Dr. Phil's Dreamwidth Journal

Long time readers of this blog will know that I have used dinosaur applications for years. Office 95 was good enough to write in. I had a large base of documents and spreadsheets written. WHY must I switch versions of Office? Especially when they keep changing the damned document formats.

I used Office 2003 with the Office 2007 file extensions for some years now on my Windows XP machines, for compatibility with more modern documents. All the while still being able to use Office 95 as well in XP. Going to Windows 7 forced me to go to only Office 2003 on KATNISS, and Wendy's Windows 7 machines, ZEPPELIN and CAROUSEL, have Office 2010. And I have found an accommodation with the Word and Excel 97-2003 file versions. Then came Office 2013 on OUEST, the first university machine they've ever given me.

Yes, files are still compatible. But what the hell is with this obnoxious animation, which causes the screen to pseudo-scroll herky-jerky? Worse, I couldn't even turn the damned thing off.

Today I finally tried again, using Google on "office 2013 turn off animations" and lo-and-behold, success:

This week, Rafael has published the fix in his post Disabling animations in Office 2013, which still works in the currently-available Public Preview version of Office 2013. It’s available as a downloadable registry tweak which you can easily install. But the entry within looks like so:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\Graphics]
"DisableAnimations"=dword:00000001

To see the effect, you’ll need to reboot your computer.

To reverse the effect, change the value of the added DWORD to its default of 0.

I hate crap like that. You shouldn't need a Registry hack just to turn off some goddamned Microsoft Office "feature" that crept in through the pet door in the middle of the night and vomited on the new carpeting.

But further down someone else was more sensible:

kinghunter77 on Jun 23, 2013

Another way to turn off animations in Office 2013, which does NOT involve going into the registry, is as follows (quoted from Excel 2013 built-in help):

"Turn off Office animations

Office 2013 is the first release to use hardware acceleration throughout the user experience to deliver beautiful, fluid animations. But if you use your computer without a display or just prefer to block unnecessary animations, you have the choice to turn them off.

1.Open the Ease of Access Center (shown below) by pressing the Windows logo key + U.

2.Under Explore all settings, click Use the computer without a display.

3.Under Adjust time limits and flashing visuals, click Turn off all unnecessary animations (when possible).

4.Click OK."

Wait, this was in Excel 2013 Help?

I was so busy trying to find an Options screen or something, like every other version, that I'm not sure I tried Help. Of course, Help is no long Help. It is not sitting there on the right-hand pull-down menu. I think Help is on the FILE tab page in Word 2010. In Office 2013, you just have to know to click on the anemic grey "?" in the upper right-hand corner where no one ever looks.

But as to why I couldn't find a simple "turn off animations" checkbox, I was looking in the wrong place. Silly me, why should I use it as an option in Word 2013 or Excel 2013. It is completely OBVIOUS even to the most casual observer, that I should go to the section to "Optimize for blindness." (eye-rolls)

Really, Microsoft? That's where you put the fucking toggle? Under BLINDNESS?

Windows-U:




And hey, it works!

Wow, now I can use Word 2013 and Excel 2013 without feeling seasick. And, it makes me a teeny-tiny bit more optimistic about Office 365, which we will have to use in 2016 in order to get campus e-mail. Because after using Word 95 for decades, out of Office 95, Office 97, Office 2003 -- then Office 2010 on Wendy's machines -- I _REALLY_ hated using Office 2013 on the university's laptop OUEST at work. Really. Hated.

I can't fix how the screens work, because I don't "own" this machine, and they've got some settings locked down tight. Ugh. I suppose this is why I happily owned my own machines for 22 years, even though it was obnoxious that I had to spend my own meager part-time teaching money for THEIR work.

Now, if only I could get MathType to truly support their older equations, so that Word doesn't blow up if I double click on an old equation block -- and have to retype the stupid thing...

Dr. Phil

Posted on Dreamwidth
Crossposted on LiveJournal

When I shut down ZEPPELIN at home Tuesday night, there were five updates to Windows 7. So I knew it would have to do some updating when it booted Wednesday evening. Applied 3912 updates, not all that many, considering how long it was updating the downloads last night.

And then you get to boot and Windows pauses to Configure your updates -- and then you get to go to work. Right? Isn't that why you paid money for a computer? To do work? And not just update some company's software?

Grrr...

ZEPPELIN was being really pokey, which happens because you have no good way of telling what the Sam Hell is going on in the background tasks. I had planned to post the Quiz 6 solutions for both classes this afternoon, but as I wrote, I deferred doing anything serious while OUEST was on battery (DW) (LJ) due to the power issues at work.

