#69: Thinking Deeply

Posted on March 28, 2025 by ewand

It’s a little over 47 years since the Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy was first broadcast on the radio, followed by the publication of the written work the following year. It took the most powerful supercomputer, “Deep Thought”, 7.5 million years to come up with the Answer to the Ultimate Question.

Who knows in the modern era how long it would take? Things have changed a lot over the last 50 years, and surely Google et al could manage a reply quicker than that.

It seems that the answers to many important but previously impossible questions are only a moment’s search away.

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Copilot’s Getting Deeper

Microsoft quietly unveiled an additional feature to its main Copilot offering – i.e. the free, web thing or Copilot app on PC or mobile (as opposed to the paid-for Microsoft 365 offering, or any other app’s Copilot-branded functionality).

Go to copilot.ai and just below the prompt, select the drop-down to change the mode – with a single click on the flower-like icon (which is not at all like the OpenAI logo), you can get it to Think Deeper.

This feature uses the fairly recent o3-mini (high) model from OpenAI (which runs on Azure, don’t you know… well at least most of it does), giving additional insight into whatever you’re asking. It doesn’t take much longer to answer compared to the regular reply so you might just think about using it all the time for questions of moderate complexity. And it’s free.

ChatGPT itself has a “Deep Research” function which is available to paying users (Plus or Pro), and Microsoft has also unveiled a forthcoming “Researcher” capability that will be part of the Microsoft 365 Copilot commercial offering, alongside some deep reasoning stuff for agents built in Copilot Studio. It’s all getting really deep, man.

Wannabe Record Breakers

As well as Copiloting-everything (mostly based on top of OpenAI stuff), Microsoft has been looking further afield and building its own AI technologies. There’s still plenty of Ayy Eye noise coming from Redmond, and an AI Skills Fest virtual event starting in April is going to keep the foot on the gas.

It might have one of the more obscure Guinness World Records, too…

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Let’s not get too excited now, kiddies. There are plenty of strange records to aspire to.

#68: It’s all about the prompt

Posted on March 21, 2025 (Updated March 18, 2025) by ewand

When internet search engines took off in the mid 90s – remember Alta Vista? – and Google exploded into the public consciousness in the early 2000s, it became increasingly apparent that getting good search results were helped by being able to ask your question correctly.

Savvy searchers might use a combination of quotes and other “operators” to specify an exact phrase, or guide the search engine to include only certain terms or results from a particular website (such as site:tipoweek.com onenote). Google and Bing both tend to use the same operators (so, as Scott Hanselman would say, you could “Google with Bing”).

Prompting Today

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When using some of the many AI tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini etc, you can get very relevant results by being quite specific in what you ask it to do. As an example, one of the best ToW banner images was created using Microsoft Designer with the prompt, “a serene image of a young boy sitting at an old laptop (with Windows 10) but lurking in the dark background is the grim reaper”

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Or, getting much more detailed, see Kat Beedim’s detailed 200+ word instructions to create consistently-formatted notes from meeting transcripts.

Being much more verbose and directional than you’d ever try in a regular search engine can give some quite remarkable results. The order of what you ask might vary the emphasis given to certain parts of the response, and the general advice is to be positive – i.e. ask for things you want, rather than telling it what you don’t want.

It seems that AI can suffer from a variant of Dostoevsky’s “White Bear Problem”; ie. Asking it not to do something increases the likelihood of doing it. Not long after Microsoft went big on Copilot and Designer, here’s one example when Copilot was asked to draw an image on a particular topic…

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The idea was to convey a background threat with those hooded figures, not the feeling that the poor girl was in imminent peril. The figures lurking in the background might be a mite less sinister if they weren’t armed, so clarification was called for…

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Maybe DALL-E 3 at that time was just fixated with firearms, or asking it not to do something was a step too far. We’ve gone from “some guns” to “pointing guns at her”. Hmmm.

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Trying the same prompt in Designer seemingly gets a little less gun-heavy now, but still has the odd one creeping in. Trying to be more explicit doesn’t appear to work… adding to the end of the prompt, “The sinister hooded figures are not carrying guns of any kind”.

You might think that instruction is simple enough, but no. It seems to be interpreted as “you want more guns? Gotcha”.

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#67: Are you sitting comfortably?

Posted on March 14, 2025 (Updated March 13, 2025) by ewand

Regular readers of ToW might have spotted the caption under the main image of last week’s missive: it was a photo of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, for a 1991 article in Fortune magazine written to celebrate the 10^th anniversary of the PC. Taken at Jobs’ house, the image shows supposed soap-dodger Steve barefoot astride a lounge chair, with Bill perched on its footstool, or “ottoman”.

There are no official online archives of this article (at least, not easily found) however physical copies pop up at auction on occasion and there is at least one downloadable scanned copy.

