The Merkinman posted:

How is Windows 8.1 at automating maintenance like anti-virus and security updates?
Looking to get my not-at-all-tech-savvy father a laptop replacement for his desktop and netbook (both running XP!) He's not very good at taking care of his computers so they get vulnerable. ("this wants to update? Leave me alone!" Of course this just causes the updates to pile on until Windows goes "gently caress you I'm updating and rebooting in the process".)
Frankly I wish I could just get him an iPad, but he wants to be able to store/watch his gigs of unedited home movies.

404notfound posted:

Inzombiac posted:

Anyone else getting "Limited or no internet access" in 8.1?
When I run the troubleshooter it is fixed for a few minutes and then goes back to poo poo.

GreenBuckanneer posted:

Is it possible to virtualize the pagefile so it only uses ram? I mean if you've got 12gb or 36gb or whatever, I'm sure you can set aside 2gb of it just for that usage.

Flipperwaldt posted:

As far as I can see, you tap the word so it's selected and mistype it again and then it stays like that. I'm assuming that's the proper way, because it's the same for speech and handwriting recognition on Windows.


Can I just take this opportunity to rant a bit about locales? Windows 8.1 is the first Windows I know of that sort of cleaned up the mess locales were before. Used to be third party programs would assume the language they should use should be derived from where I am instead of what the OS language is, causing me to say I'm in the US. And it used to be that I'd need to manually customize time and date settings. All this is better now. I can stop lying about being in Belgium and I can just set an alternative time and date formatting scheme if I want to, while still keeping the OS language English, but the input language Dutch (for spell check) and my keyboard layout Belgian. I've only seen one installer default back to Dutch, which is great progress compared to XP or 7.

Except, the whole Metro environment doesn't consistently obey those settings. Yes, even the separate (?) settings under PC Settings. The whole desktop environment finally does it (mostly) right, but all my live tiles show am/pm nonsense, as does the calendar app. The alarm app is worse as far as consistency goes; it does 24h times in the app, but am/pm on the live tile.

I get a really weird mixture of French, Dutch and German in the Store app. I know these are all official languages here, but come on.

On top of that, but related I feel, the Mail app, in addition to the locale settings, doesn't respect the setting to not underline 'misspelt' words. That's fun when writing a mail in Dutch, because it insists I must be writing in English.

I'm sort of edge casing the gently caress out of this with my preferences, but all the settings I'm offered suggest it should be a viable path.

I can understand that if I'm completely logged out, the login screen has to default to something, so why not the time and date formatting that is common for the OS language. Fine, I'll live with that. When I'm logged on though. With preferences explicitly set. Why? I'm still not sure if it's the entire Metro environment that just blatantly ignores the settings, or whether it's the individual Microsoft apps, but either way, it sucks donkey balls.

Ravel posted:

If I have a completely new build without an optical drive is it possible to install windows from an external optical drive or do I have to do it by USB? Which is easier?