I had to create two JPEGs from screenshots for the PHYS-1070 Quiz 6 and a PDF for the PHYS-2070 Quiz 6 -- all of this complicated by having to work in both Windows 7 and editing my webpages in Windows NT4 in a virtual machine. This involves having a lot of windows open: Word, Acrobat Reader DC, Paint, Notepad, VirtualBox plus HoTMetaL Pro 4.0 and Ulead PhotoImpact 3.02 in NT4.

The virtual machine crashed when I booted it and I had to try again. Just as I was starting to do my file transfers between Windows 7 and Windows NT4 sessions, I realized there was another icon on the Taskbar below.

Turns out Windows 7 wanted to reboot to finish installing the updates and was running a counter down to forcing a reboot. This in a window WHICH WAS BEHIND EVERYTHING ELSE.

Now I've dealt with this crap before. Basically, it does the eager dog/pestering child routine -- Can we reboot now? Can we reboot now? Can we reboot now? And I swear it is doing this at 85% of the total billions of clock cycles, so drags the whole system down to where, not only does it not work very well, it won't even recognize for a while that you click the Postpone button Microsoft thoughtfully provided. Which, by the way, only restarts this hidden window and its insidious countdown to reboot doom, and polling for permission to reboot NOW, it slows the system down...

So Microsoft fails at coming up with a priority pop-up window for its very own operating system.

But really, it's worse.

Why the HELL did you wait twenty minutes, to where I was knee deep in open windows and doing a bunch of complex procedures, before deciding to let me know you trying to hold it in your pants you needed to reboot so hard?

Microsoft, here's a clue. Windows is YOUR fucking operating system. I think you know how to do a reboot. If this update REALLY needed to have a reboot, you could have built it into the update before I even logged into the computer. After all these years, you should know how to reboot Windows 7.

I'm sure they'd answer that this would delay the startup and... and... and... nothing, guys. Because when I did do the Restart, after interrupting my work and closing NT4 and all the other windows, there was an excruciatingly long Configuring Updates... 28%... 29%... pause... pause... pause... 30%... This was going to take a while.

FINALLY, I got my machine back and sat through more configuring and all. No doubt this was all updates related to something stupid, like future updating to Windows 10 or something else I don't need Right Now.

Man, somedays you gotta wonder if anyone in Redmond has every actually used a computer...

Dr. Phil

UPDATE: To add insult to injury, at 25:10 EDT, when I shut down ZEPPELIN, I saw the little yellow update shield next to Shutdown and sure enough, Update 1 of 1. How much you want to bet it's supposed some they fucked up yesterday? (evil-grin)

UPDATE2: 10-15-2015 Th 09:46 EDT -- Oh, lookee at that... ZEPPELIN at home is Windows 7 Home Premium. OUEST at work is Windows 7 Enterprise edition. I knew when I shut down yesterday that it had loaded 8 Updates. Today when I booted, it Applied 34,361 updates... and then it rebooted. So somebody at Microsoft is smart enough to manage Updates better, but only for big IT customers. Screw the Home users.

Posted on Dreamwidth
Crossposted on LiveJournal

Back on 17 August, when I wrote about Windows 10 (DW) (LJ), I meant to speculate that perhaps Microsoft would start stuffing the files onto your hard drive, whether you wanted them to or not. I'd already assumed this as a possibility.

Thanks to Steve Buchheit, for finding this article from Ars Technica which says, YES, this is actually happening.

Microsoft is downloading Windows 10 to PCs, even if you don’t “reserve” a copy
Files of up to 6GB in size showing up in a hidden directory.

Worse, from the article it suggests that this Microsoft update KB3035583 repeatedly tries to install. The update page, "Update installs Get Windows 10 app in Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 SP1", is pretty much unintelligible gobbledygook.

Duh, duh, DUH-HHH. Windows 10 is coming for you. You cannot resist us...

So... let's recap.

You choose not to upgrade to Windows 10 now. Microsoft goes ahead and downloads 6GB of files onto your HDD. And keeps trying.

What could possibly go wrong?

My objections are three-fold. One, I am tired of any and all manufacturers thinking that my HDD real estate is there's to play with without asking. Two, given compatibility issues with devices and software, to say nothing of workflow, the $64,000 horror scenario is Windows deciding to upgrade you to WinTen against your will. Three, 6GB is a LOT of disk. But it is even MORE download bandwidth.