The chair / stool in question is an iconic shape, known as the Eames Lounge Chair and designed in 1956 by couple Charles and Ray Eames for the Herman Miller furniture company. You may remember Herman Miller from the ubiquitous and not-inexpensive Aeron office chair.

Buying a genuine Herman Miller Eames chair in the US will cost a pretty penny (even old ones running to thousands), though licensed versions were made in Europe and Asia. Vitra still sells their version now, though be sure to be sitting down before you look at the price.

If you’re keen to add a bit of mid-century chic to your home without further ruining your financial future, knock-off versions are available on eBay. Or, especially if based in the UK, look at Iconic Interiors, who produce a high-quality replica at a fraction of the price of the official one.

So that’s the comfy seating for putting the world to rights taken care of; what about the day-to-day seating for getting the work done?

The Desk-jockey

Deskbound office workers are reckoned to spend between anything up to 9 hours a day slouched at their desk, leading to more than 2 months a year of being officially “sedentary”. Businesses insisting on staff returning to the office for much or all of the working week could trumpet the benefits on their physical and mental wellbeing compared to the WFHers, though perhaps they should make sure they have an environment that can accommodate everyone.

Having a sit/stand desk is one way of avoiding the doldrums as long as you remember to actually use it standing up occasionally. If you’re a hybrid/home worker, FlexiSpot do a decent range that’s not shockingly expensive, in case you’re looking for recommendation; also available in the UK. Why limit yourself to merely sitting or standing, when you could do so much more at your desk?

Should your employer decide that you need to be in the office all the time, they do have some responsibility in making sure the workspace isn’t going to cause harm. The UK’s Elfin Safety executive even has published requirements, which could be handy if you’re trying to persuade your employer that sitting at a cafeteria table all day isn’t good enough.

How to sit at your desk

Sit up straight. Shoulders back, don’t slouch. Feel on the floor and don’t cross your legs. Keep your elbows at 90 degrees. Raise the height of your chair. That screen needs to be higher. You might have seen these pieces of advice before, but not all are necessarily correct, and you can certainly find plenty of supporters for and against.

One view is that you need to keep your feet behind your hips. This could stop your back from curving as you sit at the desk. Others would say, don’t sit straight, instead recline your chair. It’s quite probable that your seat is too low – many office chairs just don’t even adjust high enough, or may have large armrests that stop you sitting close enough to the desk.

The UK’s HSE recommended posture follows fairly conventional groups – sit straight, have your chair at a height where your elbows are level with your hands, and have the top of your monitor at eye level.

If you have a laptop, ideally use an external keyboard and put your PC on books or a dedicated stand to raise it up so the screen is high enough to not make you stoop or bend your neck down. Working in the typical laptop hunch is bearable on a train or plane, maybe OK sitting at a temporary desk for an hour, but should definitely not be the norm for whole days at a stretch.

There are extremes you could go to in trying to perfect ergonomics, but if all you do is sit with elbows level to your keyboard and eyeballs level with the screen, you’ll be going in the right direction.

#66: A computer on every desk?

Posted on March 11, 2025 (Updated March 11, 2025) by ewand

“A computer on every desk, and in every home, running Microsoft software” – was an early and, at the time, unbelievably ambitious goal for a small company from Albuquerque which later moved up to Bellevue, WA.

Things have moved on radically since Microsoft was founded nearly 50 years ago; now, everyone who needs a computer on a desk has one, and billions more have one on their lap or in their hand. SteveB talked recently, in a retrospective “Alumni Voices” interview, about the early days.

Thinking about PC usage (for Windows and Macs); laptops overtook desktops some years ago (notebooks outselling desktops 4:1). Laptop manufacturers evolve them more quickly, with better screens, longer battery life and now, ramming in AI features, often refreshing their ranges regularly.

But if you sit at a desk most of the time, and all your data is in the cloud anyway, shouldn’t your primary computer be a desktop? Maybe you could have a medium-spec laptop for when you need to be mobile, and a comparatively high-end desktop for the rest of the time?

If you’re using a laptop for work and spend much of your work/life in one place, at least make sure you get a proper monitor.

I found this image at the top when searching, “is it OK to sit on the ottoman of an Eames chair?” – the answer was captioned, “it is, if you’re Bill Gates”

Moore’s law

The oft-mis-quoted effect (that stuff gets faster/cheaper/bigger all the time) of Moore’s law could be applied to the growth in laptop usage; there’s more to be gained from miniaturization when you’re carrying a machine around, as well as advances in battery and display technology.

Desktops have tended to be left behind; there’s no built-in screen (unless they’re an all-in-1), they don’t run on batteries and they often sit out of sight, with the user interacting through a separate mouse, keyboard and looking at a desktop monitor. Old PCs were boring to look at, sometimes quite noisy and clearly fixed in position.

