The author is Alabama chief engineer for Crawford Broadcasting Co.
With the end of support for Windows 10 in the rearview mirror, I thought I’d spend a moment talking about what it means for everyone who is still on the operating system and about Windows update anomalies in general.
It is estimated that 40% of PCs still run Windows 10, and those users are going to have to go somewhere in order to keep their computers running current security patches and licensing. As I write, Apple has seen a 14% increase year to year in their sales, and Linux, which in most cases is not sold by a company but is more driven by the user community, is seeing a real uptick in usage as people are looking for alternatives.
The problem, as I see it, is that Microsoft has pivoted their default login to their operating system as needing their cloud services and internet.
I’m sure you have seen this while setting up the latest Windows 11 systems. You cannot easily create a local administrative account or a limited account without really jumping through hoops to do it.
During the initial install, you basically must have no internet available to the machine and do some command line work in order to have the system skip their “Out of the Box Experience” (OOBE, for short) to be able to create an account that is local to the computer.
Computer geeks have understood for a long time that the Microsoft Windows End User License Agreement (EULA) basically says that even though you paid nearly $200 for the license, you don’t “officially” own the software. This allows them to push security updates (as well as unnecessary ones) to your computer without your permission.
It’s also why after each of those updates you have to go back into the installed apps and remove Xbox, Skype, Teams and yet another Office installer (about 300 MB of space) if you don’t use or want them, even if you have removed them previously.
One way that I know Satan does exist is the fact that Microsoft Windows has a stranglehold on the PC operating system market. Of course, they aren’t the only software company that employs this type of behavior. Adobe went to a licensing structure several years ago instead of allowing you to buy their product outright and use it until it didn’t serve your needs any longer.
It’s been a trend for a while that you rent a service from companies and don’t really own anything. But when we put our logins, data and services in the cloud, what happens when the company that is “too big to fail” actually does? Maybe the failure won’t be financial (although it could be), but it could well be an infrastructure failure, as with a recent Amazon 15-hour DNS issue. Or a cloud company may send out a notice that a cost-benefit analysis indicates that the service a company requires to run its business is no longer going to be supported.
I’ve seen a general trend — in trade articles and among people I follow — suggesting that a number of companies now are being more strategic about what they do and don’t push to their cloud providers.
Interestingly, the price for hard drive storage has plummeted. A quick look at Newegg, an online computer hardware store, shows that a 28 TB enterprise hard drive is priced at $529. That is a little under $19 per terabyte of storage. Yet paying for and using that same amount of online storage has increased.
You would think that the two lines would track together. I’m not saying that there should be a 1:1 ratio or that there isn’t value in what the cloud service companies provide with all of their hardware and support staff, but I am saying that the 8 to 12 percent increase year over year for equivalent service is forcing some companies to evaluate just how useful the cloud is to their organizations.
I know you may be thinking, “Wow, I knew Todd was a little crazy and that he is also an open-source guy, but I didn’t know that he harbored this much resentment toward the computer establishment.”
The genesis of this article stemmed from something basic. In the past month, I’ve had several people ask me to look at their computers because the keyboard was acting weird and they couldn’t do anything meaningful as a result.
It turns out that in every case, the settings for the delay in repeating characters on their keyboards had been maxed out on the sliders that control those rates. What?
Obviously, if they had done it, these users would have known where to look to fix it, but they hadn’t done it; they had received an update on their computers.
It doesn’t help that Microsoft has been making it harder and harder to get to its Control Panel to handle settings like this. All of them were at the point of thinking their laptops were broken, but it turned out that a setting had been changed during an update.
If this happened to three people in my limited sphere, how many other people experienced it?
This isn’t a call to circle the wagons. At the end of the day, I know the reality of the computer world we live in, and we all have to make friends with Microsoft and other companies and get along in order to make our markets work. But Microsoft is moving slowly toward heat death. Apple is continually upgrading its software, forcing its hardware into obsolescence. The only operating system I’ve ever worked with that gives me some peace in all these areas is Linux.
Do you have an older computer around that Windows has passed by? Linux will work on it. Do you need a Network Attached Storage service on your local network? There are several Linux options that are easy to manage and will work on older hardware.
I’ve basically been using Fedora Linux for 20 years, and it has never broken on me whether by update or the file system itself. It just works. I could probably set it up for my 80-year-old mother and she’d have no issues navigating it.
In fact, as soon as I wrote those words about Linux, my blood pressure started to go back down and everything in my computer world seems more normal again.
This article originally appeared in Crawford Broadcasting’s “Local Oscillator” newsletter.
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