New Windows OS?

Thread Starter

MrChips

Joined Oct 2, 2009
30,707
Yesterday when I woke up I was surprised to see a new display (in sleep mode) on my Win 10 screen. It was a black background with just the time shown in a very large white font in one location (left side, centered vertically). The time was incorrect by hours.

On waking up the PC, a completely new desktop appeared, one that I have not seen before. The location city was set to New York. I managed to reset the time but could not change the location.

After rebooting the computer, the screen is back to what it was before. No sign of the mystery screen.
Now I wish I had taken photos of the screen.

Has anyone seen this or knows what is going on? It's like I was in a dream!
Looks like a prank to me and on me.
 

k1ng 1337

Joined Sep 11, 2020
940
Yesterday when I woke up I was surprised to see a new display (in sleep mode) on my Win 10 screen. It was a black background with just the time shown in a very large white font in one location (left side, centered vertically). The time was incorrect by hours.

On waking up the PC, a completely new desktop appeared, one that I have not seen before. The location city was set to New York. I managed to reset the time but could not change the location.

After rebooting the computer, the screen is back to what it was before. No sign of the mystery screen.
Now I wish I had taken photos of the screen.

Has anyone seen this or knows what is going on? It's like I was in a dream!
Looks like a prank to me and on me.
Those sneaky bozos will install updates when disabled. The worst part is the changes are unknown because the process is lurking. I've had my windows machines using all CPU at times and I pinpointed it to ghost updates.
 

DickCappels

Joined Aug 21, 2008
10,153
They improve something and sometimes break something else. I used to run an application on my Mac that would prevent and incoming contact with my computer unless I explicitly permitted it. There may be something similar available for Windows.

Now the Mac OS tells me when there is an update available begs for permission to install the update. Maybe there is a Windows setting that does something similar.

I've been using XP under Virtual Box for about 20 years and you know what? It is finally stable! (Sound of cheering in the background)
 

Ramussons

Joined May 3, 2013
1,404
Windows updates can be deferred by up to 35 days. After that I think they're inevitable.
That 35 days is each time.
After 30 days, extend it by another 35 days.
That is, till B Gates decides that he has to oblige the hardware manufacturers and forces an update that will not run in your present hardware!!!
 

MisterBill2

Joined Jan 23, 2018
18,167
In addition, keep in mind that not all changes are IMPROVEMENTS. So change is good only half of the time.
Also understand that most microsoft products are released and sold long before all the bugs are fixed, and that they are totally aware of the fact that they are selling "buggy" products. And it does not bother them at all.
 

Alec_t

Joined Sep 17, 2013
14,280
That 35 days is each time.
After 30 days, extend it by another 35 days.
This is what Win10 says:
UpdatePause.jpg
So resetting the pause before it terminates works ok, to enable extending the pause indefinitely? Looks like a monthly chore, then.
Would doing updates as a batch of N take N times as long as a single update, or would some earlier updates be absorbed into later ones and save a bit of time?
 

Ramussons

Joined May 3, 2013
1,404
That statement you will need to get updates before you can pause again is not really true. I have my Windows 10 avoiding updates since October 21.

Would doing updates as a batch of N take N times as long as a single update, or would some earlier updates be absorbed into later ones and save a bit of time?
No, not really. Delayed updates will take longer to complete, but I think it is telescopic. 4 pending updates in one go will take less time than the 4 updates done one by one. But that is more academic. 4 short update times will be less irritating than 1 long one!
 

MisterBill2

Joined Jan 23, 2018
18,167
I find it particularly obnoxious when it keeps trying to add an update that has failed for whatever reason., since 2019, even.
And what sort of sloppy production sells an OS so full of bugs that it needs weekly repairs?

Now consider would you even be willing to own an automobile that had a safety recall every few weeks? (not meaning to hijack the thread, but this has bothered me for a long while.)
 

Ya’akov

Joined Jan 27, 2019
9,069
That 35 days is each time.
After 30 days, extend it by another 35 days.
That is, till B Gates decides that he has to oblige the hardware manufacturers and forces an update that will not run in your present hardware!!!
Just for the record, Bill Gates retired years ago.
 

