mikeymikec
Lifer
A customer was replacing their Lenovo AIO PC (AMD A-series APU, 4c/4t circa 2018, booting Win10 off a freaking HDD) with another Lenovo AIO PC with an anaemic CPU, the Intel N100 (also 4c/4t), and wanted me to help migrate their setup from the old PC to the new one.
The visit took twice as long as I expected (3 hrs, in my experience 1.5 hours should have sufficed, maybe 2 with some derps), and while the N100 played its part of being saturated virtually the entire time I was there and so making everything take ages longer than it should (I later resorted to temporarily switching off the antivirus as that was consuming a core a lot of the time.. this is a measure I would normally reserve for a >10 year old Core i3 2c 4t CPU!), for example an in-place upgrade of Office 365 over an install of Office 365 (I'll get to that) took half an hour at least, and not because of downloading time. The CPU was thoroughly overloaded with Windows choosing the best possible time for Windows Update to kick in, along with the Office install, probably along with the Store apps auto update.
My normal workflow for installing a reasonably modern PC is that while Office was doing its thing, I could be downloading and installing say the printer drivers, or basically whatever else because a freaking Office install does not saturate a reasonably modern processor. The N100 however, I spent at least 75% of this visit deciding that it would be a bad idea to give the machine more work to do because it will just take longer to do it, so I didn't even want to say start Edge to tell it to stop auto-starting / running in the background. I needed Office done ASAP as Outlook takes no small length of time to configure to satisfaction and that was probably the most important job. With this computer however, I felt like I was pulled into a time-warp back to the days of PCs booting from hard drives where if you're installing one program, there's no point in trying to rush the system. Pre-SSDs, a lot of my visits were spent waiting for something to finish. If I was there to speed up a PC, I uninstalled one program at a time and had to be patient, and each program would take maybe 3-5 minutes to uninstall. With SSDs, you can typically uninstall many programs in under a minute. If this N100 PC had a hard drive... my god. I would probably have been able to hear it accessing like a noisy floppy drive. Is DMA enabled?
The Windows (24H2, I checked) oddities were what took the cake today though. For example, it's commonplace for a big-name PC to already have an 'ready to activate' install of Office 365 ready to go, this is the first time I've seen such a setup *not include Office Outlook*. I even attempted to hunt down the outlook.exe binary in case it somehow didn't get a Start menu icon, but while the rest of the install was there (winword.exe etc), outlook.exe was not. I figured that I had two options at this point: 1) Wait an age for the machine to auto-update Office and hopefully download Outlook, or 2) Sign into the customer's MS account and tell it to install 365. I did the latter. It ought to be quick, right? LOL.
The second oddity I discovered because I was going through my usual cycle of getting rid of unnecessary messaging, for example how Microsoft Photos will try to foist OneDrive on unwary users so normally I fire it up once to clear the message. This computer however didn't fire up the app in its usual view, instead it acted like I had clicked on a JPEG in Explorer and told Photos to open it. Except I'm pretty sure this photo wasn't one that belonged to the customer. Confused, I tried to get it back to the main timeline view it shows by default, only to be told that I didn't have the full Photos experience yet (or wording very similar).
As for why Office 365 had a cut-down install to begin with or Photos not being the 'full Photos', I haven't a clue. I could understand it if this were one of those HP Stream laptops from yesteryear with 32GB storage that fills up if you so much as sneeze on it, but this computer had a 500GB SSD, there's simply no reason not to have a normal install of 365/Windows on there.
The third oddity was OneDrive. The customer was using it on their old PC, and I had done bypassnro during setup so my first introduction between the MS account and the new PC was when I was trying to sort out Office. Between discovering the Office oddity and finishing reinstalling Office, the OneDrive icon had updated itself to the current style being the super shiny gradient edition. Some time passed, then the OneDrive icon was... gone (from the tray). The system was idle so I don't see how it could have been updating OneDrive at that exact moment. My guess is that 365 force-installs an older version of OneDrive which then gets flagged by Windows for updating again, but then it closed the process and did nothing further. I manually started OneDrive (which was back to the 2024 era 3-colour-cloud icon), and it stayed in that style even 15 minutes after a restart.
