Microsoft Windows holding up the start of my show

[Frank Cox]

I have a grand total of exactly one Microsoft Windows computer; it lives in my projection room and its one and only job is to talk to the projection equipment and do whatever it does in that regard. The techs can use teamviewer to do stuff when they have to, and the only thing I ever run on it myself is Firefox, for the purpose of talking to the gdc server and telling it what I want it to do.

Here's my story.

It's showtime last night, I go to the projection room to start the movie, and I'm greeted with a screen that tells me to click here to set bing as my default search engine. No window-close on that screen, and no button and no way to do anything other than click on "next".

I'll say here that I don't particularly care if bing is my default search engine on that computer or not since I don't use it for anything like that anyway. But even though I've been playing with computers for almost 50 years at this point (gosh, where did the time go?) I have no interest in and know very little about Microsoft Windows, so I figure the way that computer is currently set up should probably continue since the techs might have set it up that way for a good reason and I don't want stuff to be getting magically changed if I can avoid it.

So here I am reading through this "set bing" screen that I can't get rid of or bypass, trying to quickly figure out how to get past it without having it do whatever magic trick it's trying to do. And in the meantime, it's bloody showtime! Meaning that I'm standing here to start the movie, not fiddle around with a window that I can't cancel on the computer before I can do what I came here to do.

I think it took me about two minutes to read through the various screens that I couldn't bypass or close and click on the various "next" and un-check their pre-selected buttons that say make this change and that change and then at long last this un-closable window went away and I could (finally) start the show.

There were very few people here last night so having to spend a few extra minutes in the projection room and starting the show a couple of minutes late didn't really matter greatly, but that's not the point. Microsoft's operating system was deliberately and intentionally preventing me from doing the job I wanted to do with my computer until I jumped through flaming hoops that they arbitrarily decided I would be forced to jump through.

They made a deliberate decision to not allow that window to be cancelled or closed or bypassed. And that's bloody ridiculous.

[Bobby Henderson]

I've never had Bing try to force itself like that in any of the Firefox installations I have on my work desktop PC or notebook at home. Sometimes I'll get a pop-up from Microsoft on the task bar trying to push their Edge browser. It happens once every few weeks when I launch Chrome or Firefox. But the pop-up is easy to close.

If I were to launch Firefox and Bing tried strong-arming me, I'd resort to a few work-arounds. The first one is opening a new browser tab and closing the browser tab Bing was spamming. If I was unable to do that I would press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to bring up Windows Task Manager. I would select Firefox on the list and kill the process. After that I would re-launch Firefox, bypass any suggestions to restore pages and then check settings. It's easy enough to change the default search engine there.

[Jim Cassedy]

But all this digtialcinemastuff was supposed to make our lives easier and trouble free, if I recall.

I was visiting a booth one time to discuss details about an upcoming film festival event I'd be working at. As we were speaking, the guy there was sort of starting to freak out a bit because the older (Windows) laptop that he used to communicate with his projector had frozen up, and the his show was starting and for whatever reason either the lamp hadn't fired up or the douser hadn't opened and he had no picture on screen. He was sort of starting to panic- - like he didn't know how to deal with this, when I calmly said "you do know that there's a button on the projector you can walk over and push that will solve this". It reminded me of the time I was walking bak to my my friends car after a shopping trip and his car-door remote wouldn't work. "Awww crap" he cried, "My wife is gonna kill me- - she;s been bugging me to get a new remote battery and now Im locked out and I gotta pick up the kids in 15min. Whatarewegonnado? " I waited a few seconds before I said "You do know that you can actually use a KEY to unlock your car door, right? " He was so busy panicking that it never occurred to him. ( I really don't blame him too much for panicking - - I've met his wife) This was several years ago, I know there are some cars now that don't have keyed door locks, but often you can get them unlocked using OnStar or some other remote auto access program.

[Randy Stankey]

Whenever I get a popup or a dialogue that I don't like the looks of I often close the page, restart the browser or, if it is persistent, force quit the application.

Typically, those kinds of dialogues which tell you that you need to install something or make a change to your settings are traps set by malicious websites or similar. No matter what option you take, you will probably end up accepting the change that you are being asked to make.

