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Deanna,
Your articles, for me, come first in “Ask Woody” newsletters, not last — i.e., I usually read you first. This one was especially good.

CAS,
Thanks for the tip about Malware Bytes Firewall Control. That’s also useful

Well, Deanna, you’ve hit another home run here. I’ll check out Pocket Radio, and I’m also interested in the StreamWriter that Wayne recommended. Thanks to both of you!

Depending on where one is listening, it may be worth mentioning that Alexa, the genius who lives inside my Amazon Echoes, can reproduce many of the tricks that Pocket Radio can do if you’re away from your PC. However, she wants you to provide the call letters or the frequency of the station you’re after, as she can’t show you her database. (I’d assume that her sisters, Siri and Google, can do the same thing.)

joep517 wrote:

You can always use OneNote. It is free and multi-platform. It is as simple or complex as you wish. You can start very simply with just notes and add more if you need it.

That’s what I came here to say. I said exactly the same thing about last week’s suggestion of Info-Base. OneNote is much better and more elegant that both Info-Base and NotesMan, because it’s a free cross-platform app, storing its notes in the cloud where they sync with OneNote on iMacs, Macbooks, iPhones, iPads, Android phones, all PCs running Windows and Linux, and perhaps even Chromebooks (via a browser). (There used to be an app for Chromebooks that users are begging to be brought back.)

Moreover, it allows rich-text formatting of notes that can be copied into word processors, PowerPoint, etc., and it allows insertion of hyperlinks and images, none of which is possible on Info-Base or NotesMan

Imho, an informed PC user will continue with OneNote rather than Info-Base and NotesMan.

Deanna is my favorite columnist on Ask Woody. She’s saved me a lot of time and work over the years, but indy freeware isn’t always superior to Commercial freeware.

Deanna,

Every time i get a new issue of Ask Woody, the first thing i do is look to see if you have a new article. They’re always great and superbly illustrated.

This time, I have a question: Is there anything I can do with Info-Base that I can’t already do with Microsoft’s equally free OneNote? I don’t really discern any functionality like that, and OneNote has the significant advantage of being a cross-platform app — I can install it on any device whether Windows, macOS, iOS, or iPadOS,

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Taliaferro

Quite true. Your description is closer to the truth than mine was.

It’s off-topic but perhaps worth mentioning that the caveat about not allowing complete discharges applies equally to the lead-acid batteries in our vehicles. A battery will usually recharge after one complete discharge and often after two. However depending on the age of the battery, after that, a complete discharge may result in one or more of the cells dying completely.

I recently accidentally discharged a 3-yr-old automobile battery for the second time. After leaving it on the charger overnight, the device indicated that charging to “100%” was complete and that the voltage was 6, indicating that half the cells in the battery had been irreparably damaged by the second discharge to zero. I believe there are some chargers that have the ability to electrically rejuvenate batteries like this, but, for me, it was a $107 mistake that I’ll not repeat.

A TPM usually must be enabled in BIOS, but the main requirement is the hardware chip that is often soldered to the motherboard. If it is, enabling it in BIOS would be all that’s necessary, and that should not require a BIOS upgrade.

If it’s not, the motherboard may have a socket for plugging in a TPM that can be purchased separately. The trouble with that is that I’ve been led to think that the pin assignments in those sockets are not universal — i.e.,  it could be necessary to buy a TPM of the same brand as the motherboard, so finding one in stock might be problematic.

There supposedly is such a thing as a “virtual TPM,” but I know nothing about it and doubt that it would satisfy the MS requirement under discussion here.

And late-version AMD CPUs have a firmware version of TPM2 in the CPU. In that case, one has to simply enable fTMP in BIOS   OR   depending on the chip and motherboard manufacturers, change the TPM setting in BIOS from “discrete” to “firmware.”

blueboy714 wrote:

Best Beginning of an AskWoody Article Ever…

Windows 11 announced

Why this? Why now? And what the heck is going on?

On June 24, 2021, Microsoft announced Windows 11. I have no idea why. It is surely not for the cobbled-together reasons the company gave during its rather brief briefing on Thursday.

**

When I bought my Win10 PC a year I doubled and tripled what the specifications told me I needed knowing I would more.  Yesterday, when I ran the PC Health Check to find out if my PC would work for Win11 I get the warning that “This PC can’t run Windows 11.  TPM2.0 is a requirement for running Windows 11.”

Wonderful – thanks MS.   Just what I want to do is go out and buy a new PC or expensive computer chip.

 

IF your new computer is a desktop and its  motherboard has a TPM socket, the plug-in TPMs ate not what I’d call “expensive.” Name-brand ones from Asus and Gigabyte are only about $25

I’m not an IT pro, but I gained  a rudimentary understanding of the Trusted Platform system from some hasty Google searches.

**  My first question is why MS thinks a TPM should be mandatory for Windows 11 Home. In the Enterprise versions it makes sense, and in that sector, TPMs have probably been enabled for years already, but why is it necessary for domestic users on the laptop they keep in their bedroom?

**  My second question is what the effect will be for users currently running Windows 10 in VMs, especially on Macs, none of which have literal TPMs?

 

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Ascaris, Charlie

Susan,
I just logged in to thank you for the most useful column I’ve run across in ages. I have an older Win7 PC that has been used only rarely since I switched the home mostly to Apple products. Its hardware is easily good enough to run Windows 10, so I have been intending to boot it and update it for that upgrade. However, I absolutely dreaded the task of installing all the updates from the last 18 months. I think that your tips will greatly simplify that task. Whew!
My question involves the recently-released Microsoft’s recently-released “cumulative rollup pack.” I’ve downloaded that, but I’ve yet to run it. At this point, would you advise just doing that, OR should I first manually install the five updates listed on the Dalai page that you referenced?

Thanks