Apparently Win 10, which our desktop is, does not play nicely on housenets with Win 7…it really doesn’t play well with lower levels of Windows, but it doesn’t even talk nicely to 7. It wants a user name (which could be, oh, let us see, computer a, computer b, or some new one specific to the net—3 variables to guess) and a password, which we figure SHOULD match the user name, except that this COULD refer to the target computer, OR the password of the group, or the individual password of the originating computer) another 3 variables. Are we calculating the variables, friends? Plus are we considering the possibility of a keying error in one try or another? Win 10 wants you to link directly, not by housenet, but you’re still stuck. Oh, and if you’ve ever had a housenet created by a ‘dead’ computer, you have to go into REGEDIT and try to kill it from there, but you must do that on every one of, oh, 3-5 machines, some of which are like, printers, with no regedit, and fix it there and get it offline before, at computer speed, it can resurrect that former network, which persists like a movie zombie.
Maddening. We finally have one of ours talking to another, but not talking to the ‘central’ machine of the network…and we still don’t know the answers to all or any of the above. I have NEVER seen such a bollixed-up launch of a product as this, which reaches backward in its history to really screw things up which it is not even supposed to mess with.
Oh, Windows networking …
I discovered by a lot of trial and error, a few months ago, that the network password for my Win10 desktop is neither the local password the machine had when it was running Win7, nor my current Microsoft Account password, but the otherwise obsolete password I was using for the Microsoft account when I first upgraded. Is that helpful at all?
another reason to avoid Windows 10……
We figured out a few weeks ago that we had to be sure that the network was marked as a private network, which one does by telling W10 to allow other computers on the network to see the device. That simple. But not intuitive to someone who’s been messing about with computers since DOS. We also use a Home Group, but I’m not sure it does anything except share music. And the password and user name our setup wants is a valid user name password combo for the computer that you are trying to access. So even if I’m logged onto my work computer, for example, and I want to access from my other laptop, I have to enter the same user name and password that is already logged into the work computer. W10 does not seem to think it odd that a user is logged in twice.
If you DID set up a Microsoft account when installing W10, what ellarien mentioned above may be useful. I didn’t setup MS accounts on anything but the first W10 installation; the others are strictly using local accounts.
Good luck. There was some hair-pulling and teeth-gnashing involved in being sure I could see and access ALL the devices on the network, but right now I seem to be winning.
You have it right: Win 10 doesn’t like Win 7. And it is hard/next to impossible to set up a home network and share things like printers, with computers that run different versions of Windows. But Win 7 is nicer about it than Win 10.
It has gotten to the point where normal everyday home users need an IT staff on retainer.
Is it any wonder I got off that train a decade ago? It pains me to read of all the difficulties you all are having–continuously.
I want to get my mom a new computer; her laptop dates back to 2007 or so and is dying of senility. I will do my damnedest to get her a laptop with Win7, because I do not want to inflict the Mad Hatter that is Win10 on her without being able to personally hold her hand (or have my bro, who is IT, do so) while she gets used to it.
Windows 10 does not play nice. Period. Windows 10 has a built in ball bat that goes after the kneecaps of older versions of Windows. It’s called business strategy.
Perhaps this page from Windows Central may help:
How to set up and manage Windows 10 HomeGroup on a local network
Though it says, “HomeGroup is only available on Windows 7, Windows 8.x, and Windows 10, which means that you won’t be able to connect any Windows XP and Windows Vista machines.”
Personally, I upgraded to Win 10 on my work machine, and then rolled back to Win 8.1 because I didn’t like it.
That’s supposed to be the “easy” way to do it? Oy.
I just use password-protected network shares, which I find much more flexible and easier to set up — and they can talk to my Android and Linux devices as well. But I’m the only user on my local network, which simplifies things.
ditto for me, as I have an Android, an iPad, several PCs running different flavors of Winders…..so, in order to make them work and play nice together, I don’t use the “Homegroup” quite the way Microsoft thinks I should. As long as it works, I don’t care what Microsoft thinks.