BTW: If you get a message asking you to install Adobe Flash, it is very likely to be a ruse. Adobe has officially killed off Flash and recommends it be removed from your computer, all together. If you get a message asking you to install flash, it didn't come from Adobe and is likely to contain malware or it is, at minimum, using deprecated code which could cause trouble, further down the line. Do NOT reinstall flash. Flash is officially dead. If you do, it is at your own risk. So says Adobe.

[Frank Cox]

The un-closable window wasn't in Firefox. It was an overlay that covered about 80% of the screen and prevented any interaction with any other elements on the desktop until it was "made happy". It didn't come through or show up via Firefox in any fashion, it was a notification window through the desktop itself, I guess. Again, I couldn't interact with anything else until I clicked the next button and read through the rest of the crap, un-checked all of their "set bing as default search engine" stuff that was helpfully pre-selected for me, and finally click on "finish" so the window would go away.

I've had this sort of thing before about setting up Cortana and making Edge my default browser and "finish setting up your computer now or remind me again in three days" too, so it's not the first time I've seen this kind of thing.

But it gets my goat every time and makes my decades-old choice to use Linux for anything and everything look better and better.

[Randy Stankey]

If that happens to me, I force quit all apps then relaunch Finder.

If that doesn’t work, I restart the machine.

If that doesn’t work, I restart again with kernel extensions disabled.

I don’t remember more than once or twice when I ever had to go that far because, by that time, there’s something really wrong.

[Frank Cox]

My point is that it shouldn't be happening at all.

This isn't an error. It's not a mistake. It's a deliberate decision by the trolls at Microsoft that "no one shall use his computer from this day hence without doing the following things." And you are then forced to do those things before you can use your computer for anything else.

Work-arounds, ways to "force quit", none of it should be necessary. Again, it's not a response to unexpected event like an hardware error or programming bug. It's a deliberately planned and implemented malicious action that's being taken by the makers of the operating system that runs your computer.

[Carsten Kurz]

And you were lucky it was just that. You could as well have seen the thing installing 'update 1 of 19' or forcing you to create a Microsoft account (without any simple means to bypass it).

Our projection room machine is still running WIN7 and has updates disabled, on the system and app level.

[Bobby Henderson]

BTW: If you get a message asking you to install Adobe Flash, it is very likely to be a ruse. Adobe has officially killed off Flash and recommends it be removed from your computer, all together. If you get a message asking you to install flash, it didn't come from Adobe and is likely to contain malware or it is, at minimum, using deprecated code which could cause trouble, further down the line. Do NOT reinstall flash. Flash is officially dead. If you do, it is at your own risk. So says Adobe.

Hasn't Flash been dead for something like a decade now? It's a shame Adobe couldn't fix the security issues with it. Oh well.

I'm a little annoyed with Adobe lately for a recent announcement. They're going to end support for Postscript Type 1 fonts, a technology they invented, for use within their applications. Adobe Photoshop will lose Type 1 font support some time this year. And then T1 font support will gradually disappear from all their other applications by 2023. I wonder if Apple and Microsoft will follow suit by removing Postscript Type 1 font support from their operating systems.

I have quite a few old Postscript Type 1 fonts, many of which are still valuable for graphic design use. Some of those fonts came bundled with 1990's versions of Adobe Illustrator or PageMaker. I have other T1 fonts that were purchased. I'll have to consider buying a font conversion application like TransType in order to use those fonts in the future.

[Harold Hallikainen]

This is what we get for using a consumer OS in a professional application.

[Ed Gordon]

It's showtime last night, I go to the projection room to start the movie, and I'm greeted with a screen that tells me to click here to set bing as my default search engine. No window-close on that screen, and no button and no way to do anything other than click on "next".

I'll say here that I don't particularly care if bing is my default search engine on that computer or not since I don't use it for anything like that anyway. But even though I've been playing with computers for almost 50 years at this point (gosh, where did the time go?) I have no interest in and know very little about Microsoft Windows, so I figure the way that computer is currently set up should probably continue since the techs might have set it up that way for a good reason and I don't want stuff to be getting magically changed if I can avoid it.

So here I am reading through this "set bing" screen that I can't get rid of or bypass, trying to quickly figure out how to get past it without having it do whatever magic trick it's trying to do. And in the meantime, it's bloody showtime! Meaning that I'm standing here to start the movie, not fiddle around with a window that I can't cancel on the computer before I can do what I came here to do.

