Logitech: 20 years of good mice and dreadful software.

All I have ever wanted was to map a mouse thumb button to double click. That's all, and I prefer a free wheel to a click roller. Can Logitech deliver? The answer is, no, and it is so grossly frustrating. It also lays bare how you as an individual count for nothing, somebody to be ignored when the masses, especially the reviewers, are gushing with praise, hence one need to go away with their pithy problems.

The trigger for writing this? I just restated my PC, that I hibernate every night after the Windows 10 Explorer and Icon Sheppard were refusing to play ball. Logitech's G-Hub manages to recreate a version of the problem that has plagued their software for over 20 years. Namely it detects my lightspeed mouse, but fails to register the button assignments. The first I notice this is when I thumb button click an icon, and nothing happens. Oh dear, it's that old chestnut again, quit it, and re-load. I just hadn't realised that their software has now become so awful that it couldn't even load correctly on a fresh Windows start-up. Normally it happened if you sleep or hibernate the machine, but on a fresh start, I just didn't think it possible.

Now this is more frustrating than you can imagine, you wake the machine up by moving a mouse, tapping a keyboard etc. and then thumb click on an icon, expecting a double click, but nothing happens. Oh, restart Logitech's, all bells and whistles but doesn't quite work, software again.

Remember I said 20+ years of this. It starts with an interesting story, I tell a friend that I've paid a shed load of money for a Logitech Mouse, but I keep having to stop the process and restart it after I sleep my PC, he goes, tell the company they like feedback like this. How wrong could he be? Very. In the first instance I stuck a batch file on my desktop, a single double click would kill and start the process again. This caused some problems, like I couldn’t detach the process so a command prompt windows left over etc. 

However, with 'Mouseware' version whatever, Logitech went one step better, they decided you won't be able to map the thumb button, default 'back', to double click, you had a number of options available, and double click was no longer one of them. Eventually I worked out it was a bunch of XML files it was using for assignment, so I decided to edit these. Problem was that they were in more than one place, and the changes were never persistent.

I sent Logitech support an e-mail, this was in an age when you could easily e-mail support, try sending eBay one today and enjoy yourself as you are sent around in circles to make sure that there is no way in which you will be able to e-mail them. And they replied. The response was not useful, so I told the support chap that the problem is related to these XML files, could he ask the development team. What followed not only came as a bit of a shock, it pretty much put me off the whole concept of ever asking any support personnel for help. The chap actually became angry and exasperated stating that he doesn’t have access to the developers and can't help me with XML files. The end.

So I've bought Logitech mice over the past 20 years, going from one to the next, and the software, always bug ridden junk that you just have to use. It has improved somewhat, however my G602 using mouseware would often decide to change the resolution to one that then became a pain to use, requiring me to get back to what I was expecting. With the G802 Lightspeed, after some niggles, I am now with a resolution that appears to 'stick' even if I decide to, shock horror, sleep the machine and not restart the whole thing.

Some musings I wrote probably seven years ago that I feel I need to regurgitate. Mouseware’s predecessor, SetPoint I think, over 10 years ago had this fantastic software 'feature' that the software developer(s) (do they have more than one?) at Logitech implemented, namely that you were now restricted in which functions you could assign to a button, and yes, you've guessed it, you could no longer map the double click to the 'back' mapped thumb button. So sorry to be rude, but what matter of insanity, or just plain obnoxious thinking, made them add a feature to limit the use of a product they were selling? Is it a power trip, 'we get to decide how you'll use our product, not you!'? Or is it an example of sheer bloody mindedness, someone in Logitech decided that you should be able to map a button to perform only a particular subset of operations, and went out of their way to remove some of them, when it was easier to just leave them alone, i.e. allow any button to be mapped to any function. Anyway, that's fortunately ancient history, the software hasn't limited assignments for quite some time.

Uber mouse control apparently was written to modify those very XML files I referred to earlier, which I think is now ancient history, no updates since 2015, six years.

I have used HighRez's X-mouse control, and this is just brilliant, if I didn't need to use the Logitech software to customise the illumination and resolution, forget the game customisations they like to push so much as they're of little use to me, this takes care of button mapping that Logitech have failed to in 20 years.

Oh, and here are the e-mails... found them, they have been anonymised:

From: Logitech Customer Support <logitech_us@mailca.custhelp.com>

Sent: 22 February 2007 11:49 AM
To: ***
Subject: Unable to assign double click to button 6, the 'back' button. [Incident: 070203-001749]

 

We have not heard from you concerning your request for support in the 120 hours since we sent you a response. Consequently, we have changed the status of your question to SOLVED.

