Friday, October 24, 2025

Saturday, October 18, 2025

Problems with Internet Access after Mac OS Update

My iMac is dual-boot, meaning it can start up in either macOS or Windows 10. I mostly use the now-outdated Windows 10, but yesterday I switched to macOS to learn app programming. While using macOS, I was prompted to upgrade to the latest version of the operating system. I accepted the upgrade, which took about an hour. Everything worked fine afterward, both in macOS and when I switched back to Windows 10.

However, after leaving my computer in "sleep" mode overnight, I found in the morning that Windows 10 could no longer access the Internet. My other computer and my phone could connect without any problem.

I tried the obvious fixes — rebooting the gateway (router) and restarting the computer a couple of times — but nothing worked. When I switched to macOS, it connected to the Internet just fine. Then I set up a hotspot on my phone, and Windows 10 was able to access the Internet through that, which told me it wasn't a hardware issue and likely not a problem with the gateway.

I suspected that upgrading macOS might have caused the Boot Camp drivers used by Windows to become outdated. So, in macOS, I formatted a flash drive and used Boot Camp Assistant to copy the latest drivers onto it. Then I rebooted into Windows and reinstalled the drivers.

Initially, that didn't seem to help. I was about to call Comcast technical support, but I decided to reboot the gateway one more time. For a few seconds after restarting it, the Internet still didn't work — and then suddenly, Windows connected.

Apparently, the fix was a combination of updating the Boot Camp drivers and rebooting the gateway.



Wednesday, October 8, 2025

Why the end of support for Windows 10 is uniquely troubling

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqh_40hyGYw&t=118s

Computer manufacturers, in partnership with Microsoft, have sold us computers costing hundreds — if not thousands — of dollars, with the implied expectation that we could use them for as long as we wanted. Yet Microsoft has now decided, seemingly arbitrarily, that we must either discard perfectly good computers or pay $61 per year for continued support. This feels criminal, given that Microsoft was the one selling the operating systems that power those computers.

Microsoft could easily create a version of Windows 11 that runs on relatively recent hardware if it chose to.

Perhaps the free market will eventually produce a viable alternative operating system or independent security software. In the past, there were efforts to develop Windows-compatible versions of Linux, but those projects often faced legal challenges from Microsoft.