parched

I have the opposite problem. I run windows 7 on a low-end piece of hardware just for a home built arcade machine running emulators. It needs windows to drive the front end software (Hyperspin). Trying to run this on Windows 10 is a nightmare. The disk activity on win 10 is horrendously and slow, plus Hyperspin doesn't natively run on 10.

I had to reinstall win7 on that system recently, and it absolutely refuses to do the online registration for it even though it's a valid (MSDN) license key. I think maybe they took the servers down or something because I get a comms error. So now after 30 days it keeps popping up a dialog box every 10 minutes saying that "I may be the victim of counterfeiting". How helpful of them.

I still don't have a solution for this so if anyone has an answer I'd be glad to hear it.

A couple of years ago a fairly large, multi-storey apartment building was put up in my town. It was constructed entirely of wood. While the roof was being finished, a worker who was putting in some overtime on a sunday accidentally started a small fire which quickly got out of control. It ended up taking the entire building out, costing millions of dollars, but thankfully no lives.

Wood is great, but it does have downsides. I wouldn't like to see a real-life sequel to The Towering Inferno.

As referred to at the bottom of the article (an additional edit after the article is posted), there is an "official" way to stop your PC from being automatically rebooted after an update is installed:

1. Click on the “Start” button and type gpedit.msc press Enter. 2. In the Local Group Policy Editor, go to Computer Configuration -> ->Administrative Templates-> -> Windows Components-> -> Windows Update 3. Double-click on “No auto-restart with automatic installations of scheduled updates”. 4. Select "Enabled", and then click "OK". 5. Close the local group policy editor.

This is from the second shown reply on https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/disabl...

Hope it's helpful to people.

450 keys but no spacebar?

In my humble opinion, mental models are like software design patterns. You kinda have to understand them to understand them, otherwise you end up falling into the "when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail" situation, which I guess is a mental model too!

I'm really disappointed that Google has decided to do this. I've been using these all over my house for a couple of years now and, at least for Google Play Music and Tune-In Radio, they work really well. When the price dropped recently, and there was speculation they would be discontinued, I bought another four of them for my own use and for gifts.

They're not really comparable to Bluetooth receivers. The killer feature is synchronized multi-room audio without paying exorbitant prices for proprietary speakers (Sonos I'm looking at you...). I have them hooked up to powered speakers (PC 2.1 style) in the bedroom and bathroom, a mini-stereo on the deck, a ghetto blaster in my workshop and my media room AV amplifier. For parties it's fantastic to have seamless audio around the whole house.

I have to wonder why Google did this. It seems like a strategic move to push people towards their "smart" speakers. Personally I really don't want something with a microphone in it, just good quality sound at a good price. Very sad.

By the way, it's easy to cast audio only from YouTube or any other app - just go to the Google Home app and cast your phone's audio to the device or group.