WW 873: Amino Man!

Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…

What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!

Richard is correct, we are on Microosft 365 and the constant changes to Office, even in the LTS channel, are a constant pain, something stops working, or, worse, it moves!

Microsoft moved the search bar for lists in Outlook from the head of the list, where it has been for nearly 30 years, to being in the title bar. We were inundated with calls that search had gone! It also didn’t help that they broke search in the process. In the past, you could search and it would find everything, after the upate, it broke, it found some things, but not everything. On some PCs it found one subset of the results on another computer, a different subset. On some, we had to turn local caching on, so that the search results worked, on others, we had to turn it back off, because there were even fewer results with caching turned on!

It is a case of pot luck! If a user calls and says they can’t find an email, we look to see if caching is turned on, if it is, we turn it off and see if the results are better, if it is off, we turn it on and see if the results are better! The users are upset and they take it out on us, we are upset, because there is nothing we can do about it and we are being told we are incompetent, because Microsoft can’t get their act together!

Worse is M365 on a Microsoft Terminal Server! For some users, Office keeps logging itself out, but not all users, just a small subset, some get logged out once a month, others sometimes a couple of times a week! And they can’t log back in, they get an error message, that the Microsoft registration servers couldn’t be reached, oh, you can ping them, but Office can’t talk to them, at least not from that user’s account, from another account on the same host, no problem… So you have to log them out, disable logins on that host and get them to log back in (and reenable the host, once they are logged back in) and try again, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, you have to get them to log off again, then you delete the virtual disk with their profile on it, which gets attached to the host when they log on. Doing that means you also have to log them back into Office, set up their email (many have multiple departmental account - sales, purchasing etc. for which they don’t have passwords), Adobe, ERP system, DMS system, CRM system, maintenance system, standard printer etc. Luckily they are not allowed to store any documents on their local profile, but it is still about half an hour to sort out the problem and get them back online again!

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Just came across this gem: Reddit - Dive into anything

Makes me think back to the high times of Windows, when people could really get excited about a new version. It’s like we were all kids back then. :slight_smile: Reminds me of when Paul reminisces.

I’d love for him to write a Windows manifest somehow - the path this OS ought to take. Not for commercial reasons or goals, but for reasons and goals of awesomeness.

I’d love Windows to be as great as it could be that Linux and Apple would really have to fight hard to win any sort of ground.

What would Windows look and work like if it were the greatest thing since sliced bread again?

I appreciate Paul bringing up MS Rewards, even though he doesn’t use the program. I think about 2 years ago I gave up playing a stupid daily style game for farming MS points. I’ve netted $125 in gift carts, which recently purchased a Series X, and what I can earn monthly should easily pay for GamePass Ultimate. As they did several months ago, in true MS fashion, they make big changes to the program without any notice, they take big things away before slowly adding something positive back, and design is always an after thought.

I’ve had issues with Bing Rewards in the browser for a few months now. The clicks aren’t always credited to the search, but it seems like the fact you’ve been to the page is. So I can be clicking along and sometimes I get the points and sometimes I don’t. It’s really frustrating.

I’ve largely stopped using it on XBOX and in Edge for that reason.

About 3 months ago, they started implementing a cooldown period. You could only get rewards for 3 or 4 searches within a 15 minute period. That was the worst. What used to take 10 minutes now took all day, and there was no UI informing you on a current cooldown. Thankfully I think it’s no longer a thing, though it all varies by region, and some got this cooldown rescinded earlier than others.

I still experience a 5 second cooldown between searches, which isn’t too bad.

And they recently added a Streak protection, which I’m sure is nice for those times when some random server issue caused the streaks to reset.

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