The computing stuff rant thread

[MattH]

Every system I've used has had a "your password expires in X days, would you like to change it now?" type prompt when logging in. I wonder if there has been an "incident" where they've decided they need to do an immediate password change?

[Jaded]

I hate the way that Teams tiles things, so you never really get the whole video of someone participating, just bits of them, in a nice square, or other inappropriately shaped tile.

[barakta]

Every system I've used has had a "your password expires in X days, would you like to change it now?" type prompt when logging in. I wonder if there has been an "incident" where they've decided they need to do an immediate password change?

I've had the "your password needs changing in 5 days" before and this one IS old. I just need a bit of notice. I already log in early after UpdateTuesdays cos the machine invariably demands a reboot and gets less and less stable by the minute till it gets one.

I'm heading for a new machine, I'm constantly CPU-bound at 100%. I know from friends high in IT that Teams is an absolute resource hog which is requiring faster hardware updates cos the computers can't keep up with after 2-3 years which is where I am at.

[citoyen]

I hate the way that Teams tiles things, so you never really get the whole video of someone participating, just bits of them, in a nice square, or other inappropriately shaped tile.

I always find that amusing rather than annoying.

[ian]

I still rejoice at the time my computer declared that it would 'restart in 5 mins' with no option to stop it. Because it wanted to install an entire OS update. That was about 4GB. Over hotel wifi. Hotel conference room wifi. Hotel conference room wifi in Vietnam.


This might have been an inconvenience were I not at the time just taking the podium to commence a 45-minute presentation to ~700 people.


Big shout out to the former mothership's IT team for overriding the perfect sensible MacOS software update that will cheerfully do this kind of thing while you sleep with a 'managed service' that deemed an entire OS update had to happen right there and then.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Every system I've used has had a "your password expires in X days, would you like to change it now?" type prompt when logging in. I wonder if there has been an "incident" where they've decided they need to do an immediate password change?

I've had the "your password needs changing in 5 days" before and this one IS old. I just need a bit of notice. I already log in early after UpdateTuesdays cos the machine invariably demands a reboot and gets less and less stable by the minute till it gets one.

Ah. So you had a bit of notice. Five days of notice. That's different then.

[barakta]

No, sorry. In the past I've had 5 days notice.

This time, no notice, just the sudden demand during a random logout which we do everytime we leave our desk. So massively disruptive.

[MattH]

I still rejoice at the time my computer declared that it would 'restart in 5 mins' with no option to stop it. Because it wanted to install an entire OS update. That was about 4GB. Over hotel wifi. Hotel conference room wifi. Hotel conference room wifi in Vietnam.

I've had a similar experience, though it was just doing a demonstration to an important potential customer that had taken months to set up rather than standing up at a conference. Got up in the morning, fired up the laptop to check all was OK, it insisted on doing an update. Left it updating whilst I had breakfast, it finally finished as the taxi arrived. But the demonstration was running inside a VM, and the update had broken the networking in VirtualBox. So I had to fix that. The salesman I was with literally guided me to the taxi waiting outside, and dealt with getting us to the customer, and booking us in, whilst I was carrying the open laptop fixing the demo. Got it running just as the customer met us in their reception.
I hate Microsoft.

[chopstick]

My workplace is a big Teams user but the nature of my job means that my usage is minimal.  I pretty much only use it for messaging and audio/video calls (usually one-to-one or two).  When I first "fired up" new Teams, I couldn't immediately see the online status of my colleagues and found it easier to slide the switch back to old Teams than to try to work out how to make new Teams work the way I wanted it to.

We still have to use Sharepoint/OneCloud/Teams for document management/storage but a lot of the staff don't know the difference between this and networked shared drives - and they see any folder in their file browser as a unique physical location (just like it was when they learnt how to use a computer) - and they end up saving a lot of stuff on their local machines because they can't manage the confusion caused by the apparent duplication of folders and files in the "shared areas".  I have to admit that when I started the job, I found it confusing and a hurdle to overcome to make sense of it - it needed a long session watching Micro$hit training videos - how do they manage to make them so fecking irritating?

[barakta]

Today I had a Teams incoming call where I could hear the speaker say hi but then his sound cut out and the captions weren't picking him up. No idea why, he ended up hanging up and redialing. Not helpful when talking to a stranger and already anxious sounding (him).

Also, we've discovered with the NewShittierTeams that if the recipient of an invite doesn't accept it, the invite doesn't show up in their calendar. Given this is how we do 90% of student appointments, and most don't accept even if we nag them to, this is A PROBLEM.

