Win 11 networking

[pjw]

I too had big problems when W11 decided to "update" to 24H2. My network was working fine before the update and then all turned to shit. I went through many of the same mazes as did you (they should make a game of it!) and nothing worked, so I rolled back to the previous version. Some days later M$ surreptitiously updated my computer again - and now, for some unfathomable reason, all is well!

As I had registered on the M$ community support site, I still keep getting mails almost daily with people complaining about that same update and M$ doing nothing about it. Since I dont know what I did, or whether my equipment matches any of theirs, I havent responded with any "good advice" of my own. It seems rather arbitrary as to what works and what doesnt.

"Thoughts and prayers!", as the Americans say, seems to be the solution. I didnt pray, but I had some thoughts, but they werent pretty enough to print here..

Regarding your power outages, I used to have that problem a lot when I lived in the UK, so I got me a UPS. That solved that problem, but the mobile issue is more difficult. Perhaps change your provider.

[Pr0f]

Microsoft have been known to put out updates with issues

I think rolling back and then having it reapply a few days later will potentially load in a fixed version - but if your machine already thinks it has the update - it won't check for the same update again - so you'd miss a sureptitious fix...

[dilwyn]

The mobile outages seem to have been fixed (according to an email reply I got from the local Plaid Cymru politician). Exactly the same issue as I've been moaning about the power outages - the short power blips locally nobbled the power supply to the mobile phone transmitter. After I got the politician involved to bang a few heads, Vodafone finally sent a specialist engineer out, but although he found the power issue, he couldn't fix it and had to call in electricians to fix the power issue. What's more, for once they gave a detailed explanation to the politician too, and her office forwarded it to me, then I put it on the local Facebook page so that the locals finally new what was wrong instead of never knowing what was happening.

Changing network - I hadn't realised, but O2 has been down locally as well, only found out when someone mentioned during the Vodafone "discussions" (for that read "verbal abuse of Vodafone") that O2 was down too. No idea if they share a transmitter or not. Changing provider isn't really an option, they're all just as bad around here. The same old problems for years which never seem to get fixed for any length of time.

I got the entire network of my PCs working now with the exception of the router's USB port drive. That's been rehomed on the main PC as a shared drive (not actually set it up as shared yet) in place of the Seagate drive which died this morning, so I don't need an extra hub.

Another issue which has now cropped up is that the PC's SSD filled up without warning. That was down to Dropbox. Normally, I have my Dropbox set up to Online-only so it doesn't take too much room (i.e. no local copies of the hundreds of GB of data I keep in it - backups of everything, hundreds of thousands of individual files). One of the updates this week seems to have reset this setting for some reason and it synchronised it all onto my SSD. I've reset it to online only, so far it hasn't freed up the space, but it might take days to restore normality (or so says the estimated time that Dropbox status gives). I'm a bit worried about this, as I've seen loads of people online complaining that going back to Online-only doesn't actually release space like Dropbox promises, it keeps the space as "placeholders" for the files, which seems totally pointless since the whole point of online-only is NOT to take up space locally. Anyone with experience of this? I often find I get more sense here about PCs and Windoze matters than the normal places online.

[tofro]

The mobile outages seem to have been fixed (according to an email reply I got from the local Plaid Cymru politician). Exactly the same issue as I've been moaning about the power outages - the short power blips locally nobbled the power supply to the mobile phone transmitter. After I got the politician involved to bang a few heads, Vodafone finally sent a specialist engineer out, but although he found the power issue, he couldn't fix it and had to call in electricians to fix the power issue. What's more, for once they gave a detailed explanation to the politician too, and her office forwarded it to me, then I put it on the local Facebook page so that the locals finally new what was wrong instead of never knowing what was happening.

Changing network - I hadn't realised, but O2 has been down locally as well, only found out when someone mentioned during the Vodafone "discussions" (for that read "verbal abuse of Vodafone") that O2 was down too. No idea if they share a transmitter or not. Changing provider isn't really an option, they're all just as bad around here. The same old problems for years which never seem to get fixed for any length of time.

Dilwyn, please don't take offense, but Wales seems to be degenerating to a third-world country.

[pjw]

Ive given up on Dropbox: My drive had filled up so I deleted some heavy files. DB still said my drive was full. I waited a few weeks (months?) No change, so I deleted all files and disconnected from an other account my account was sharing. Waited another few weeks. Still full, so I deleted my account and moved everything to Box, with which Ive been some years now. Box has not suffered from shittification - yet.