You can update your question by simply replying to this email, but you must enter your reply in the space specified below:

[===> Please enter your reply below this line <===]

[===> Please enter your reply above this line <===]

To update your question from our support site, click here.

 

Question Reference #070203-001749
Summary:  Unable to assign double click to button 6, the 'back' button. Product Level 1:  Logitech Product Level 2:  Pointing Devices Product Level 3:  MX Revolution Date Created:  02/03/2007 09:51 AM Last Updated:  02/22/2007 03:48 AM Status:  Solved M/N:  M-RBQ124 PID or S/N:  LZ628B4 P/N :  8318690000 Operating System:  Windows XP Logitech Software:  Setpoint Version:  3.10 Downloaded latest SW:  Yes HarmonyFlaskAgentId:
Discussion Thread
Response (***)	02/13/2007 09:59 PM
Dear Furbian, Thank you for your response. Furbian, Logitech does not provide the information on how to change the xml files or how to restore the functions. Besides, I do not have such information with me. In addition, there isn’t any information available to me that I can provide for you to contact the software development team. I do not have the contact numbers or the email address or the contact point. Furbian, please be aware that Logitech Technical Support only provides support for products which are already owned by the customer and are not functioning or are having issues. We are not trained to handle the programming issues. Furbian, if you would prefer to speak to the phone agent regarding your issue, I would suggest that you visit the link below to get the contacts. http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/utilities/contact/US/EN Thank you. Sincerely, *** Logitech Technical Support www.logitech.com/support In United States 702-269-3457 In Canada 416-207-2782 Business Hours: 6:00AM – 6:00PM PST Monday-Friday Disclaimer : Please note that your incident request has reached the AMR Email Support team. We are currently supporting the end-users of Logitech products for America and Canada. If you are currently from a different location, kindly inform us or update your contact details to allow us to submit your query to the appropriate region for more help and assistance.
Customer (Furbian)	02/13/2007 06:57 PM
If your development team don’t communicate via email or phone, is there another way in which they communicate? Let’s just leave the design comments aside. I just want information, i.e. which xml files need to be modified, or what other configuration files need to be changed to restore functionally to your Setpoint software that has been REMOVED. I paid for the product, it wasn’t free, and it is probably the most expensive mouse on the market, and you’re behaving as if I should be grateful to you for the opportunity to buy your mouse, I can tell you that I am NOT. If you are unable to answer this question this question, then what does Logietch’s ‘support’ staff actually do? Answer question like, "How to hold a mouse"? Your SUPPORT is turning out to be akin to talking to a brick wall. The arrogance is also breath taking, i.e. our developers don’t communicate with customers, insulting to customer such as myself, am I some sort of sub-human not worth responding too? Yours in absolute disgust, Furbian
Response (***)	02/13/2007 12:13 AM
Dear Furbian, Thank you for your response. Furbian, I am unable to advise you on this issue as it is beyond my capability and authority. Besides, the development team does not reply or support customer’s requests and enquiries via email or phone. I am sorry that I am unable to assist your further in this issue. Thank you. Sincerely, *** Logitech Technical Support www.logitech.com/support In United States 702-269-3457 In Canada 416-207-2782 Business Hours: 6:00AM – 6:00PM PST Monday-Friday Disclaimer : Please note that your incident request has reached the AMR Email Support team. We are currently supporting the end-users of Logitech products for America and Canada. If you are currently from a different location, kindly inform us or update your contact details to allow us to submit your query to the appropriate region for more help and assistance.
Customer (Furbian)	02/12/2007 06:57 PM
I live in the UAE, so a USA/Canadian refund offer is pretty useless. My message wasn’t read properly, I want to enable software functionality that your ‘software engineers’ have disabled, for whatever reason, I have managed to identify that there are XML files which dictate which button can be assigned which function, so far my edit have not managed to enable ‘DoubleClick’ on the ‘Back’ button. So one of your SetPoint ‘development team’ must know how to achieve what I want to know, and maybe NOT leave disable this feature in a future SetPoint release. Do you actually listen to product feedback, or do you use ‘focus groups’ to decide specifications?
Response (***)	02/05/2007 02:03 AM
Dear Furbian, Thank you for contacting Logitech Email Support. My name is *** and I will be assisting you in this issue as much as possible. As per your email, I can understand that you are unable to assign the double click function to the back button. Please correct me if I am wrong. Furbian, it seems to me that you are dissatisfied with the mouse. If you would like to have a refund, I would need you to contact the phone numbers below as I am unable to process a refund for you: In United States 702-269-3457 In Canada 416-207-2782 Business Hours: 6:00AM – 6:00PM PST Monday-Friday As for the left scroll and right scroll, they should be easy to be depressed. Should you require further assistance in relation to this issue, please feel free to respond at your earliest convenience. Thank you. Sincerely, *** Logitech Technical Support www.logitech.com/support In United States 702-269-3457 In Canada 416-207-2782 Business Hours: 6:00AM – 6:00PM PST Monday-Friday Disclaimer : Please note that your incident request has reached the AMR Email Support team. We are currently supporting the end-users of Logitech products for America and Canada. If you are currently from a different location, kindly inform us or update your contact details to allow us to submit your query to the appropriate region for more help and assistance.
Customer (Furbian)	02/03/2007 09:51 AM
After selecting button 6, i.e. the button assigned as 'back' by default, I am unable to set to double click, even from the 'other->Select Function' list, something I have been doing for the past 10 years with any mouse I have had which has 3rd button. I can see that buttons for scroll left and right can have double click assigned to them, so why not the 'back' button? Very very disappointing to pay this much for a mouse that has in effect had a trivial (from a coding perspective) feature removed. Also the scroll left button is significantly easier to depress then the right scroll button, is this difference supposed to be there, i.e. a feature or a defect? On a general design issue, I have large, not huge, hands, and yet I find that my thumb cannot reach the thumb wheel unless I grip the entire mouse with my hand, which then makes it difficult to move, as I then have to move my whole hand and can no longer rest my wrist on the desk. If I hold it like I did my MX1000 Laser (Logitech) mouse, i,e. wrist on desk, and fingers hold mouse, I also find that my thumb cannot reach the thumb wheel, and the back and forward buttons, though just above my thumb, need for my thumb to be moved up over them to use them. No button lies direct under (or rather to the right of) my thumb by default.
Auto-Response	02/03/2007 09:51 AM
This is an autoresponse message. We have received your support request and will be responding soon.

