OneDrive problems: Report No.3

A couple of weeks back, I reported at reference 1 on my problems with Microsoft's OneDrive product. Problems which involved loss of a few days work from some Excel Workbooks and a rather smaller number of Word documents. I dare say there has been minor damage which I have not noticed.

I have not made any progress with versions not working.

I decided to keep some work on OneDrive and move some off, this last while things settled down. I had not had any more OneDrive problems.

However, I suspected that my old HP Pavilion desktop, dating from 2017 and stuck on Windows 10, was implicated. A complication which OneDrive could not, for some reason, always cope with.

This has now been addressed with a small, new-to-me desktop from Tier1, the people at reference 2, people from whom I have made a modest number of purchases in the past, only one of which - an HP Zbook - did not age well. An HP ProDesk 400 G4 DM i5-8500T topped up with some extra SSD - which is what seems to serve as what I used to know as disc storage. The idea was that I would plug it into my existing display and my existing printer, both from HP, both quite old now. But I did buy new wireless keyboard and mouse, just in case.

Got it out of its box to find that it connected to the display with something called Display Port - while my old but entirely serviceable screen was HDMI. The one in the roof used rows of pins! Luckily, Amazon were, for £15 or so, able to deliver a suitable convertor cable the next day, that is to say today.

At which point, having backed up some of the stuff on OneDrive, I plugged it all in and powered it all up. An hour or so later, and it all seemed to be working, including both old display and old printer. Including both old keyboard and old mouse, also both from HP, unlike the Tier1 replacements. Including Windows 11 and Microsoft 365. All much easier than it used to be in the olden days, say twenty years ago.

Only two flies in the ointment so far. First, some odd behaviour of the Screenshots folder on OneDrive. Hopefully not the tip of some unpleasant iceberg - but, just in case, I shall keep the offline chunk of my work offline for the time being, tiresome though that is.

Second, doubt about what version of Microsoft 365, for which I pay a subscription, the new desktop has access to. Is it the free online version, maybe not as good as the downloaded version? Something to be checked out over the next few days.

And while I still have the old desktop, I have not bothered to lift the picture archive from it. An archive which I only rarely use and which, I dare say, could still be recovered were it to become important for some reason. And then there is the late, lamented BT Cloud.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/04/onedrive-problems-report-no2.html.

Reference 2: https://tier1online.com/.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DisplayPort.