More on connectivity

Monday afternoon, I went into town, and hunted for a new office PC, in John Lewis and PC world, but didn't find what I was looking for. All in One HP desktops with touch screens are now retail flavour of the month. We don't need the touch interface for work purposes. An hour in the office re-examining the Cloud file sync problem, revealed that as long as you log in with proper MS Account details every time rather than an alias username and password, there's no problem. When Windows Update requires a system re-start, logging in with an alias won't deliver synchronisation. There's no warning. Get into the habit of accessing using an alias, your files get saved on your machine and local network, but not in the Cloud. It's obvious, but not obvious. There are so many useless bells and whistles to annoy Windows users, but a helpfully placed notification here would lower resentment and blood pressure levels.

Tuesday, I was going to extend my hunt for a new office PC, but as I was about to leave, Mary, our neighbour came over and asked if I could come and check her PC, as something was stopping her from accessing her emails, and she thought she'd done something wrong. She has an old slowish XP machine and was exercise by the thought of having inadvertently disconnected it from the router, but wasn't sure how to check this. Physically it was fine. The error messages were all of the 'network not found' type, and compounded by a confusing browser install of AVG 'Safe Search', which detracted from the simple browser set up she was used to. The problem didn't show immediately until I re-booted the router. No broadband. After Clare joined us for a cup of tea, the red light on the router had turned blue again, and all was back to normal. Back at home, I learned about an inexplicable spate of BT broadband outages across the country during the day. Not linked to any cyber attack. Is the weather, sunspots or what?

Earlier in the day I spent a couple of hours thinking about doing another daily Lenten blog. Last year's was quite demanding to sustain but worth the bible study and mental exercise it entailed. This time, I'd like to write about the venture of prayer, especially bearing in mind that I'm currently working with a newly baptized Christian convert. He is coming to Lenten activity afresh, a first time experience, both of prayer and participation in Liturgy. I have to keep Hamid in mind as I write, even if his English is far from adequate to understand what I write. On a one to one basis ideas can be communicated more simply than they can in writing.

I enjoyed my double class of Chi Gung and Tai Chi this evening, and wasn't nearly as tired at the end of it. So much so, that I set up a new blog page and wrote for an hour, in readiness for the weeks to come.
     

Cloud woes again

After preparing a sermon for Sunday and working on an office document at home, I went into town mid afternoon for a short spell this afternoon, but it turned into a longer spell than intended, as we realised that Julie's HP All in one PC 'admin central' hadn't synced with MS OneDrive for the past three weeks. It's now the third time this has happened since the the machine was upgraded from Windows 7 to 10 at the end of September last. We discovered this because Julie couldn't find some template documents I had prepared at home a few weeks ago. They were there in the Cloud, but not on her machine as they should have been.

As Julie's worked almost exclusively on issuing invoices in the past three weeks, all I had to do was copy the missing files to a flash drive, and upload them to OneDrive form another machine, then Julie could continue working uninterrupted. For me, it gave an impressive reminder of how productive she's been recently. I completed the missing template task after Julie had finished work for the day and didn't get home until well after eight.

Thank goodness we haven't given up using a network drive and flash drive to back up all that we also keep into the Cloud. Frankly, I wonder if this new way of working is ever going to be quite as good as office back up hardware system under our exclusive control. Mobile computing is great for anyone who works at different locations. In our outfit, I'm the only one that does. Before Windows 10 and OneDrive file system sync by default, we kept files in the Cloud, accessed them from a browser, and/or emailed documents being worked on, admittedly struggling some times to maintain version control. Moving from there to the new status quo seems not a big step, but three sync breakdowns in six months without an obvious reason, using reliable hardware and internet services is ominous.

Trouble shooting to find out exactly how the sync mechanism aborts could take a long time, and might not be possible in the limited hours I have available to spend in the office from Monday to Wednesday, to do the job while she's not at work. Julie's machine's been in use two years and four months. It was solidly reliable syncing to OneDrive under Windows 7, but now no longer. It's the one machine which does need to be completely reliably up to date in every respect.

It's time to get a new PC and set it up, make sure it syncs correctly, before next Thursday so as not to interrupt Julie's workflow. Then, if syncing proves unreliable on an all-new machine, we simply revert to the way we used to do things, restrict our file system to office hardware, and back up to the Cloud just once a week. And maybe ditch OneDrive for Google Drive storage. It's not slick and perfectly safe, but better controllable and safe than sorry.

Our company accountant works on what seems to me like an insanely fast depreciation rate for office electronic equipment, and regularly expects us to include a sum for replacements in our annual budget. So far I've avoided replacing equipment unless its really dead. Older kit has not necessarily proved to be much slower in action for normal office tasks, thanks to our increased use of on-line resources and a faster office internet connection. As with one's car, reliability is the most decisive criterion, not glitz or speed.
      

Windows 10 comes to CBS

Today has been spent in the CBS office again, working on a job description to drive recruitment for the appointment of a Business Crime Reduction Manager for the city centre. The job will take on many of the Partnership functions we've been carrying and developing over the past six years. It's been quite a revelation to review all the minor activities generated by our work, making up the total picture, like camera pixels

First thing, my office PC, being the newest, fastest and most capable of taking advantage of the faster office broadband link, announced it was ready for the Windows 10 upgrade. True to the Microsoft promise, the upgrade took an hour, and left every program I installed working properly. Just as well, as I needed to be able to put it to use immediately. It'll take a few days to read the reviews and try out all the new features, however.

Ashley and I had a first meeting this morning with the new Brains area manager, who has been invited to be a BCRP Board member. Another element of much needed progress in developing the public face of the organisation is now in place. On the the way back to the office, we bought a new Acer 23" desktop PC for Ashley in John Lewis', to replace his six year old Vista laptop. In the business realm, the value of equipment like this decreases to virtually nothing, even though it works adequately. Everything else works well enough with new cloud based services, but older kit can struggle a bit for lack of processing power, or a not fast enough network hardware on board

I say 'works well enough', as Windows 10 re-synchronises the whole of our OneDrive file system as if it had never happened before, and it proved annoyingly slow. Working files saved, so others could access them, took an hour or so to show up and be accessible from another machine's file menu. Curiously however, OneDrive accessed from a browser found the files immediately. With millions of computers re-syncing with their Cloud drives on any given day after upgrading, it seems to me we can expect a period when file access from the desktop filesystem is less than efficient.

Still, that's number one machine updated. I wonder how long I will have to wait before Windows 10 is ready to install on any of my home machines?