The Grumpy IT Admin

Android, oh my god really? I tried, really, I tried very hard, but a combination of Android craziness and Lenovo ineptitude just made it so hard I couldn’t be bothered. In fact, the combination of the two made Microsoft look positively stunning in their slickness of updating and a paragon of patching. In the windows world Microsoft delivers updates to all manner of hardware mixes without a pause for breath. You may not want them, but you get them anyway and since Windows 10 you get OS updates on the fly for free as long as your chipsets are supported, but it is quite a long term support, 7 or 8 years at the shortest, normal 10 or more. With Android, you are lucky if you get 2 years for OS updates if you are lucky and security patches, I really don’t as I have yet to work out how to find out. So what produced this anti-android rant? Trying to update my Wife’s Yoga Tablet (less than 1 year old) from 5.1 to 6. Yes, I know the latest Android version is 8.0 but due to the unique ...

Backup retention periods seem to be driven by urban myths and how systems worked in the 1970s. Not wholly surprising since most back up software still seems to be stuck in that period and most sales pitches are urban myths. So how long do you keep backups for (this is the easy starter question) 10 years, 7 years or even forever? Do you keep you daily backups for that long or only your monthly or yearly ones? Why (don’t you just hate it when someone says why) have you chosen that time period? Was it because someone in the business said there was a law that said they had to keep some data for that time? What happens to stuff that was created and then deleted between your backups tapes? Have they ever shown you the law that states that? My first question is where is the data kept? Most HR/finance/legal systems likely to have a data retention requirement store data in a database these days and the data covers the last seven years or whatever is the legal requirement or for w...

What is annoying me right now is not an admin thing except in the loosest sense. I have been on the Windows 10 fast ring forever and have had a few issues but nothing major over the years, but as we rush headlong in to the Fall Creators update one aspect has really annoyed me. My PC is used by myself and my wife, her mostly in the mornings and daytime, me in the evening. After we have finished the PC gets shut down, yes, its weird behaviour in this modern always connected world but it’s what we do. Sometime before build 16273 a rather annoying configuration seems to have been imposed. When you boot a PC the last logged on user is signed in as a disconnected user. Why? It may make login (sorry sign in) quicker but in reality, if I have just started the PC I am waiting to log in and with SSDs it makes no difference at all. Why worry you may ask? For me it affects two things. First, and most visibly, when I shut down the computer an annoying message pops up and tells some...

I know a lot of people dont think Windows 10 phone is worth a punt because it doesn't have enough apps or err........ is there any other reason other than it isn't IOS? How many apps do you actually use? If we ignore all the apps that do the same thing how many would each platform actually have? Anyway I use a windows phone because it is relative simple at doing stuff and it generally works for me. I still haven't worked out how to remove all the Tesco apps that came pre-installed on my wife's Hudl tablet, Android just doesn't seem to work in any kind of logical way for me, I am sure if I spent some time (a year or so) with just Android I may grow to ......... work with it. As for Apple, I am really not keen on their closed shop Apple only business mentality. I am currently running 10586.71 on my trusty Nokia 925. Having gone through all the fast ring builds i have to say it is mostly very stable and slick. There are a few minor issues. Outlo...

Hi all you gaming developers out there. I like gaming (on my PC) I don't do consoles because my wife watches Eastenders (for you US folks that is a British soap) and we only have one TV in the house, I now it is sad but that is how the other 99% of the world live. I imagine gaming development is a high pressure job these days with the humungous film like budgets and all that you have to deal with, but there seems to be a be a disconnect between you and us. I accept you develop for consoles and then transfer to PC, if we are lucky, because apparently we in the PC zone like to pirate your games, well here's some news for you, everyone I know who owns a console has chipped it and there is a hard disk going round with 100's of games on so don't delude yourselves that there isn't as much pirating going on on consoles as there is on PCs. From a gameplay perspective, you need to focus on the end user. Yes, they come in many varieties and you need to cater for all of ...

I have been using Windows 10 on my Nokia 925 for two weeks now and for the most part there is a a lot to be thankful for. It is a development of the Windows 8.1 Phone, especially the not widely released one that spookily turns up on your phone just before Windows 10 if you decide to go down the Windows Insider path, I would like to spend a bit more time with that one. However, as with Windows 10 on the PC there are signs that Microsoft are struggling to to hit that one OS rules them all goal that they started with Windows 8. It is all beta still but as we are expecting an Autumn (fall) release, you would expect them to have nailed the basic design of the OS and supporting in house apps and just be fixing GUI and interface issues and any bugs. Unfortunately there are still, in my opinion some major issues with some functionality which I would have expected only from an immature company not one that built it’s empire around how the user interacted with its software and could mak...