I think it took me about two minutes to read through the various screens that I couldn't bypass or close and click on the various "next" and un-check their pre-selected buttons that say make this change and that change and then at long last this un-closable window went away and I could (finally) start the show.

It sounds like you encountered the final screen in a windows update process. There is also a chance that your windows computer has been infected with the "bing.com redirect" virus. I would install Malwarebytes (available at malwarebytes.com as a 30 day trial at no charge). The malware scan will detect any viruses/PUPs and remove them.

Windows updates consistently tries to force you into accepting what Microsoft wants. Windows update should be configured to run only during hours you designate. I also always run Windows Update manually in order to assure that it will not surprise me with an update at the most inconvenient time possible. I also use Revo Uninstaller (free) to remove Microsoft apps like Cortana and Edge and all the other "crapware" Microsoft installs by default.

If you have no interest in Windows, and prefer to leave the administration of the Windows machine to the techs that set it up, I would escalate this issue to the techs who set it up.

I hate Windows 10, and consider it to be the worst OS Microsoft has ever released. Microsoft has always marketed to application developers, who is turn develop applications that only run on Windows. So here we are...

[Marcel Birgelen]

Like Ed already indicated, I'm also pretty sure this is simply the last step in one of those Windows 10 "Feature Updates", in where your Windows version is essentially bumped to a new version and all kinds of stuff might be changed on the background, without even properly informing you.

Like Harold indicated, Windows 10 essentially is a toy OS, something you should try to avoid in any production environment, whenever possible.

In order to get some more control about when Windows 10 updates are installed, you may check this article.

Also, TeamViewer is also available on Linux. If the techs only need a "jumpbox" with a browser and SSH client, they may as well use a Linux machine instead of Windows 10. Not only are most Linux distributions entirely free, they also tend to behave better than current Microsoft Windows iterations, because they don't assume they own your computer, like Microsoft essentially does...

[Randy Stankey]

Hasn't Flash been dead for something like a decade now?

Yes, Flash has been dead for a long time but Adobe officially killed it last January.

They have issued advisories to remove it from your system and have said that anybody who uses Flash or any website that recommends it is doing so against their advice.

Adobe has come right out and said that any website that tries to get you to install Flash again is probably trying to infect your computer with malware.

https://www.adobe.com/products/flash...d-of-life.html

[Marcel Birgelen]

In addition to that, since January this year, all common web-browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, Internet Explorer, Opera...) are blocking Flash as an extension and there is no override provided.

For those that still need Flash support for their embedded applications, Adobe has outsourced their "extended support" to the services division of Harman, yes, that's the same Harman which also owns JBL.

[Bobby Henderson]

Like Harold indicated, Windows 10 essentially is a toy OS, something you should try to avoid in any production environment, whenever possible.

Not that I'm a big fan of Microsoft, but for many businesses avoiding the use of the Windows platform in company computers is just not practical at all. For many industries the choice of OS is fully dictated by the applications and associated hardware in use.

For example, my day job is in the sign industry. I defy anyone to try to run a sign manufacturing company with computers not running Windows. Nearly all the industry specific software in that field runs only on Windows. That includes applications that control computerized routing tables, vinyl plotters/cutters, large format digital printers and LED-based variable message signs. Caldera is the only professional level large format printing RIP application I know of that has a Mac-based version. All the rest are Windows-only (we use Onyx Thrive on our two HP Latex printers and RasterLink Pro with our Mimaki flatbed printer). 20 years ago there were more sign making applications available for the Mac platform. Today, outside of Caldera, there is none. Flexi used to have a Mac version but they discontinued it many years ago. Support in the sign industry for any distro of Linux is non-existent.

My shop also uses mainstream graphics software. In that area the choice of platforms expands to two: Windows and Mac OSX. We have 3 licenses of Adobe Creative Cloud, which runs on OSX and Windows, but not any version of Linux. We've used CorelDRAW for many years; they launched a Mac version in 2019, but Corel stupidly ties user licenses to specific platforms (unlike Adobe CC). Our licenses are tied to Windows. I also have Affinity Designer and Inkscape on hand, mainly just in case I get any customer provided artwork made in either application. But I do most of my vector design work hopping between Adobe Illustrator and CorelDRAW. I'm able to use some Adobe applications and Affinity Designer on my iPad Pro to augment the work I do on my regular computers. But any desktop or notebook computer I use will be tied down to running Windows whether I like it or not.