GTC, Robbbert, my subscription runs out April next year and I will get rid of it. I am attracted to Brad's idea of letting Microsoft Defender take care of it.

In the meantime I am getting messages about an upgrade to W11. Any thoughts?

W11 is a bit off-topic I suppose. Win11 requires a computer with TPM 2.0 enabled in the bios. But none of my machines even have it, so no Win11 for me. All I've heard is the start menu is stuck in the middle of the screen, and they removed a bunch of features.

There's no pressing need to upgrade, unless you're worried about Win10 eventually becoming unsupported in 2025.

The real crime is that 99% of existing computers can't have Win11 and are expected to be consigned to the bin. So much for saving the planet and all that stuff.

Robbbert, you are spot on.

In my experience it seems those who accuse us of ruining the planet are themselves the worst offenders.

Building cars, computers, phones etc. That are non repairable, or have built in obsolescence is indeed a criminal waste of energy and resources. The cover up is economy of scale and the criminality lies in the amount of energy used not only to make it, but how much energy is used to un-make it and the amount of resources lost in the process.

One looks at an incandescent light bulb then one looks at an LED one or a CFL. The incandescent does not put out as much light, nor last a lot of hours. However, it is a resistive load, which is clean and it is 100% recyclable, albeit for some reason glass is an issue apparently.

You then look at LED & CFL and ask why all of the electronics, which in the case of electronic ballasts seem to be waste, as I have had to replace or, am on the verge of replacing every one installed since 2013. One would have thought by now that a string of LED's could be made to handle rectified mains DC and not need much more than a rectifier & one NP cap?

Ultimately, Consumerism & Greed are going to be our downfall. Tar & Cement does not grow food & the more we consume land for the Human Mouse plague: The more we endanger ourselves.

The biggest cause of human suffering, loss of species & habitat and pollution is the fact that the human Mouse Plague is too big and totally unsustainable.

The way its going Eric Idol's "Galaxy Song's" last verse is becoming very poignant.

You tell em Marc!

The globes are just another example of our "keyboard" teaching.
I read the pages of BS about how bad those vacuum globes were and how green the new lamps from paradise were and how much less power and greater efficiency and blah blah blah..
When you point out how much poison bearing parts are in a lamp nowadays and then ask them what is poisonous about a couple of grams of brass, glass and a bit of tungsten and a lot of vacuum in the old jobs you get the blank look.

If you mention wave shape, power factor, resistive load to this current crop of electrical engineers they look at you blankly because that was on the first page of a 3 year uni course full of keyboard program oriented complete BS subjects. No concept of AC generation, that just comes out of the wall socket doesnt it?

Phhhht!

Fred.

Maarc and Fred,

Your comments on energy generation and use (read abuse) sit very true with me. I have been recording earth currents for over thirty years now. Very recently a nasty beating, approx. 4 seconds, has crept into the normal mains hum. Bloody annoying, to put it mildly. I have had to filter out man-made spikes, switching currents, harmonics etc. and after all that this damn second hum comes on the scene.

Finally narrowed down the possible source:

Damn solar panel inverters pushing slightly off-phase power into the grid. They are supposed to phase lock with the mains. I suspect there may be a few "budget" inverters out there that do not know what synchronisation means. Our poor long suffering grid seems more neglected as the race to see who can make more money from the renewable myth continues.

This is what happens when salespeople replace engineers.

Everything turns to sh*t but we are told it's for our own good. BS BS BS

Good for profits only.

Synchronisation reminds me of B&W TV's and their synchronisation to the mains. As the alternators lead an lagged, so the picture rolled. Cost of building internal sync, or transmitting sync pules with the other garbage seems to have never got past the bean counters.

I do wonder at times as to what the current boy brats have leant (if anything) from the past. If an oscilloscope & TV are able to sync to the mains, where have this lot gone wrong? Clearly that noted is a heterodyne whistle caused by the Inverter not being able to sync to the master oscillator (mains).

My biggest issue is miles of HV aerials bringing in RF, which gets into radios. I did have a Solar Inverter fail & create spikes, however the protection systems I have incorporated into the RF filters dealt with that.

With poles& wires its the same as Telstra & NBN. Which prove privatisation is a con and as the Royal Commission on aged care proved "you cannot have an industry providing service & making money; as money & bean counting will always trump service.

One of the things that is annoying and Kaspersky is one of the many, is that they follow the mob & stop servicing the program in older computers. Whilst most of the XP computers are being more and more, less capable of running internet, they are still vulnerable by way of data transfer.

Mine is running a few programs that would need an ap to run on modern architecture but in reality, as long as that computer runs it will run those programs, which in many cases no longer exist, or can be replaced by anything so simple, or good.

