Fastest Pi on Earth?

its insistence on spending ages updating itself at inconvenient times, whether you like it or not.

Go to the Services control panel (it’s easiest to use the Start menu’s search box) and disable the Windows Update service. Note that this will prevent all updates, including security updates, so it might be a good idea to periodically re-enable it and let it update (at your convenience!)

Cheers! I thought there ought to be something like that, but could I find it? I might have tried harder if my Windoze guru (Windoze-ex-guru?) hadn’t said there wasn’t…will pass on to my brother too, for whom this is more of an issue (and who is not my Windoze guru…)

Warning: Wall of Text follows.
I feel like I ought to insert a road cone graphic.

99% of the world doesn’t care about open software and other such freedoms

There’s an interesting discussion on El Reg’s forums regarding the recent DDoS against a DNS provider. As there are many nerds, they’re coming up with idiotic and unworkable ideas like – get this – making it illegal to hook a compromised system to the internet.

I have two thoughts on this. Firstly, as anybody who has read my blog will be aware, my little IP camera has such abysmal security it would actually be funny if it wasn’t a real commercial product. But, you know, people are going to buy these things. They’re going to download the app (Android or iOS). They’re going to tell the app the identity of the camera (like 123abc or something) and the name/password. And then it will just work. In the house. In McDonalds. In a frigging airplane. even. It’ll just work. Piece of cake.

I’m sure I could explain in Daily Express style headlines what a terrible mistake they have made, but I’ll use words like “uPNP” and “router” and their eyes will glaze over and they will go into dummy mode, nodding, saying “uh-hu”, but secretly wishing I’d STFU because Corrie is on soon. And what’s the big deal? It works, dunnit?
Secondly, how does one define “secure”? I’ll make it easy. You are ALL now criminals. Why? Look at OpenSSL. Proof that open source is not inherently more secure. And that’s just one of several in the last year. Yup, even mighty Linux and doesn’t-get-viruses-MacOS can get pwned when nefarious people put their minds to it. The thing with software, especially modern way complicated systems, is what is rock solid today may be worthless and begging on its knees tomorrow.

am starting to come to the conclusion that perhaps I shouldn’t care

I care a bit. I will use Android, and if Google could put their minds to it they’d have both my address and my phone number¹, but I don’t use the likes of GMail (or Yahoo!) for anything confidential. Neither Apple nor Google nor PayPal have any idea of what my real bank account information is, and that’s how it is going to stay. Yes, it means I’m a freetard that never buys apps, but I am now used to thinking along the lines of “when not if” about big sites being compromised. Don’t think lack of news headlines is any indication of anything – it took Yahoo! two damn years to work out they’d been compromised!

The only service that has my phone number is Facebook. Because it is more or less my only communication with cow-orkers, I have set Facebook to send me a code before I can log in using an unknown machine.
As for Facebook itself, I don’t visit often (think multiples of months, long enough that Facebook usually sends me a “welcome back” email) and it is highly segregated from my online self that you guys know. There are no links to my blog, or anything much. As far as I’m concerned, Facebook and “the entire rest of the Internet” are two separate things. My cow-orkers don’t need to know anything about this, source codes, ARM, etc etc. I’m just another pointless +1 in their friends list.

This is why I can live with the fact that I generally work for companies producing closed software and generally work on closed software to produce it!

Why is there even a conflict?
Some of the vocal FOSS zealots have been the most insufferable gits I’ve had the displeasure of being in proximity to. There is nothing wrong with the concept of open source (don’t get me started on the GPL), and if you wish to release your programs that you write in your own time as some flavour of open source, that’s great. A lot of my stuff is EUPL, and I learned half of my techniques from pulling apart source codes to programs on floppy discs stuck to the front of magazines back in the ‘90s. With open source being so prevalent these days, it makes sense to consider it for your own software. Example? I’m sure the venerable Mr. Pilling left Ovation behind long ago. He released the source. Now it works nicely (as nicely as can be for a program that old…I hope!) on the Pi.