Now, many new home desktops are sold as gaming PCs with high end graphics and are often adorned with elaborate cooling, colourful lights and the like.

Acer Predator Orion 5000 (2024) review

The rise of the Mini

Around 20 years ago, capable desktop PCs started to shrink in size – it wasn’t uncommon to see demos being run from a “Shuttle Box”, which had way more storage and CPU horsepower than could be gotten from a laptop of the time, so it was possible to run servers in VMs on Virtual PC or similar.

Mac Mini and other small-form devices followed, but were often relegated to secondary use.

Julian Datta and Brett Johnson, posing in 2007 with a Shuttle which worked so hard it was literally smokin’

Desktops for today

If you’re running a laptop from a home office and sit at a desk 90% of your day, it’s worth looking at getting a modern, small form desktop. They’re quiet, can be much neater than a laptop with loads of cables or a docking station, and can be surprisingly cheap.

An Dell Inspiron with Intel i5 10-core CPU, 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD can cost £650 (eg Dell Inspiron Desktop with the Latest Intel Processors). If you’re using an existing screen setup from an older laptop, you might need to buy a webcam too. A broadly comparable laptop might cost £100 or more extra, though it might last a good bit less time than a well-spec’ed desktop.

Desktops are generally more self-upgradeable and repairable than laptops, though that tends to change when you get into highly miniaturized machines. Framework, who build laptops that are sold as being fixable rather than disposable, recently unveiled their first desktop too…

Framework | Configure Framework Desktop DIY Edition (AMD Ryzen™ AI Max

#65: Enshittifcation 2025 pt 1 – progressing well

Posted on March 5, 2025 by ewand

The “word of the year” for 2023 was “Enshittification” – as defined by author Cory Doctorow:

“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”.

Similar concepts have been written about previously.

An Australian dictionary summarized it nicely in 2024 as “The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.”

There are numerous variants of enshittification which we’ve all observed, usually concerned with improving revenue streams for the service provider at the expense of the quality of the service or organizations failing in some way.

· Changing the business model of the service because the original premise isn’t sustainable

· Killing products or removing features which cost too much to provide

· Failure to adapt with technology, stifling innovation, leading to stagnation and irrelevance

· Decline of a service or community due to poor leadership, user behaviour or rise of another

· Trapping customers, making it inordinately difficult to cancel or migrate from the service

Sometimes these moves are long planned – capture the market by operating at a loss then pay back your investors later by reaping the rewards of early market advantage, potentially even turning the screws on your customers (see Amazon, Netflix). Companies might be overaggressive competitors, looking to quash alternatives (Amazon, Microsoft), and it’s just a fact of life that some things don’t work and walking away from them angers or disappoints customers who used them (see Google, Microsoft, many others).

2025 In

This year is barely 20% over but we’ve already seen numerous changes to popular online services. Netflix is cranking up subscription pricing again (among others); Microsoft has added Copilot features to Personal and Family plans, jacking the cost up significantly to pay for it. Spotify has been teasing a lossless service for years, but might get around to launching it this summer. Hands up who thinks it will be an extra cost over the standard tier?

Even if a service provider puts out notice that they’re going to make some degrading change (or if, as WindowsForum.com does about all the upcoming Microsoft cuts, others collect the news and report it), it can still feel like a shock when you notice it’s not there any more. Microsoft calls it “deprecation”.

As mentioned in ToW #62, there are lots of occasions where a feature changes very much for the worse (from a user’s perspective) but there’s nothing much you can do about it other than seek an alternative.

Search caching

One relatively quiet change that happened in both Google and Bing during 2024 was the removal of cached pages in search results. This was a handy way to find a web page which, for whatever reason, wasn’t online any more … though could be used to find out how a page looked before some recent change. “Link Rot” means that lots of pages link to sites that have disappeared.

Both Google and Bing used to have cached copies of pages that could be viewed by clicking an icon next to the item in search results.

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Google discontinued it without notice in February 2024, so people who noticed would turn to Bing, Yahoo or Baidu as they all still offered the cached feature. The reasons for removal? “It was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading. These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it.”

Bing followed suit in December, saying, “This week, we’ve removed cache links from Bing search results. As the internet has evolved for better reliability, and many pages aren’t optimized for cache viewing.”

Both reasons smack of “we’re doing this because it makes your life simpler and the feature wasn’t needed any more anyway”, but in reality there will be cost savings and potentially legislative reasons too. Why offer the service if you can’t monetize it? What’s next?

Google has since wired in a link to the Internet Archive – a free, useful resource though sometimes a bit slow and not always complete – if you click the “:” to the side of a search result, then click through to “More about this page ->”.

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Turn to specific addins

One of the use cases for looking at cached results is to see how something was previously described before it was updated; or maybe to see how much something was being advertised for, previously? Have you ever seen a product marked as “SOLD” and wondered what it had priced at before?

