#80: What to do about Windows 10

Posted on June 19, 2025 by ewand

As was mentioned in a previous tip – #64: Tick, Tock, Time is up (nearly) for Windows 10 – this October sees Windows 10 take a last gasp as it slips beneath the waves. It hasn’t been getting any enhancements or fixes for a while, except for flaws which compromise its security. After October, it won’t even get any of those.

Well, not entirely. For $30 – for one year and then, who knows – extended support will be available for individuals, or a bit more if you’re a commercial operation, via the Extended Security Updates (ESU) program. Enrolment is not yet open but will be sometime before October 14^th.

Microsoft has been signalling for a while now that everyone should move to Windows 11, but due to some somewhat particular (and to some, peculiar) hardware requirements for Win11, there are lots of otherwise perfectly workable Win10 machines which cannot be upgraded. More than half of all PC users will – unless they ditch their old machines and move beforehand – be on the wrong side of the line.

Hardware Upgrade Opportunity

Naturally, PC makers are leaning in on this forcing function; “oh dear, all your old PCs won’t be upgradeable so you’ll need to replace them all”. There are some pretty good reasons why Windows 11 has enforced a specific set of hardware specs, though: almost all to do with security. As threats evolve, modern hardware and operating systems have to develop means to counter them – and in the case of Windows 11, that requires a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 chip to securely store information used to encrypt and protect the machine. Modern CPUs also need to be used, and even if a 7-year old Windows 10 PC might have a fast-enough processor and plenty of memory, it likely won’t have cutting-edge hardware to ensure it can stay secure.

Ever-engaging ex-Microsoft developer Dave Plummer has a good explainer on his Dave’s Garage channel.

Silicon Landfill

Even if you could add a TPM 2.0 module, lots of modern PCs won’t have a processor be on the allow list. One of the earliest flagship devices to fall into this trap is the Microsoft Surface Book, itself only 10 years old in October and although it has TPM 2.0, its CPU processor family is too limited.

The fear is that many users will (be forced to?) carry on running Windows 10 – just as lots still used Windows XP years after it was out of support – or they will grasp the nettle, upgrade to new hardware and then just junk their old machine?

Microsoft, for all its intent to be carbon neutral, is seen by some as an enabler for a likely surge in usable electronics being prematurely scrapped. It’s reckoned 240 million PCs will be ditched, and since the e-waste recycling rate is only around 25%, that’s the equivalent of 180m PCs going into landfill. If they were all laptops stacked on top of one another, it would be more than 10 times the height of the path of the International Space Station.

A computer and a satellite

The flipside is that modern PCs are more energy efficient, they will be more productive (even just because they’re clean and fresh and not full of old stuff). People used to upgrade much more often, so if you only replacing a PC every 7-10 years then it’s better than it was 20 or 30 years ago, where they might only have lasted 4 or 5 years.

Another way

f you have a 10-year old laptop that hasn’t yet devoured its battery or caused incendiary problems, it might still be useful as a second machine or a hand-me-down to other family members.

An original generation Surface Book with a bulging screen caused by a swollen battery (partially visible through the gap).

A Surface Book with bulging battery – from The Microsoft Surface Swollen Battery Problem

One way to keep things running is to check out of the Windows ecosystem altogether.

Since there are over 1 billion users of Windows 10, lots of bad people will be trying to exploit them. Any vulnerability that is discovered in Windows 10 in future could be attacked by nefarious sorts, and since Microsoft won’t be patching it, then you’re at risk of having the crown jewels taken. Even if other operating systems that could run on the same hardware might be intrinsically less secure, they won’t be attacked as much if they are in the minority, so switching to something more obscure could be one form of avoiding attack.

You could wipe Windows and move it to Linux, maybe? Years ago, it might have been the path taken by the less mainstream user, and fans said every year was going to be “the year” of the Linux desktop.

If you’ve a PC – desk or laptop – which is beyond upgrading to Win11 and will be otherwise junked, it might be worth having a play. You could set the machine up to dual-boot between Windows and Linux, and that way could try using Linux and even switch to it as default – leaving Windows there “just in case”, even if it’s not supported and potentially at greater risk from attack.

Chrome Up

A further idea, if you’re sure you don’t need the old machine and are prepared to wipe its Windows clean, is to have a play with Google’s ChromeOS. Designed originally for ChromeBooks – supposedly cheaper laptops that could run more efficiently on lower-spec hardware because they’re not encumbered with all the bloat of Windows – it’s actually possible to run ChromeOS in other places too.