However. Employment. It’s a different thing entirely. You may have a job you love. You may have a job you “go do”. You might even detest your job and the morons you have to put up with. But the basic premise of this “job” thing is that you trade some of your time (and expertise) in return for cold hard cash² (or random digits in bank accounts, that can be converted to cash²).
If they work with closed source, you work with closed source. If they believe in DRM, you believe in DRM. If they… you get the idea. Play along with the company line, go home, do whatever you want in your own time with the money you make.

I spent a long time agonising over which phone I should use,

I (non-explodey) Samsung. I have an iPad Mini so I have experience with iOS even if not in the form of a phone. For a long time I wondered why Apple was so gung ho on attacking Samsung in the courts. Then by chance I got myself a Samsung (S5 Mini). It is seriously nice. Not outstanding in the hardware stakes, it is to the S5 as the Electron was to the BBC Micro; but the software has so many little touches and features that I can see why Apple is scared of it. And, better yet, while it has some bloatware (mostly games), the stuff can be uninstalled and there’s not a whiff of Facebook integration anywhere.
I am looking at one of the S7 family for my next phone come January. Probably not the bendy corner one as that seems a bit pointless. The two main criteria are that it can take a µSD card and it has a removable battery.

Oh, and score extra for Samsung – I’ve had a Motorola (when it was a company), a SonyEriccson, and a Sony. They are ALL on Android 2.something. Never updated. An expecially big middle finger to the Sony Xperia U that shipped with Android 2.x in the days when Android 4 was available, and had so many bits of Facebook lingering around that couldn’t be disabled that I was almost tempted to root my phone and install something else.
My S5 Mini? Came with Android 4.×. Got a security update. Got updated to Android 5.x that looked and felt remarkably similar except loads of white (what it is with UIs reverting back to the look and feel of the early ‘90s?). Then two more security updates. The only critisism I’d give to Samsung is that they never say what these updates actually fix… but at least there are updates.

Whichever manufacturers phone I choose, they’re going to be collecting data on me, so its not so much “a rock and a hard place” as “a rock, another rock, another rock….”

True, but you can mitigate a bit of it. You don’t need to provide an address to the mothership. Nor do you need to give over bank details. Keep GPS off until you need it (drains battery anyway).

For me, my phone is a tool for my benefit. When I’m at home, the phone is put into airplane mode and then WiFi turned on. So it becomes a mini tablet. No, you can’t phone me.
But that said, if you could phone me, you had better hope you are in my addressbook. Because if a call comes in and I don’t see a name I know on the screen, I swipe left to chuck the call to the answering machine.
My answering machine message used to be a blast of enthusiastic Japanese in a booming voice (taken from one of the many epic-sounding voiceovers in Moretsu Pirates). Now? Now it is a short recording of the cat purring.
Are you getting the hint that I don’t want to be called? ;-)
If you survive all of that and get to leave a message, then I might pay attention to it. But people rarely leave messages and I have a very simple rule – no message, no interest. I will erase numbers from the call log without even looking at who it might be, if there is no message.

The benefit of this approach – organisations (banks etc) don’t like to leave messages. Even less when they get an incomprehensible reply so can’t even be sure where they’re leaving the message. So they write instead. Official stuff belongs on paper in writing. Phone calls are not acceptable alternatives.

Sometimes the “old me” gets through and I have a rant about things

That’s half the reason my blog exists; though I think I’ve been really good and not let rip about brexit. Mainly because my current feelings would not permit me to even attempt to be even remotely polite (especially in reference to Sunderland), and also because – what’s the point? Put that copy of The [Express|Mail|Telegraph] down and open your eyes people. Things are not “doing okay” after brexit, as that hasn’t even happened yet. All that’s happened is an advisory non-binding³ referendum. And look at the fallout from that.

