XPost: alt.comp.os.windows-11

More complaints about win11.

1) When you click on the date/time in the systray, it still opens up
this months calendar, but the time is no longer there. It used to be
there in LARGE NUMBERS, and I used that all the time, once or more a
night.

It took up little space but instead they've used a lot of space for notifications, even when there are none, and for this silly thing called
Focus, from some diy psychology book that said if you read the word
Focus, you will focus.

2) The day of the week is not in the systray and there is no room to put
it there, because it has to go in one of the two lines and that makes
the line wider and takes space from the already limited width of the
task bar. In win10, I have the day of the week in the middle of 3 lines.

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XPost: alt.comp.os.windows-11

On Thu, 2/13/2025 5:02 PM, micky wrote:

More complaints about win11.

1) When you click on the date/time in the systray, it still opens up
this months calendar, but the time is no longer there. It used to be
there in LARGE NUMBERS, and I used that all the time, once or more a
night.

It took up little space but instead they've used a lot of space for notifications, even when there are none, and for this silly thing called Focus, from some diy psychology book that said if you read the word
Focus, you will focus.

2) The day of the week is not in the systray and there is no room to put
it there, because it has to go in one of the two lines and that makes
the line wider and takes space from the already limited width of the
task bar. In win10, I have the day of the week in the middle of 3 lines.

Mine has the weekday, because I put it there.

[Picture]

https://i.postimg.cc/W4mL0RBf/W11time.gif

Paul

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XPost: alt.comp.os.windows-11

In alt.comp.os.windows-10, on Fri, 14 Feb 2025 05:53:03 -0500, Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> wrote:

On Thu, 2/13/2025 5:02 PM, micky wrote:

More complaints about win11.

1) When you click on the date/time in the systray, it still opens up
this months calendar, but the time is no longer there. It used to be
there in LARGE NUMBERS, and I used that all the time, once or more a
night.

It took up little space but instead they've used a lot of space for
notifications, even when there are none, and for this silly thing called
Focus, from some diy psychology book that said if you reed** the word
Focus, you will focus. **Changed fror read, where the tense is ambiguous. >>
2) The day of the week is not in the systray and there is no room to put
it there, because it has to go in one of the two lines and that makes
the line wider and takes space from the already limited width of the
task bar. In win10, I have the day of the week in the middle of 3 lines.

Mine has the weekday, because I put it there.

[Picture]

https://i.postimg.cc/W4mL0RBf/W11time.gif

Yes, I referred to that in my complaint 2 above. Adding the day of the
week adds 4 or 5 characters to the width of the date field, taking away
that much width from the rest of the taskbar, where it is needed for
programs. Also when I did it temporarily, the small print was much
harder to read than in my win10 laptop with the same size screen which
has 3 lines of date/time and the day of the week gets its own line in
the middle. I think the typeface was the same size, but being alone on
its own line makes it much easier to read.

YOu provided a very good gif, btw.

Paul

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XPost: alt.comp.os.windows-11

In alt.comp.os.windows-11, on Thu, 13 Feb 2025 17:02:58 -0500, micky <NONONOmisc07@fmguy.com> wrote:

More complaints about win11.

1) When you click on the date/time in the systray, it still opens up
this months calendar, but the time is no longer there. It used to be
there in LARGE NUMBERS, and I used that all the time, once or more a
night.

ExporerPatcher fixed this, fwiw.

It took up little space but instead they've used a lot of space for >notifications, even when there are none, and for this silly thing called >Focus, from some diy psychology book that said if you read the word
Focus, you will focus.

2) The day of the week is not in the systray and there is no room to put
it there, because it has to go in one of the two lines and that makes
the line wider and takes space from the already limited width of the
task bar. In win10, I have the day of the week in the middle of 3 lines.

New complaints:

3)in Settings, until 11, there was a list of file types and protocols,
if for example you changed web browsers or email programs, you could go
down the list, look for any icon from the previous program, and thange
it to your new one. Took 5 or 10 second for each entry. now you have
to open each one. Much harder to find what you want to change and takes
much longer when you hit one of the right ones. Same thing for
defaults.

Why they changed from convenient to very, very inconvenient I can only
guess. My guess is to make it harder for people to stop using Edge as
their web browser.

4) Forte Agent and Eudora work without being installed, and all I've
had to do with every change of Windows is just copy all the tiles, but
this time Eudora won't send or receive mail (even though Agent still
does.)

5) Otoh, clicking on links in Agent no longer works, I will ask on the
Agent ng about this, unless someone here knows.

6) Installing Eudora has long been necessary if you want it in the list
of programss that mailto might send to, or if you want a stray .mbx file
to open Eudora, but my copy of the installer, used over and over again
since 2010, was blocked by "an administrator". I'm the only
administrator. I downloaded a new one from a trusted site and it too was blocked. A)Runing as administrator or B) changing permissions to give
myself total permision, or C) turning off UAC didn't help. Finally
installed by explicitly runing the 2010 version I used first, from a CMD
window opened as adminstrator. That worked fine, (Not my idea. Had to
google for the suggestion.)

