I endorse this Pitting! It’s my word against yours, but a few decades ago I could do things with computers that flabbergasted top-notch Silicon Valley nerds. Nowadays I often ask my pre-teen son for help. :smack:
Here’s a rant I prepared a few months ago but (like most my rants :eek: ) I didn’t post it. I’ll post it now.
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Some talk about the “technological singularity”, when progress achieves sudden growth. I’d like to discuss a different singularity which we may be approaching – the point when Window’s masturbatory behavior consumes all available memory and CPU power, and computer users are no longer able to get any benefit from their Windows computers.
The computer scientist Fred Brooks famously declared that adding additional programmers to a software project may delay the delivery of the software! Microsoft now has a legion of programmers larger than many country’s standing army. Profits continue to roll in – as with Coke, the quality of the products is irrelevant, only the brand name matters to mesmerized consumers – and the legion of programmers continues to grow. I hypothesize that they are approaching a singularity where all their efforts are forms of masturbation. They may continue to release new versions of Windows, but each new version will be more worthless than the previous version.
My laptop with 1 GB memory and Windows 7 failed, so I bought a new laptop. I got 4 GB despite that 1 GB was plenty for me, and I intended to do nothing new or different. The store wouldn’t sell me Windows 7 so I got Windows 10. Some things I could do on the old 1GB machine now cause thrashing on the 4GB machine!
I’m starting to wonder if I should have just hunted down an old third-hand Windows 7 laptop at a junk store. Not to save money – I’d have paid antique price for the treasure – but so I’d have a comprehensible working machine.
My laptop put itself to sleep after two minutes of “inactivity.” I put “inactivity” in quotes since it goes off even when I have a background process doing simulations. In the ineffable wisdom of Microsoft, computers are for punching the mouse button and watching videos; background computations are evidently beyond their ken.
The Microsoft Control Panel has four (or eight) places to set the time delay before sleeping. I set all four (eight?) to two HOURS. Nope, the sleep still comes after two MINUTES. I can understand why the anal-retentive programmer wanted to have eight distinct places to set the sleep delay – he had to earn his keep somehow. Unfortunately some other anal-retentive programmer felt the need to override all eight settings.
I would have been as happy to have zero settings as to have eight. Call me old-fashioned but when I want the laptop to Sleep I … [wait for it] … click Sleep(*)! But eight visible settings, or even sixteen, would be OK if they actually set the thing they claim to be setting!
(* - Bizarrely the clicked Sleep behaves differently – less friendly – than the timed-out Sleep. “Hibernate” is gone; I suppose that was too long a word for their Windoze 10 target customers.))
Google is your friend. Type “Why does my Windows 10 laptop go to sleep after two minutes?” and you’ll get 1.8 million hits. Most of the hits, unfortunately, will be to YouTubes showing how to change the obvious settings, or others with the same unanswered question as me. But finally I found a post that did solve my problem. I wonder if Windows apologists will find a way to endorse the solution that worked!
- Click on the windows icon
- Type regedit
- Right-click on regedit icon, click Run as administrator
- Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power\PowerSettings\238C9FA8-0AAD-41ED-83F4-97BE242C8F20\7bc4a2f9-d8fc-4469-b07b-33eb785aaca0
- Double click on Attributes
- Enter number 2.
- Go to Advanced power settings (click on Windows button, write power options, click on Power Options, in the selected plan click on the Change plan settings, click on the Change advanced power settings).
- Click on the Change settings that are currently unavailable
- Click Sleep, then System unattended sleep timeout, then change these settings from 2 Minutes to 20 for example.
That’s it!
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Yes, there are hidden settings which somehow override the visible settings. But if the interface is intended to be intuitive and user-friendly, I think we might agree that 238C9FA8-0AAD-41ED-83F4-97BE242C8F20 was not the best choice for a descriptive folder name. Note that there are many other folders with useless names there; not to mention that you need to somehow navigate at least six levels down … just to get the opportunity, when you guess 238C9FA8-0AAD-41ED-83F4-97BE242C8F20 correctly, to then somehow guess 7bc4a2f9-d8fc-4469-b07b-33eb785aaca0.