It may be worth looking at the various extensions / app stores to see if there’s an enterprise developer who’s built something that might help. One such is the excellent AT Price Tracker, for the UK Autotrader website.

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Who’d want to be trying to sell luxury 3-ton EV-SUVs at the moment?

AT Price Tracker will show a summary of what the same advert has been listed at previously; traders could remove it entirely and re-post to fox the logic of the app, but it’s presumably under the radar enough for most not to even notice it.

Unless Autotrader decides to get some enshittification in and block whatever access the addin has.

#64: Tick, Tock, Time is up (nearly) for Windows 10

Posted on February 26, 2025 (Updated March 5, 2025) by ewand

Microsoft developed a reputation for having a couple of shaky versions of anything before the one that you’d be actually happy to use came along. Just as many people do with phone releases, it often seems to make sense skipping a few and just get the latest whenever it’s time to upgrade the computer.

There’s that old joke: “How does Bill Gates count to 10?” The latest answer is “1, 2, 3, 3.1, 3.11, NT3.1/3.5, 95, NT4, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10, 11”. Windows 3.1 was the first to be what you might call mainstream, and XP, 7 and 10 were the versions which got the most users.

Returning to the compelling Statcounter site (as mentioned in ToW #62); it bases its research on which machines/browsers are seen being used to access a host of websites. There are still a lot of people using older Windows versions. Surprisingly, 0.27% of all browsing being done by Windows users was by brave souls still on Windows XP. Vista is barely above 0.

Data from Desktop Windows Version Market Share Worldwide | Statcounter Global Stats

Windows 8/8.1 (the dark green line which peaked in mid-2015) never really took off – maybe because of corporates who had rolled out Windows 7 as an upgrade to XP (having steered well clear of Vista) and user resistance to the touch-centricity of the whole thing, especially useless if you’re on a desktop PC.

When Windows 10 came out in mid-2015, it took 2½ years for it to overtake Windows 7 in usage, at least according to this data. Windows 11 was released in October 2021 but in well over 3 years since, it still has less than 2/3rd the usage of Windows 10.

Support Lifecycle

Microsoft took a view some years back, that in order to be credible in the Enterprise, you need to support your stuff for a long time. As a result, the standard lifecycle is for every product to have 10 years of life, usually split 50/50 into Mainstream and Extended support. Extended means you might get security fixes but there will be no more updates to add features, make it better, jam adverts into places you don’t want them etc.

On 14th October 2025, Windows 10 hits that decade milestone – at which point it will go out of support, there will be no more security updates and if you get hit by a cyber attack then that’s too bad. In future, you’d be ridiculed for it when anything goes wrong.

Performing an operating system upgrade can be a big deal – especially if you’re doing it on behalf of a company or large organisation – as some of the existing hardware and software might not work under the new OS. Windows 11 complicates things further by having some fairly specific hardware requirements in the worthy name of security; but even some expensive PCs from a year or two before COVID are now excluded. Many of Microsoft’s own Surface range are upgradeable, but the flagship $4K Surface Studio sold from 2016-2018 is not one of them.

If you have a Windows 10 PC then it’s very likely it will have been offered Windows 11 as an upgrade; if in any doubt, then try the PC Health Check app and see what it says.

How to run Windows 11 on unsupported hardware

tl;dr – don’t.

It’s worth noting that the majority of PCs which can happily run Windows 10 would also be able to run Win11 if they were allowed to. The hardware requirements dictated, though, that you need a certain level of processor and a TPM 2.0 security module, or you get denied.

There have been various tricks and tweaks to fool Windows 11 into running through the upgrade process and letting it continue; some of them even offered up by Microsoft itself. Lately, however, the signal has been that even if the unsupported machine made it to Windows 11 now, it could be blocked in future from getting subsequent updates and therefore would be in limbo. Microsoft’s own advice if you have followed one of these unofficial workarounds, is to revert now to Windows 10.

The previously-toted registry key to bypass the hardware validation has now been removed, in order to prevent any more unsuspecting souls from going down that path.

Some complainers have doggedly stayed on Windows 10 because they don’t like the look of 11, but if you are still using Windows 10 because your hardware can’t make the leap, then you’re in something of a quandary. Microsoft will let you pay $61 to extend support for Windows 10 until October 2026, with that sum doubling every year. So to keep Win10 until the absolute drop-dead deadline of October 2029, it would cost you over $400.

Or time to fork out the readies and buy a new machine before the October bell rings.

If you fancy a Surface, then Intel variants of last year’s ARM-powered Copilot+ machines are now available (at least for business customers), though it might make sense to wait until the summer and see what arrives, given that the current gen Surface Copilot+ machines were unveiled in May 2024.