Dear Microsoft, Stop Fucking About FFS!

[Mr Larrington]

Someone* has snuck some HCT** trailers into Euro Truck Simulator 2 which are popping up where they ent supposed to be***.  And I can’t find their origin.  Own up!  'oodunnit?

* Possibly me…
** No idea what this stands for but it’s shorthand for “two full-length trailers connected with a dolly”
*** Places other than Finland, basically

[Mr Larrington]

Now attend, Brazilian halfwits!  It was blindingly obvious that those road templates were going to disappear at some point because they were part of a special Christmas wossname.  And now they HAVE disappeared.  Which means that as of today your map mod no longer works.  And it’s not as if the game publisher sprung this as a surprise coz they put a notice in the game saying the said Christmas wossname was being extended until midnight yesterday UTC.

No excuses sort it out u muppets 

[FifeingEejit]

Today I had a Teams incoming call where I could hear the speaker say hi but then his sound cut out and the captions weren't picking him up. No idea why, he ended up hanging up and redialing. Not helpful when talking to a stranger and already anxious sounding (him).

Also, we've discovered with the NewShittierTeams that if the recipient of an invite doesn't accept it, the invite doesn't show up in their calendar. Given this is how we do 90% of student appointments, and most don't accept even if we nag them to, this is A PROBLEM.

Dear Microsoft, Stop Fucking About FFS!

The tighter integration with outlook is really messing us up too, chose to dismiss the 5 min reminder ha well you're not getting a notification on 0 mins are you... ffs

Sent from my IV2201 using Tapatalk

[barakta]

Ah, that might explain why I'm not getting the reminders either.

FUCKSAKE Microsoft. It's like they never see how users use it.

I can't see how to make Teams do multiple reminders which would be handy.

[barakta]

Laptop has started bouncing all its USB devices at random, during teams calls. So I lose sound, monitors, keyboard/mouse as well as Internet.

It then started doing it after calls when just in a word doc.

I've rebooted twice this morning, losing my concentration on work. I can't face going back to it cos i swear I'll throw the entire laptop out of the window if it does it again.

Feels like it is installing updates which destabilise it. It takes ages with the spinnig balls to shut down and come up again.

This is the computer equivalent of someone picking up papers i am writing on, and throwing them around the room so I have to pick them up, reorganise and work out where I was.

I don't have the mental energy for this today.

[Kim]

I've said many times, Windows will never be ready for the desktop until they do something about the dreadful update mechanism...

[TheLurker]

I've said many times, Windows will never be ready for the desktop. until they do something about the dreadful update mechanism...

Joking aside.  It wasn't too bad in the before (subscription model) times when it was possible to pick and choose updates so that you only took the security related ones and could leave the other crap festering on their servers.

[Mr Larrington]

iOS mail, with your strange deletion of all but four messages from that folder (containing more than ten years of daily bulletins from El Reg) and subsequent downloading them again you are confusing us.  Please to be not doing it again and stop being shit.

[JonBuoy]

Big migration thing happened with the work IT systems over the weekend.  As predicted most systems are broken this morning.  Teams wouldn't fire up on my new laptop so I raised a support ticket not expecting to get a response for ages.  To my surprise it wasn't long before I received an email (they still work) telling me that the head IT migration honcho had sent me a message...on Teams 

[Mr Larrington]

Would whichever benighted piece of software responsible for that terrible – and non-functional – mashup of the Pink Fairies “I Might Be Lying” and Creedence's “Who'll Stop The Rain” kindly cease the trait?

[Mr Larrington]

OK, Inkscape, riddle me this.  I copy a wossname from a .svg file and paste it into paint.net.  On arrival a vertical strip two or three pixels wide has unaccountably migrated from the far right end to the far left.  It's just enough to be noticeable.  Why?

[Jaded]

It is to balance out Lee Anderson.

[Mr Larrington]

It isn’t working then.

[woollypigs]

and who had the brilliant idea when you want to join a call with NewShittierTeams but you only got the ID# and magic word, that you need to go into NewShittierTeams calendar, to find a button that says call and you can then enter that ID# ...

Just create a button, on the "frontpage/homething/orwhateveryoucallitthisweek" that say call and there you can use the option to dial someone in your team, in your address book or the ID# you have been given, wouldn't that be an nice and easy way?

[Kim]

"netsh interfeace" isn't a valid windows command, even though it ought to be under TBAGO rules