news and they do keep it for specifically that reason, it's their job.

# ¿ Dec 17, 2021 15:23

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

Klyith posted:

I think it's mostly just an rear end-covering for the future.

One, at some point they probably turn on HVCI by default and people with older CPUs have performance loss. So if people complain that the 2023 11 update makes their apps slow, MS can say that their PC isn't supported in the first place.

Second, it's possible that a future security tech will be even more dependent on MBEC features, to the point where it isn't just less performance but doesn't run on unsupported CPUs. And that's the point where you'd get blocked from an update. I don't think that's likely though.

i'm still wondering what the problem with kaby lake is, since it supports all that stuff

# ¿ Jan 24, 2022 19:14

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD posted:

I think OneNote is a bit simplistic for these purposes, we have a ton of knowledge and projects to manage. I don't think our management is at all opposed to paying for something new if it will really help. This would start just getting rolled out to my small team at first anyway before maybe considering it on a broader basis.

Look at Obsidian then, yeah. It�s far less coder-y than you might be thinking it is at first look, just markdown+internal links+whatever plugins you want.

But really it does sound like you want a business knowledge base program.

# ¿ Feb 11, 2022 04:43

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

Housh posted:

It was 100% the wireless keyboard/mouse dongle. Removing that allows the system to sleep again.

You should be able to find the dongle in device manager and turn off its ability to send wake-up events, then.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2022 16:13

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

There�s a note on the page you linked Trabant that the Thumbelina and/or its successor has a driver included by default in XP. That might work if you�re willing to go digging for it.

# ¿ Mar 29, 2022 08:50

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

Brass posted:

Can anyone recommend me good note/whiteboard apps? I need something thats good for notes, writing up ideas, creating flow charts on the fly, etc.

I do a lot of random writing and notetaking and I've found that I like Miro the most from the few things I've tried and am used to. Problem with Miro is the free version is limited to 2 boards otherwise it's a monthly fee for mostly collaboration features so I'm wondering what else is out there. I don't mind purchasing an app but I don't want to pay monthly services unless it's a few bucks.

Aside from Miro I've also used Evernote, One Note, and Diagrams.net. I kinda drift around between them right now. What programs do you all use to organize thoughts & ideas? Trying to move away from pen & paper for good!

Obsidian. There�s a dedicated thread probably on the second page for it.

# ¿ Apr 3, 2022 14:10

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

xzzy posted:

My secret shame is I actually ended up liking the tile grid, it let me pin stuff in certain spots and there were nice clear icons with gaps.

The W11 style is just a bin of icons and while the icons don't move, I still hunt around too much finding an app. I hate that it needs third party apps to get the old style.

Windows 10 seems completely allergic to letting me add my own items to the start menu and I don't know why. I have stuff pinned to the tile grid just because there seems to be no way to add programs to the actual start menu programs list without incredible pain.

# ¿ May 16, 2022 15:12

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

Klyith posted:

The bad news is that MS has been following the Star Trek Movie Rules:
code:
TMP             95
II              98
III             ME
IV              XP
V               Vista
VI              7
Generations     8
First Contact   10
Insurrection    11
Which means that the next OS after 11 is Nemesis, breaking the good-bad pattern and establishing the new pattern of "always bad, if not terrible".

15 will be pretty good if this keeps up though.

# ¿ Aug 1, 2022 19:57

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

Medullah posted:

Is there a way to have a mouse keep moving even if you've stopped it? I play Dead By Daylight and use mouselook, and there are times where I need to do a complete 360 turning the mouse, but I only have so much space on my desk. I can pick the mouse up, move it, then continue moving it but by then it becomes too late. It'd be nice if there was a way to set it up so "Move mouse Left it keeps moving left until you move a different direction"

Adjust your mouse sensitivity.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2022 21:59

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

gradenko_2000 posted:

the other day, I activated the Transcription feature of Microsoft Teams for the very first time ever and I was solidly impressed with how well it worked

is there a piece of software that can just do plain speech-to-text as a way for me ... ti type? Like, I open it up and press a button and start talking and it takes it down for the purpose of me copy-pasting the text output to use in an email (or a forum post?)

for that matter, is the quality of such transcription likely exclusive to Teams, such that any other solution I might try will not be of the same caliber?

Press windows + h to try the built in dictation in windows. I have no idea how good it is, but that kind of stuff has been worked on for decades. There�s very likely other options as good as Teams for sure, but I�m not sure what�s available that isn�t super highly priced (ie good old Dragon Magically Speaking)

# ¿ Nov 20, 2022 09:32

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

Toshimo posted:

Is there any sort of good alternate front-end for discord? I have like 30 servers, but really only focus on a couple of channels per server, so I'd like something where I can just see the status of those channels, instead of whole servers (and not have to mute all the other channels on the server).

you still have to mute the other channels but that's what the inbox is for https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360045027712-Inbox-FAQ

# ¿ Dec 24, 2022 22:10

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

katkillad2 posted:

Before I make an effort post in Haus of Tech Support, are we allowed to ask for help/troubleshooting with issues with torrent clients? I've got rock solid fiber internet but speed jumps from near max to nothing constantly.

As long as you�re using them for your legal Linux ISOs, it shouldn�t be a problem.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2023 12:34

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

Red_Fred posted:

Is that something I need to be worried about? I don�t think my company will care given yet just gave it to me.

Microsoft doesn�t care. If your company removed it from their asset/computer tracking system if they have one (and it sounds like they would have), then you�re fine. Recycling business machines for home use is extremely common. You don�t have anything to worry about.

# ¿ Mar 12, 2023 05:55

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

Thanks Ants posted:

Microsoft have released PowerShell scripts to patch the WinRE images on devices that had their OS installed before the problem was fixed.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb...a3-e13eb56fb589

Works well, is a lot quicker than the manual steps and doesn't throw up the same issues with partition size that I had when trying the manual process. Read the bit at the bottom about needing the Safe OS update file for the script to reference.

To clarify, �the problem� is a security hole allowing a physical attacker to get through BitLocker protection using WinRE if you have BitLocker turned on. Without that context your post was confusing.

# ¿ Mar 18, 2023 14:34

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

Medullah posted:

Any word on what the infinite weapons are like? Like OG where you only have the Rocket Launcher, Chicago Typewriter and Hand Cannon? Or like RE8 where everything can have infinite ammo?

I think you got lost on your way to Games.

# ¿ Mar 18, 2023 22:56

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

TATPants posted:

Is there a way to remove or bypass the password/login screen for Windows (both 10 and 11) that is linked to a Microsoft account for Office 365? I have tried disabling Windows Hello, removing PIN (which only made me scramble to find my Microsoft password), and editing the registry.

FWIW, both machines are never going to leave my home, so I just want them to boot without any interaction from me. My W11 laptop is the more important concern because it now shuts down when I try to wake it after it goes to sleep. That's a whole other can of worms that I haven't attempted to fix yet. I suspect that my laptop is a bit broken, because this only started happening after I managed to squish a USB dongle into the port that is right next to the power button and had to get it out with some pliers.

All of the guides/videos that I have found don't seem to work. Any help? Or flame me for being stupid and missing something obvious is okay with me.

it'll work if you put the pliers back in

# ¿ May 29, 2023 00:03

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 15:58

Arivia: Mar 17, 2011

~Coxy posted:

Is there such a thing as a third party dictionary for Word?
I write technical/business documents (proposals, specifications, impact assessments) and am getting more and more annoyed at the lovely synonyms that it offers.

yes: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...&rs=en-us&ad=us

finding one is obviously field-dependent

# ¿ Jun 1, 2023 08:38

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