Wikipedia:Reference desk/Computing
Latest comment: 13 days ago by Vchimpanzee in topic Where can I report a problem with Microsoft?
Welcome to the computing section
of the Wikipedia reference desk.
of the Wikipedia reference desk.
Select a section:
Want a faster answer?
Main page: Help searching Wikipedia
How can I get my question answered?
- Select the section of the desk that best fits the general topic of your question (see the navigation column to the right).
- Post your question to only one section, providing a short header that gives the topic of your question.
- Type '~~~~' (that is, four tilde characters) at the end – this signs and dates your contribution so we know who wrote what and when.
- Don't post personal contact information – it will be removed. Any answers will be provided here.
- Please be as specific as possible, and include all relevant context – the usefulness of answers may depend on the context.
- Note:
- We don't answer (and may remove) questions that require medical diagnosis or legal advice.
- We don't answer requests for opinions, predictions or debate.
- We don't do your homework for you, though we'll help you past the stuck point.
- We don't conduct original research or provide a free source of ideas, but we'll help you find information you need.
How do I answer a question?
Main page: Wikipedia:Reference desk/Guidelines
- The best answers address the question directly, and back up facts with wikilinks and links to sources. Do not edit others' comments and do not give any medical or legal advice.
See also:
August 6
Microsoft 365 Restarts for No Obvious Reason
I have a Dell desktop computer running Windows 11, and often have a lot of Word documents open, and four Access databases open. I have autorecovery saving So enabled. Sometimes when I have been away for a few hours (or have been in bed for the night), I sit down at my computer and discover that Word has some, but not all, of my Word documents open, and some of them are shown as being recovered files, and that Access is open to a blank screen. If I had had Excel open, it will also be open to a blank screen. I assume that this means that the Microsoft 365 suite or Microsoft Office or whatever it is called now has restarted itself. This is a nuisance rather than a serious problem, because I have to recover all of the changes to the Word documents from the autosaves, and any changes to any Excel spreadsheets from the Excel autosaves.
So I have a two-part question. First, what is causing Microsoft 365 to restart itself? I have the Event Viewer, but it isn't helping me because I don't know how to look for the relevant events. Second, what can I do to minimize these restarts? I know that maybe the answer to that depends on the answer to the first question. Robert McClenon (talk) 04:03, 6 August 2025 (UTC)
- First off, check if it is Office or Windows rebooting. In the task manager, select "more details" (if it doesn't show them already), then on the side check the tab "performance". Under CPU it should list "Up time". If that is lower than expected, it was your laptop rebooting and reopening office, not Office restarting.You can also check with Event Viewer, under "Critical" there is the "Kernel-Power" error if your system restarted without a shutdown. Under "Information" there is "Kernel-Boot" which should give you when the system booted if it rebooted "expectedly", from e.g. a Windows update. That should sort out which of the two it is, and give us a clue on what to troubleshoot. Hope that helps, Rmvandijk (talk) 09:46, 6 August 2025 (UTC)
- Thank you, User:Rmvandijk. I said that I had Event Viewer. I didn't say that I knew how to use it. It there a manual for how to filter its output so that I don't have to read through thousands of entries whose meanings are only known to those who know their meanings? Where do I look for system restarts, rather than for thousands of other events? Robert McClenon (talk) 22:17, 6 August 2025 (UTC)
- Hello User:Robert McClenon, this might be a bit difficult to explain without pictures, but I'll try. If you open Event viewer, you get 3 columns: the left one shows the folder structure, the middle the events, and the right the actions. We only need the middle one. It should show several boxes, and the only one we are interested in is the "Summary of Administrative Events". This shows a list of "Event Types" such as "critical" and "Information" (by default all are collapsed). If you open them, you can see the actual events. The "Source" shows the descriptions "Kernel Power" and "Kernel Boot" I mentioned earlier. By double-clicking on a source/event ID you get more information showing in the centre column. The Top box then shows the events and the date it was logged. The box below that shows a description in the "general" tab. you shouldn't need the details tab. To go back to the overview, there's a little blue left arrow in the top left. Hope this helps! Rmvandijk (talk) 09:04, 8 August 2025 (UTC)
- Thank you, User:Rmvandijk - I got the picture just fine. Where can I look up an explanation of what the RestartManager is and what to make of warnings issued by it, that it has been unable to restart each of the programs in Microsoft 365? Robert McClenon (talk) 19:31, 10 August 2025 (UTC)
