End of an era in to points

Hi all.
Firstly, windows 11 and ms.
It appears ms maybe in the process of abandoning local accounts.
It is almost impossible to setup a local account in windows at least not with all the bits and bobs.
Entering a fake email address or entering the current day as a birthday of the user will trigger the usual account system but who knows how long that will be.
I can see why microsoft want to do this.
Having access to onedrive, promoting services and other business things that I can at least understand.
Adds and certain extra banners while annoying again I can understand.
Storing things online like backups and settings again I can understand, user apps, and other store stuff.
I can also understand this.
I have a user that updated from windows 10 with a pin word in his login and he really enjoys his system.
He is a full office 365 subscriber and I plan to give him key upgrades for birthdays from time to time.
Thats the good news.
There are several reasons to be frowning.
1. as I have mentioned in less than polite terms, cryptolocker on drives.
Encryption of a drive is not the big issue, in fact businesses would really like it.
But I struggle to see how or why a standard home user would want it though some may actually wish it.
I am an old gen and see no reason in encrypting my data but then I haven’t got a password manager so yeah I am a retro bastard and should know better but I don’t.
Anyway I do not like the fact microsoft is putting choices for users and going, you have this and that and it will be fine.
No warnings at all.
And in deed if it works you have no issue and you may even be safer with your 128gb encryption.
Or is it bit?
So sometimes it breaks.
I understand this.
But what then?
Your system is screwed till you decrypt your drive.
You can do this by logging into microsoft and getting your code and typing in a string of numbers and then its fine.
That sounds fine but microsoft failure rates are well kind of high.
It would be easier for me to just reformat and reinstall to be honest if that ever happened.
And fact is a standard user doesn’t need this.
You can turn it off which is yet another task you have to do you don’t need.
The fact that all this goes on is a concern as it is.
Never mind all the other things you don’t immediately need.
On 10 I use my store, one game and a couple other things.
I like my microsoft account but as a secondry app login only not a system one.
Next I have had friends that had been online when things have gone offline.
Your system is simply bricked till the net comes back.
A load have disproved this to me but even if its a pile of bull I couldn’t trust the net for a 10000000% uptime otherwise everyone of us would be running from the cloud.
I just don’t like the idea and never will.
I have also had a bad situation with an encrypted drive going bad.
Granted, there were warning signs, of which the client was aware but kept putting off.
He also didn’t have a current backup.
Eventually he contracted me to do the transfer.
I transfered 2 systems, an old laptop and the old server to internal drive and he obtained another system.
This I quickly setup, secured, configured and optimised.
That was held up by a failed wireless card causing windows to become unstable.
The client then proceeded to try everything to fix his system.
This included but was not limited to transfering critical system files and other junk from one place to another.
This completely screwed up his account and destroyed his system at least as far as configurations were concerned.
After swearing fully in his face for at least a minute, I was that mad, I set to trying to fix his mess.
Luckilly the only thing he had destroyed was his account.
I was able to make a test account, kill his account, make his account, kill the test account.
The system logged in.
Office was able to reconfigure itself and recover without an error.
I was able to transfer all his data back.
I was able to rerun all his applications and after logging back in and reconfiguring each as new apps everything came back from off and online storage.
He didn’t lose any data and he was happy.
Meanwhile I had had no error so plugged his wireless card in to see what was going on.
Almost immediately the system crashed and windows corrupted and everything went away.
I pulled the card and windows rebooted and everything worked.
Obviously there was no net but this proved the issue.
The company ralink had been out of business for years and simply put the card was ancient.
It was no wander windows had failed, simply put no drivers and nothing coming.
So I got a new card and installed it and no issue there.
Meanwhile I had this old box to transfer things to, the one that had been failing.
There was 1 step.
I needed to transfer the data over the net to the location and then the job would be done and I’d get payed.
Turn it on and it didn’t do anything.
Finally turn it on and it did but no start.
So anyway to cut a long story short the main encrypter chip on the main drive had been failing.
The guy had at least 3 months grace and plenty time before it really failed completely.
Things like slow access, etc.
His backups were not up to standard either.
Anyway luckily his system repair contracter knew someone that worked with the cops, a guy that hacked things and did this with encrypted systems.
The good news was the client hadn’t lost anything.
The bad news was that the main encrypter chip had burned out.
The only way to retrieve anything was to pull the drive to bits and do it platter by platter.
This took several weeks but was eventually done.
The client got his data and payed for it.
The data came back, its not organised but it came back.
Having had a hard drive fail and while I got the data back a lot of it at least half of it was completely rubbished.
The data that I lost was not important though and the critical stuff programs and a few other bits and pieces did not get destroyed.
I had another drive that was itself failing but was able to recover data from that and got most of everything else back.
There are a few things I will never get back but 99.9% of it bar a few bbc docter who episodes is a small price to pay rather than losing everything.
So as you can see encryption and me have a reason to distrust eachother.
Next on the list is ccleaner by piriform/ avast v7.
No portable version only an installer.
The interface looks friendly and is web based.
However reviews on several sites had things screwing up a lot.
Some disliked the interface etc.
To do anything comercial you need to buy a licence anyway like updaters, etc.
CCleaner 6.39 portable is still active on the main site and I plan to keep using this.
Aparently rumors are that beta tests didn’t work so well either.
It didn’t get much testing.
Thats a pitty as ccleaner was due for improvements.
However with all the issues and the fact there is no portable I will be continuing with my portable and if that goes south getting the sunset release.
If you use an arm cpu like some of the snapdragon releases you may have to use the new version.
Its a shame the portable is gone.
Still at least for now v6 portable can still be gotten.
Final patch day for 10 on wednesday.
Extra update of chrome was released after edge updated so who knows what that was about.
Dropbox 134 is out as well.
So what is in the pipeline for releases.
The mozilla thunderbird and firefox releases are at 144 b9 and b4 respectively.
So its likely that we will be getting these after or at the same time as patch day.
Codecguide 125 is out but free-codecs advertises new updates so I wouldn’t be surprised of a minor 126, 7 or a 130 or at least a 30 build in the v12 series.
There hasn’t been a java release in some time and as we approach the end of year we should see it.
There are no dotnet releases but I’d expect 10 to drop sooner rather than later.