Copilot again

Following my brush with Copilot as geek noticed back at reference 1, I had occasion to give him another go this afternoon, on what looked to be a much less challenging problem than fixing an obscure chunk of Visual Basic code. I might say that I did not revisit that code, although I did post something about its output, such as it was, at reference 2.

The new problem concerned the behaviour of the Photos app, that is to say the Microsoft Photos app that comes with Windows 11 and Office 365. This last being the thing that I allow to be continually updating my laptop, on the grounds that just letting it get on and do its thing seems like a good idea and does not cause many problems - apart from the continual drip-feed of change irritating rather than helping me.

Now for the past few weeks, a lot of the time, when I open an image from File Explorer, Photos comes up with a middle sized panel locked into the middle of the screen of my Windows 11 HP Zbook laptop. With the top right portion of such a screen being snapped above. If I click on the maximise option top right on the Photos panel, I get a whole lot of options about clever organisation of panels on my screen which I do not want. And I can't move the panel: left click and drag with the mouse does not seem to work - although it works fine with, for example File Explorer and Word panels.

Then rather than just ask Bing, which usually turns up some advertisement infested geek, sometimes helpful, I thought I would ask Copilot. 

I got the impression that he did not have privileged access to my laptop, not even knowing, for example, that I was on Windows 11 rather than Windows 10. And his advice was fairly broad brush, not really focussed on my particular problem. But I plod through this stuff and first try a Photos repair, which helped, and then a Photos reset, which went a long way to fixing the problem. All that was left was the unreliability of mouse left click on a Photos panel. Copilot did not seem to think that this was odd and gave me another raft of things to try, including updating the drivers. But all this seemed terribly complicated, particularly as Copilot only seemed to have a sketchy knowledge of the options that I would need to click through to get to mouse driver update. Would Gemini have just got on and done it?

All this has burned up a couple of hours and I am not terribly impressed. But as I noted at reference 1, fixing someone else's computer remotely is a tricky business.

References 

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/07/limitations.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/07/a-word-frequency-analysis-from-dream.html.