I’m off to check out The Register now…

Unfortunately it seems El Reg shed half of the decent writers last year, so now we have a nice selection of articles by Andrew “Copyright is awesome” Orlowski (or however it is spelled) and things reproduced from other sources. My general method of reading El Reg write now is to load up an article on a topic of interest, speed-read the article, then pay more attention to the comments. They, the comments, are often much more informative.

generally I get scorn poured on me for being a “weird Linux user"

At least you get scorn. I’m not a “weird RISC OS user” because it’s like “huh? wassat?”.

however, whenever anything went wrong it was generally my fault and generally because I wasn’t using Windows.

Of course. It’s the fault of the odd guy out. It’s funny how cliquish people can be about stuff like that.

but again if I faced any kind of problem with the code it was dismissed as “yeah but your using Linux” implying that using Windows would somehow make it all better (never mind the fact that the code is embedded C running on an ARM microprocessor!).

The worrying thing is that your use of “oooh, weirdo” is the reason for there being a problem with the code, instead of… oh, let’s go out on a limb and wonder if there might have been a problem…with the code?

Somehow the crappy firmware in my IP camera is starting to make sense. Some Chinese guy pasted it together from random bits of GPL projects, built it on Windows, and when they had one that actually resulted in a binary that didn’t crash the moment it was switched on, they shipped it.
Yeah. That’ll be it. Long live Windows development! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!

Got a mortgage though so not a great amount of choice!

Like I said. Go to work. Use whatever they tell you to use. Get paid. Go home. Enjoy reality’s many varied choices.

“Linux is amazingly fast!”

Apparently Windows can be pretty nippy if you keep the harddisc defragmented and turn off all the visual rubbish.
My PC is becoming intolerably slow. I’m going to need to clear off some stuff to give me around 15-20% disc space, and run a defrag.

Some day, when I have a better idea about the capabilities of my machine (HP Compaq dc7100sp), I’m going to order a SATA harddisc off Amazon and set up XP Dark Edition to dual boot with Linux. I know the BIOS can only handle so many GBs. Don’t know if it is 128 or 256 (or something around those values). There are a few things keeping me with Windows, but for most of the stuff I do these days – watching video, visiting websites, etc – the underlying OS is mostly irrelevant.

The same way they use Android for mobile (Open Source)

I think you’ll find a purely open source version of Android doesn’t actually do that much. You will need closed source binary blobs in order to use a fair amount of the onboard hardware to its fullest extent, plus an ever increasing amount of Google stuff that people just expect to be on the phone is missing. And, generally, there is no (or minimal) support for DRM.

I don’t use Linux because I don’t have the patience to get to grips with it,

Time for my rant. :-)

I’m going to try Linux – but the case sensitive filenames, the mount points, and the horrible /bin /sbin /usr/bin /usr/sbin and the utter lack of installing stuff in logical places – Linux may be a solid badass modern operating system, but it is saddled with a filing system from the seventies.

Not to mention the desktop is getting worse. “The brown/orange one” wasn’t bad. Unity? How the hell do I know what’s even installed in this machine? It is as if it is deliberately trying to hide stuff from me, only to say an hour later “oh, you meant XXX, here it is!”. Grr.

The CD burner (Brasero?) is only good at trashing discs. I tell it to write my DVDs slowly. It ignores me, charges full speed ahead. The writer can do 48x or something, but not only is this machine not capable of keeping up with that data read (something like 64MB/sec to be read then written), the drive mechanics aren’t up to it either. End result? Trashed disc. Every time.

Online help is 60% useless. Too many contradictions, too many pages that describe an “easy fix” with utter screenfuls of commands you’re supposed to type in (with no decent explanation of why – so if something goes wrong it might be useful to know what you’re actually trying to do). And that’s avoiding those who will regard you as stupid because “you still us XXX? that’s broken, nobody uses XXX”. Well excuse me, if it is that bad, WhyTF is it still part of the official distro?

