WOW! I can't believe you either found this, or somehow knew about it! What an obscure piece of information, but highly appropriate to this discussion. Thanks for posting.

OMG! You guys are on it! Thanks for the chuckle this morning. My brain has been trying to visualize an attempt at burying a live chicken since I read this, particularly a fiesty mean rooster. :laugh:

I respectfully disagree. Windows recognizes that your drive is an SSD and doesn't do it. Instead, there are other optimizations that Windows does to SSDs that are good to keep it working well. From my reading and understanding over the years, defragmenting, however, does nothing at all to an SSD drive except needlessly burn read/write cycles. If you know of information supporting your viewpoint, I'd love to read about it.

And that is the very thing that makes a place like this actually usable. Too often people want to hide behind anonymity while slinging personal insults towards people that they don't know. I don't ever find that here. I would absolutely attribute it to soft but firm guidance from the moderator(s). I absolutely love getting my daily emails and clicking on articles that I find interesting. And to whoever creates the story sub-headers in the emails, you are freaking AWESOME! :-D

Ahhh... "bespoke". I haven't came across that term since my Project Management studies a few months back. I may be coming across it a lot more since I landed a federal (government) job as an IT Project Manager. Took me a couple of lookups to discern exactly how it applied to the business world. Pretty simple actually but still caught my eye because the word is very uncommon in South Georgia.

I ran into the push toward the networking stage with MS trying to push everyone towards subscription based Office. You have to look and dig, and sometimes argue with your vendor, but there IS still a LTSC (Long Term Support Channel, ie, "stand alone, non-subscription based" version of Office. I had to find it myself, argue with my vendor about the availability, until they finally found it and offered it to me.

I agree with you to a degree. I would not say that it is completely useless, but I will agree that anyone getting into a "computer field" needs to drill down a bit further and decide upon a specialty that is of interest. The ultimate goal is to make yourself marketable and squeeze your way into the workforce and then fake it until you make it. A degree in networking, or DevOps, or InfoSec, or programming, or some other specialty, is immensely more attractive to an employer than a Computer Science degree. However, as I stated, I would not totally negate the usefulness of a Computer Science degree altogether.

Would you be interested in sharing? We do a lot of stuff in C# and I'm always on the lookout for improved ways to block unwanted data from hitting our network. We use a robust 3rd party Endpoint service and are pretty happy with it, but this thread caught my eye.

I am an IT Manager. My department produces OEM software among other "normal" IT tasks. Our software is used to create USDA inspection data. We are required by the government IT Modernization mandate to maintain a Code Signing Certificate in addition to regularly scanning our code for security weaknesses and vulnerabilities. We use AppScan for our code scanning and GlobalSign for our CSC's. My point is that in some instances, there is an absolute requirement to obtain and maintain the Code Signing Certificates as well as code scanning. Without the Code Signing Certs, Windows Defender, AVG, and the other AV software will either disallow installation and operation, or even delete the files outright at times. Yes it is expensive, but is a cost of doing business for some of us.

I am in total agreement with your statement on all points. I recently got certified (PMP) as a Project Manager. I did well on the 180 question certification test, however there is supposedly a 1st time failure rate of up to 60% on the 210 test. I prepared diligently for the test and am happy to share my study/prep techniques. The PMP core values are built on responsibility, respect, honesty, and fairness. These values for me also mean helping out those around me that I interact with. This community has been awesome and thankfully I've seen very little condescending self-righteousness on here. I love it! Great post. :)

I'm a fan of detailed documentation as well, however, keep in mind that if using an Agile development approach, then there is minimal focus on documentation. In fact, one of the core values is valuing "working software over comprehensive documentation". This has always been a mind struggle for me. However, I remind myself that the Agile Manifesto doesn't forbid documentation, and many projects may include that requirement, however, it just states that it is much more important to spend time on software that works as intended rather than using that time to create comprehensive documentation. Ultimately, I just try to strike a good balance, because my users must be able to know how to install and use the software that my company produces. I wear many hats as an IT Manager, one of which is Project Manager, but could easily see myself happy as a Software Architect. Best of luck to you. :thumbsup::cool::java:

It can definitely be a little challenging at first. There are some awesome videos and tutorials online that explain it all. The very purpose of Github is to be a "versioning" system, so yes it will indeed retain all versions for you. Learn the command line interface as well. You can do some pretty amazing thing with it. As with anything that is a little complex, if you don't practice and use Github regularly, you will lose familiarity with the process. Good luck!:cool:

I set up new laptops all the time in my position as an IT Manager. I always use the "Limited Experience" (offline account) option and have never had to use an email account, not even once. I set up a new one as recently as 3 weeks ago. One other hack to avoid setting up the secret questions and answers to your computer user accounts - initially create them without a password, then go back and create a password later after your initial startup configuration. We only use Windows Pro editions (Win 10, but starting to transition to Win 11). Works great for me and I've never had to do anything with an email account at all.

The FBI also did it with the Russian collusion thing. Whether you like or dislike Trump, the Russian collusion allegation was a prime example of a circular reference and in this case they (FBI) knew it all along.

Personally, I like the Sawzall option.

Hello. This is an awesome site, stocked full of amazingly technically informed individuals. Use the resources as needed and don't be afraid to post questions or comments.

This concern is true with any organization with top tier talent. That is where it is important to build in redundancy of personnel as much as possible and to build an internal system that preserve corporate knowledge. And while this "guy" is so busy "burning himself out", he is accomplishing some pretty remarkable things. There have been a handful of people throughout history that seem to be able to push themselves to the threshold of burn-out, and then stay at that point for an ungodly amount of time. This guy appears to be one of those people. Multiple iterations usually moves a system toward higher quality, less errors, more stability, and higher levels of dependability. Design, Test, Fail Fast, Learn, Repeat.

I lost faith in applying logic to MS's update methodology with the Windows OS years ago. I'm still trying to figure out why random functions in Windows 10 break while a new update is only downloaded and staged (supposedly). I've had updates here in my office take over 12 hours to complete. I've had all sorts of functions break until the staged update is applied. It is insane since I directly oversee around 200 computers, laptops, and tablets. I'm delaying my jump to Windows 11 for the same reason that I delay all updates of MS software - to allow their public debugging process to get farther on down the road. Good luck.

I have purposely delayed in migrating our organization to Win 11 just for this sort of thing. I have one single laptop (mine) that I upgraded just to make sure that all of our custom software will run on it successfully (it does), but I am not willing to risk potential O/S related issues all at once on approximately 800 computers that run our software across 14 states. M$ has been horrible at this whole Windows update thing for the last decade, particularly the last few years. We are constantly having to reload printer drivers after Windows updates. It is freaking insane that a Windows update not only breaks printer drivers, but even causes all sorts of weird operational issues even when a new update is simply being downloaded and staged, but no installation yet started.

Ditto. And I pride myself on using shortcuts!