#63B: It’s Your ISP

Posted on February 18, 2025 by ewand

Following on from last week’s missive on finding problems in your home network, this one turns its attention to network of the internet service provider (ISP) itself. Just like any other utility provider, there is a lot going on behind the scenes before the pipe or cable that shows up at your property delivers its stuff. As UK Gov CTO David Knott says, the simpler something looks, the more complex it probably is.

If you think there are problems with your internet connection’s speed or reliability, and it’s not your fault, there are a few things you can do to try and pinpoint where the cause lies. Being quite specific can also help short-circuit the early stages of the supplier’s support desk, where they’ll be getting you to clear your cookies and restart your browser.

Let’s assume that any WiFi devices are working and the home router itself is connecting OK – the lights on your device are behaving like they should be connected.

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I bet none of you losers has their own named port on their broadband router

Sometimes the connection to the ISP might be ropey – even if the lights are on, it could be worth logging into the admin page on your router to see if there are any tell-tales or warnings. There’s probably a log of events that might show repeated disconnect/reconnect loops, or other tell-tale errors. If you have a fancy-pants NAS device or similar, you might even be able to collect the logs and give better reporting.

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It’s worth checking a public speed test site, like www.speedtest.net, to see if it thinks you should be getting decent performance. Pay attention to that Ping ms number – as mentioned previously, latency is the enemy of anything that needs real-time communications like a Teams/Zoom meeting or online gaming. Streaming video can often deal with poor latency since it will buffer at least a few seconds in advance, though if it gets really bad then it might still be unworkable.

HOW NETWORKS WORK

Without grossly oversimplifying things, when you try to connect to a remote resource (say, www.google.com), your computer will use the magic of DNS (short for the Domain Name System) to figure out what is its actual address on the internet, then will attempt to reach it.

Imagine going on a journey with tens or hundreds of junctions along the way; at each turn you don’t need to know all of the directions to the destination, only that it’s further along this road rather than the other way. When connecting to a remote internet site, there will be many “hops” that your data will take – and the connections between each of those points could be a cause of problems.

Given that the internet was conceived to survive a nuclear war, traffic should find a way but sometimes there’s a single link that can throw everything off. If a single website is slow but everything else works, it’s probably that site. But if everything seems slow or unreliable, it’s more likely there’s a problem with your ISP’s network, or possibly the network it connects to.

To test a single connection, there’s a built-in command (again, on Windows, press Win+R an enter cmd) called tracert, which will basically ping everything between you and that remote site:

In this case, it sends 3 requests and measures the round-trip time of each; sometimes you’ll see an isolated spike or a drop out but that’s not unusual. In many cases, for popular sites like Google or Bing, you’ll only really be connecting to a nearby node anyway. Look up the IP Address on whatismyipaddress.com and you’d see, in this instance, that Google.com lives in a Datacenter in London, but if the same experiment was repeated from a PC in LA, the IP address and therefore final destination that corresponds to www.google.com would be different.

If you think your network problem is a bit more transient, you could try an old bit of Windows software called WinMTR (or a lightly refreshed version called WinMTR Redux). This will repeatedly run TraceRT probes and show you the results over time; if you see one particular hop which spikes a lot and it looks like it’s part of your own ISP’s network, then it could be worth sharing this info with them in the hope they go and switch that router off and back on again…

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In this instance, the first hop into the ISP network – 217.47.72.122 – appeared to be the problem as it and everything later had terrible latency (almost a whole second where you’d normally expect a few milliseconds). This above example was presented to a well-known UK national telecoms provider some time ago, as proof that the problem was with them, and to stop ordering the end user to faff about with ADSL microfilters or get engineers out to test the phone line.

Another example shows that while there’s no cataclysmic issue, there appears to be a delay in some of the connections further up the line – probably not worth escalating but it might explain why some sites feel slow while others don’t:

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The nice thing about WinMTR is that you could save it to OneDrive / Google Drive and run it directly without needing to install anything. If you’re happy to add some troubleshooting software in advance of having a problem, another alternative could be PingPlotter:

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WHAT IF IT’S DNS?

Ask anyone who has worked in IT support and at some point, the DNS infrastructure or your connection into it will be the thing that breaks everything else. Moving everything off-premises to a cloud-based environment merely means that DNS is someone else’s problem, but if you can’t figure out how to connect to the cloud, it’s yours.

Stack of blocks below text 'All modern digital infrastructure' made precarious by single small block near the bottom labelled 'DNS'

Normally, when your ISP gives you a connection, they also provide the address that your computers will use to make DNS queries. Your broadband router might act as a proxy, so the devices on the home network just ask it to resolve DNS queries, then it will connect to your ISP’s DNS service and relay the response back.

If everything else appears to be working but your connection is still flaky and slow, it may be that your ISP’s DNS service is stuffed. To the end user, you’d try to connect to www.google.com and it would spin for a while and eventually get an error saying it had timed our or could not be found; this could just be that your PC asked the router, which passed through the request to the ISP’s own DNS server(s), but if there’s a problem connecting or they’re not working properly, then a reply might not come.