 

The misery of buying a 4K Benq 32" BL3201PT from Amazon

Another story of broken hardware, out of the box. My 2 year old Yamakasi 30” monitor, with a 2560x1600 display, that was about to be listed as hero hardware, died. E-mails to Yamakasi went unanswered, so money down the drain. I decided to go 4k, and after reading a lot of reviews went for a Benq, BL3201PT from Amazon Warehouse Deals, and hence began another wretched episode, that I’ll cover in two parts. From the outset it’s worth mentioning that Amazon censored my review, which wasn’t much of a review but a factual list of how badly I was treated. In fact they had a review cull and removed other reviews too that showed defects in videos etc. Most odd was that one of the older critical reviews had been there for months, and mine was up for over a week before they had their review cull, negative ones only of course. More on that in part two, but here’s what Amazon censored to start with:-

I’ll dispense with opinion, and just list what Benq have ‘done’ to date, bearing in mind that I don’t actually have a monitor that I paid £700 for that they collected 23 days, i.e. over three weeks, ago, i.e. I have the e-mails sat on Google’s Gmail server as proof of their behaviour.

Monitor is just six weeks old and develops a flicker/glitch problem, more on that at the end. 

Day 1: Contact Benq Support. Support ticket issued by e-mail, but then nothing happens.

Day 2: DPD van turns up with a collection request on behalf of RepairTech. The driver has no idea what is to be collected, and does not know anything about Benq, so nothing given. More tickets opened, again no e-mails after support ticket e-mails issued.

Day 8: Benq get in touch, claim I never received e-mails they sent, though ticket acknowledgements came through just fine, and the very e-mail they had sent claiming this had come through. They offer a choice of a repair or a re-furbished unit, the latter is their “normal service term”. I agree to a re-furbished unit.

Day 12: They decide not to provide re-furbished unit claiming that it’s “of easy solution”, and that, “you will have your monitor back in short time.”

Day 15: The monitor is collected by DPD, they (RepairTech is Benq’s UK repair agent) receive it the following day, DPD confirm this in an e-mail when asked.
All e-mails are now not answered.

Day 25, 9 days after it was received, Benq send an e-mail that now claims that it was only received on day 24, although it was signed for having been received the following day, i.e. day 15. The e-mails were not being answered, as sole Benq employee who deals with defective monitors was absent due to being ill.