- Hello Robert, I am unfamiliar with RestartManager and how it works. From a quick Google Query (for "RestartManager"), it doesn't sound like something the average user would normally be using (but I might be wrong). from what I read, it is basically what Microsoft created to reduce the number of reboots required, as it only restarts the program after they've been updated. Hope somebody who does know it pipes in, because I can't help with this one... Rmvandijk (talk) 10:03, 11 August 2025 (UTC)
- Thank you, User:Rmvandijk - I got the picture just fine. Where can I look up an explanation of what the RestartManager is and what to make of warnings issued by it, that it has been unable to restart each of the programs in Microsoft 365? Robert McClenon (talk) 19:31, 10 August 2025 (UTC)
- Hello User:Robert McClenon, this might be a bit difficult to explain without pictures, but I'll try. If you open Event viewer, you get 3 columns: the left one shows the folder structure, the middle the events, and the right the actions. We only need the middle one. It should show several boxes, and the only one we are interested in is the "Summary of Administrative Events". This shows a list of "Event Types" such as "critical" and "Information" (by default all are collapsed). If you open them, you can see the actual events. The "Source" shows the descriptions "Kernel Power" and "Kernel Boot" I mentioned earlier. By double-clicking on a source/event ID you get more information showing in the centre column. The Top box then shows the events and the date it was logged. The box below that shows a description in the "general" tab. you shouldn't need the details tab. To go back to the overview, there's a little blue left arrow in the top left. Hope this helps! Rmvandijk (talk) 09:04, 8 August 2025 (UTC)
- Thank you, User:Rmvandijk. I said that I had Event Viewer. I didn't say that I knew how to use it. It there a manual for how to filter its output so that I don't have to read through thousands of entries whose meanings are only known to those who know their meanings? Where do I look for system restarts, rather than for thousands of other events? Robert McClenon (talk) 22:17, 6 August 2025 (UTC)
August 7
Why do websites such as Reddit or LinkedIn display the approximate age (e.g. "two months ago") of a post instead of its exact date and time?
Thanks. Apokrif (talk) 01:12, 7 August 2025 (UTC)
- You'd be better off asking there, but I would suspect they see it as an unnecessary waste of resources to constantly update all the dates and times. Shantavira|feed me 08:28, 7 August 2025 (UTC)
- I don't see how the resources would be conserved by doing that; the easy thing would be to just leave the timestamp and let users do the math if they want to. No math to do at all. Next easiest would be to do it precisely: ("Comment is 4 days, 17 hours old"). Hardest would be what they're doing, which is taking the math and then converting it to something conversational ("About two months ago"). As a user, I like what they're doing: it gives you an immediate sense of whether the conversation is stale or not and you can find the exact timestamp if that's important to you. Matt Deres (talk) 14:01, 7 August 2025 (UTC)
you can find the exact timestamp
: how? Apokrif (talk) 15:41, 7 August 2025 (UTC)- Generally, hovering your pointer over the "one day ago" (or whatever). Reddit gives the timestamp down to the second. Not sure about LinkedIn; I don't use it much. They might not do it. Matt Deres (talk) 17:20, 7 August 2025 (UTC)
- Is the info available on mobile? Apokrif (talk) 23:15, 7 August 2025 (UTC)
- Generally, hovering your pointer over the "one day ago" (or whatever). Reddit gives the timestamp down to the second. Not sure about LinkedIn; I don't use it much. They might not do it. Matt Deres (talk) 17:20, 7 August 2025 (UTC)
- @Apokrif Generally, because a relative date is easier information for a user to consume/mentally process, than the exact dates and times. The exact dates and times require more mental calculations to process and often have a level of detail that is too high for most use cases. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:26, 7 August 2025 (UTC)
- I agree, that's surely what they would say. E.g. looking at Reddit, you can find the timestamp in the HTML as e.g.
⟨time datetime="2020-04-02T12:17:17.182Z" title="Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 12:17:17 PM UTC" class="text-neutral-content-weak text-12"⟩5y ago⟨/time⟩
- This "service" is something that became common some time ago (15 years?). Unnecessarily taking away potentially important information from the first glance, not helping in any way, if you ask me.
- Icek~enwiki (talk) 17:18, 7 August 2025 (UTC)
- So why does Mediawiki software (as used for Wikimedia projects) do otherwise? 😉 Apokrif (talk) 23:16, 7 August 2025 (UTC)
- @Apokrif Mediawiki does still do proper UX research with their own users and the development process is more open. If you hover over the timestamp next to your message, you can see they still felt the need to put the relative time somewhere, but it was more practical (probably to make archiving easier too) to put the absolute timestamp at the very front. Komonzia (talk) 17:47, 9 August 2025 (UTC)
- I agree, that's surely what they would say. E.g. looking at Reddit, you can find the timestamp in the HTML as e.g.