Take a non-supported bit of kit – a first-gen Surface Book, for example – and it’s pretty easy to get the “ChromeOS Flex” variant up and running on it.

· Go to Prepare for installation – ChromeOS Flex Help for instructions. Start by installing the ChromeOS Recovery Utility browser addon on a working PC.

· Take a 16GB USB stick or memory card, and prepare it for ChromeOS by running the Chromebook recovery process, but instead of choosing an existing ChromeBook type, tell it you want to use a device called “Google ChromeOS Flex”.

· Once that’s done, restart your target PC with the bootable USB inserted – hold the SHIFT key while clicking on the Power / Restart option, or look for Advanced Startup options in the settings menu.

· You’ll be able to choose if you want to play with ChromeOS Flex by running it off the USB drive, or whether you’d like to wipe the disk on the PC and install it there instead. Choose.

In a surprisingly short amount of time, you’ll be able to walk through some self-explanatory setup procedures. Now to figure out what to actually do with the thing…

There are some gotchas with ChromeOS Flex – it doesn’t have the Google Play store and Android apps cannot be installed, though there are a variety of non-sanctioned ways to install a generic ChromeOS build (which does have Google Play etc). Good luck.

#28: Recalling history

Posted on May 24, 2024 by ewand

tl;dr – press WindowsKey+V on your Windows 10 or 11 PC. If you don’t have Clipboard history turned on, enable it. You’re welcome.

Microsoft unveiled a new range of Surface laptops recently; the foghorn headline is they’re not just PCs, they’re Copilot+ PCs with lots of AI goodness. There was also a lot of news from the Microsoft Build conference this week – Copilot might have mentioned once or twice, but I think they got away with it.

The really big news for PC watchers is concerning the most recent attempt by Microsoft to move away from Intel to ARM processors; tried before with the Windows RT and Surface RT cul-de-sac, then later the Windows 10X project and the Surface Pro X which was ultimately superseded by an Intel-powered replacement.

Apple showed that it was not only possible but desirable to move from power-hungry Intel to lightning fast ARM chips, delivering huge improvements in battery life at minimal expense of application compatibility. The new Surface Laptop 7 purports to deliver power and performance that will finally take the fight to Apple in-house ARM silicon.

As well as flashing the new hardware, Microsoft also announced a bunch of new capabilities coming to Windows, delivered by snazzy new hardware and the Copilot Runtime which will allow advanced AI computation to take place locally on the device, without having to round-trip to the cloud.

One such AI-powered feature is “Recall”, which captures what the user is doing on the PC over time and will use a local AI model to analyse the data, so you can ask it to bring back whichever document, web page or app you might have been using when you were doing or thinking about something.

So far, the use cases being discussed are a little basic (like “I saw a recipe for a goat’s cheese pizza but can’t remember where it was”) but it could prove really useful when in the wild.

Remembering history

There are plenty of other places where history is recorded as you do your thang on a PC. Office apps remember documents you’ve been using in the past either by presenting the Most-Recently Used (MRU) list or letting you search across common document areas.

Outlook will cache the email addresses you’ve sent to before, browsers like Edge have an extensive and searchable history of pages you’ve been to, and even Windows Explorer’s Home tab shows you all the documents you’ve opened recently alongside ones you might have pinned as favourites.

One history feature which is presumably switched off by default due to some sort of privacy worry, is one where when you start using it, you wonder how you’ve lived your life to date without it: Clipboard history. In a nutshell, CTRL+C and CTRL+V have been widely-used shortcut keys for copy & paste since before Windows was an apple in its creators’ eyes. Using WindowsKey+V to initiate a Paste, will present you a list of the last few things you put on the clipboard.

It was covered in Old Testament ToW #670.

Remember Windows Timeline? It was a feature which recorded what the user was doing across many apps, browser sessions and different devices (even on mobile), synched to the cloud and presented in a logical, searchable timeline view. While it still exists in Windows 10, it wasn’t part of Windows 11 and since it relied on Cortana (RIP), the feature which remains has very much had its wings clipped.

“Recall” Chicken Licken

The old fairy tale of the chicken thinking the sky is falling (originally an Indian story about a hare, not a hen, and known by a variety of names around the world) was revisited in relation to Microsoft’s “Recall” feature which is part of this new range of Copilot+ PCs, enabled by the additional NPU chips (and not to be confused the Outlook’s “Recall” feature which purports to un-send a message but rarely works as expected, especially if sending to a lot of people).

The story behind the new Recall is that the PC will keep a history of everything the user does by screen-grabbing every few seconds, so that the user can later ask Copilot for help in remembering what they’ve done previously.