Laughing with a pained look. Around 2007 or 2009, my stove/oven quit working for no apparent reason. I called a repairman. Nothing was wrong with the low-tech hardware, the parts that made it a stovetop and oven combo; it was the computer controller board that had gone bust. Attempts by me and by the repairman to locate a replacement part or used part for the appliance, which had been put in by the previous owners, were a no-go; the part was over 10 years old and therefore non-existent, unless one could luck onto a used one. I had to replace the oven/stove with a new one. I could not find any unit that did not have a computer circuit board and readout to run it.I know just how that fictitious/hypothetical Englishman must have felt. My oven/stove is now around 8 to 10 years old and has two quirks and runs on a circuit board because, oh, simply everyone must have them, you know. I really hope it continues to work until I move.
That said, I could very much wish for a handy electronic clipboard/notepad to put on my refrigerator, just so I can scribble in a grocery list, have it convert the handwriting to text, and save it or print it so I could take it with me to the store. My cell phone is too small to be of much use to me for that, and I don’t want to carry an expensive and eminently, imminently stealable iPad around in the store. (I’m thinking of experimenting with my cheaper Kindle/Fire tablet for that, but so far have only used printouts or the old-fashioned handwritten list.) What might be idal is an e-paper / e-ink sheet, perhaps which one could roll up (a scroll?) as a small or large tablet/notepad. Something easy to write notes on and cheap enough that no one wants to steal it. That technology is still around the corner, not here yet, but it sure would be useful for the quick notes we all use, grocery lists, to-do lists, and so on.
I use ColorNote for shopping lists on my phone. It’s very well-designed and very useful.
You can easily display the list full screen and check off items while you shop. If you sort by status then the checked-off items drop down the list and the items you still need are at the top.
If you make a checklist for each store, or for each kind of shopping, then after a while you build up a list of the things you usually buy. Then you can just look down the list of checked-off items and uncheck the ones the need to shop for on the next shopping trip.
The app is free. They charge for their online sync service, but it’s not necessary if you only want to use it on one device.
Nice. Thank you. Out of Milk is a more specialized app that can read bar codes. Both allow voice input.
I’m pleased so far with Google Fi and my Nexus 5X. I expect it to end up under $23/month, not counting phone or data. You pay data in advance, but then unused data is refunded, so if you buy $20 of data, you have 20GB, but if you don’t use it, your next bill is refunded down to about $23, $20 plus fees; a second phone is $15.
You can turn off data and just have it use WiFi, though some things won’t work without a data connection. The Nexus was $250, which could have been paid by the month at no interest; the $200 Nexus with less memory is apparently never in stock and a bad experience anyway.
Thanks so much for the how-to. One of our problem is a dead computer which started the last homegroup. It’s become our resident ghost, and no matter what we do we’re confronted with ‘join network’ for this dead computer. I understand if we go into regedit and replace the …\currentversion\homegroup\uis statuskey [number] with 0x00000004 it will lay the ghost for good, but you have to do it on each computer (regedit makes me real nervous) and shut it down fast before the ghost reinfects it.
Thank you for the tea and sympathy, and assist. We finally discovered the magic phrase Windows was too stupid or too stubbornly locked in its own language-set to use: “Destination computer.” When you are sending a file, you input the computer name/user name, then the password of the DESTINATION COMPUTER. There is nothing on the DC to tell it you are a friendly, nothing resident anywhere we can figure, and this situation, in the words of Tantor the elephant, ‘looks qwethionable to me…’ but hey, we hope not to have electronic gatecrashers after our grocery lists.
1.) open a “dos” window (cmd.exe) on Windows 10. (Type “cmd” into the search thing, or press Windows key and type cmd and press Enter when it shows you “command prompt” as the best match.)
2.) Type “cmdkey /?” <– this will show you the options for this little thing that saves passwords. .
Basically, you need to input the computer name and the user name of the TARGET (destination) computer, and enter your password for logging on to that computer. (If you don't have a password on it, you're NOT going to log on. If nothing else, create an account just for this.) So, for the sake of discussion here, if "central" is the name of the central computer, and the username is CJ, then:
3.) In that same "dos" window:
cmdkey /add:central /user:central\CJ /pass
4.) Enter your password for that account on that computer.
5.) Now, to connect to that computer’s “Stuff” share, and assign it a drive letter of “S:”
net use S: \\central\Stuff /persistent:yes
Now, your local computer will automatically recreate the S: drive whenever you log on to it. Oh, and you get to do this for each account you log on to that local computer with. 🙂
This is all basic Windows networking. What’s different these days is that Windows has gotten fussier than it used to be about connectivity, in an attempt to protect us from ourselves.