I’ll have a constant fear of upgrading in case stuff that used to work…doesn’t. Or changes. And like “New improved recipe”, it is never going to be a change for the better for us mere users. Look at Unity…

I know, I know, I can pull out that rubbish and install KDE. Or Cinnamon. Or XFCE. Or… aw hell, I just want a desktop that looks like a desktop, not somebody’s latest greatest idea of how to apply the “standing table” methodology to a computer.

I’ve figured out that the sound was actually outputting sound. To my headphones. The entire OS seems unable to recognise that there is a speaker. The USB capture card doesn’t work either. It should, as it is a very common mass-produced-in-China thing, but… wrong kernel version or something like that.

It actually takes longer to boot than XP. No, really. They’ve hidden the billion screenfuls of junk that appears at boot and made the startup boring to the point of wondering if it has crashed (the brown/orange one used to have an on-screen logo with spinny balls or something). It starts. Really slowly.

I know, I know, upgrade my computer or use xubuntu instead… because that’s easier than just facing the fact that Linux is following in Windows’ footsteps.

Welcome to the world of free software where you are absolutely going to find an awesome program that you like, and discover that it is weird, convoluted, crashy, and an all round pain in the ass to use.
Wanna know one of the must-have apps on Windows? WinSCP. Because my web host uses a password and a shared key. With WinSCP, it “just works”. There is nothing that I can see that is the same for Linux. There was a program, I forget the name. And apparently the file manager (Nautilus?) can do it given a URL instead of a path. But this doesn’t get around the fact that the private key code is broken. Why? I eventually tried using the command line. I got as far as the local key being loaded and the system asking for the key’s password. The key does not have any password. So… that’s the failure point. I looked online, the first thing I found told me I needed to change (do something) to the key on the host machine. So I booted back to Windows where it works.
Oh, and that’s not to mention that the key was created using putty on Windows, but Linux doesn’t like that sort of key any more, so needed to apt-get something to change this key to… oh sod off, shutdown, swap cable, reboot into Windows.

I also use The GIMP in preference to Photoshop

I use an aging copy of PhotoImpact (5) that came on the front of a magazine. PC Shopper or something. It is powerful enough to do the things I want, without being overly complicated.

This is probably one of the reasons I like RISC OS. It does a simple thing well, as do many of the programs. That isn’t to say it is perfect (hit the PS printer driver with Kana and marvel at the utter gibberish that comes out the other end), but by and large things are simple, to the point, and functional.
The fact that I can write a fifty page document and not have it utterly mess up by “intelligent” reformatting just because the printer I want to use has different size margins than the printer I had selected (even when said margins didn’t cross into content boundary in either case), that counts for a lot. And having used a variety of clever IDEs… VisualStudio isn’t bad, and is it just me or is Eclipse the slowest thing on Earth? Anyway, having used, I can’t help but feel I know my code better when I write it using Zap. I get pretty colours, which is nice, but I don’t get fancy pop up menus helpfully autocompleting variable names. I don’t get things prompting me for array elements. I don’t get fancy automatic formatting (other than making the ’}’s line up). Instead, I need to learn what the variables are, what the array elements are called, how it all fits together, and I can decide how I want my code laid out, instead of “the one true style”⁴ preferred by whoever wrote the IDE.

Windoze 10 is bloody annoying – in particular, its insistence on spending ages updating itself at inconvenient times, whether you like it or not.

Are you sure it isn’t just sending data back to the mothership? It is Windows 10…

Note that this will prevent all updates,

Don’t you have the option to “Notify me”?

Okay then. Time for some cake. So here endeth the long meandering sort-of rant.
Zap tells me this is 18½K, with 3394 words. Maybe a few less (some HTML tags). That’s plenty. ☺

¹ I have an Android phone. It has an identity, a SIM, a number. Yet Google keep asking me for my phone number for account recovery. Well, um, if you’re so damn smart Google then why are you asking ME? ☺

² Anything but sterling, thanks.

