Tale of two offices

After the midweek Mass with Tredegarville school children at St German's, I stayed around and chatted with people in the thriving church hall Elderly People's Day Centre. It was pleasing to hear that ITV local news would be visiting to do a feature article this Friday, as a follow up to one a year ago, when the centre landed a substantial piece of funding to sustain the excellent work done there. There was a karaoke sing along in the main lounge with a couple of dozen participants having a good time, and a reflexologist was giving someone a treatment in the hall, while others not musically inclined relaxed and chatted over a cuppa. 

I stayed around because Area Dean Fr Bob Capper was due to make a visit to inspect church records and premises certificates, all part of the Archdeacon's visitation report. Thanks to Angela, the church administrator, all the essential documentation is systematically and accessibly filed. Bob expressed his admiration if not a little envy as well. Such a thorough and disciplined control of paperwork is rarely a strength for any cleric, even if this virtue is high on their wish-list. It's ages since we last had a chance to chat, the August before last, in fact. How time flies.

When he'd finished his inspection, we parted company and I headed for PC World on Newport Road to shop for a computer. Much more choice of machines there, but not of non-touchscreen devices. So, I drove across Cardiff to Culverhouse Cross, where there are still two stores, a Curry's and a PC World, but it was the same story in both. Back then to Western Avenue and Staples, where I found exactly what I'd been looking for, and at a reasonable price. It's a stylish 23" Core i3 HP Pavilion All in One PC with 8GB of RAM and a terabyte hard drive. Far more capacity and power than is really necessary to get the job done, but properly set up from scratch in the light of experience, it should see off recent troubles and be reliable for a good few years to come.

It took me six hours to set it up with additional software to resemble the existing office machine, so as to make it possible for Julie to continue working where she left off when she next comes in. It was yet another machine which had Windows 8.1 pre-installed, but at least on this occasion, as soon as it had completed the set up routine, it switched smoothly into update mode. I do resent the fact that there is no warning about delays involved in getting a new purchase into use. But at least it didn't have a sticker on it saying Windows 10 NOW - such a downright lie.
  

Lost, unsynced by Windows 10

I can't believe that we could have so much hassle as a consequence of the upgrade of the main office admin computer from Windows 7 to Windows 10. We realised last week that the file system wasn't syncing as it was supposed to, and that we seemed to have more than once copy of it on the machine. It took us a while to discover that the OneDrive location where Julie had been saving files since April existed only on her machine, and was not syncing to the web, possibly because it had been set up in a file location that suited us, rather than Microsoft. 

Until April, under Windows 7 it was syncing fine, then stopped without warning. Upgrade produced on this computer another edition of the file system held in the Cloud, up to date until April, with a few additions made by me, directly to the web from other machines, but with none of Julie's work, several hundred files - all there in the filesystem of her choice location but unsynchronised. It's easy enough now she knows for her to save material direct to the web version, but finding and uploading six months of files is no easy matter.

After I'd taken a copy of the file system containing the past six months of work, it was a matter of working out which of several dozen file folders needs updating and doing it manually. Not an easy task. Often resorted to file folders are identifiable quickly, but the myriad of lesser used ones are far more of a problem. We spent several hours together doing this, and I completed as much as I could find at home in the evening before disaster struck. My six year old Linux driven Dell XPS laptop, one of the first purchased by CBS, and redundant for several years, despite being useable and useful, died on me in mid-operation, almost certainly from a motherboard failure. Probably it's beyond economical repair. I was able to complete most of what I'd set out to do on another machine, but now I'm faced with retrieving confidential data from a machine I've never needed to take apart before.

At least there's good news from Ipswich hospital. Eddie's chest infection is responding to treatment, and his rehabilitation course continues.

 

A warning light that doesn't

I received disconcerting news from Ashley that his new Acer all in one desktop machine was yet again misbehaving and not starting up as intended. It's cycling in a re-boot - repair mode loop, it seems to be caused by unadjusted power settings putting the machine to sleep or switching off, depending on how long it's been left. Normally the machine is left on permanently, cond configured to stay on, with only the screen blanking on idle. I had to do this when it needed reverting to the OEM Windows 8.1 or else the 148 updates would never have been completed. As it was with those reboots that demand consent, it took several days to get the machine in to a state where the upgrade to Windows 10 could take place. This returned to power settings to default and neither of us noticed, so the same old story started again.