- I don't see how the resources would be conserved by doing that; the easy thing would be to just leave the timestamp and let users do the math if they want to. No math to do at all. Next easiest would be to do it precisely: ("Comment is 4 days, 17 hours old"). Hardest would be what they're doing, which is taking the math and then converting it to something conversational ("About two months ago"). As a user, I like what they're doing: it gives you an immediate sense of whether the conversation is stale or not and you can find the exact timestamp if that's important to you. Matt Deres (talk) 14:01, 7 August 2025 (UTC)
- They do that specifically for me. When I look at pages like those, usually referred there througn some googling results, I'm interested how old some information is - and it's much much easier to comprehend and compare smething like '2 weeks' vs. '1 yr old' than 'March 17, 2024' vs. 'May 12, 2013'. Just because the most significant difference can be one of the least visible (a single digit at the end may mean more than a word and a number spanning the half of the date). --CiaPan (talk) 18:05, 7 August 2025 (UTC)
- My complaint would be that it stays "1 week ago" for 1 week, with an error up to 100% it does not seem to be so useful. It could be like "2025-07-31 02:15Z" or at least "1.1 weeks ago" for a little bit more information. Icek~enwiki (talk) 19:24, 7 August 2025 (UTC)
- It also loses accuracy over time, progressing from a resolution of minutes to hours to days to months to "about 1 year ago". Imagine future research of, say, people's attitudes during the covid pandemic. When exactly were these posts written? Oh, about 1 decade ago. Thanks for the information. Card Zero (talk) 00:48, 8 August 2025 (UTC)
- Agree to all that, but both of you are viewing this from the wrong lens. It's about letting people know how active or stale a thread or conversation is. On August 8, 2025, a post from August 7, 2023 might initially appear to still be active because people are generally inattentive. But saying it's from "two years ago" is easy to read and unambiguous. The difference between a week old thread and a two-week old thread is not material to that purpose. (Also, I'm sure different sites use different methods and they've certainly changed over time, but Reddit seems to use days until a post is a month old. At least currently. I only did a cursory glance, but found no "week" nomenclature.) Matt Deres (talk) 12:34, 8 August 2025 (UTC)
- It also loses accuracy over time, progressing from a resolution of minutes to hours to days to months to "about 1 year ago". Imagine future research of, say, people's attitudes during the covid pandemic. When exactly were these posts written? Oh, about 1 decade ago. Thanks for the information. Card Zero (talk) 00:48, 8 August 2025 (UTC)
- There was a recent UK story about an itinerant murderer who left numerous reviews of scenic locations on Google maps. One of these was close to the site where he did the murder, but the interesting matter of whether it was written on the same day is unknown, since the date was stated in terms of "about N months ago". Card Zero (talk) 00:42, 8 August 2025 (UTC)
- Google did not provide more info? Apokrif (talk) 02:23, 8 August 2025 (UTC)
- Perhaps to the cops, but it didn't reach the news sites. Besides this is more of a curiosity than something that could be used in evidence, since from what I saw his reviews just discussed painters and nature reserves and fishing spots, and used the word "tranquil" a lot. Card Zero (talk) 03:52, 8 August 2025 (UTC)
- Google did not provide more info? Apokrif (talk) 02:23, 8 August 2025 (UTC)
- My complaint would be that it stays "1 week ago" for 1 week, with an error up to 100% it does not seem to be so useful. It could be like "2025-07-31 02:15Z" or at least "1.1 weeks ago" for a little bit more information. Icek~enwiki (talk) 19:24, 7 August 2025 (UTC)
- I've wondered about this, too. It's not just Reddit and LinkedIn, it's virtually all modern software. It's quite annoying. I regularly find myself knowing the exact date of something I'm looking for in a long list, but if it's less than a week old, first I have to do math to determine that it's, say, 3 days ago.