Wow, thanks for that. I’ve been using Windows since before it had a number, and I tend to prefer the command line to gui, (I have the cmd window pinned to my taskbar, but I mostly work in xterms) and I’ve never known that command existed.
I live in the PowerShell command line. (It’s replaced cmd.exe for me.) There’s almost always a better way to do things at the command line. And Windows networking is a perfect example of a Windows feature that you can more easily manipulate and control with the command line.
I have that issue when connecting with Win10 to a Windows2K box, over the local network. In my case, it involves using the login name and password for the Win2K box. Win10 to WinXP works without any requests, for login details.
CJ, can you check and see if your spam blocker ate a post of mine yesterday? I had suggested using the user name and log in for the computer you are trying to connect to, but I don’t see it here. Thanks.
We all have the the ‘internet of things’ look forward to – smart household appliances connected to a home network.
Hilarious article in the Guardian:
English man spends 11 hours trying to make cup of tea with Wi-Fi kettle
“Well the kettle is back online and responding to voice control, but now we’re eating dinner in dark while lights download a firmware update.”
OMG, that’s funny!
@CJ – I’d posted a comment about a prior oven/stove on which illustrated the computerized tea kettle problem in real life. I’d thought the post took, but now I don’t see it. Did it get eaten by the spam filter -ivore, or was it somehow too negative? Just wondering, thanks.
Neither. It’s just not there. Curious.
Is there a “monopolization limit” on how many posts one can make in one thread and/or one day?
Thank you! Every once in a while, I post a reply and it disappears like that. I try not to post more than two replies in sequence to avoid any flooding limit. As far as I know, I’m not clicking Preview instead of Post Reply, but that would seem to be the most likely explanation. Huh, well, no great loss, I was just wondering. I’ve also wondered if it might coincide with you, CJ, editing or doing WordPress maintenance or backups. So, for now, I’ll still go on the theory it’s human error, somehow getting the Preview when I think I’ve selected Post Reply. ::shrugs:: Thanks for checking and for the explanation. 🙂
I had a long confusing discussion with an English friend about getting her a kettle. I tried a common stainless steel whistling kettle. Nope. A kitschy version? Nope. What she meant by a kettle was a hot water dispenser. (I just use a cheap coffee maker since I don’t like my tea scalding.)
One recent Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack set a record of 1 terabit per second, if I’m recalling correctly. Terabyte, maybe. The botnet was entirely composed of Internet of Things (IoT) appliances, which typically have poor security. Reportedly, two DDoS botnet systems are warring over collection the most IoT appliances, so they think future DDoS attacks may be worse.
Good grief, the robots are being subverted. Doom is nigh.
Given I have difficulty with some of this emotional ****: if one doesn’t win because most people really, really don’t like one, and one claims instead it was “rigged”, does that mean one really doesn’t believe in democracy? Just wonderin’.
If ‘one’ is a blustering, self-centered, misogynistic frat boy who never grew up – an entitled 1%-er bully who has treated his employees like **** his whole life, and thinks that taxes are only for the little people – then one probably doesn’t believe in democracy in the first place, only in manipulating people for one’s own advantage.
No, I was going to ask what you thought about the “other”, but realize that it would just drag me into a political discussion of which I want no part…….
@Paul: looking at it from the outside, getting information from various different sources, this seems obvious. One thing has become clear to me: the danger to any democracy of letting the media become too much consolidated in the hands of a few very rich and powerful people/corporations; and not having any kind of rule where things presented as news and facts need to be fact-checked (and not just weaseled out of checking the reported so-called facts by only writing “someone said x”- they also need to tell their readers/viewers if x is true). People get attached to a source of news, and from what I’m seeing the news sources are mostly very biased and/or committed to a kind of false “he said/she said” balance. Instead of presenting their audience with clear and factual information on which to base their choice, they are trying to steer that choice, which gives demagogues a platform. Considering a democracy depends on a well-informed populace, capable of making reasoned choices, I find that rather alarming.
Another alarming thing, from the viewpoint of a European, is how far the USA already seems to be on the path to becoming an oligarchy instead of a democracy. Maybe not at the level of many small local elections, but at the state and especially national levels it’s clear that with no to very little checks on monopolies and monopsonies, no sort of “share the wealth and the responsibility for society as a whole” (tax)rule for rich people and companies, and allowing unlimited amounts of money to be given to politicians/campaigns both by rich people and by companies (legal bribery!), that the large commercial interests and richest people are having a disproportionate say both in what information the voters are seeing, and what choices the politicians are presenting them with.