Periodically we find that our web access crawls. Often on the Kindle Fires, it ends up being software updates being pushed by Whispernet -- the only reason we know they happen is that either an icon shows up in the beginning of the carousel that we haven't used in a while, or the program launches from scratch when you select it, or Norton reports that So-and-so Is Clean in the Activity Log.

But downloading 6GB over DSL is wasting a lot of my bandwidth. Worse, if I was on the road and using haiku, our Verizon WiFi hot spot, 6GB exceeds the amount of bandwidth we usually buy in the pay-as-you-go package.

It's MY damned computer, it's MY damned hard drive and it's MY damned bandwidth. If Microsoft wants to buy me resources, then they can download all they want. But otherwise, you fuckers, ASK!

I swear, the manufacturers think we buy computers just to install their updates. They don't think we ever have WORK to do.

(The only silver lining is that I don't have to worry about this at work -- this doesn't apply to Enterprise editions of Windows 7/8/8.1)

Dr. Phil

Posted on Dreamwidth
Crossposted on LiveJournal

In music -- or writing -- sometimes you just go on a riff. Despite our devotion to recorded music, to the point where the definitive version is not whatever the band is playing now, but that one recording that you've listened to all your life, there is a whole world of other versions. And variations. The Grateful Dead allowed recordings of all their concerts, so you can listen a different Grateful Dead concert probably from now until forever, and Jerry Garcia died nearly ten years ago!

Many jazz standards were not, at the time, written down. Improvisation is a thing. Classical musicians have long taken one theme and produced countless variations. Variation is a thing.

It shouldn't be with computers.

Sometimes it has to do with technology. My copy of IBM PC-DOS 1.10, for example, doesn't know about hard drives or networks. Which made it perfect for booting up in a computer lab during the infancy of networked computers and early viruses. PC-DOS 1.00 felt "different" than 1.10, not only because it had different commands and subcommands, but 1.00 didn't even have COMMAND.COM so that certain functions like DATE and TIME were DATE.COM and TIME.COM programs, which had to be loaded every time.

Similarly with IBM PC-DOS 2.10 and MS-DOS 2.11, which were similar. PC-DOS 3.20 and 3.30 were variations. And PC-DOS 5.00. And early Windows 1.04, 2.03, 286 and 386.

The Windows 95 and NT 4.0 Professional era brought things closer -- but there were differences. If you wanted to open an MS-DOS box it was MS-DOS.EXE versus CMD.EXE. And the DOS subcommands are different between those. My numerous DOS batch files had to test for 95/98/SE/Me versus NT4/2000/XP. And now some of those NT-class batch files don't work right in Windows 7.

Same with all the variations of Microsoft Word and Office. I've railed about this before.

This essay, however, is about Windows 7. Sure, it's past its due date according to Microsoft. We're deep in sales of Windows 8/8.1 and Windows 10 is in beta testing -- as if they are seriously going to address even 30% of the things wrong with Windows 10 before it ships.

So this is old hat to most of you Windows users. Uncaring for those who just do a few things. Smirking contempt for those of you are/were Windows 7 whizzes.

OUEST, the Dell laptop I've been given at work, is technically my fourth Windows 7 machine. KATNISS is an Asus netbook running Windows 7 Stupid, er, I mean Windows 7 Basic. You can't even change the wallpaper. Really? ZEPPELIN is Wendy's Toshiba laptop running Windows 7 Home Premium. CAROUSEL is Wendy's desktop, which I haven't booted since Georgia -- I think it has Windows 7 Home Premium as well.

OUEST is running Windows 7 Enterprise Service Pack 1.

Yes, I know there are lots of technical reasons for all these versions, but Microsoft could have made those changes internal so that the user didn't have to know anything about it. Home and Professional, with a Server version for powering the back end properties. Instead there are an appalling number of versions.

That plus this is the only machine I have running Microsoft Office 2013 and there are a bunch of things which "don't quite work right" from my point of view. Yes, I have a tendency to do things in an unorthodox manner, but the bottom line is:

It shouldn't be so hard to get the machine into a familiar configuration so I can browse and type. Really?

The College of Arts Sciences owns this machine and so, like Windows 7 Basic, I am locked in with a BRIGHT WHITE SCREAMING wallpaper. Yuck. Without the Y. With another letter. As in, "what the ..." It took a while to get Word 2013 to have the background stick and stay with a light gray, instead of INTENSE SCREAMING WHITE. Whoever was the keyboard jockey setting the defaults is either blind, wears dark glasses at work, or is getting kickbacks from the university's health care providers of vision and epilepsy coverage.

