Windows

mo 26 May 2025	In Microsoft's photo viewer the slideshow option may appear to have gone away but user key f5 will still fire it up.
tu 13 May 2025	Michelle Kaye's helpful review of Microsoft ending Windows 10 support this autumn though being Trump's America they will sell you an extension.
tu 6 May 2025 Windows 10	WARNING Trump isn't the only knob in the USA. Microsoft are ending support for Windows 10 on Tuesday 14 October including security fixes. To see if your box will run Windows 11 download and install PC Health Check but if your box is more than five years old probably not. Maybe Trump will make the Windows 12 upgrade easier for us by only allowing Americans to have it ...
mo 9 Dec 2024	It was only when we needed to batch rename a group of files we rediscovered Power Toys. There are so many toys in the box it's a bit overwhelming but PowerRename appears with a right click and does just what we wanted and ImageResizer looks useful. PT is open source so probably not absolutely bomb proof.
we 8 May 2024	More PC nostalgia than a PC tip but Finland's Windows95man is wonderful Eurovision daftness with the final this Saturday. If you think Windows 95 is ancient earlier we stayed with DOS because we thought (correctly) Windows 3.1 far too slow.
fr 8 Sep 2023	Microscoft have been pratting about again, this time adding an intrusive filmstrip to the bottom of the Photos viewer. Thankfully you can turn it off; click on the See more three dots at the top of the Photos window, click Settings at the list bottom and then there's a Filmstrip Off/On toggle under Personalisation.
mo 11 Jul 2022	Worth repeating; in Word highlight a word or phrase. Whilst holding down the shift key press and release the user key F3 ... now do it again ... and do it again, good eh? Works for other apps as well.
fr 15 Oct 2021	Friend of nearthecoast Peter Brockett has a four year old Microsoft Surface and it's incompatible with Windows 11. Gratifyingly he agrees with us and Tom's Guide, wait and see.
mo 11 Oct 2021	On a second monitor we wanted to easily put two browser windows side by side. We found the easiest way was to use the Windows key with the cursor control keys ← → ↑ ↓, try it, it's fun.
th 23 Sep 2021 Windows 11	The free Windows 11 upgrade is due 5 October. To check compatibility on a maybe five year old HP workstation we downloaded and installed Microsoft's PC Health Check. To download Health Check scroll to the bottom of the bloated Windows 11 page. Our workstation failed on incompatible cpu and even after a BIOS upgrade Secure Boot and TPM 2.0. Isn't necessarily game over though ... we'll wait and see.
we 1 Sep 2021	After a Windows update a while back a new icon appeared on the task bar to the left of the system tray. We found it popped up an annoyingly large window whenever the mouse pointer strayed near the icon. It was surprisingly easy to get rid of, right click on the task bar then News and interests and then Turn off, that'll do it.
mo 15 Feb 2021	Don't know why it's taken us years to trip over this. In Windows 10 photo viewer double click on an image and it zooms up, hold and drag to move the image about, and double click again to zoom back ... l♥ve it.
th 10 Dec 2020	Windows 10 feature update 20H2 this morning had two cracks at installing and prompted a .NET update. Unsurprisingly the feature update suggests using Microsoft's browser, search engine and a free try of 365 so you can pay for it later.
sa 26 Sep 2020	With our Apple devices we often remove the sense when typing by not noticing autosuggest has changed something. Despite this we've turned autosuggest+ on for Windows 10 on a desktop ... we'll let you know how it goes ...
sa 25 Jul 2020	Every two or three months we manually check the Windows update status via Settings. This time we found feature 2004 update hanging since May. When we manually started the upgrade it got stuck around 90%. Running Update Assistant just got a Thanks for updating message. Uninstalling, re-installing and then running Assistant again solved the problem though as so often the update did take forever.
mo 6 Apr 2020	When Windows 10 fired up this morning it offered to make our life better by selling us Office 365 for eighty quid a year and linking our mobile to the pc. We thought it could make our life better by leaving us alone but despite this perhaps foolishly gave it our mobile number for linking. After texts/passwords/verifications we now have Microsoft's Edge browser on our iPhone ... we'll let you know if our life gets any better.
sa 14 Dec 2019	We upgraded an aging laptop to Windows 10 from aging media. It was a bit of a struggle but in the end leaving it alone to sort itself out sorted it out. It then kept failing during update. The Internet thought the problem was an elderly version of Win10 and it should be re-installed from more modern media. We downloaded an install to a USB stick (to make an install disc you need high capacity DL discs) and the re-install kept failing. After three attempts we used the install's advanced options to reformat the destination hard disc, fixed it and the activation remained valid.

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