MisterBill2

Joined Jan 23, 2018
18,167
Gates retired but the demons that he infected the whole organization with remain, and are still active. "Good enough to ship and sell" is still, apparently, the standard policy. At least that is what the evidence of the last ten or more years indicates.

It is entirely reasonable to evaluate an organization by their history of performance over some longer period of time.
 

Ya’akov

Joined Jan 27, 2019
9,069
His legacy continues......
I don't really want to get into it, but while I am very aware of Microsoft's shortcomings, and only use Windows at this point when I have no other choice, I spent a significant portion of my career working with Microsoft and Windows very closely. I've met Bill Gates several times, he's rather unassuming in person and he appeared genuinely interested in selling good products. He's a programmer, and actually writes code, so he knows the internals of Windows and applications.

I am not minimizing the corporate sins of Microsoft, but the context of the business, and the many other people in management, greatly influenced decision-making at the level were many of the problems with Microsoft products, and they were not technical issues for the most part.

Microsoft made many innovations, and yes, they did stifle some in the name of profit, but Bill Gates is not the evil person he's made out to be. My personal experience is that he wanted to release good products and was unhappy when "business" decisions led to releasing essentially beta level products to avoid losing market share.

Having been there when desktop computing became a thing, it is my opinion that we own a lot to Microsoft's hegemony. They created a situation where a de facto standard platform for hardware and software, using the non-proprietary IBM PC architecture, spawned an industry at a time when competition among incompatible platforms would have squelched it. Having one (flawed) target for hardware and software meant the focus was on making those things better and cheaper rather than trying to invent a new "standard".

So, did Microsoft under Bill Gates do things that were "bad"? I think there is no question about that. But, was the net effect of Microsoft positive or negative? I think it is critical not to start with what we have today and reason backwards. I believe we have what we have today because some of the ruthless competitive moves by Microsoft focused the industry on a single target and while it could have been someone other than Microsoft, who knows, maybe better—or worse—it was Microsoft and we needed someone to be that focus point to get to the industry we have today.

[EDIT: added missing word "in"]
 
Last edited:

BobTPH

Joined Jun 5, 2013
8,807
(disclosure: I am a former Microsoft employee)

One of the problems with making the OS stable is that the hardware platform is totally unconstrained. There are an astronomical number if combinations of hardware and peripherals to support. Microsoft has literally thousands of PCs that they test on, but that is still a tiny fraction of what is out there.

Apple, on the other hand, has complete control of their hardware platform, and, IMHO they are not much better at stability.

I also worked at Metrowerks, where my job was to port their Mac (power PC) compiler to Windows. I had a PC running on Windows NT, which eventually replaced the older Windows. One of the Mac developers noticed on my screen an indicator that the OS had been up continuously for 31 days. He was amazed. His experience with Mac was several crashes per day.

Bob
 

Ya’akov

Joined Jan 27, 2019
9,069
(disclosure: I am a former Microsoft employee)

One of the problems with making the OS stable is that the hardware platform is totally unconstrained. There are an astronomical number if combinations of hardware and peripherals to support. Microsoft has literally thousands of PCs that they test on, but that is still a tiny fraction of what is out there.

Apple, on the other hand, has complete control of their hardware platform, and, IMHO they are not much better at stability.

I also worked at Metrowerks, where my job was to port their Mac (power PC) compiler to Windows. I had a PC running on Windows NT, which eventually replaced the older Windows. One of the Mac developers noticed on my screen an indicator that the OS had been up continuously for 31 days. He was amazed. His experience with Mac was several crashes per day.

Bob
Somewhat tangential to the main topic…

When I started with Windows I also owned and supported Macs. MacOS versions prior to OS X were terrible with memory management among other things. They crashed constantly when pushed. I also worked in advertising, managing designers who used the Mac (which made sense due to their toolset) and constant increases in RAM did only a little to help.

When Adobe released Photoshop for Windows NT, I spun up a workstation with NT to run it. It was much faster and more stable than the Mac but the interface was foreign and the other programs they needed were not present. So we used the NT machine for very large images or very difficult transformations.