7) If I don't open my preferred file manager early, maybe first, later I
can't open it at all. One or two other programs act like this too.

8) Used to be right-click in Taskbar and click on Open new toolbar, and QuickLaunch bar was listed there, Now it's just Other, and you have to
go find it or make it from scratch.

9) Erratic behaviour with my hard drive docks, though that could be the
problem of the docks themselves or even maybe a hard drive. Don't know
yet. Have to try them with a win10 computer.

And I've barely used it. Who knows how many problems I'll find later, or
I myself won't find because I don't try to use all the "features".

The windows writers have gone wacko. It is to be hoped that the men in
white coats will be coming soon.

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XPost: alt.comp.os.windows-11

In alt.comp.os.windows-10, on Fri, 21 Feb 2025 00:08:15 -0500, micky <NONONOmisc07@fmguy.com> wrote:

5) Otoh, clicking on links in Agent no longer works, I will ask on the >Agent ng about this, unless someone here knows.

This was an easy fix. The full file name for Firefox was wrong, but it
was wrong in this win10 computer also and yet it always worked fine.
Very strange. Instead of being a Program directory, the Agent Settings
showed it in users\username\appdata...! of all places.

7) If I don't open my preferred file manager early, maybe first, later I >can't open it at all. One or two other programs act like this too.

This seems to apply to Anvir Task Manager too. A verrry useful,
vavluable, free program.

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XPost: alt.comp.os.windows-11

On Fri, 2/21/2025 4:45 PM, micky wrote:

In alt.comp.os.windows-10, on Fri, 21 Feb 2025 00:08:15 -0500, micky <NONONOmisc07@fmguy.com> wrote:

5) Otoh, clicking on links in Agent no longer works, I will ask on the
Agent ng about this, unless someone here knows.

This was an easy fix. The full file name for Firefox was wrong, but it
was wrong in this win10 computer also and yet it always worked fine.
Very strange. Instead of being a Program directory, the Agent Settings showed it in users\username\appdata...! of all places.

7) If I don't open my preferred file manager early, maybe first, later I
can't open it at all. One or two other programs act like this too.

This seems to apply to Anvir Task Manager too. A verrry useful,
vavluable, free program.

But there is a story behind this.

In the old days, the OS didn't have security (Win98).

So what the developers used to do was, their program
was stored in Program Files, and they would store their
settings file next to the executable. See ? So neat and
tidy.

Then one day, Microsoft "did security", and it changed the
security on Program Files to "TrustedInstaller" account.
Suddenly, Micky could no longer write to the Program Files,
with naive techniques.

To help people like Micky, Microsoft invented "redirection"
for this issue. If Micky runs Forte Agent, and Forte Agent
tries to write the settings into the TrustedInstaller-controlled
folder, then the Microsoft OS redirects the writes to

users\username\appdata...

because that is a directory owned by username = Micky.

The next time the program is running, an attempt to read an
item from the TrustedInstaller-controlled folder, instead
reads it from that AppData location.

What you describe, makes perfect sense. To a security person.

Paul

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XPost: alt.comp.os.windows-11

On 2025-02-22 02:42, Paul wrote:

On Fri, 2/21/2025 4:45 PM, micky wrote:

In alt.comp.os.windows-10, on Fri, 21 Feb 2025 00:08:15 -0500, micky
<NONONOmisc07@fmguy.com> wrote:

Very strange. Instead of being a Program directory, the Agent Settings
showed it in users\username\appdata...! of all places.

But there is a story behind this.

In the old days, the OS didn't have security (Win98).

So what the developers used to do was, their program
was stored in Program Files, and they would store their
settings file next to the executable. See ? So neat and
tidy.

Then one day, Microsoft "did security", and it changed the
security on Program Files to "TrustedInstaller" account.
Suddenly, Micky could no longer write to the Program Files,
with naive techniques.

To help people like Micky, Microsoft invented "redirection"
for this issue. If Micky runs Forte Agent, and Forte Agent
tries to write the settings into the TrustedInstaller-controlled
folder, then the Microsoft OS redirects the writes to

users\username\appdata...

because that is a directory owned by username = Micky.

The next time the program is running, an attempt to read an
item from the TrustedInstaller-controlled folder, instead
reads it from that AppData location.

What you describe, makes perfect sense. To a security person.

Except that, strictly as written, it doesn't, does it? It's possible
Micky has copied it down incorrectly, but, as written, surely ...

users\username\appdata\etc

... wouldn't work? It should be either ...

C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\etc

... or, better ...