Fortunately, there is an option to sidestep this – temporarily, maybe – and use somebody else’s DNS service instead.

Google operates a free, public DNS service, on addresses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. If your ISP’s DNS is not responding well, try substituting the default automatic provisioning of DNS server addresses that your machine will likely have, with hard-coding Google’s DNS – see Get Started | Public DNS.

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If all else fails, you might just have to endure the ISP’s support desk to get someone to check the connection back to you, or just give up and go outside instead.

#63: Trouble with your network?

Posted on February 7, 2025 by ewand

We’ve all been there. Just when you need it to work, your home internet connection goes down or huffs off in go-slow mode. You’ll have seen others who, even 5 years after enforced home working, haven’t quite figured out how to make their networks, er, work. Or the colleague who always appears to be having trouble with their internet, so they can’t switch on the camera…?

What to do if your network appears to be up the swannee?

STEP ONE – THE THREE-FINGERED-SALUTE

If you’re lazy and uninterested in the root cause of a problem, then a quick way to resolution might be the have-you-tried-turning-it-off-and-on-again trick. Most broadband routers have a button to reboot them, or even just pull the power for 10 seconds and then put it back in.

Sometimes, service providers will tell you to reboot your router if you are getting an error – streaming apps on smart TVs appear to be adept at this. Technology gurus will scoff that there’s no way that could be the problem, it must be something with the app provider (until they reboot the router as a last resort, and the app starts working).

The original “Three Fingered Salute” was a moniker applied to CTRL+ALT+DEL, the unmaskable hardware combination on early PCs which forced a reboot. Nowadays, Windows handles it with more grace.

STEP TWO – CAN YOU SEE OUTSIDE?

Once you’ve waited 5 minutes for your broadband router to restart (and assuming that hasn’t fixed the problem), the next thing to check is if your computer can talk to the outside world. If not, that means the problem is somewhere between your keyboard and the internet service provider that the modem connects to. Trying to log a fault with your provider’s support desk will generally mean they’ll make you try unplugging and restarting everything in your house first, so be prepared.

Make sure you’re actually connected to the network and have a valid address; in Windows 11, go to Settings / Network & Internet and look at Properties of whatever the connection is. You should see the local network address of your machine, and the gateway through which everything is sent and received. The format of the numbers might vary but should look something like:

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[If you’re getting a 169.xxx.xxx.xxx address then something is going wrong with your computer and getting an IP address; if it’s in your house, try removing and replacing the network cable, or rebooting the PC and/or router. If it’s in a hotel or public wifi area, give up and set your phone up to do Tethering].

PING!

Now, fire up a command prompt (press WindowsKey+R then enter cmd) and enter ping 192.168.1.1 (or whatever address your default gateway is).

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The ping command literally bounces a short piece of data at the address you’re looking for; if that location is available (and not being blocked by some firewall or other) then it replies, and the fact that you got a response and the speed it took are displayed.

If you’re going to be playing with cables and stuff, you could enter ping -t 192.168.1.1 – the -t flag makes it continue pinging until you close the window or press CTRL+C. If you’re getting a reply at all, and the latency (time<1ms) is stable and low, then your connection to the router is just fine.

Latency is the enemy of a stable and reliable connection – when you see people having problems with Zoom/Teams meetings and their audio or video is garbled and choppy, that’s almost always a latency problem, either within their home network or somewhere further up the chain. Some networks suffer from it inherently – satellite connected, like in-flight WFi, are a good example – and anything that needs a stable, real-time connection (video calls, multiplayer gaming etc) is best avoided.

STEP TWOa – ARE YOU WIRELESS?

If you’re using a wireless network, it’s worth checking that something isn’t getting in the way unexpectedly. IT bods troubleshooting a problematic early business WiFi network found that it kept dropping out randomly, but more often around lunchtime – until they realised their neighbour in the office block had a kitchen on the other side of the wall, with a microwave oven that nuked their WiFi whenever it was used. Some home electronics could do the same, or even things like wood burning stoves.

Maybe your household is near other users who could be getting in the way? Try scaring them for a laugh but it’s also worth making sure your WiFi network isn’t clashing with theirs. It could be worth trying the ping -t trick above and move the machine around the place to see if there are some spots where you’re getting really high latency numbers, or to see if the ping reply doesn’t come back at all.

Try the WiFi Analyzer app from the Windows Store (if you’re on a PC; there are many others for iOS/Android and Mac):

A screenshot of a graph

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This app will show you all the neighbouring networks and which channel they’re operating on; if you’re sharing the spectrum with too many others then it might be worth reconfiguring your WiFi network to lock to a different channel; time to RTFM for the router.