Day 35, i.e. over three weeks on, all e-mails on requesting a status update are now being ignored, no timescale, no re-refurbished monitor, nothing.

What’s the problem? The whole picture flickers every so often, and very rarely, also produces a crackling sound from its speakers.

Using VLC media player and doing a simple well timed screen grabs, no need to do slow motion, shows what the flicker is, it’s a band that appears across the screen. Graphics cards used:-

Gigabyte AMD Radeon R9 270
MSI Radeon R9 290X TWIN FROZR IV AMD

.. and finally a brand new graphics card purchased to better cope with games at 4k resolution:-

Sapphire Radeon R9 390 NITRO Tri-X Graphics Card - 8 GB GDDR5 - 512-bit - 1040 MHz

Different display port cables used too, with no difference.
Video flickers at 9 seconds, and then at 15 seconds. The images speak for themselves.

Oh and here's the video.

Another iPad mini dies in its 'sleep'. Hate Apple, warm to Sony.

So another day, another blog entry, one written months ago, and found today. Time to put Apple in my bad book of poor manufacturers. The then bane of my life, an Apple iPad mini. In an older blog entry, I praised Apple for having quickly replaced, on the spot, my younger son’s dead iPad, that had literally died in its sleep. I thought nothing of the fact that it had died after just 8 months of use. However my elder son, who takes even more care of his hardware than his younger sibling had his iPad die on him in identical fashion. He put it on charge overnight, and in the morning it was dead and totally so, no sign of life. Try the usual, different charges, different leads, try hard resetting it by pressing home and off buttons together for ages etc. Nothing, same as before. Well not quite the same, this one was slightly older, it was, shock horror, 15 months old. I might as well start being disparaging from the outset. Yes 15 months, which apparently is three months longer than an Apple device is meant to last, after which it is beyond reasonable economic repair and is destined for landfill. The idea being that you pay for Apple care, which is extortionate (yes I know millions of Apple users love it and it’s obviously only me and few others who find it extortionate), or throw it in the bin and buy a new one.

Well I for one am not made of money, and find it outrageous that a near £250 piece of hardware when purchase was now, dead, and just after 15 months of use. So how did I arrive at this conclusion, i.e. it’s now landfill. Well time to step back in time some two months or so.

How to not get your iPad serviced in 10 easy steps.

A little background, my eldest son is 16, and I’d like him to experience the real world, so sent him on the mission to try to get it repaired. So he goes to the Apple Store in the Trafford Centre (that’s Manchester to the uninitiated) and they quote him a price of £180 to fix, but tell him that he should take to ‘3’ as it was on their contract originally and they will sort this out.

So off he went to ‘3’. ‘3’ said no can do, we need a confirmation from Apple that it’s dead.

Back to Apple. Apple provide the necessary report, all seems to be going well.

Back to ‘3’. They take the report, but now have new requirement, they want some form of proof of purchase.  At this point my son gives up and comes over to me to ask for help.

I suggest he thinks about this a little, but I give in and provide some advice, ask them if they would be happy with the eBay invoice we have for the iPad.

Back to ‘3’. My son goes and asks them if the eBay receipt will be enough. They go, yes that will be fine, bring it over and we’ll sort it out.

So we abandon our iPad repair quest for the day and return home. We printed off the receipt they wanted, and went back again a few days later.

Back to ‘3’. My son gives the Apple report and the receipt over, now different staff there and they tell him a new story. Ring our call centre with details, we can’t do anything here.

Son comes back to me and his mum. Now mum decides to intervene, goes over and states that the staff members my son met previously asked him to come back with documentation. Their response was an expected, “Oh old staff was wrong” and that was that.

So back home again, I now ring ‘3’, or rather the Indian half of ‘3’ that appears to be what ‘3’ is, the shop front is just that, an utterly useless shop front for selling you things. Support? Well the support I had received from their shop is not my idea of support.

After about an hour on the phone, being passed around various departments, the whole things turns into an argument about my pay as you go account with them being useless, and that they will not offer a repair, all that I was told by the shop was irrelevant, it is the Indian half (call centre?) that runs the show from over 4000 miles away and that is that.

Oh yes, why did I declared the iPad to be landfill, well, here goes. A second hand one with a proper one year warranty could be bought for just £150! Which is less than Apple’s repair cost. Apple Care would have cost us £85. So adding 1/3 to the price and only covering it for an extra year. As I am trying to teach my son how to budget, it was not going to be an option for him to pay for that. Then again a used Android tablet would have had a longer warranty and cost less, e.g. a Sony Z Ultra, two years RTB warranty.