I would never trust all my stuff to any cloud only; I always keep one copy at home and another at a friend's who lives some miles away. Its worth (IMO) to have a few extra USB HDDs for that purpose. Yes, it can be hard to keep everything up to date, but at least all will not be lost while I live.

Also, any private/personal stuff is kept separately (to the best of my ability) usually in its own .WIN container or zipped directory, and that is always encrypted before it goes anywhere (including to my friend ;o))

[dilwyn]

Dilwyn, please don't take offense, but Wales seems to be degenerating to a third-world country.

Certainly feels that way sometimes.

[Pr0f]

...

I would never trust all my stuff to any cloud only; I always keep one copy at home and another at a friend's who lives some miles away. Its worth (IMO) to have a few extra USB HDDs for that purpose. Yes, it can be hard to keep everything up to date, but at least all will not be lost while I live.

...

I completely agree Per - you can never have too many copies of things you want to keep. I have to NAS boxes, some cloud storage for things that I am less concerned getting into the public domain, and several USB sticks and USB hard drives to distribute the data across - I'm happy if it's on more than 1 site and more than 3 devices.

[dilwyn]

Good news on the dropbox front. Although it took about 36 hours, changing the Dropbox content to Online-only has finally increased free space on my SSD C: drive from about 20GB to about 650GB. So even in Online-only mode it still seems to use a few tens of GB of space (placeholders, indexes etc), but that's no problem. I accept everything will be slower to access when Online-Only; the files I store there are mostly backups, or files I plan to access when not at home, and some shared content from Rwap's QL Preservation Project. In other words, stuff which would only need occasional access.

Accessing "Properties" for the physical folder on the SSD actually gives you the rather misleading online size of about 700GB not actual space used in the physical SSD folder, but at least I understand now what they meant about the Placeholder system, even if it is very misleading and probably the source of all the "it never freed up a single byte on my hard drive" complaints I see online, i.e. people were probably testing the free space in the physical folder on the hard drive, not looking at the total free space for the drive itself. I suppose it shows that the people who design these systems are the absolute worst people to explain things in clear simple terms to other people.

At least the free space on the C: drive has vastly improved, hopefully I'll see a bit of speedup too now there's more free space on the SSD.

It's now being indexed, Dropbox says (the PC has slowed right down to a crawl), and forecasts the indexing will take 48 hours. (Did I really have 288,000 individual files in there???)

Feel strangely proud of myself after this and feel I've learned a lot despite the frustration. I guess if you have the patience to work through the frustration you'll feel better about it in the end.

So I just wait for the indexing to complete, then make sure my backups are up to date, then let QLing recommence over the coming days!

[XorA]

Good news on the dropbox front. Although it took about 36 hours, changing the Dropbox content to Online-only has finally increased free space on my SSD C: drive from about 20GB to about 650GB. So even in Online-only mode it still seems to use a few tens of GB of space (placeholders, indexes etc), but that's no problem. I accept everything will be slower to access when Online-Only; the files I store there are mostly backups, or files I plan to access when not at home, and some shared content from Rwap's QL Preservation Project. In other words, stuff which would only need occasional access.

Accessing "Properties" for the physical folder on the SSD actually gives you the rather misleading online size of about 700GB not actual space used in the physical SSD folder, but at least I understand now what they meant about the Placeholder system, even if it is very misleading and probably the source of all the "it never freed up a single byte on my hard drive" complaints I see online, i.e. people were probably testing the free space in the physical folder on the hard drive, not looking at the total free space for the drive itself. I suppose it shows that the people who design these systems are the absolute worst people to explain things in clear simple terms to other people.

At least the free space on the C: drive has vastly improved, hopefully I'll see a bit of speedup too now there's more free space on the SSD.

It's now being indexed, Dropbox says (the PC has slowed right down to a crawl), and forecasts the indexing will take 48 hours. (Did I really have 288,000 individual files in there???)

Feel strangely proud of myself after this and feel I've learned a lot despite the frustration. I guess if you have the patience to work through the frustration you'll feel better about it in the end.

So I just wait for the indexing to complete, then make sure my backups are up to date, then let QLing recommence over the coming days!

Like on a QL a zero size file still takes 1 block on disk.