I got a new machine just to run Windows10 so I could run the TaxACT program for my taxes.

Wow, I wouldn't buy a new pen to do my taxes, let alone a computer. Those people won't get the time of day from me.

We had a power failure and mine is a laptop and shifts to the battery. Lost all WU's so I spent half the day diving deep into that laptop. 10th gen by the way.
On exiting Boinc, it exits only upfront and not in the Taskmanager. Afterburner and Task Manager are kept running upfront so I know.
I deleted Boinc and reinstalled it. Funny, all the WU's and projects were still there with my local preferences?
I deleted it again then went into the Registry and File Manager and gave them a proper cleanup. Reinstalled Boinc, all my WU's and preferences still showing up? On exit, Boinc exiting upfront but not in Taskmanager.
Out of frustration, went and put in a new drive. Reinstalled Boinc on the new drive. Thanks to the Power-up above, my old WU's and preferences at least were not there. But, on exiting Boinc, it still keeps running in the background.
I give up. The only option if it still gives errors is to leave CPDN in Windows mode and run Linux WU's in Virtual Box. I do not mind losing a seven-minute WU but a ten-day WU?
Both my Laptops have the same OS and the same version of Boinc, the question is what and why? The other one is 8th gen but that does not make any sense to me.
Apple I know is making life difficult for its users by not allowing third-party repairs. Microsoft is also going user-unfriendly but Boinc? According to Les, they have made some changes so that we do not fiddle under the bonnet but? Where on Earth is it hiding?
Anyway, one bright side is, when Windows does an update and automatic restart, the WU's do not error out. Windows seems to do a cleaner job of exiting. If we like it or not, Windows will restart.
Just giving observations.

Anyway, one bright side is, when Windows does an update and automatic restart, the WU's do not error out. Windows seems to do a cleaner job of exiting. If we like it or not, Windows will restart.
Just giving observations.

I have forced all my 7 Windows 10 PCs to never ever reboot unless I say so. Most of the workarounds to stop them fiddling with our private property don't work. But the one which involves setting policies in the policy editor actually works. The worst I get is a very angry message popping up saying "you must download this update". There's no must about it, you can have it when I happen to be rebooting anyway!

Anyway, one bright side is, when Windows does an update and automatic restart, the WU's do not error out. Windows seems to do a cleaner job of exiting. If we like it or not, Windows will restart.
Just giving observations.

I have forced all my 7 Windows 10 PCs to never ever reboot unless I say so. Most of the workarounds to stop them fiddling with our private property don't work. But the one which involves setting policies in the policy editor actually works. The worst I get is a very angry message popping up saying "you must download this update". There's no must about it, you can have it when I happen to be rebooting anyway!

Just block the M$ domain with your firewall. That will stop them.

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Please do not private message myself or other moderators for help. This limits the number of people who are able to help and deprives others who may benefit from the answer.

Anyway, one bright side is, when Windows does an update and automatic restart, the WU's do not error out. Windows seems to do a cleaner job of exiting. If we like it or not, Windows will restart.
Just giving observations.

I have forced all my 7 Windows 10 PCs to never ever reboot unless I say so. Most of the workarounds to stop them fiddling with our private property don't work. But the one which involves setting policies in the policy editor actually works. The worst I get is a very angry message popping up saying "you must download this update". There's no must about it, you can have it when I happen to be rebooting anyway!

Just block the M$ domain with your firewall. That will stop them.

I never thought of that. Although my firewall was written by Microsoft so they probably delete that rule if I add it. My router might have the option. But I do want to get updates sometimes, at my discretion, when I'm ready, and something isn't running I want to keep running. If you moan to Microsoft about it, they seem to think all we run in Windows is Office products which have autosave....

Just picked up some reruns (by accident rather than design) which had all failed on the same machine initially and then on a different one second time round. Strangly they are all missing the stderr listing at the end of the report. They are batches 892 and 894. Any reason or just a glitch somewhere along the line?

I only looked at a few failures from those batches, but some have the std listing, and some don't.

#892 and #894 are at 45% and 50% success rate so far with 13 and 7 hard fails respectively. looking back to an older batch #872 these are the figures

Success: 2608 (83%)
Fails: 1300 (41%)
Hard Fail: 102 (3%)
Running: 425 (13%)
So at the moment it doesn't look as though these two batches have a higher than normal failure rate.

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Please do not private message myself or other moderators for help. This limits the number of people who are able to help and deprives others who may benefit from the answer.

Anyway, one bright side is, when Windows does an update and automatic restart, the WU's do not error out. Windows seems to do a cleaner job of exiting. If we like it or not, Windows will restart.
Just giving observations.

