JeremyNicoll

Battery-wise, I think it was this review that made me think AMD was more power-hungry: https://uk.pcmag.com/ultrabooks/124866/amd-ryzen-7-vs-intel-core-i7-microsoft-surface-laptop-cpu-face-off

@GT500 Going back to your comment about deferral of updates: " Microsoft generally gives people up to a year and a half before they become mandatory" ... My impression is that what MS do keeps changing, making it quite hard for people to stay on top of terminology changes etc. For example see: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/windows-10-and-the-disappearing-sac-t/ba-p/199747 (I know that's quite an old article) https://www.computerworld.com/article/3447877/the-difference-between-defer-updates-pause-updates-and-delay-updates-and-what-happens-with-win10-19.html (Oct 2019) You also mentioned imaging software - which do you use? Also: AMD cpus... Very very few laptops have them, presumably because they are power hungry, thus worse battery life.

You can revert to an older version (not the immediate past one though, but one that may be a month or two older) by going to Settings - Updates - Update feed, and changing from "Stable" to "Delayed". Once you've altered the setting, do an "Update" and EAM will download and install the older version. Keep the setting at "Delayed" until you are willing to come back to the newest version - as soon as you change the setting back to "Stable" the following "Update" will change the program version.

See: https://support.emsisoft.com/topic/32557-emsisoft-for-imac/?tab=comments#comment-199818

@GT500 said: "I think there's usually someone online in the early morning hours..." In whose timezone? You in the US, us in Europe or what?

@Eddie Timestamps: the "2020-02-14T23:42:35.000Z" looks to me as if it is saying 23:42 Z(ulu) ie GMT, which might well be the same as 10:42 /pm/ in a nearby (or the same) place if there's a one hour difference from GMT in local time. But your "10:42" timestamps show /am/. It would help to know where in the world you are, and where in the world the client pc is.

Well, I tried it, and I did get that question. I expect that's us back to the 'problem' of having File Guard set to 'Thorough'. It's exasperating that behaviour is different then, rather than just appleid more often, IYSWIM.

@GT500 said > Windows 8 isn't supported, and I don't see it listed on any of our product pages. Oops. Sorry, yes you're right. > It's actually dangerous to run Windows without the latest updates installed, and I don't recommend waiting to install them Waiting a few days is a trade-off between being fairly prompt to install them and trying to avoid the ones that are 'bad', of which there are lots. In my experience waiting until the weekend after a Patch Tuesday is usually long enough for MS to have withdrawn the bad updates, or refined the code that decides whether or not to install them, or at the very least, updated their info pages to tell people what problems they shoudl expect and - sometimes - how to work around them. My attitudes are shaped by my previous professional life, researching and applying fixes on S/390 systems. With Wndows, back in the XP days I read all the info about each KB that MS released before deciding whether to install it. Nowadays there's a lot less info available from MS unfortunately, but I still read what they do produce. > The only important recommendation I have right now is get something with an AMD processor, as Intel is having too many security issues. Noted.

For anyone reading this, who doesn't know who "which.co.uk" are ... it's a long-standing consumer affairs organisation (known just as 'Which?') - which in the days before the internet did product and service testing which consumers could read about (if they subscribed). They still do so, but it's less necessary with online reviews of stuff easily found. On the other hand, as a formal product testing organisation they don't have the problem of "fake reviews" that plague online sites. They also offer compting and legal support to their members. Most cities used also to have a local "consumer groups" who tested and reported on (and pressured councils etc to improve) local services and also local branches of national shopping chains etc. There was (is?) also a National Consumer Federation which acted as a sort of clearing-house for the local groups.

@GT500 said "It's possible ... debug logs...." Well, I did send them.

@stapp- Thank you. I'm puzzled by "Then once upgraded, just download the Windows Media Creation tool to make an iso and do a clean install of Windows 10" -- do you mean that in essence one upgrades twice to W10? The first time gets you a mix of W10 and whatever's left from one's W8.1 system, then the clean install reverts that to a base W10? In the first part of that - the upgrade - would I expect all my existing software theoretically to survive the process? In the second, does one then lose them? If it all goes wrong, how does one get back to the original W8.1 system? Does that rely on me already having a system image? I'm not upset by MS support ending at a specific date - I've known about that for years. But I'm taken aback by Emsi's decision to withdraw W8 and W8.1 support at the same time as W7's. The product lifecycles for W8/W8.1 were much later on.

@GT500 said > We'll be reevaluating EOL dates in January 2021, so nothing is set in stone yet. That being said, we don't have many Windows 8.1 users among our customers, which is why we're considering discontinuing support before the official Microsoft EOL date. The problem is, no-one can be sure that if they wait until Jan 2021 and hope, that that hope will be rewarded. The change date on https://help.emsisoft.com/en/2881/supported-operating-systems-and-platforms/ is mid-Jan, almost a month ago. Why did no-one think to tell the users? And why do your sales pages still say W7, W8, W8.1 are supported when anyone who buys EAM today but uses one of those OSes is going to be unsupported within the period of the just-bought one year licence? At the very least you should be saying up-front that support is /likely/ to end inside the next year. People might think my question about other anti-makware software (that IS planning to stick around longer) is irrelevant. Why would I not just upgrade to W10? I read elsewhere of innumerable problems people have with Win 10, mainly when the major updates come along. They seem in a lot of cases to undo settings that people have made to their systems. I suppose that's inevitable in a way if (from MS's point of view) these updates ship new improved portions of the OS, rather than just fixes. But that doesn't make users' lives easier. Nor does MS's increasing tendency to force all updates onto people; right now with W8.1, I note notifications of available updates, then apply them a week or so later /if/ it looks like they are unlikely to screw my system up. You've only to look at eg: https://www.askwoody.com/ to see plenty of good reasons not to install updates immediately... and that's IF your version of W10 gives you the choice. So I am not willing to 'upgrade' my working W8.1 system to a W10 one. I /am/ willing to buy a new system and put W10 onto it, and have been trying to decide what to get. But I was assuming that I'd have a safe working W8.1 box to run alongside it, until Jan 2023. If I do manage to get a W10 system that seems to be stable etc before that, I might update the W8.1 machine too, but then I'd want to keep one or other of them at slightly different service levels, and that might be increasingly hard to do too.

> If that were the case... Well I've already said that it wasn't in the exported settings.

> If you don't allow it to be quarantined, then it won't work as an effective test anymore. Surely that depends on whether (if not choosing to quarantine it) someone picks "allow once" or "allow always"? With "allow once", I'd expect another alert if I tried to run it again.

> We have a crash reporting tool that we bundle with Emsisoft Anti-Malware and EEK. I know. I'm not sure it always sees all crashes though. I tried to search for reports of scans not completing &/ report files not being produced but it's hard to find them because words like "complete" and "report" crop up all over the place and some people would use "end" or "finish" instead of "complete". Without opening and reading every topic that the forum search located, the only thing I found with a topic title that seemed relevant was in fact a report I made a while ago: https://support.emsisoft.com/topic/31312-custom-scan-ended-prematurely/ If the crash reporter had seen anything happen then, then you can be certain I would have said so.