An alternative to WiFi Analyzer is the long-established inSSider. The latest version needs you to register for an account, but the old one – which still gives a lot of useful info – is still available, if you’re careful to dodge the many links to other unwanted stuff:

A screen shot of a computer

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IT’S NOT ME, IT’S YOU

If the internet connection is still not playing ball, but initial signs are that the local network is OK and you’re fairly confident you don’t have sporadic hardware problems or similar, then it’s pretty likely the fault lies elsewhere. Get ready to face the inertia of service provider helpdesks who will assume that the problem is at your end… to prevail, we must arm ourselves with evidence and above all, keep calm.

To avoid over-doing things, we’ll pick that one up next week.

#62: Will the web become exclusively mobile?

Posted on January 31, 2025 by ewand

Looking back over the last 50 years of technology progress, the internet must surely be the most significant change enabler. When the developing ARPANet adopted TCP/IP in January 1983, the ‘net as we know it started to really take shape. TimBL wrote up an idea of how to connect pages of info together, and within a few years the Worldwide Web started on one of Mr Jobs’ NeXT machines.

As the web evolved to become more consumer-centric and people got PCs in their home which could connect, life started to shift online, especially when broadband replaced dial-up in the early 2000s. Laptops and WiFi helped to unshackle people from their desks and enabled working and playing from nearly anywhere. Coffee shop owners of the world rejoiced; up to a point.

But the most significant trend has surely been mobile connectivity – initially providing access to the same stuff just on a smaller screen. Now, we’re beginning to see the web and info on it become desktop-free zones. The decline in relevance of the desktop or laptop computer has been coming a long time, as smartphone usage around the world exploded. In the future, we’ll potentially be forced to use phones where a better user experience could well be delivered on a big screen, as service providers try to reduce costs while trying to provide a secure, easy to use experience.

Desktop falling behind

Even in 2014, Windows accounted for nearly 2/3 of web traffic at the start and a bit more than half by the end of the year. Android was taking an early lead over iOS and the Mac had a steady-ish 5%.

Data from statcounter.com

Contrast to the end of 2024 and two-thirds of all traffic is from Android and iOS, with Windows & Mac together just over 30%.

Looking beyond which mobile or desktop OS you use, Chrome is the default browser cross-platform with two-thirds of all traffic, while on the desktop, Microsoft Edge has about 13%. Looking at mobile only, Edge has less half of one percent of usage (beaten slightly by Firefox, and Opera has 4 times the usage) though it’s available for both Android and iOS. You have to wonder when Microsoft will pull the plug, even if the mobile Edge browser is a decent effort (especially so if you use Edge on Windows PC too).

Apps taking over, not always for the better

It’s not just that content is moving to be more mobile-oriented; increasingly, stuff that used to be available on the web can only be done via using an app. To a degree, this could be part of an ongoing enshittification process – a topic we’ll delve into in a future ToW.

As an example, Google has removed the “Timeline” feature from Google Maps online. Discussed briefly in ToW #638, this was a great way of checking where and when you were – handy for doing stuff like mileage claims or remembering how long it’s been since you’ve visited someone.

A screenshot of a phone

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This particular change has some solid reasoning behind it; rather than The Chocolate Factory storing data about where you’ve been on its servers, they announced that the data would be held securely on the device instead. Is this Google being altruistic and privacy-sensitive, or just trying to avoid being held to account for something down the line? … You decide.

From an end-user perspective, losing access to Timeline in the browser is a bit annoying and too bad if you want to share your history across multiple devices – the data is local to one device only and that’s that. Just in case your phone gets lost, you might want to back it up now…

Un Appy with Online Banking

There are many other examples of websites trying to push you to use their apps (click a link on a mobile browser and it often will try to redirect you), but the biscuit is surely taken by at least one UK credit card provider.

Early digital banking services might have required special hardware or bespoke PC applications, but gradually all went into the browser, with some requiring a hardware token or other device to be used when signing in. Now, it’s very common to need some form of Multi-factor authentication like receiving a one-time SMS message to be able to login; even making a one-off purchase generally requires Strong Customer Authentication.

Users of Virgin Money credit cards have no web-based view of their account, with the options being to use the app or do everything another way. Viewing and download statements can only be done on the phone; the only alternative is to request a paper version be posted.

The in-app help used to advise that if you wanted your statements on a proper computer, then download the PDFs to your phone and email them to yourself. Fortunately, that advice has since been removed…

Happily, if you’re an Android & PC user at least, you could use the Phone Link app to browse the file system on the device when it’s connected. The phone will appear in the left pane on Windows Explorer…

A screenshot of a computer

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… and if you navigate to Phone Name > storage > Download, you’ll be able to view, copy elsewhere on your PC, and even delete the file from the phone storage.