I have forced all my 7 Windows 10 PCs to never ever reboot unless I say so. Most of the workarounds to stop them fiddling with our private property don't work. But the one which involves setting policies in the policy editor actually works. The worst I get is a very angry message popping up saying "you must download this update". There's no must about it, you can have it when I happen to be rebooting anyway!

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Acer. They have blocked the BIOS and I could stop automatic restarts but Acer thinks otherwise. This is the first and last time I am going to buy an Acer. Anyway, no problem. The only thing in my control was project detach and I detached. Now I am using that Acer Predator only for Linux WU"s. As far as I am concerned, I am crunching.
Dell behaves as expected. Asks my permission which I ignore until I myself do a restart.

Acer. They have blocked the BIOS and I could stop automatic restarts but Acer thinks otherwise. This is the first and last time I am going to buy an Acer. Anyway, no problem. The only thing in my control was project detach and I detached. Now I am using that Acer Predator only for Linux WU"s. As far as I am concerned, I am crunching.
Dell behaves as expected. Asks my permission which I ignore until I myself do a restart.

Acer won't let you change BIOS settings?!

Acer. They have blocked the BIOS and I could stop automatic restarts but Acer thinks otherwise. This is the first and last time I am going to buy an Acer. Anyway, no problem. The only thing in my control was project detach and I detached. Now I am using that Acer Predator only for Linux WU"s. As far as I am concerned, I am crunching.
Dell behaves as expected. Asks my permission which I ignore until I myself do a restart.

Acer won't let you change BIOS settings?!

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Locked. I run only Boinc but if you want to see the fun and games, go read Acer forums. Gamers need to play with their settings or life is no fun for them. Peter, I think you are also a gamer if I am not wrong.

Acer. They have blocked the BIOS and I could stop automatic restarts but Acer thinks otherwise. This is the first and last time I am going to buy an Acer. Anyway, no problem. The only thing in my control was project detach and I detached. Now I am using that Acer Predator only for Linux WU"s. As far as I am concerned, I am crunching.
Dell behaves as expected. Asks my permission which I ignore until I myself do a restart.

Acer won't let you change BIOS settings?!

_______________________________
Locked. I run only Boinc but if you want to see the fun and games, go read Acer forums. Gamers need to play with their settings or life is no fun for them. Peter, I think you are also a gamer if I am not wrong.

Is the BIOS password protected, or is it some other type of lock? Do they at least let you update the BIOS within Windows? Or doesn't Acer ever release updated BIOS? Just curious.

Interesting.

I used to have an Acer netbook with an atom processor. The BIOS wasn't locked on that though it didn't have a lot of options to play with. I wonder when they started locking things down?

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Please do not private message myself or other moderators for help. This limits the number of people who are able to help and deprives others who may benefit from the answer.

Acer. They have blocked the BIOS and I could stop automatic restarts but Acer thinks otherwise. This is the first and last time I am going to buy an Acer. Anyway, no problem. The only thing in my control was project detach and I detached. Now I am using that Acer Predator only for Linux WU"s. As far as I am concerned, I am crunching.
Dell behaves as expected. Asks my permission which I ignore until I myself do a restart.

Acer won't let you change BIOS settings?!

_______________________________
Locked. I run only Boinc but if you want to see the fun and games, go read Acer forums. Gamers need to play with their settings or life is no fun for them. Peter, I think you are also a gamer if I am not wrong.

I've never heard of a "locked BIOS" - what do you see when you go in there? I know HP laptops have very little in the way of settings, so you can't fiddle with clock speeds and stuff, but surely you can change things like the boot order?

If I had bought a laptop new from Acer, since the first thing I do is make sure everything is set nicely in the BIOS, if I noticed a lack of things to adjust, it would have gone straight back to the shop.

There's some really rubbish stuff on sale, my Aunt bought an HP laptop from Currys/PC World, it had 4GB RAM! What can you do with that?! She said it was horrendously slow just using emails. She took it back for a full refund and bought one I recommended with 8GB RAM and an NVME from box.co.uk.

Yes, I'm playing Fallout 4 just now. But I don't fiddle in the BIOS. I used to meddle around with overclocking, but all you get is either a 10% (as in unnoticeable) speed improvement, or a crash in the middle of a game, or a disk corruption. I now set everything to precisely what it says on the tin. Stock speeds everywhere. I do use XMP on the RAM, but that's not really overclocking, it's the speed they've designed it to go at.