The visit took twice as long as I expected (3 hrs, in my experience 1.5 hours should have sufficed, maybe 2 with some derps), and while the N100 played its part of being saturated virtually the entire time I was there and so making everything take ages longer than it should (I later resorted to temporarily switching off the antivirus as that was consuming a core a lot of the time.. this is a measure I would normally reserve for a >10 year old Core i3 2c 4t CPU!), for example an in-place upgrade of Office 365 over an install of Office 365 (I'll get to that) took half an hour at least, and not because of downloading time. The CPU was thoroughly overloaded with Windows choosing the best possible time for Windows Update to kick in, along with the Office install, probably along with the Store apps auto update.
My normal workflow for installing a reasonably modern PC is that while Office was doing its thing, I could be downloading and installing say the printer drivers, or basically whatever else because a freaking Office install does not saturate a reasonably modern processor. The N100 however, I spent at least 75% of this visit deciding that it would be a bad idea to give the machine more work to do because it will just take longer to do it, so I didn't even want to say start Edge to tell it to stop auto-starting / running in the background. I needed Office done ASAP as Outlook takes no small length of time to configure to satisfaction and that was probably the most important job. With this computer however, I felt like I was pulled into a time-warp back to the days of PCs booting from hard drives where if you're installing one program, there's no point in trying to rush the system. Pre-SSDs, a lot of my visits were spent waiting for something to finish. If I was there to speed up a PC, I uninstalled one program at a time and had to be patient, and each program would take maybe 3-5 minutes to uninstall. With SSDs, you can typically uninstall many programs in under a minute. If this N100 PC had a hard drive... my god. I would probably have been able to hear it accessing like a noisy floppy drive. Is DMA enabled?
The Windows (24H2, I checked) oddities were what took the cake today though. For example, it's commonplace for a big-name PC to already have an 'ready to activate' install of Office 365 ready to go, this is the first time I've seen such a setup *not include Office Outlook*. I even attempted to hunt down the outlook.exe binary in case it somehow didn't get a Start menu icon, but while the rest of the install was there (winword.exe etc), outlook.exe was not. I figured that I had two options at this point: 1) Wait an age for the machine to auto-update Office and hopefully download Outlook, or 2) Sign into the customer's MS account and tell it to install 365. I did the latter. It ought to be quick, right? LOL.
The second oddity I discovered because I was going through my usual cycle of getting rid of unnecessary messaging, for example how Microsoft Photos will try to foist OneDrive on unwary users so normally I fire it up once to clear the message. This computer however didn't fire up the app in its usual view, instead it acted like I had clicked on a JPEG in Explorer and told Photos to open it. Except I'm pretty sure this photo wasn't one that belonged to the customer. Confused, I tried to get it back to the main timeline view it shows by default, only to be told that I didn't have the full Photos experience yet (or wording very similar).
As for why Office 365 had a cut-down install to begin with or Photos not being the 'full Photos', I haven't a clue. I could understand it if this were one of those HP Stream laptops from yesteryear with 32GB storage that fills up if you so much as sneeze on it, but this computer had a 500GB SSD, there's simply no reason not to have a normal install of 365/Windows on there.
The third oddity was OneDrive. The customer was using it on their old PC, and I had done bypassnro during setup so my first introduction between the MS account and the new PC was when I was trying to sort out Office. Between discovering the Office oddity and finishing reinstalling Office, the OneDrive icon had updated itself to the current style being the super shiny gradient edition. Some time passed, then the OneDrive icon was... gone (from the tray). The system was idle so I don't see how it could have been updating OneDrive at that exact moment. My guess is that 365 force-installs an older version of OneDrive which then gets flagged by Windows for updating again, but then it closed the process and did nothing further. I manually started OneDrive (which was back to the 2024 era 3-colour-cloud icon), and it stayed in that style even 15 minutes after a restart.
