The WIN10 Experience - Post 2

This is a blog of the experiences I have Installing and navigating the new Windows 10 Operating System.

So far, Win10 has been downloaded and activated with minimal effort, and only a modest investment of my time. My computer was occupied for an hour or so., but no problem there, it did not require my personal intervention. So there we go, WIN10 and a pretty familiar interface. My old programs were across the task bar on the foot of the screen, with a couple of new icons I need to examine.

The most active applications for me are email (Outlook), browsing (Firefox) and data analysis (Excel). I opted for Office 365 when I bought this machine a year or so ago, and that should be a cakewalk for Microsoft. So – I punched up Excel from the Taskbar.

Uh-oh.

The Excel opening window pops up, instructing me to log in to my Microsoft account to activate. OK, I can do that. And Excel produces this response:

First response – hit the “Repair Now” button and move forward. Restart Excel from the Task bar.

Same response from Win10 – login to activate, followed by an Excel crash. Do it again. Sometimes three times IS a charm. One more time. Nope.

My response – pop up Firefox and search “Windows 10 errors.” A fair amount of listings, many for Office product install or activation errors. But no helpful advice. Since there was no quick solution there, I decided to check out the other Office components for Win10 errors.

WORD  is on my taskbar, next to Excel. From there, it pops up ready to go. No problem. But where is PowerPoint? I never linked it on my task bar…But scrolling through the app tiles does not produce Office PowerPoint, or any of the Office 365 applications. Wait, “All Apps” is at the bottom pf the Task List. AN alphabetic list of installed programs comes up, and Microsoft Office 2013 is there. Punch that for a lower dropdown menu, and there they are, all of the familiar Office apps. PowerPoint fires up, and properly loads a list of recent files, and everything works fine. Outlook loads and updates my emailbox. Let’s try Excel from here.

Whoops. It works!

Excel loads up a recent spreadsheet, even recovers the file I was marking timings for the WIN10 install. Looks fine. Close up, back to the Taskbar to try again, and voila, Excel executes properly. Microsoft equivalent of kicking the TV set.. [Older readers will know what I mean; if you don’t, ask someone over 50 if they have ever kicked or slapped their TV.]

The WIN TEN Experience

This is a blog of the experiences I have Installing and navigating the new Windows 10 Operating System.

Windows 10 was available to most Microsoft users on July 29, 2015, at no charge if loaded within one year from that date. Most technical reviews were highly favorable of the OS as a “step backward” from the Windows 8 (and 8.1) OS which was cited as overly tablet centric for a desktop or laptop. Most technical writers, who generally had been advance users of Win10, lauded the return of the START button as a major retrograde improvement.

Tech Specs:

I am using a Hewlett-Packard Pavilion 17 Notebook with 12 gigabytes of RAM, an AMD A10-5750 APU with Radeon HD Graphics running at 2.50 GHz. The machine is running a 64-bit OS, Windows 8.1, prior to Win10.

Microsoft is pushing eligible customers to upgrade to Win10, but the web page where you request the upgrade states that “Your notification to upgrade could come as soon as a few days or weeks” which does not inspire new users to act quickly. Most reviewers recommend you wait a few weeks or months while Microsoft works out the inevitable kinks of a new OS. I made my request on Monday, August 3 – five days after the initial release. Let’s see how that works out.

I requested the upgrade at about 11:00am on the first Monday after release, figuring that would be a good stress test on the Microsoft delivery system. Told to wait patiently for “days or weeks,” I went to lunch. When I checked back in at 1:00pm that day, I had the notification that my Win10 was ready for me to download.

July 29 had been a busy day for Microsoft servers, and I expected some speed issues with the download. While some users report that the Win 8.1 upgrade was 6.08 GB, my install directory is only 4.08 GB. The download took ten minutes, beginning at 1:02pm. I benchmarked my WIFI download speed at about 40 MB/second.

Of course, downloading is not installing, so Windows recommended I relax while it activated the installation – which took about 45 minutes. After numerous progress bars, cozy messages form Microsoft, and lots of blue screens and restarts, the deed was done. I logged in using my previous credentials, and bingo…it looked pretty much like Win 8.1. My custom desktop, home screen background, and task bar were almost identical. Clicking the START gave me an abbreviated Win 8 “Tablet Tiles” on the left third of the screen, which scrolled down through the tiles instead of left-right

Almost. There were a couple of changes in program icons on the taskbar, a readily accessible search box, and the old paned window start button at the bottom left of the screen.

Oh – and I soon discovered, there was a glitch or two in the OS…

More tomorrow.

DISA, in 30 words or less

One of Quantified Perception’s activities is to analyze Agency strategic plans to provide a distillation of their key concepts as they have projected them over (usually) a five-year period. This represents an abbreviated and abridged version of such an analysis. If you are planning to do business with the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), you should study their strategic Plan, released last May. The Director’s introduction notes that the 2014-2018 Plan incorporates words that were “new to our lexicon” two years earlier. The Plan also reinforces some of the key concepts that have long been a part of the DISA focus. Quantified Perception has reduced the DISA Strategic Plan to 30 words and phrases, sort of an ultimate distillation of the plan. This of course is not enough to build your capture plan, but it is an interesting snapshot of how a complex agency can be summarized succinctly.

We have divided key words and phrases from the DISA plan into four primary categories, with a fifth are inserted for further clarity. The categories are concepts, actions, platforms, and technologies, with participants included just in case you aren’t familiar with DISA at all. If you’d like to know more about Quantified Perception’s approach, contact us at info@qpllc.com 

A quick analysis of the 2015 SOTU Address 

 Lately, the State of the Union speech has been getting more and more quantitative analysis – the Washington Post today has time frames for how long the President spoke about education, immigration, economics, and other major topics compare to last year  (Example: 2015, 25:06 minutes on economic opportunity versus 8:23 in 2014.) There are graphs and bubbles, maps and timelines, depicting how times and presidents have changed.

Quantified Perception has been following the semantic content of the SOTU for several years, has a slightly different spin, looking at the words from the President. This analysis uses the transcript of the speech, rather than the prepared text. There are minor differences between what was written and what was said.

There was a lot of “we” used last night – “we are,” “we can,”, “we need.” A total of 136 “we”’s this year, versus only 91 in 2014, plus an additional 28 “we’ve” and “we’re.” (19 in 2014)  Apparently we are more cohesive after the divisive mid-term campaigns and elections. There was also a lot of “new” and “more” last night. The ten repetitions of “this congress” were mostly positive or neutral, not particularly accusatory, supporting the notion of greater bipartisan cooperation, in the mind of the President, at least. And he was conciliatory in explaining “that’s why” for many of the steps moving forward.

“Surely we can” show more comity in politics than has become the norm throughout his six years so far. We are, after all, a “strong tight nit family” – “all of us.”

“Surely we can agree” that “middle class economics” should get mentioned, although this is the first time Obama has raised it using that particular phrase In a SOTU.

Phrase	Count	Adjusted Count
we are	24	72
we can	14	42
we need to	7	42
more	41	41
new	41	41
for the first time	4	40
strong tight knit family	4	40
we need	12	36
surely we can	6	36
will	34	34
I want	11	33
that’s why	11	33
this congress	10	30
all of us	5	30
middle class economics	5	30
surely we can agree	3	30
we believed we could	3	30