2 days Ago By Richard Speed
BORK!BORK!BORK! A reminder today that bork – the nickname The Register gives to IoT displays gone awry – is truly international. You're almost done..
. In this case, it's an advertising display at a train station in Warsaw, Poland revealing that it is running Windows – or rather is trying to. At least it's a current version - it will probably warm the hearts of many at Microsoft to see an OS that is actually still in support as opposed to the usual suspects – Windows 7 or XP – lurking behind the display.
Windows 10 and 11 are increasingly filled with nagware, as evidenced by this screen, which we are fairly sure is running Windows 10. At the end of a normal Windows set-up, Microsoft likes to give users the opportunity to engage with its services. Fancy some cloud storage? There's OneDrive for that.
A bit of browsing? Just fire up Edge. Need to do some productivity tasks? Microsoft 365 is right this way..
. "Continue" will send the user into a warren of configuration screens for Microsoft's many and varied services. It can be skipped but, unless one turns it off in the Notifications and Actions section of Settings (for Windows 10), it will relentlessly pop up every time Microsoft wants to sell something let users know about new features or following a major update.
The practice has continued in Windows 11, where the setting "Show the Windows welcome experience after updates and when signed in to show what's new and suggested" is hidden away in the Notifications section of Settings. While this might be merely irritating for a user glaring at a laptop, it is downright catastrophic for a poorly configured advertising display where there is no way to click skip, unless this is a touchscreen and passengers can, in a very real sense, put the boot into Microsoft's helpful suggestions. Register reader Peter Valuks told us that he'd spotted the borked unit while taking in the sights and sounds of Warsaw prior to returning home to Fife.
We were delighted to hear that he'd also managed to visit the computer section of the Museum of Technology during his trip, which can be found in Warsaw's Palace of Culture and Science . While there, he spied an AKAT-1 prototype, an analog computer built in 1959 to solve differential equations. It's a glorious looking thing, even if it never troubled mass production.
It also never felt the need to flash a helpful screen of services a customer might want to avail themselves of. Progress, eh? ®.