³ Most Leave campaigners will try to tell you otherwise. But given that they seemed to happily believe and parrot the nonsense about all the cash that can be invested in the NHS, I’d generally consider them to be too stupid to be capable of reading the Act of Parliament that outlines the specifics of the referendum…

⁴ So you have an if followed by the test. Now tell me – does the opening brace of the if block follow that, or does it sensibly go on the next line, on its own, to be matched by a clearly placed closing brace, also on a line on its own?

Sadly, my guru was very nearly right. Windoze 10 doesn’t possess an option to disable the Windows Update service. However, you could theoretically tell it that your connection is metered, and it then won’t update until you connect to an unmetered connection – according to this site:

http://www.howtogeek.com/224471/how-to-prevent-windows-10-from-automatically-downloading-updates/

Unfortunately the option to tell Windoze that my connection is metered doesn’t appear as described. The site says this happens for wired ethernet connections, which mine isn’t, but it is an internet hub (Virgin) which might have the same import so far as Windows is concerned. I’m left with the suggestion of doing a registry hack to tell Windoze that the connection is metered, but registry hacks are the point at which I give up. At least I can stop it actually restarting my computer at inconvenient moments, even though I can’t stop it installing things.

I can’t help but feel I know my code better when I write it using Zap.

Absolutely! I must get Zap back – I lost it at some point, it stopped functioning and I’ve not renewed it yet. I’ve been using StrongEd and Edit lately. And Atom on the Mac is a bit annoying with its pop-up “suggestions” that I don’t seem able to disable, but at least it works.

Are you sure it isn’t just sending data back to the mothership?

Ah, you mean like the “essential” service for “protection” that is started by any MS Office app?
Or maybe the “activation” service that complains when a legitimate and already “activated” copy of Win7 hasn’t seen it’s designated route back to the mothership recently?

Anyway, like many other people I think MS software and the apps on it are wonderful in the way that they cause the department I work for to exist and thus my mortgage gets paid…

Don’t you have the option to “Notify me”?

What? On an OS that sneaks its initial install in through the backdoor and then actively upgrades when you close the notification box with any icon in the same fashion as a virus or malware?

in the same fashion as a virus or malware

Surely “in the same fashion as other viruses or malware”?

Windoze 10 doesn’t possess an option to disable the Windows Update service.

It does; I just did it a few days ago. I’m not home at the moment but I can post exact steps/screenshots later if you still can’t find it. Did you at least find the Services control panel?

It does; I just did it a few days ago.

Maybe they’ve released an update to change the way it updates the update system since then…?

We have a Windows 10 computer at home that hasn’t been turned on for over a year – if I turn it on now will I have to wait another year while it updates itself?

Regarding constant updates…as a Linux user I can safely say “hey we were there first guys!” :—) The difference is that for most things it can update itself without having to do a full restart.

I’m going to try Linux

Cool. Why not? There are a zillion different flavours and I’m sure you’ll find one you like…

What I will say to anyone trying Linux is if my non tech-savvy mother can use it then I’m sure you can to. She went from typewriter to Windows 3.11 to 95/98 and then on to Linux and hasn’t looked back since (I also get far fewer support callouts now!). She does photo editing, email, word processing, browsing the web, watching videos – all the things that the vast majority of computer users do…which I guess is why Android/Chromium/iOS tablets have a real chance at stealing users away from Microsoft and why Microsoft are panicking and doing weird things to their core product…

I know Linux isn’t for everyone and I accept that…actually when it comes down to it its not necessarily even the open source nature that I like and indeed my favourite OS is Sun Solaris (which is why I use OpenBSD at home now). Some of us actually like the 70s style filing system! What really annoys me is the smug superiority that many Windows users seem to carry around with them – or maybe I’ve just been unlucky to work with a bunch of twats up to now…? There is room enough for both I feel and its really irritating that people assume that my stuff isn’t working because I use Linux. My stuff wont work likely because I’ve made a stupid mistake…whichever OS I’m using wont matter to that process.

Why is there even a conflict?