%SystemDrive%\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\etc

... which would cover the very rare occasions where Windows is installed
to a drive letter other than C:, or, better still, ...

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\etc

... which latter would cover the rather more common occurrence of
profiles not being kept in the standard location.

Micky, did you copy that down as is, verbatim, or was that your own abbreviation for what is actually there?

More generally, I don't trust Trusted Installer further than I could
throw him, and I get over his sort of obstructive crap in one of two ways:

1 On my 64-bit builds, I installed as much of the software as possible
under my own created directory ...

C:\Programs

... and also, to cover those programs where the developers had
hard-coded*, and therefore broken, either the program or its installer
so that this didn't work very well or at all, I also gave Administrators ownership and Full Control permissions of every file on the C: drive, so
that where Trusted Installer decided to be obstructive, I could simply
override it. (If anyone else decides to do this, back-up to an image
first, in case you do it wrong, and don't replace the existing
permissions on any one file or folder, ADD the Administrator having Full Control as an EXTRA permission.)

2 On my 32-Bit W7 build created to cover the need to keep an old
scanner going for which I can't get 64-Bit drivers (it's the only one I
have from which I can remove the lid to scan large documents in
sections), but which nevertheless has 32-Bit versions of all my everyday software installed so that I can do other work at the same time, I was
more adventurous. I still created ...

C:\Programs

... but, booted into another OS on the same PC so that the affected OS
wasn't running when I did this, also I copied the entire contents of ...

C:\Program Files

... into it, deleted the latter, and created a link of the same name
pointing to the former ...

mklink /d "C:\Program Files" C:\Programs

... and then changed the Registry key value appropriately ...

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion
ProgramFilesDir="C:\Programs"

Everything seems to work just fine with both methods.

*Hard-coding, instead of reading the appropriate values from the
environment, commonly used Windows locations is a far-too-common fault
among software developers, let alone script hacks. If I had a tenner
for every time in my life I've had to correct this, I'd be richer than I
am now. During my last few years at work, we had a massive influx of
contract programmers doing stuff for our project to move first from Win
3.1 over DECNet to W95 over TCP/IP, then in a later stage to W2k.
Nearly all of these contract programmers had hard-coded the location of
the Windows folder as ...

C:\Windows

... but the default in W2k was ...

C:\WinNT

... and so, unsurprisingly, nearly all of their programming fell over
when run in the new environment! Rrrrrrrr!

--

Fake news kills!

I may be contacted via the contact address given on my website:
www.macfh.co.uk

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XPost: alt.comp.os.windows-11

In alt.comp.os.windows-10, on Fri, 21 Feb 2025 20:25:07 -0700,
...w¡ñ§±¤ñ <winstonmvp@gmail.com> wrote:

micky wrote on 2/21/2025 2:45 PM:

In alt.comp.os.windows-10, on Fri, 21 Feb 2025 00:08:15 -0500, micky
<NONONOmisc07@fmguy.com> wrote:

5) Otoh, clicking on links in Agent no longer works, I will ask on the >>> Agent ng about this, unless someone here knows.

This was an easy fix. The full file name for Firefox was wrong, but it
was wrong in this win10 computer also and yet it always worked fine.
Very strange. Instead of being a Program directory, the Agent Settings
showed it in users\username\appdata...! of all places.

7) If I don't open my preferred file manager early, maybe first, later I >>> can't open it at all. One or two other programs act like this too.

This seems to apply to Anvir Task Manager too. A verrry useful,
vavluable, free program.

Paul explained the reason behind Trust Installer and respective user >permissions necessary for access and functionality, but the picture is a
bit larger.

Win11 and Win10(and Win10 updated to Win11) would treat Forte Agent's
path the same...when Agent was installed on a clean install of Win11 or >Win10.

The exception for Win10 and why it worked fine would/could only be
related to Win10 having been upgraded from Win7(and also Win10 upgraded
from Win7 and earlier from Vista).

Forte Agent had to be installed at one point in time to work in Windows

Not necessarily true => "Forte Agent and Eudora work without being

installed"

Right. That's what I like about them. I don't think I ever install
Forte Agent anymore, and Eudora reads and sends mail without being
installed, but it does eventually have to be installed if one wants to
be able to click on a Mailto link in a webpage or someplace. Also, I
can't remember if it has to be installed to click on a .mbx file (a
mailbox) that is not in the same folder as all the mbx files that the
program usually uses. I can't remember because after installation that
works too.

So Forte Agent worked fine in win11 just with copying, and other than
mailto and .mbx, so did Eudora. (The problem with installing Eudora was
the lack of Run-time programs that were already in my previous computer
when they were needed, nothing to do with windows security.)
.

Copying files from an earlier os(or even same os) would need to abide by
the security hardening and in this case the destination os Win11(or Win10)
- if not in the permission-ed location the impacted program(e.g. Agent)
can't complete its desired task.

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