So we gave up, and now I have written this.

What am I sorely tempted to do? Waste £50 and take Apple to a small claims court, on the grounds that a £250 iPad should last more than 15 months and that it is their manufacturing process that’s deficient. Problem is have I got the time to do this, wouldn’t it be easier just to spent the £150 or and buy another? Probably. Not only that but if the iOS apps are not that important, my son borrowed my little used iPad 3, then why not go for an Android tablet instead?

If anyone, and it might not even be one person (!), has been following my exploits, then they may be wondering how is it that I am not as Android hostile as I used to be.  Well that should be the subject of another blog entry, one that would describe how Sony included a backup program in their Android build that actually does quite a good job and made an upgrade from an Xperia Z1 to a Z2, quite a lot easier than it used to be.

Addendum:

The above was written quite a few months ago, since then that iPad mini sat propped up near some books, and all it did was remind me of how much it makes me hate Apple every time I see it. Yes I had a trusty local repair chap look at it, and he told me the battery is fine, the logic board is dead, and hence it’s worthless. I sent my son again to the Trafford Centre Apple Store, this time to ask for a corporate address to take them to a small claims court, and they just gave him, now a 17 year old, the URL for Apple UK which he is meant to give to the lawyer he’s meant to hire. Truly obnoxious. No there’s no address there, and on-line I found two, and can’t be sure which one to use.

In the meantime I wasn’t going to make my son suffer, he achieved 2 A*’s, 4 A’s and 4 B ‘s in his GCSE’s (all sciences were A/A*), so he was allowed to select some treats and he chose to upgrade his ageing Sony Xperia T to a (used but pristine) Sony Xperia Z3 Compact. He gave up the iPad 3 he had borrowed from me, which we sold last month. Good riddance, we now have just two iPad mini’s remaining in the household. Oh and the old Mac Mini that’s been replaced by an MXIII 4k media player; need to sell that. Actually I did sell it, to some moron on eBay who decided it was faulty, when it wasn’t, and then forced me to accept the return. Selling on eBay, the stuff of nightmares. Many a story I have to tell, for another time, if ever.

The march of Sony Xperia Android phone is now reaching saturation point in our household, two Z2’s, a Z and that old Xperia T which is behaving a little oddly.

Firefox's session managers strikes again, 50+ open tabs lost!

... but read on for a quick and dirty solution ...

New day, new gripes, but here’s a common one, Firefox’s session manager. Well it has improved a lot over the years, so much so that when my browser was eating 2GB and running like treacle due to what seemed like an extension memory leak, I turned off all extensions and then re-enabled the essentials one, I didn’t turn on the Session Manager extension, and trusted Firefox’s built in one.
 
Obviously one day the browser crashed and I restarted it as I had done several times, and expected it to offer me the option of opening the previously open tabs. For whatever reason it didn’t happen, I just ended up with a single tab. Restarting the browser again, hoping that it would pick the old session, was a mistake. I now had a backup copy that only had a single tab in it.

So this is point at which restoring old session store files etc. has all failed. Problem was that looking at the session.js file (found in the directory C:\Users\furbian\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\****.default) it appeared all my old tabs and some even older were present as a jumbly.

But no matter what I did, it would not re-open those tabs, maybe if I looked into how the file is structured I could find a way to move the old tab URL’s into the area where it reads those from when opening a new session? So I tried browsing for details on how the session store file is structured, and didn’t come across much, other than this :-

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=622036&start=30

.. and this ...

http://www.ghacks.net/2013/06/03/how-to-restore-firefox-sessions-if-session-restore-is-not-working-correctly/

These forums were useful, but I couldn’t get the HTML code to work, so took a simpler approach.

Loaded Sublime edit, opened the file and replaced all http:// with “\nhttp://” basically just line breaking before each URL, and now it was just gunk with a lot of URL’s on individual lines. Some had extraneous parameters added on, but I had a good list I could whittle down to the 50 odd tabs I had open quite easily, a few further search and replaces to clean it up, and that the job was done.

Oh I’ve now gone back to using Session Manager again, as it stores an excellent frequent history, and has never caused me to loose a single open tab.

Windows 10 - it's ugly and broken.

Windows 10, all the press is raving over it, so I thought I hate it’s flatness, but maybe an increase in performance will win me over? OK time to trial it on a newish machine.