Its the Little Communist deep in my psyche banging on the walls and screaming to get out. He’s only small but can make a lot of noise.

oh, let’s go out on a limb and wonder if there might have been a problem…with the code

Nope. The idiot who was accusing me hadn’t wired up the hardware properly. Its one of his specialities.

the underlying OS is mostly irrelevant

Good! This is exactly why if I have the option to I write all my programs in a compatibility layer such as Qt, wxWidgets or GTK+. Give the end-user the choice to choose whatever operating system they want and have the application work well regardless. HTML5 was supposed to do that too…anyone remember the Firefox Phone? :—) But then maybe if it were all HTML5 then everything would “be in the cloud”.

So you have an if followed by the test. Now tell me – does the opening brace of the if block follow that, or does it sensibly go on the next line, on its own, to be matched by a clearly placed closing brace, also on a line on its own?

It goes on its own line. We don’t want Egyptian braces!

+1 I’m all for the brace having its own line!

It is great for debugging because you can comment out the conditional statement without having to type in another brace (and then remember to remove the second brace when your done)

This is exactly why if I have the option to I write all my programs in a compatibility layer such as Qt, wxWidgets or GTK+. Give the end-user the choice to choose whatever operating system they want and have the application work well regardless.

Hah! A while back Mac users on usenet were bemoaning the lack of supported clients. I mentioned Messenger Pro. Apart from the assumption by some that it wasn’t supported due to the state of the R-Comp/Intelligit web sites, the cry was, ’It’s not [native] Mac’.

’It’s not [native] Mac’.

Properly written Qt programs should behave like native applications…its kinda the whole point of it. You write in Qt, it then passes this code through a process and generates standard OS API calls (be it Win32 or Cocoa or whatever) and at the end you get a nice shiney application.

Or rather “properly written and tested” Qt programs. Trouble is many people don’t bother testing on other platforms, or don’t test as much on other platforms, so the experience isn’t as good.

There are bound to be lots of examples of good programs out there but the one that springs to mind right now is Calibre (the eBook program) – that was always pretty good across Windows, Linux and Mac (even if the Mac version is always larger for some reason).

I mentioned Messenger Pro.

Interesting. Didn’t know it was cross platform! Maybe we need an entry in Wikipedia.

I can post exact steps/screenshots later if you still can’t find it. Did you at least find the Services control panel?

1) Yes please.

2) Nothing called exactly that, no. Control Panel – yes, of course. No search facility (apart from Cortana) to use to search for Services Control Panel; Cortana just sent me off to the internet and turned up a load of guff but no link to any Services Control Panel.

I mentioned Messenger Pro.

Interesting. Didn’t know it was cross platform!

Strictly speaking, it isn’t.

The Windows/Mac/Linux version is a different beast – written at a different point in time and using different libraries, tools, etc – to the RISC OS one, but written by the same original developer of the RISC OS application, Mark Sawle. When he first released it, it wasn’t even called Messenger Pro, but Gemini.

Somewhere down the line, R-Comp and Mark did a deal whereby they’d handle sales of Gemini – with it rebranded as Messenger Pro [for other platforms].

How similar it is to the RISC OS version, I can’t say – I’ve only ever used it on Windows.

Messenger Pro should not be confused with Messenger Pro (This is not a recommendation, I’m just pointing out there’s a different application out there with the same name – and note the Norton A/V warning in the summary text).

Nothing called exactly that, no. Control Panel – yes, of course. No search facility (apart from Cortana) to use to search for Services Control Panel; Cortana just sent me off to the internet and turned up a load of guff but no link to any Services Control Panel.

I’ve never used Cortana so can’t comment on what it’s doing. Try Windows key + R, then enter services.msc (I am again doing this from memory).

Windows key + R gets me a “Run” window. If I type random gibberish in there is says it can’t find it, so it’s obviously recognizing Services Control Panel when I type that in, because it doesn’t say it can’t find it (it doesn’t say it can’t find just Services, either) – but the Run window disappears and nothing further happens. At least, not for at least ten minutes so far…

but the Run window disappears and nothing further happens.