Little niggling details. On KATNISS and ZEPPELIN I get readable icons in the Task Bar, and a two-line Time over DATE display. Handy to have both those bits of information. Have had that through many versions of Windows -- the old CLOCK program put the date into the tab in the Taskbar, too. On OUEST, the icons in the task bar were tiny -- and because they were small the pre-start icons for Firefox and Chrome were both tiny and widely spaced apart. And I only go the Time in the right hand corner. Oh sure, you can hover the mouse over the Time and get more info.

Surely there was an option to toggle to get Time AND Date? In an Enterprise Edition of Windows 7? Hmm? Alas, could not find anything. (What do you mean go and ASK someone? Are you crazy? That's no fun! Plus I should be able to figure this out -- ANY user should be able to figure this out -- that we can't tells us the problem is not about asking someone else a question. Plus-plus the Physics Dept. is filled with a bunch of people who either take Windows as they come or are Mac users.) I'm only coming to this issue late, because I stuck with Windows XP Professional SP2 on KATSUMI, WINTER, SUMMER and LARA for a very long time.

So yesterday, it occurred to me that maybe I was looking at this wrong. It wasn't a setting for the clock display in the Taskbar, it was the Taskbar itself.

Today on my once-a-week office visit I did a right-click on OUEST's Taskbar | Properties | (uncheck) Use Small Icons -- and voila! The Taskbar is now twice as high, the icons are readable -- and I get a two-line Time over Date display. Silly rabbit, you weren't looking to change the time display, you wanted to change icon size. Obvious. (rolls-eyes)

And look, in the old days you could grab the top of the Taskbar and yank it up to make for a second row of tabs if you had a lot of programs open. That didn't work either, and yes I unlocked the Taskbar first.

I have long complained that Microsoft's programmers have too little depth of knowledge -- no Institutional Memory, which is something I very strongly believe in for any large organization. They don't care, or don't know, how things were done one, two, five versions ago. They just wing it any old way now.

Corporations have learned they have to pay people to do IT training and whole companies are built on teaching people how to use Windows and Office and other programs. Never mind that some of these clients include slow-to-learn older folks who have been using computers for several computer generations and would really rather things got back to Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect 5.1.

So, it's a success. And yes, I added in the Additional Clocks so I can hover over the Time and Date to get the current time in Central Europe and Tokyo (DW) (LJ). Rather than have industrial images burned into all of the machines and complicated Windows Registry machinations, what users really would like would be a portable User Profile. But that's not needed, because We Know How You Should Set Up Your Machine.

And... There Is Nothing We Can Bother To Learn From The Past.

Uh-huh. And:

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana

We simply do not need so many useless variations. Not until we have A.I. computers smart enough to handle sixty-zillion different ways of asking for the same thing. And then, like Ex Machina (DW) (LJ), they may no longer be interested in our agendas, but their own.

Dr. Phil

Posted on Dreamwidth
Crossposted on LiveJournal

It's Partly My Own Damned Fault

Yeah, I know that I deliberately use a non-standard Windows configuration. As in I still use programs that are useful to me, work and are not replaceable. That includes Microsoft Office 95 Professional.

Currently I have three machines running Windows XP Service Pack 2. This year's version of TurboTax wants XP SP3 at a minimum. I debated using Wendy's Windows 7 laptop, but decided on Saturday to bite the bullet and update to Service Pack 3.

It took forever. Worse, in an 18GB C: partition, I was left with 250MB free. I freed up some space and did a little work last night. Also realized I'd done all that work for nothing -- TurboTax also wanted 1.5GB for Microsoft .NET 4. What the hell is in there? The lost Microsoft Help files that actually... help? Anyway, unless I run Partition Magic and re-space the drive, there's no room.

So today I was going to update Wendy's laptop. But first make a PDF for my grader... and Word 95 now crashes during any print attempt. So I resolve to roll back Service Pack 3. And of course Windows said there are no restore points -- even though SP3 made one Saturday. Go to method 2 of 3. Which takes forever.

When I boot back up, the screen is wrong. And I have to download and reinstall the video driver via Sony. Now the screen looks right, the icons went back into their right place.

And Word 95 crashes when you try to print.

Insert thirty seconds of the foul language of your choice.

Gandalf: "[Gollum] hates and loves the Ring, as he hates and loves himself."

Edit that for Dr. Phil and computers and, well, you get the idea. I don't have time for this Mickey Microsoft Mouse crap. I really don't. No one does.

Dr. Phil

PS - Had lovely corned beef and boiled cabbages and potatoes for dinner. Yum.