Cue, heavy breathing from all sorts of commentators who’ve never even laid eyes on this thing being used. The UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office – the Gov data watchdog – issued a short statement and was widely reported as “looking into” the potential privacy concerns, however Microsoft was clear to point out that:

Recall will (initially) only work on these new (ARM) Copilot+ PCs and is in preview. Other PCs with Intel CPUs and Neural Processing Units (NPU) hardware will get the feature in time.
Recall will be enabled on initial PC or user setup, but can be switched off using the Settings menu and sys admins can centrally disable through policy; ditto, the length of time Recall will store data for can be tuned (and the amount of storage it uses).
Specific apps (and InPrivate browser windows) can be excluded from the screen-grabbery
It holds all the data in an encrypted store on the local PC and is only accessible by the user (i.e. not synced to the cloud, not readable by Microsoft or by any company administrator).

643 – Wireless extensions

Posted on August 12, 2022 by ewand

“A computer on every desk and in every home”; that original Microsoft motto, all the way back from a time when any sane person would have said it was nuts. Looking back now, though – hands up, who has only the one computer at home?

The WindowsKey+P shortcut key has been used since Windows 7, for sending your screen output to another device. At one point, this was maybe a meeting room’s projector – hence “+P”. You’d plug it into the VGA port on your laptop, press Win+P and you’re away. These days, does anyone “project”? Or just mirror or extend their desktop to another connected display or monitor?

You’ll commonly be able to wirelessly “project” to a large screen on the wall in a meeting room nowadays, rather than having to faff about with ceiling-mounted projectors, with all their bulb issues, noisy fans and the multitude of connectors required.

Windows 10 and 11 has a nice wireless projection UI, used to “Cast” to a wirelessly-available device, such as a TV which uses the somewhat messy Miracast standard. Either through native support, or by adding a media stick like Roku, Chromecast or FireTV, most TVs can be made to receive the display output of your laptop.

One somewhat underappreciated feature, though, is the ability to set your PC to be the recipient of wireless projection from another machine. This could be used to show something to a nearby colleague, displaying your desktop on their PC, or to share your PC screen to a room where someone else is currently plugged into the screen / projector, and you can project to their machine rather than unplugging them.

Lesser known is the ability to wirelessly extend your desktop to another PC, effectively using it as a 2^nd monitor.

To kick off proceedings, press Start and type project to find the shortcut to Projection Settings.

If you haven’t set it up previously, you’ll need to add the Wireless Display optional feature; have a look through the others in the same dialog to see if there’s anything else that takes your fancy.

After adding Wireless Display, you’ll be able to set various options about how and when to receive connections. Start the “Connect” app on the destination PC and you can run a source desktop in a window or make it full-screen.

This projection feature can be used to extend the desktop of your main machine onto a second PC.

If you have a spare laptop or a home desktop PC which has Wi-Fi capability, you could set it up to be the recipient of projection from your main work machine, as long as they’re both on the same wireless network, and without the need to join in domains or have the icy grip of corporate control extended to your own hardware.

Select the option to extend your desktop to the remote machine and you can use it just like an additional monitor.

As many of us are used to having multiple screens in our home office, it could be worth carrying a second laptop if you go into an actual office where decent 2^nd screens might not be available.

Having better kit at home than in the office is just one thing to deal with when going back to a workplace

Tip o’ the Week 440 – Break out the whiteboard

Posted on July 23, 2018 (Updated July 4, 2024) by ewand

Teachers of any tenure will probably have used a blackboard, with the dusty chalk and the other paraphernalia that goes with it, and be thankful that whiteboards came along to make things easier. Many companies will have whiteboards in meeting rooms too, and most will have the good sense to never allow permanent marker pens within 100 yards of the whiteboard, and to throw away whiteboard markers when they stop working well, rather than put them back and pick up another one…

As we move to a more digital future, the days of the whiteboard – like the flipchart before it – are giving way to electronic smart boards, first seen as a projector/camera arrangement over a relatively normal whiteboard, but now more integrated with screens and multi-touch sensors in front. Much like the Microsoft Surface Hub, in fact.

The Surface Hub 2 will be with us in 2019, and looks like a great step forward while mimicking some of the flipchart form factors of old. Just make sure no clown goes near it with a flipchart pen…

Before the gorgeous-looking SH2 appears, there is some news for 1:few collaborators who like to use a smart board, especially if they’re not in the same room – the general availability of the Microsoft Whiteboard store app.