- I honestly don't know if this is a meaningless fashion trend that all modern programmers copy each other on, or if they actually think people will find it useful, or if some majority of users actually do find it useful. I certainly don't, but I appear to be in some kind of minority. —scs (talk) 15:22, 9 August 2025 (UTC)
- Decisions like this aren't usually the programmers' unless the programmer is also a UX designer. Those decisions are based on (sometimes shoddy, assumption-laden) research, or, sometimes the idea spreads to other software (because the UX designer thinks it's a good idea or 'the done thing') without researching about whether that website's particular audience prefers one option or the other (in this case, precise versus relative timestamps). In cases where the programmer still had their wits about them and knew better, you can hover over a relative time to see the exact time (I prefer to see both). Komonzia (talk) 17:17, 9 August 2025 (UTC)
- It's possible that most people do prefer natural language relative times to precise absolute timestamps. But then, most people prefer TikTok to Reddit, so it's not clear why UX should conform to what most people like, as opposed to being good. Card Zero (talk) 12:18, 10 August 2025 (UTC)
- Decisions like this aren't usually the programmers' unless the programmer is also a UX designer. Those decisions are based on (sometimes shoddy, assumption-laden) research, or, sometimes the idea spreads to other software (because the UX designer thinks it's a good idea or 'the done thing') without researching about whether that website's particular audience prefers one option or the other (in this case, precise versus relative timestamps). In cases where the programmer still had their wits about them and knew better, you can hover over a relative time to see the exact time (I prefer to see both). Komonzia (talk) 17:17, 9 August 2025 (UTC)
- One reason is to not have to worry about timezones. If it says "posted at 12:21," is that at my local time, your local time, the server's local time, or some other time zone? If it says it was posted three hours ago, that's the same wherever you are in the world. Chuntuk (talk) 14:25, 14 August 2025 (UTC)
- On Reddit, if you hover over the approximate age, you'll get the exact date and time, at least on the default "New Reddit" theme. -insert valid name here- (talk) 19:18, 15 August 2025 (UTC)
- Usually you can inspect element and the full ISO date will be in the code AFAIK. —Matrix ping mewhen u reply (t? - c) 14:11, 18 August 2025 (UTC)
August 12
Spike in readership
Hop water had a notable spike on 5 August. I started the article, so I'm curios if someone can tell me where it came from. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 14:30, 12 August 2025 (UTC)
- Hi Gråbergs Gråa Sång, looks like it was an answer to the New York Times' The Mini crossword puzzle on August 5.
- I checked Google trends to see if it was general internet interest rather than just on Wikipedia's Main page or a random robot issue. I saw "Monterey Bay" as an associated trending search term there and when I googled hop water monterey bay this Forbes blog-style article on crossword hints for the NYT Mini popped up mentioning hop water.
- I think culturally these crosswords are popular in the US (we probably have an article about that!) so generate a lot of interest, and Wikipedia visits it seems. I am sure many frustrated crossword players are grateful for you starting the article :-). Commander Keane (talk) 23:54, 12 August 2025 (UTC)
- Thank you very much! Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 05:35, 13 August 2025 (UTC)
- I think the NYT mini crossword has a big readership outside the US, thanks to the popularity of Wordle (both Wordle and the Mini are part of the NYT Games app). Obviously, the crossword is aimed at a US readership, so some of the terms used are unfamiliar to international readers. Hence spikes in Google/Wikipedia activity. That's certainly the case for me personally. Chuntuk (talk) 14:20, 14 August 2025 (UTC)
August 15
Where can I report a problem with Microsoft?
I tried to ask a question on https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/ask/
Which used to be https://answers.microsoft.com/
This was the result
Please fix the following issues to continue: We encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later. If this issue continues, please open a ticket at https://sitehelp.microsoft.com.
There are specific error details but I'm kind of reluctant to post them here.
So I get this:
Selected user account does not exist in tenant 'Microsoft' and cannot access the application 'eea5f4ef-dd4d-4755-aa86-3e0283223b97' in that tenant. The account needs to be added as an external user in the tenant first. Please use a different account.
I try another way in and get
Sorry, but we’re having trouble signing you in.
AADSTS50020: User account '[my real name]@hotmail.com' from identity provider 'live.com' does not exist in tenant 'Microsoft' and cannot access the application 'eea5f4ef-dd4d-4755-aa86-3e0283223b97'(DevRelMC) in that tenant. The account needs to be added as an external user in the tenant first. Sign out and sign in again with a different Azure Active Directory user account.
I tried going to Azure and they'll let me sign up for a free account but I gave up when they asked for my credit card number. That plus the fact that the site seems to answer only highly technical questions and if they get something irrelevant they just won't bother.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 23:40, 15 August 2025 (UTC)
- Try non-community support instead and ask your original question: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/contactus Should be live chat. Aaron Liu (talk) 03:26, 16 August 2025 (UTC)
- I thought I had tried that and ended up going in circles but this time it worked. I'll know in a minute if that helped.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 17:37, 17 August 2025 (UTC)
- Didn't get what I wanted, but the problem is solved that I needed to ask about, and I was able to ask a question on the site.
- I thought I had tried that and ended up going in circles but this time it worked. I'll know in a minute if that helped.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 17:37, 17 August 2025 (UTC)
- "I must say, working with you was a nice experience. Thank you for all your patience."— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 18:44, 17 August 2025 (UTC)
- I'm back with being told to do things I already tried to do that didn't work. Someone needs to solve this problem.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 17:50, 18 August 2025 (UTC)
- "I must say, working with you was a nice experience. Thank you for all your patience."— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 18:44, 17 August 2025 (UTC)