Andi

Have driven VAG cars for most of my driving life (25 years out of 27) and have always found something that suited my life at the time. I’m currently driving an Arteon Shooting Brake, but that’s no longer made and the iD range is just dull, dull, dull. The Audi EVs are priced so high they’re ridiculous, and the Cupras are just not different enough from the iDs… I’m hoping the Skoda concepts come to fruition, but they’ll most likely be dulled down and not as cool as they look now (the Epiq looks neat)… We shall see. But it may be time to move on.

I might be getting old, but I don’t want a dull car, thanks!

Though someone hacked it a few years ago and took it over. Demanded money from me and I told them to f off, as I hadn’t used it for years.

To quote Under Siege 2 “assumption is the mother of all fuck ups”.

3 years, dude! 😁

Enjoy giving Windows 11 a proper spin. I recommend choosing “English (World)” as the language/location, then you don’t get any of the post install bloat / sponsored apps, etc installed too. Then when you log in, just change your locale to the correct one if you want to use the Microsoft Store. Or don’t, if you want that to remain disabled.

30 seconds on Google would’ve answered your question.

The TPM is part of the Intel Management Engine in your CPU.

In your motherboard UEFI firmware, goto Security - Trusted Computing and enable Security Device support.

Et voilà.

It’s not directly the TPM - it’s the enhanced security instructions in the newer chips (which is the real reason for the very definite line drawn).

Read https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/why-windows-11-has-such-strict-hardware-requirements-according-to-microsoft/ from “A towering stack of security acronyms”

No chance.

You concentrate on the TPM but ignore the CPU requirements…? If you have a CPU that is up to spec, you have a TPM - they’re built in the CPU. Most people just need to turn it on in the BIOS (or update their BIOS as motherboard manufacturers have turned on the TPM as “Windows 11 support”)

The truth of it is, every “jump” OS, i.e. 95, XP, 7, 10 has run really poorly on >5 year old chips at the time of launching. And MS got panned at “how slow” is was. But it was also the norm to update your PC more often. Now speed increases have slowed and Moore’s Law has ended, it’s about security and performance hit of said security. The truth is, the kernel hardening and malware protection and encryption built into 11 to make it far less likely to get infected than 10 and 7 means it needs the hardware support to do it. Without it, it runs far slower or is less secure. Neither anyone wants.

When 10 support ends in 2 years time, the lowest supported processor for 11 will be nearly 9 years old…

Certainly YMMV. I have an HP 8720 and it works wirelessly perfectly, Windows finds it and installs it automatically. Including the scanner. Even works from my wife’s Chromebook. I can print from my Android phone without any issue.

I do pay for the HP ink subscription, but it’s only 99p per month, and that’s 15 pages with rollover and that suits our need 99% of the time.

This seems a bit fishy to me, I don’t buy it.

I reckon the couple had done something stupid in the car like drive it through a fjord ford that was deeper than they thought, or through a flooded section of road and actually did submerge the battery. Multiple times.

Then went to dinner. And the car had enough.

They get the scary quote, then decide to omit the majority of the day’s activities when complaining to the local newspaper in order to shame Tesla/Elon to pay up.

Yes, our 365 team got estimates from Microsoft about 3 weeks ago.

If we don’t cull our usage before next August, our renewal will be £1m more than this year… That’s for 70,000 accounts and a whole lotta SharePoint.

Wait until Corporate sees the new data storage rates for 365 for next year and their potential new bill for cloud storage.

They’ll be spinning up those server room file servers in no time.

Until the directory structure and filename, including your SharePoint hostname, exceeds 400 characters and then it just breaks. Because, Microsoft.

Surprisingly easy to do with some quite nested folders with spaces in the names (as that takes 3 characters per space) and a long filename.

Because the paid-for “bloat” is per region. If you don’t define the region… taps side of forehead

Remember some ‘core’ apps, such as Paint and Calculator are delivered via the Store now too - so they’ll also be missing.

When choosing the region/language, choose “English (World)”. Boom, bloatware be gone.

You can safely change it to your correct region once you’ve logged in (Note: the Windows Store won’t work until you do).

You can’t run Android Auto directly on your phone anymore, it was disabled last year. It only runs as a service to be used by a suitable head unit.

You misunderstood. The US is <10% of Samsung phone sales globally (I found retail sales online for their handset sales per country) . And they will know the stats of which of those phones ever used the magstripe feature. An educated guess of <1% of global users activating the mag stripe feature is a feature they can afford to cut, especially if it saves on cost.

Re. the Mag-Stripe. Bare in mind the US is <10% of the market for the Samsung phones. And then you’d need to break down of the Samsung phones sold in North America - how many of those were S-series vs. the others which don’t support the mag-stripe. Even if 50-50, that’s now <5% of phones which have mag-stripe support in a country that uses it. Then rough guess of 20% of users actually pay by phone? You’re now <1%. A small pale blue dot in the vast cosmic arena…

SD cards - there’s also the point of user data security. Data stored on an SD card can’t be easily guarenteed safe by Knox. Yes, you can encrypt it, but remove that SD card and the card itself can’t protect the data from brute forcing encyption keys.

The other issues with SD card is security. Your data isn’t safely tucked away, controlled by Knox if it’s on a SD card which can be removed. And ‘letting the user choose’ just means that there needs to be configuration and extra options in firmware, which leads to backdoors and workarounds and a higher chance of comprimsed user data. (When they’re not just stealing it off your device and selling it anyway…).

You’ll need an OTG MHL adapter that has HDMI out as well as USB for your mouse.

Hook up to a TV, and it should just work…

I’m going to jump to Samsung’s defense here as I think your anti-consumer belief is misguided:

• the SD card has been drifting away from most Android phones for the core reason of reliability. Data stored on SD cards is not at reliable and when apps are forced to run off the SD card, there are side effects and crashes which are nightmares for devs. When a non brand SD card loses a user’s data, the user blamed the phone manufacturer, which is akin to putting the wrong fuel in your car and then blaming the car manufacturer that your car won’t go.
• mag-stripe. Considering they are a Korean company, I don’t blame them for dropping a complex feature used by a select few in the US. Because the US is the only country left that thinks the ancient technology of the magnetic stripe is still a good medium for the transfer of your bank details. Contact-less paymemt is now pretty much standard everywhere else and is so much more secure and standardised. The range and reliability of the contact-less payment has increased massively for me on the S23 in comparison to the S20 which was also lumbered with magstipe support.
• dilution of features? Again, why should it be more complicated? A larger phone can incorporate more lenses, screen and battery, but the core features and benefits should be the same to make the choice simpler for the consumer. Advertising of the range is simpler also.

Each to their own but these are just my views based on 11 years in the mobile phone retail business.