WIN 10 again!

Specifically to Oldiron.

If equipment is running well, and doing what is required, why should the user spend good money to replace it? My main machine is 10 years old this year, and does all that I need. It's true that I added extra RAM (to make it the same as my backup machine) and I changed the hard drive (same reason), and a few years ago I had to dismantle it to clean the exhaust outlet (it's a laptop and was overheating), nevertheless it does all that I want and need.

I use Linux Mint v.18.1 and regularly receive updates: these are performed at a time convenient to me, not at 3.00 am, or whatever time Microsoft dictates. I also use old versions of some software because a) they do the job I want, and reliably; and b) I have paid for them. One of the programs is indeed obsolete, with no equivalent replacement, therefore I would have to learn a new program, for which I have neither the time nor the inclination, especially as the program does what I want. The other old program could be updated - at a cost, but why should I when the old one is adequate for my needs?

The other software that I use is open-source and as such gets updated as and when necessary by the program support team at nil cost.

I have to say that when I hear, or read, people saying that you should update because of whatever, I do feel that these people have more money than sense. I also feel that this is a symptom of today's throwaway society. I absolutely will not replace equipment, of any sort, just to keep up with the Jones: this is why we have, for example, a 18 year old washing machine, a 20 year old caravan, and until we were forced into it due to incompatibilities, a 17 year old television. Yes, I'm well aware that modern equipment is supposedly more efficient, but if you take the overall cost of making the item in the first place, I do wonder just how much is being saved? Just consider this: There has been a lot of hoo-ha over lighting - incandescents wasting electricity in the form of heat, but were they? That heat was helping to warm the room. So we changed to CFC's. Vastly more expensive to buy, contained as I understand it, mercury, and the part that "they" didn't tell you, a gradually diminishing light output. Today, the buzz word appears to be LED's. Ok, we have a room which is dark at the best of times so last September we obtained three of the most powerful LED's available. Since then, one has failed (flickering and replaced under warranty), and now another appears to be failing (flickering again). At £15 each one has to wonder. Using incandescents, we never had a problem, other than the short life span.

Back to computing. I actually have three laptops, with the one written about above being the oldest, as my main machine. Of the other two, the backup is a better machine, bought S/H, but still old, whilst the third was rescued before my daughter sent it to the tip. It is now doing sterling service as an experimental machine, even if does have the wrong keyboard, the DVD player is somewhat duff, and the ethernet port doesn't seem to work properly.

It isn't that I can't afford to buy new - I just cannot see the necessity of scrapping something that does what is required.

And yes, I do understand that new software includes new facilities. My 5 year old car, bought new, has features on it which I have never used. That says it all.

Regards,

Peter G. Shaw

Martin P,

The main reason why I bought a new car (first in 45 years incidentally) was because a) I finally realised I can't take it with me; and b) because I was absolutely sick of the previous car & its problems, so rather than risk another s/h car and problems, we bought new. I only wish I had bought new 4 years previously.

Murray,

A question. Why should I, being as I was a reasonably happy XP user, have to fork out good money to upgrade fully working hardware just because Microsoft decide to produce an OS which will not run the programs I use. I object strongly to being forced into spending my hard-earned money just because of Microsoft's attitude. Don't refer to me as a an attitudinal rebel just because I favour Linux over the tyrannical monolith known as Microsoft which wants nothing more than to control every single PC on the planet, and thus control what you may, or may not do with your computer.

As it is, I have gained at least an extra 4 years or so of life out of my equipment by converting to Linux. And I expect to have at least another three years. And all without having to spend my money at Microsoft's behest.

Peter

ps. I should point out that I have no objection to spending money if a good case can be made for it, but as yet, no-one has made a good case for upgrading what I already have. Lots of "keeping up with the Jones", yes, but not a good financial case. It doesn't matter whether SSD's are readily available or not. I ask again, other than "keeping up with the Jones" where is the financial case?

I enjoyed being labelled as an 'attitudinal rebel' by7 Muzzer. That's me - a cross between James Dean and the Fonz, so cool it hurts...

Back to Clive's problem: sounds unpleasantly that it's not even getting though the BIOS boot stage. (This BIOS is a simple built-in rarely changed program in firmware with a basic understanding of what the computer's hardware is: CPU type, real time clock, memory and peripherals.)

When you switch on a computer it jumps to the beginning of BIOS memory and executes whatever it finds, all being well setting up basic interfaces to the screen, hard-disk and other peripherals. Once it's set the scene, it reads another program off a fixed part of the hard-disk that understands how to launch the operating system. It's called the booting as a reference to 'pulling yourself up by your boot-straps', which is impossible. Actually all it's doing is starting with a tiny program that calls a series of bigger programs until it knows enough to launch the operating system. You have probably spotted that W10 is some distance down the chain.

Usually the boot process is pretty solid but it can be disrupted by a hardware failure or by corruption of your hard-drives boot sector.