I used Windows as my own desktop starting with version 2.11 (the runtime for Word and Excel, among other things) so it was a mixed DOS/Windows environment. At the release of 3.x, I reversed it living in Windows and running DOS programs as needed. I made a good living integrating Windows and NetWare, and later NT. I had large corporate client, I taught network administrators in seminars, I wrote for magazines, and other Windows-related things,

When I went to work at a university electrical engineering department, I found a mixed environment of SunOS/Solaris, Windows, and Mac platforms. A substantial number of faculty used the Mac. It was still pre-X days and I really disliked it. The majority of destops (and notebooks) were running Windows XP. It was not too bad. Mostly stable, well supported by both software and hardware, and fast enough.

But as updates came in, they progressively slowed and destabilized the machines. It became hard to support older machines because the hardware just couldn’t cope with the demand for CPU and RAM.

With the release of Apple’s OS X 10.1, I made the decision to switch to it. Not only was there an ever increasing fraction of faculty using Apple computers, but the UNIX underpinnings of OS X were much more comfortable to me than the constant adaptation of Windows to play nice with all of the UNIX I was otherwise using. All of my servers were either Solaris or FreeBSD and it was quite a relief to be at a UNIX prompt, natively, inside my own desktop. (I didn’t want either Solaris or FreeBSD for a desktop environment because frankly, though superior as a server, I found their X-Window desktops unpleasant.)

It wasn’t an easy decision. I had 20+ years of accumulated software and mental tools for Windows. But, OS X was very attractive for various reasons. I stuck with it and have no regrets. Windows 10 has a lot of nice features (I don’t even have 11-ready hardware, not even my quad core i7s qualify, and I have no reason to buy something to run it).

I like the Apple ecosystem, it’s shortcomings notwithstanding. The high level of integration, from my 27” iMacs, to my 15” and 13” MacBooks, to my iPads, iPhone, and even to the watch on my wrist, the usability is, for me, brilliant.

One thing to remember though, it is down to Microsoft for providing the path for OS X to succeed. They released the Office suite for OS X which allowed people to adopt the platform. Had they not done it, and they didn‘t have to, OS X would have been dead before it even started. So, thanks Microsoft.
 

MrSalts

Joined Apr 2, 2020
2,767
One thing to remember though, it is down to Microsoft for providing the path for OS X to succeed. They released the Office suite for OS X which allowed people to adopt the platform. Had they not done it, and they didn‘t have to, OS X would have been dead before it even started. So, thanks Microsoft.
I don't understand this statement. Microsoft offered Mac-supported word & excel long before the 10th version of their operating system (OS X) - and long before Microsoft decided to bundle everything into an "office suite". First Mac version of Word was 1.05 in 1985.
Mac OS7 was the first to offer read-write of Windows-formatted floppies with their so-called SuperDrives in the MacII Ci and SI from 1992ish timeframe and word/excel files saved on Windows could be read on Macs (but windows PCs could not read Mac-formatted disks).
There is no need to thank Microsoft, at $300 and growing to $600 a pop, I have a feeling you are thanking them for making a profit off of you - weird.
 

ApacheKid

Joined Jan 12, 2015
1,533
Yesterday when I woke up I was surprised to see a new display (in sleep mode) on my Win 10 screen. It was a black background with just the time shown in a very large white font in one location (left side, centered vertically). The time was incorrect by hours.

On waking up the PC, a completely new desktop appeared, one that I have not seen before. The location city was set to New York. I managed to reset the time but could not change the location.

After rebooting the computer, the screen is back to what it was before. No sign of the mystery screen.
Now I wish I had taken photos of the screen.

Has anyone seen this or knows what is going on? It's like I was in a dream!
Looks like a prank to me and on me.
Might Windows 11 have been installed without you realizing?
 

Thread Starter

MrChips

Joined Oct 2, 2009
30,707
No, the system is back to WIN 10 Home.

The mystery screen was on with the time displayed. Normally, when my computer goes to sleep the screen is blank.
On the mystery screen I was unable to go to my normal desktop or view my files. There was a menu option to reboot the system which I did. Now it remains a mystery.

Next time, if there is ever a next time, I will make a point of taking photos.
 
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