The machine's power tell tale light is so dim, it's impossible to tell if it's switched on. Neither does it  blink when in suspense, so one is fooled into thinking it's switched off. Pressing the power button is supposed to switch on or wake up the machine, not sure which. But prolonged pressing of the power button brings up the 'Advanced Startup' menu, which you may or may not need, depending on whether the machine thinks its been properly switched off or not. Without any useful tell-tales, this produces a vicious cycle, for no apparent reason. Only after reading up on 'Advanced Startup' on the Microsoft website was I able to find a way to understand the issue. But as today is bank holiday, I had better things to do than go into the office.

After a lazy morning, we went for a walk along the Taff Trail as far as Llandaff North and had a drink in the Railway Inn before walking back. I cooked a seafood paella for supper, and made an effort not to think about work and time consuming operating systems of any kind.

 

Windows 10 comes home

A sunny Friday morning started with a computer notification that the Windows 10 upgrade was ready for installation – eight days after the new operating system was launched. So, around eleven, I clicked go, then went off to my GP appointment. Thankfully the blood pressure was what it should be again. What it was like at the end of this day, I didn't bother to check, but I imagine it'd be high in the light of what I now report.

The upgrade took about an hour on a machine only a little slower than my office PC, but took another quarter of an hour to configure to my requirements. Again, all installed programs run nicely, the Edge browser is still a fiddle to set up for my default choices, but this time expected.
 

I started writing my Sunday sermon on another Windows 8.1 machine, my little underpowered travel portable, and it soon gave me an installation notification, but when I clicked on it, downloading the upgrade hadn't finished. An hour later, it changed its mind and let me start. Again this took about an hour and a quarter to get to a state usability, except for one thing.

Internet access speeds on standard consumer 2mb/sec broadband connection plummeted to the point where it took a minute or two to access any new page. Other wi-fi devices in the house were also crippled, and even the phone signal booster struggled to deliver the consistent in-house signal we've got used to relying on. The reason? One Drive was busy syncing 8GB worth of files with both Windows 10 computers entirely from scratch. In fact, when the second sync started, the first stopped in its tracks, and could only be re-started once the other finished. 

The sync process notification said that files were downloading from OneDrive. I was mystified by this, as previously in Windows 8.1, a personal filesystem was uploaded to the internet and disappeared the machine. If you wanted to save work in progress to tackle when off-line, you had to hide it where OneDrive wouldn't whisk it away. This time, when the syncing stopped, after four or five hours, I discovered that all my files had been returned to the hard drive and now could be accessed off-line. Or so it says!

While this initial syncing process was going on, it seemed to consume most of the available bandwidth, to the point that other network attached devices were, for most purposes, apart from receiving notifications, un-useable. Like a denial of service attack, but in effect a provision of service sucking up all the capacity of the system.

It was so bad that when, later in the afternoon, during the sync-fest, I sought to retrieve my half prepared sermon from OneDrive, it wouldn't deliver, as pages were loading so slow they timed out. Finally, after more long waits, my trusty Linux Mint six year old Dell machine managed to slip through the traffic stream and deliver me vital file. Then I was able to complete the sermon off-line and print. It then took several attempts to upload the edited file to OneDrive. 

This may be a one off experience to do with upgrading. It won't much affect people with fast broadband, but anyone with ordinary broadband speed is going to be confounded by the experience, wishing they'd never bothered to upgrade.  In essence the upgrade is a seamless experience, apart from this issue, which is a stumbling block for those unwarned.

What I have been reminded of by this waste of a day is not to rely totally on any Cloud based service or application. Great for back-up, or file sharing, sure, but today's experience reduced fancy new Windows 10 to an offering no better or worse than a Chromebook, and brought the household to a halt.

Admittedly we're running a lot of connected devices on our domestic broadband service. Four wired devices and six to eight wi-fi devices are attached at any time, but most are just idling. Any massive file download is going to disrupt. So, it's time to pay extra for more capacity, and switch to a fibre optic system. Cable has been in the street for over a decade, and the BT cabinet around the corner has boasted of being upgraded for the past two years. 

It may be a long time before we have such a diminished service again, but truth to tell, we're now so dependent on seamless delivery, it's hard to cope with such disruption. Are we right to be so heavily reliant on internet connectedness? Days like this seem to suggest untold disasters if things ever go wrong on the macro scale.