Get it here. Oh, and Teams has a free version too, now… Go forth and collaborate!

Tip o’ the Week 439 – Go! Go! Go!

Posted on July 23, 2018 by ewand

The legendary Merry Talker made a big thing about his “Go” (quite apart from his Colemanballs). Public Service Broadcasting celebrated the iconic Gene Kranz (nearly 49 years ago) calling round all the flight controllers to get them to agree whether the Eagle should “Stay” or “Go”. And, of course, there’s an ancient board game.

But if you haven’t been hiding under a rock for a few weeks, you may have seen news about the Microsoft Surface Go being announced.

Is it an “iPad Killer”? No. The tablet market is pretty saturated, and even if potential buyers of one device flock to the Go, it’s not likely to be kryptonite to the other. It’s probably more likely that the Go exists to appeal to potentially erstwhile Chromebook buyers, in sectors like education, or as companion device to existing Windows fans in the same way that some people use a tablet as a PC alternative when they travel.

Given its performance, the Surface Go is likely to be a useful 2^nd machine for many PC users, rather than an alternative primary device – though some early reviews seem to make it sound pretty good. MJF reckons many variants (LTE, 8GB RAM/256GB SSD) will be forthcoming, so maybe the mix will change in time.

So, Brits: like pretty much every “low-cost” device, the entry level £379 machine – now available for pre-order – isn’t the full story. It’s fairly low-spec and doesn’t come with a keyboard or stylus/pen, so ordering the one most people would want will be nearer double the headline price…

Oh well, start saving up now – or wait until late August and decide (after playing with it in the flesh – in store, maybe?) if it’s the right thing for you.

Tip o’ the Week 409 – Touchpad settings

Posted on January 10, 2018 by ewand

Once upon a time, mice had balls, and there was even a joke field service bulletin telling customers how to manage them better.

Microsoft has had a few funny KB articles over the years, too, though not necessarily intended to amuse. Barney sometimes plays on his own…, for example – who knew?

Given that a defining feature of mechanical meeces was the fact they had a rubbery ball inside, it seemed obvious to early laptop designers that a trackball would make sense to move the pointer around.

Eventually the touchpad took over, and divided opinion – some people just couldn’t live without a USB-tethered proper mouse, which they carted around with their laptop, while designers sought to add more and more functionality to the touchpad.

A slew of 3 or even 4-finger gestures can change the behaviour of the machine, from switching between apps to controlling the system volume.

On a Windows 10 laptop, if you type touchpad at the start screen to find the settings that control it, you’ll see a load of additional gestures have been added over time, depending on what capabilities your machine has (specifically, if it has a Precision Touchpad or not).

If you’re especially particular about how your touchpad works, you may wish to look into tuning it further through registry tweaks.

Tip o’ the Week 340 – Windows 10 Ink Workspace

Posted on August 12, 2016 by ewand

One of the new features of Windows 10 with the Anniversary Update* is the Ink Workspace, which shows up on your taskbar if you have a pen-equipped device, like a Surface. If you don’t have a pen-capable device but you’re a bit insane, you can still make it appear (right click on your taskbar to see the option), though good luck in trying to emulate Ink with just a mouse. Surfaceers, unclip your pen and go.

The Ink Workspace is designed to be a starting point for many ink-related capabilities: see more about it here.

There are some quite cute sticky notes that you can scribble on-screen, a one-screen-sized sketchpad that’s at least handy & interesting but of somewhat limited use (seriously, use Plumbago, which has recently been updated to support OneDrive sync, and will show up in the “Recently used” list if you have it).

The Screen Sketch function lets you doodle on-screen and save grabs for future reference, and also surfaces he new Ruler function that is showing up in other ink-enabled apps – tap the ruler icon, and you get a rotate-able, moveable, virtual piece of plastic to help you draw straight lines on-screen.

Other apps are being updated to support Ink, as with only a few lines of code, they can integrate the Ink Toolbar and fit into the Ink Workspace, too. A variety of other apps are also being suggested through the Workspace, leading to the Collections section of the Store. See here for a quick preview.

One example of a newly ink-capable app is Maps. It’s getting an inking menu that will let you drawn on the map and measure distances between drawn points, which is quite cute. Insiders on the Fast Ring have the new Maps app already; in time, it’ll surely percolate out to everyone else.

Whatever happens to other apps in future, inking within Windows is getting a good bit more mainstream, and that’s great news for anyone with a pen or even a touch-oriented device.

*if you don’t have the Anniversary Update yet, you can wait for it to appear on Windows Update, or force it by downloading the installer, here.