There is little attention being paid to explaining, or providing ways that WiFi, Blue tooth, or some other means can be used to remote scan the XP computer.

The word Amok comes from Malaya, thus the strange spelling. But what about the town of IBM's HQ, Armonk NY?

I use Avast premium cleanup on a regular basis. When I use the section that deletes obsolete files I regularly get rid of upto 20 gig of old windows back up files ( no longer needed and that makes the computer much faster. This is normally after a update.
I also do a regular boot time scan with their Antivirus.

A lot of equipment still relies on a stable 50Hz mains frequency for various reasons. Heavy intertia from coal-fired or nuclear power stations coupled together with state grids is still the best way of keepingthe frequency as stable as it can be. Back in the days of B&W television they almost had it right. Sydney had five power stations but they weren't grid connected and thus had issues with continuity and there were times when there were power shortages. In fact, even though demand was a lot less back then, it was still amazing that Ultimo, Pyrmont, White Bay, Bunnerong and Balmain held things together in a city of up to 3 million people at the time whilst also powering the Sydney rail system and the world's third-largest tram network. When the Electricity Commission of NSW came along and built Vales Point and Liddell Power Stations, that ushered in an era of far greater stability and to this day, that cannot be matched by the pretty toys we seem to be replacing power stations with.

Even master clock systems are moving away from synchronous motors in clock faces because of the move away from grid stability relying on heavy intertia and IP-based systems with time control based on NTP are taking over. It's more expensive to roll out than systems based on raw mains frequency but it is the only way to avoid the emerging grid instability caused by windmills and solar arrays switching in and out every time the weather changes.

With regard to Windows 11, I was surprised when I heard it was even being released as both Microsoft and Apple decided a long time ago that the number 10 would be the magic number with regard to future operating system releases - which was supposed to mean that Windows 10 and OSX would be the final versions but subject to rolling upgrades over time. My understanding with the hardware requirements is that there are new security features in Windows 11 that previous processors simply could not support. This meant that most existing computers would fail the Windows 11 hardware check. I've been told there are workarounds in many cases but such whilst such workarounds get the OS installed on an existing system, the new features are still not available, which in the case of security, would leave the machine vulnerable.

Obsolete hardware is not new in computing. When the world upgraded from Windows 3 to Windows 95A, people had to buy a new machine if they didn't already have one that could run 32bit software and those that were lucky enough to already own a newer machine still had to upgrade the memory from 4MB to 8MB to run Windows and 16MB if they wanted to use the Internet. A laptop purchased today will have 16GB of RAM rather than the 16MB required back then.

Then and now have advantages. Back then, the Internet seemed to be a more peaceful place, with fewer troublemakers and more people who wanted to collaborate and educate themselves. But the power of modern computers can't be overlooked. Back then you had to install an operating system and then manually set up/programme everything else that you wanted the OS to support, such as diallers, modems, printers, pointing devices, external data storage and in some cases even the monitor you wanted to use. Windows handles all that automatically now. There was a time when I didn't mind all the rigmorole required to set up a working computer but these days there's no-one around to impress with those skills and I can't be bothered. Give me the automation any day of the week.

Marcc have you ever done a cost comparison between a incandescent bulb which mostly last for years sometimes decades and a fluoro or led bulb. Most Leds that I have bought do not have a long life but they do cost upto ten times that of a incandescent. I seriously doubt that there is any savings ( moneywise or planetwise ).

Economies of scale exist for all transactions.

In the home, a well disciplined householder that makes sure lights aren't burning when they aren't being used doesn't stand to gain very much by a changeover from incandescent lamps to LEDs. There will be a gain but it is a small one.

In a building, such as the one I work in, where there are thousands of light fittings and people have a habit of letting them burn 24/7, there will be a substantial difference. A 2x36W troffer fitting, which is almost a standard in itself, burns 165W of power whilst it is turned on. 72W is consumed by the two lamps and the rest is lost as heat in the ballasts. This waste heat has a knock-on effect, as ceiling spaces in commercial buildings doubles as a return air duct for the air conditioning system, so the return air temperature will always be several degrees hotter than it'd be if all the lights were turned off. Air conditioning is a commercial building's largest energy consumer. The second biggest is usually the lighting. A typical 4000K four foot LED panel, which is designed as a replacement for T-bar troffers consumes 35W of power, with almost none of it given off as waste heat. Not only is there a big saving to be made in return air temperatures being lower, each light fitting consumes less than 1/4 of the power of the previous type.

Then, as there is negligible reactive power (kVAR) consumed by LED fittings and their drivers, the customer is not charged for that either.

As one can see, there is more to consider than merely the fact that LED globes last longer.