I’m trying to steer clear of CJ’s no politics rule here by avoiding the present candidates. But I am wondering how the people in the USA could let their political system become so polarised, to the point where the country is clearly being run for the profit of the few, instead of to the benefit of all. Where rhetoric trumps facts, and “rooting for one’s team” is more important than making rational well-informed choices. And more importantly, what can be done to solve that, before enough of the not-wealthy populace becomes disaffected enough to give the USA their very own Bastille day!
We’ve got our own demagogues in Europe, and in too many countries there are too many people willing to listen to them. We tend to copy trends from the USA, including letting the divide between rich and poor grow these last few decades, but I really hope we can learn from what is going on over there now, before we get into a similar mess. And the way the media is becoming ever more concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy owners/corporations seems to me to be a clear danger signal; as well as the kind of online information filtering that happens with Google and others, where people are only presented with the kind of news that fits into their present pattern so they live in separate “bubbles”, with completely different takes on things, hardly realizing that life for the other half looks very different.
@Hanneke, If you can find it, read Toffler’s 1971 “Future Shock”. His fundamental thesis is the adaptability of humans to change is limited, over the centuries the rate of change has speeded up to a point people and cultures cannot cope. A lot of what we’re seeing is people trying to force a present they can’t cope with into an old pattern they could cope with. Ask them if they think one can “turn back the clock” and they’ll say one can’t, but they’re so “strung out” with the present, that’s the only “out” they can see.
Back in the “good old days” when PBS was getting started, their news shows involved journalists who discussed issues calmly and impartially. Impartiality isn’t what partisans want, but one could understand things better. These days “fairness” has devolved to bringing on spokesmen from each side and letting them sling “talking points” back and forth. Heard all those before, it’s not helpful.
One of our respectable politicians said yesterday it’ll take us decades to recover from this. Probably so.
“Shocking Truth: 50% of Americans are Below Average”, so said a tabloid I once saw while in a supermarket checkout line. I “get” statistics and variability, in “adaptability to change”, intelligence, competency, skills of all sorts, including diplomacy. But I don’t get this antipathy to “elites”. A biopsy of a spot on my ear has just been identified as a Basal-cell Carcinoma. I’m not going to have Billy Bob down the street remove it! I’m going to a surgeon for a “Mohs” surgery. I’d say a surgeon is the epitome of an elite. I don’t get the problem with having people with the best specialized abilities in charge of things that require their skills.
As one distinguished American economist and political commentator likes to say, if one candidate said “The earth is flat”, and the other said “The earth is round”, the story in the media would be “Candidates differ on the shape of the earth”.
Please delete if I’m over the line here, CJ.
One party has empowered some media and endorsed that media. With their seats Gerrymandered to be party-safe, any individual who doesn’t toe the media line can be challenged within the party with no danger of losing the seat. And the line is now being drawn by the billionaires running the media. The party itself has lost control.
Win10: 2-3 weeks ago, my Win10 laptop at work started uo with a black screen, mouse showing but nothing else. Nothing I did helped, restarting, nothing. I couldn’t even do the bios start with F11 or whateverit is that used to flash by at the start, because that startup screen didn’t show either. It had downloaded an update the evening before, and I’d patiently waited for it to finish and shutdown before I disconnected to put it in my locker. After a while my colleague said she’d had the same problem, but if I just left it on and waited, in an hour or so it would probably work again. So I borrowed a laptop from someone else and lo and behold, by lunchtime mine had started up and worked normally.
A day later my laptop at home did the same. When that stated updating in the evening, I decided to leave it on for the night, in case I’d shut the other one down too early. It still did the same thing upon restarting the next morning: I looked at a black screen for an hour before I could start working.
Luckily I’ve got flexible hours, but needing to work late because my boss made us responsible for our own computers (personal laptops instead of company PCs) and Win10 is a bear about updating is not pleasant!
What is much worse, is that a Win10 update had apparently reset all my privacy settings!
I’d been very careful when switching to Win10, to put all the settings on private, no you may not send anything I do to Microsoft, no you may not suggest things to me, no you may not backup to OneDrive, no I do not want to use Edge instead of IE, no I’ve got my own antivirus etc.
A week after the black-screen update I checked these settings, and they were all set to ON! It had installed Edge and put it in the task bar, installed Outlook, MSN, and other stuff I’d told it I don’t need or want, and it had changed ALL my NO setting under Privacy to YES!