I was looking for RTX 2060 GPU, HP and Dell are still available with a GTX 1060. Only Acer was available with RTX 2060, I got it. For the purpose, I required it was performing beautifully. Only with BOINC and that to CPDN monkey tricks started. At first, I thought it was HT causing the problem so I tried to switch it off. Then I found out UEFI/ BIOS locked. I went to the Acer forums and found out about it being locked. Instead, there was a console for Overclocking. I do not think Acer have heard, my body, my life, my will.
That was not the only problem. They have tweaked the Windows OS also which considers Boinc to be the biggest virus created by mankind, one to AI. When I reboot it will not allow Boinc to auto restart. I have to start it up manually.
O' Well. Boinc and Acer is my problem but the WU's crashing on other systems is not an Acer generated problem. CPDN will have to solve it.
I jumped into the conversation because Peter was talking about absent or Devil may care type owners of computers. They might not be absent owners. Just normal users who FaceBook or use only the internet social networks. Vast majority might only be of that kind trying to do some good or return back something to the Planet. Forget it, they won't be knowing anything about OClocking, UEFI/BIOS or anything else for that matter. They are not after-credits or they would have joined Collapsed(Collatz) Conjecture. Collatz has a heart problem, its Pacemaker battery keeps giving up. PsssT, now here, now gone. Peter also happens to be a Collatz resident GP.

I was looking for RTX 2060 GPU, HP and Dell are still available with a GTX 1060. Only Acer was available with RTX 2060, I got it. For the purpose, I required it was performing beautifully. Only with BOINC and that to CPDN monkey tricks started. At first, I thought it was HT causing the problem so I tried to switch it off. Then I found out UEFI/ BIOS locked. I went to the Acer forums and found out about it being locked. Instead, there was a console for Overclocking. I do not think Acer have heard, my body, my life, my will.
That was not the only problem. They have tweaked the Windows OS also which considers Boinc to be the biggest virus created by mankind, one to AI. When I reboot it will not allow Boinc to auto restart. I have to start it up manually.

First thing I would have done on buying that laptop is formatted the disk and installed a real Windows. I always do, almost every machine comes with pointless junk. I guess you can't build your own laptop, but I'd never consider buying a desktop, I build them from parts. My choice of parts, set up the way I want in the case I want.

O' Well. Boinc and Acer is my problem but the WU's crashing on other systems is not an Acer generated problem. CPDN will have to solve it.
I jumped into the conversation because Peter was talking about absent or Devil may care type owners of computers. They might not be absent owners. Just normal users who FaceBook or use only the internet social networks. Vast majority might only be of that kind trying to do some good or return back something to the Planet. Forget it, they won't be knowing anything about OClocking, UEFI/BIOS or anything else for that matter. They are not after-credits or they would have joined Collapsed(Collatz) Conjecture. Collatz has a heart problem, its Pacemaker battery keeps giving up. PsssT, now here, now gone. Peter also happens to be a Collatz resident GP.

GP? As in doctor? And what have you got against Collatz? Maths is the basis of Physics is the basis of everything.

Legally the mechanical part is your property, you can burn it or take a sledgehammer to it. Operating System is not. You can void your warranty.
“Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction.”

Legally the mechanical part is your property, you can burn it or take a sledgehammer to it. Operating System is not. You can void your warranty.
“Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction.”

Incorrect, they just say that to stop you meddling. They also say you're not allowed to upgrade your desktop (eg. insert a graphics card) or the warranty is void. But they can't void a warranty legally.

Legally the mechanical part is your property, you can burn it or take a sledgehammer to it. Operating System is not. You can void your warranty.
“Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction.”

Incorrect, they just say that to stop you meddling. They also say you're not allowed to upgrade your desktop (eg. insert a graphics card) or the warranty is void. But they can't void a warranty legally.

In the U.S you do own the hardware of your computer, but, the Windows OS is a different matter. When you buy a copy of Windows all you are buying is a license to run the OS. The software itself is still the property of Microsoft. It’s the same with CPDN. The models that we run run using software that belongs to the U.K Met Office and CPDN only has a license to use it without making modifications.

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In the U.S you do own the hardware of your computer, but, the Windows OS is a different matter. When you buy a copy of Windows all you are buying is a license to run the OS. The software itself is still the property of Microsoft. It’s the same with CPDN. The models that we run run using software that belongs to the U.K Met Office and CPDN only has a license to use it without making modifications.

The legal position is the same here in UK. but I have been running open source software since 1999 when you needed geek credentials just to get Linux running. Not like now when it is quicker and simpler to set up than Windows.

Now about that law suit from Heinz over my open sauce ketchup recipe...

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Please do not private message myself or other moderators for help. This limits the number of people who are able to help and deprives others who may benefit from the answer.