A screenshot of a computer

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If you’re using OneDrive (the consumer version) for your personal files, you might want to enable the Personal Vault and put potentially sensitive stuff in there.

#61: Adios, Office!

Posted on January 24, 2025 (Updated January 30, 2025) by ewand

Microsoft is seemingly ditching it’s “Office” brand, which first appeared in 1990 to describe the now-familiar bundling of 3 apps – Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Along with numerous other apps and services being added to the family, for some time the company has been pushing the online version – Office 365 then Microsoft 365 – as the default. Despite this, there is still an on-premises, discrete licensed bundle of the latest apps – Office LTSC 2024 if you really must.

Users of M365 – either personal, family or corporate bundles – can go to office.com and sign in to access all the software, services and data associated with it. This has now been renamed to cloud.microsoft and the accompanying Office / Microsoft 365 app (which is really just a PWA, a web app hosted in what looks like a Windows application) is now Microsoft 365 Copilot, in the headlong rush to call everything Copilot even when it isn’t.

Somewhat confusingly, if the “Copilot for Microsoft 365” service isn’t available the following explanation is given on the support page for the app’s transition:

What about regions where Copilot is not available?

For regions without Copilot availability, the Microsoft 365 Copilot app will remove the Copilot tab from the Home screen across web, desktop, and mobile app endpoints. However, the app name and icon will remain the same as Microsoft 365 Copilot for branding consistency.

… so, it will still be called “Copilot” even if the actual Copilot functionality has been removed.

M365 Personal / Family subscriptions

As well as being corporate fodder, ~~Office~~ Microsoft 365 has had a consumer variant for a decade: Microsoft 365 Personal gets you a single user who can have up to 5 devices where you have the Office apps installed (as well as the use of web versions), 1TB of cloud storage in OneDrive, and you get Outlook.com email without any ads. The Family subscription is around 20% more expensive and gets you the same as Personal, but for up to 6 people.

Former Microsofties can receive M365 Family for free if they’re in the Alumni Association, and with membership being less than half the price for M365 on its own, it’s worth joining if you’re eligible. If you know someone who is a current Microsoft employee or who’s an Alumnus, they might be able to get you a Friends & Family login to the eCompany Store, which lets you buy activation codes for M365 Personal or Family at a significant discount. And here’s a trick: you can stack the codes (ie. buy 3 of them for less than the cost of a regular single year’s subscription, then just apply them all to your account to kick the renewal date forward into the long grass).

Speaking of cost, M365 Personal & Family have risen in price quite a bit recently; partly because they include a load of new AI features and those cloud-based GPUs don’t buy themselves.

Welcome Copilot Users!

At the same time as potentially naming something Copilot that isn’t, Microsoft has rolled out some basic Copilot capabilities for Microsoft 365 Personal and Family users. See here for the details of what’s included and how, though if you’re really not on board with all this AI nonsense, you can opt to stay on “M365 Family Classic”, which is the same as it was before without the Copilot and Microsoft Designer guff.

You’ll be shown lots of Copilot banners if you log in to any Office app with a M365 Personal subscription or the primary user of a Family one (only the owner of the subscription gets the extra sauce, at least for now). There are ways to disable it should you want to, though not everywhere – Outlook.com displays a banner at the top of every email offering to summarize it for you…

Predictably, the User forums are full of “HOW DO I SWITCH THIS OFF” type questions. The short version is you can’t; click the X on the right to dismiss the banner but you need to do that for every. single. email. Or just learn to live with it.

And Microsoft wouldn’t be true to form if branding and packaging was simple… there’s still Copilot Pro, which gives additional capacity or the paid-for Microsoft 365 Copilot addon to business Microsoft 365 subscriptions. And Copilot functionality in Business Applications, Security, GitHub and doubtless many more…

#69: Thinking Deeply

Copilot’s Getting Deeper

Wannabe Record Breakers

#68: It’s all about the prompt

Prompting Today

Further reading

#67: Are you sitting comfortably?

The Desk-jockey

How to sit at your desk

#66: A computer on every desk?

Moore’s law

The rise of the Mini

Desktops for today

Further reading

#65: Enshittifcation 2025 pt 1 – progressing well

2025 In

Search caching

Turn to specific addins

#64: Tick, Tock, Time is up (nearly) for Windows 10

Support Lifecycle

How to run Windows 11 on unsupported hardware

#63B: It’s Your ISP

#63: Trouble with your network?

STEP ONE – THE THREE-FINGERED-SALUTE

STEP TWO – CAN YOU SEE OUTSIDE?

PING!

STEP TWOa – ARE YOU WIRELESS?

IT’S NOT ME, IT’S YOU

#62: Will the web become exclusively mobile?

Desktop falling behind

Apps taking over, not always for the better

Un Appy with Online Banking

#61: Adios, Office!

M365 Personal / Family subscriptions

Welcome Copilot Users!