I immediately changed them all back again, and got Edge off my taskbar (my virtual workplace doesn’t work well on that yet) but haven’t managed to clear out the rest of the unwanted mess yet.
I finally figured out how to individually set *all the Wifi networks it can see* to data-limited, so it doesn’t start doenloading any more updates on its own.
Now I can do the updating manually once a week, when I have time to deal with the aftermath.
If you’re running Win10 and don’t want Microsoft to see everything you do, I’d urge you to regularly check your privacy settings after a big update, as apparently that can reset them to the default Open settings. How Microsoft can think this is a good idea, especially on laptops sold outside the USA, I can’t fathom.
I work for the local council, i.e. the goverment, and could be working with people’s privacy-sensitive information. We have to work on our own laptops since the council discontinued company PCs. The idea that my laptop can decide on its own (after I told it not to!) that it would be a good idea to send every keystroke to a multinational company in another country is both absurd and horrific!
@Paul: from an american point of view, I can say that the “I didn’t win, therefore it’s rigged, let’s get them!” argument is a ploy by a particular candidate whose mental and emotional stability I doubt more than any US candidate I’ve ever seen. Likewise, the ploy by the same candidate that “Those 2nd Amendment people” could “take care of that problem” (the opposing candidate).
Normally, I would be fine with it if the candidate I didnt vote for wins. I figure that was who the majority voted for and the winner will still do OK, even though it wasn’t my preferred choice. I figure the winner, the opposition, is still basically OK.
In this particular case, I would be OK with all but one of the candidates winning, and that one, I think is seriously so unstable as to be dangerous if elected. One hopes if he is not elected, he will not then cause trboule out of a tantrum or pique. But IMHO, he doesn not belong in any elected (or appointed) office, government or perhaps business. (And unlike him, I wish nothing worse for him than that he’d get the psych or medical help he needs.)
A week or two ago, I;d heard through some media scomment that former Pres. Carter had written an article claiming that the US is no longer a democracy, but is now already an oligarchy, ruled at the top by a few elie.
My only comment on the election upcoming? I am way past ready for it to be over and done with. this is the worst travesty of the processs I’ve seen. I know who I will voe for, but if there were a better choice, I would be happier with that person. I only hope that despite things, there will be positive change to solve the real problems within our nation, and to work well with other nations, so things can improve, so problems can be solved.
In the past few years, I have found it very telling that our British (UK) cousins have had some very pointed and valid criticisms of how American democracy does and doesn’t work. when the country from which your country separated over such issues now has a better handle on things sometimes, though not always, it really points out that our american system has things that need to be worked out, in order to be a better democracy or republic. And I’m just as glad that the UK can point out such things as a friendly ally. That is also needed. (They have recedntly had their own serious problems, so none of us are immune or perfect; we’re all working on it.)
I don’t know if it’s a failing on my part, that all the sites I regularly visit seem to have more or less the same opinion of this year’s US political race (Dumpster fire, caused by one specific candidate). All those folks from outside the US, all I can offer is the same apology I did when we were abroad in 2005: “Yes, our politics are weird, and the politicians frequently bear a closer resemblance to a luchador than to an actual professional servant of the people.”
I’ve been carefully ignoring the Win10 travails -“la,la,la,la” but you all started something. My Win10 version decided to sua sponte “upgrade” this morning. Since I know nothing, nothing! about computers, even with such savvy listmates, I carefully followed everyone’s instructions and suggestions and the websites and tra la di da and went out to lunch. Post-prandial results were not encouraging. Nor did Win10 respond to profanity and base utterances in several real and imagined languages.
Intrigued by the the to-do, one of the cats pirouetted across each key she could reach. OFF went the computer. If I said I handled this in an adult and mature manner, you’d laugh, so, WhatEv. I did poke at the power button. Guess what’s working?
PS on the politics: JUST DON’T WATCH. PLEASE VOTE.
It seems to me there is a lesson to be learned, and we’d best learn it toot-sweet! We forgot to be Americans first, so now we must make a determined effort to put Humpty-Dumpty back together again. I certainly will vote–haven’t not in half a century–but as important as this election is, it’s not in itself the most important thing right now. How we got here and how we get away is!
Definitely. My one political statement of the whole election, which I hope will be taken soberly and without comment: vote.