I wonder if you need to be logged in as an administrator to access it?

Open Source stuff specificaly for RISC OS tends to be good, while the FOSS stuff tends to lean toward bloat, and unusability.

It’s the same. There are no two classes of Open Source.

This results in bugs

No. The result is LESS bugs.

If I wanted to use Linux I would get an x86 PC.

Raspberry Pi is cheaper :)

Anyway, RISC OS is faster, mainly because it’s simpler.
Try to make some calculation under it, and you’ll see that Linux is MUCH faster (it uses all cores, uses VFP, has better use of resources, better filesystem, etc.).

Use TWM and our own theme, and you’ll see that window managers under Linux can be blazing fast.
You compare here apples and oranges.

There is no need too.
We use RISC OS because we want too.
We’re already convinced. No need to argue :)

I wonder if you need to be logged in as an administrator to access it?

I was logged in as Administrator.

I can do everything I could need with applications in RISC OS

Maybe. Maybe I could too, but The GIMP, FireFox and LibreOffice are free. I used to be very happy with PhotoDesk and Impression Publisher Plus, but I need more compatibility with other people’s systems nowadays, and NetSurf falls over on many, many websites.

I still love !Draw, and with !XP1Dr2SVG (which I wrote) it’s reasonably compatible with other systems; and when I get !Zap working again, I love that. I also love being able to write quick (and often dirty) hacking programs, which is far easier on RISCOS. But for other things, I’ll us the Mac for now.

Is there a decent morphing program available for RISCOS? I used to use SqirlzMorph on the PC, and I’ve not found anything to replace it yet. Not needed it recently, but I might again in the future. I might end up writing something on the Pi – if I do, I’ll make it available, of course.

Services Control Panel

In Windows 10 there is no such entity called “Services Control Panel”, what is there is a Services app. I have found three way of accessing that.

1. Type “Services” into Cortana and at the top of the list is the Services Desktop app.

2. Control Panel > System and Security > Administrative Tools > Services.

3. In ‘Run’ enter “services.msc” as said previously.

Having found the said app, whether one would feel inclined to do anything with it is another matter.

That’s what happens here, at least.

HTH.

(By way of a bit of light entertainment while digging around a notification notificated itself. From the Feedback Hub it said and then went on “How likely are you to recommend Windows 10 to a friend or colleague?”.)

In Windows 10 there is no such entity called “Services Control Panel”, what is there is a Services app.

Technically it’s a “snap-in” rather than an “app”, but I was just calling it a “control panel” (lowercase) for understandability, since it is accessed via Control Panel. In any case, running services.msc certainly should work so I don’t know why it sat there and did nothing for Clive.

Having found the said app, whether one would feel inclined to do anything with it is another matter.

Yeah. I found that, too.

That’s what happens here, at least.

HTH.

Well, it confirms my experience so far.

And by way of light entertainment, my answer to the question is, on a scale from 1 to 10, about -1/0

In any case, running services.msc certainly should work so I don’t know why it sat there and did nothing for Clive.

No, running services.msc works okay. What one does from that point is not clear at all.

Scroll down to Windows Update and go to its properties (I think you can double-click). Disable the service, which is in one of the dropdowns (I think it’s called Startup Type). Reboot and it’ll be gone.

Theoretically you can also stop the service from there, but when I tried that it failed. You might have better luck.

Sorry that I can’t be more specific but I’m not at work this week so don’t have a Windows machine handy!

Found that, thanks. It said it was on Manual (whereas lots of other stuff said automatic) so I assumed that wasn’t what was automatically updating!

I’ve now set it to Disabled, and we’ll see what happens! 8~)

Although the machine has just (just before I set it to disabled) started playing up – the screen flashes off briefly and then on again. I may return it under guarantee (it’s only a few weeks old!) and insist on my money back and put the money towards a MacBook… 8~)

Edit: it’s stopped flashing again. Will it stay stopped, or start again? I did put it on charge, but it was saying it was 75% fully charged anyway.