I have a HP Z Book given to me by my employer/institution, my relationship with them is a bit of a grey area which is why I have two desks and two ID cards for the place. This was given to me in early 2015, and is brand spanking new, with crappy Intel HD Graphics 4600, and less crappy Nvidia Quadro K610M graphics chipsets in it. It came with Windows 7, on request, and works fine. For what it is though, a regular 1080p 15 incher, it weighs a tonne, but the battery life is great, lasts for hours on end. I opened it to work out where all the weight was coming from, and it was not obvious, however I was informed that it is heady due to having a steel cage inside it, as it is a ‘business laptop’.  Unfortunately it came with a hard drive and no SSD. I have a spare SSD, so I thought I’ll put that in there too, but it only has two of those mSata/PCIe slots etc. and I was determined not to spend any money on it. The cheapest solution was to buy a cheapo optical drive bay adaptor. Problem solved, but looking at the drive bay, they just wasted space, it would have been so easy to stack two 2.5” drives.

Back to Windows 10, I used a clean hard drive to install a fresh copy. So far so good. I log in, install a few things, get rid of nearly all the live tiles etc. Then I left the machine for a few minutes to do something on my main beast, the mighty desktop PC. When I came back to it, it had gone to sleep so I woke it up. The screen flickered on, then off, a good few times, the hard drive was busy, I waited, waited some more, pressed a few keys, and then, well, this:-

…and it was frozen, no not a screenshot from that overrated movie, this was a good old Amiga style crash, a spectacular where the screen is garbled, though not as many colours, Red and Black Guru Meditations notwithstanding of course.

OK a really bad one off, lets ignore it and carry on. So force a reset, reboot, install Firefox, try some more things, and I cannot help but think of one thing, boy is this ugly, it’s ugly beyond belief, all is flat, there’s no transparency, apart from the task bar where you don’t need it much. I really hate the way this looks. Note how Firefox has gone funny, those are not meant to be black boxes.

Next I try Cortana, a lot of faffing around and not much done, so I give up on it. Yes I was busy shouting at the mic for it to do things is all that I’m going to say on this. I needed to Skype call someone, great a real world test, let’s install Skype. Oh but it can’t, gives an error about not being able to update ‘the Store’, goes around in a circle i.e. update now, and back here again, I give up and leave it.

 

Later, much later, I try to wake it up, same screen flashes etc. and it crashes again, this time it decides to tell me what went wrong:-

Oh right, same picture as before, but not garbled, this is what it was trying to tell me last time. I should now stop wasting my time and give up, but oh no, I’m in ‘guy in flasher mac who stands in front of a hungry dog fond of sausages when flashing’ mode and decided to look up the problem. Turns out this igdkmd64.sys is an old Windows 8 hangover problem that they’ve managed to bring over to Windows 10. More digging still and it turns out it’s an Intel Graphics driver problem. So go over to Intel, no driver for Windows 10 yet, use Microsoft's, yes the one that crashes, instead.

So that was it, my Windows 10 experience was over, hard drive reformatted to use elsewhere. Oh no why did I try it out in the first place? Oh now I remember, the performance increase I was meant to get. Well it didn’t boot any faster, then again I was using a hard drive instead of an SSD which its Windows 7 usually boots off, but still it was perceptibly slow. All of which is an irrelevance as I sleep my PC and it awakens form it's 5W sleep state quicker than the time it takes me to sit down, or turn the monitor on. I use a master plug which cuts all power to my monitor and amplifier once the PC sleeps, which is why my monitor needs to be turned on, and doesn't just come out of standby.

Yes the file copy dialogue box is interesting, but I’ve been using Teracopy for years, and it does a lot of extra things that even Windows 10’s file copy doesn’t.

I simply haven’t the time to waste on more faffing around with Windows 10, it’s ugly and broken. Windows 7 works just fine for me thanks. Oh I mentioned ‘Frozen’ before, I just can’t help one final reference to it, because it just applies so well here; when it comes to Windows 10, I ‘just let it go!”. Now it becomes obvious why I blog under a pseudonym. Oh as for the two desks thing, I only sit at one of my desks, even if my name is on two doors in the building, because I cannot yet replicate myself so as to occupy both simultaneously. I prefer the company at the one where I sit and feel I would be an undue distraction at the other, where my just walking in one day and saying ‘Hello’ resulted in a good few minutes of laughter. Apparently, it was stated that, I said it in a “1950’s British comedy accent”.