Diagnosing and fixing this can be difficult. The approach generally is to:

1. Try and get to the BIOS menu. This is done by repeatedly tapping a function key while the machine powers up. Which key it is varies, usually F2. Unless your system has a boot screen that tells you when and what to type, start tapping the instant power is switched on. There is only a brief window when you access the BIOS.
2. Once in the BIOS it will let do some simple checks and alter which device the system boots off. Sometimes there's a list that will be tried automatically in sequence - typically Hard-drive, the USB, then DVD. Other times you have to tell it which device to use. The idea is get the machine to boot from something else (like Linux) on a USB memory atick or DVD. If you can get that far, the BIOS is OK, and the fault is likely hard-drive failure or corruption. If you know what you're doing, it's possible to explore the hard-drive with linux. It may be possible to save data, or even fix the corruption. This is similar to the Microsoft recovery process, which is packaged differently and may be easier to follow.

Attempting this can soon get you into time-consuming advanced computing. Professionally, we didn't mess about. When a user machine failed it was swapped out. Back at base no attempt was made to fix old machines, failures within warranty generated claim paperwork, and only newish boxes were serviced. If it wasn't an obvious fault quickly fixed by board or disk swapping, it was sold to a refurbisher. Occasionally corrupt disks were fixed by copying a new image to them. That destroys user data on the disk. In our configuration there wasn't any - it was all held on a fully backed up central server. Not so easy on a home system.

None of this helps I'm afraid. If it's as dead as I fear, you'll probably have to take it to a PC Repairer. It feels more 'seized engine' than 'needs a bump start'! Repairers have the skills, software and hardware needed to diagnose difficult cases. Perhaps someone else on the forum can help.

Sorry,

Dave

Peter, the best deal I’ve had was on a “nearly new car” it was a pre-registered Honda with delivery mileage (7miles on the clock) and was about £3K cheaper than the “new” model. I prefer nearly new cars as the saving can be significant but my current car was bought new because they didn’t have any nearly new ones at my local dealer. They did give me a very good trade in on my old one though and there were other discounts on it as well. It is nice having a brand new one though!

OK, I am in, I did it by switching on and off as the circle of dots processed. As it started to open press the off switch until it closes and then do it 3 times. This then comes into a repair mode which chugs through boot up after boot up until eventually I ha a working laptop. It told me that some upgrades did not load but i am not going to try to load them.

I feel that Microsoft have failed again as I read something about older processors not liking Win10.

Clive

Had the same problem 3 times on my Acer desktop after a win10 update. First 2 times got into repair mode, 3rd time I could do nothing and had to reinstall win10 from an ISO image then reinstall all my sofwares and files.

Mght he coinsidence but after changing the internet settings to "metered connection" there are significantly less updates and have had no more problems. I had come to hate win10 but since the last reinstall and making this setting change a year ago I'v been ok with it

My better half has hard similar experiences on a Toshiba laptop.

I find Britec on YouTube to be a good source of help for dealing with win10.

Nige

Edited By tractionengine42 on 08/04/2018 05:28:14

Edited By tractionengine42 on 08/04/2018 05:29:14

There was that chip security issue as well recently, some updates may have tried to deal with it

Hi Vic,

Lucky you.

The nearest main dealer to me was a Honda dealership, and I went to see them. They tried to sell me a CRV, which I didn't want - too high, I couldn't see over it. After that they lost interest and I had to pester them to get a look at a true estate - unfortunately it didn't suit.

Eventually I bought Toyota, and never regretted it.

Peter

Conversely, try loading windoze xp onto a modern laptop, it just won't happen.

I have a Minolta slide scanner that due to it age, will only run on the latest of WXP as I discovered when attempting to run it on a W7 machine - just wouldn't work.

Bought a new laptop with no OS and as I had plenty of XP versions now not being used, went to load up.

After loading in all the various files, the laptop promptly reported that the OS being loaded was not compatible with the current BIOS.

So now you can't even backdate when you want to.

Incidentally, I hardly feel that not being able to see over a car is a valid reason for not buying it.

Regards

Lofty

I FOOLED IT, I wrote earlier that W-10 wouldn't recognize my camera, today I plugged in my film slide copier, then the camera, and went in via that, it worked for me so I'm sort of happy.

Ian S C

That's possible. Although the press have lost interest the MELTDOWN / SPECTRE thing is still rumbling on. It seems there are:

• some older processors that cannot be secured
• patches that are themselves faulty in that they crash a minority of processors or cause other problems.
• more fixes to come now the extent of the problem is better understood.

On my home machines all the upgrades so far (Window10 & Linux) have applied successfully. Performance-wise nothing has obviously slowed down here - yet. It looks like the performance hit is unlikely to effect ordinary users. More serious for the grown-ups - some server owners have reported a 30% performance hit. How bad it is depends on the machines work-profile. A CAD rendering back-end is more likely to be hurt than a lightly loaded web-server.

Delighted to hear Clive has got his computer running again; that does point the finger rather firmly at the Microsoft update. I suggest running Microsoft's chkdsk next as described here. Not difficult. With luck it will detect a shower of disk errors and correct them!

Dave

I suspect you know about UEFI already? If not, it's a security measure controversially pushed by Microsoft whereby the BIOS will only load a recognised operating system. Initially only Microsoft was ever to be 'recognised'. That attempt to crush the competition was challenged successfully, and you now have the choice.

Personally I think UEFI is a mess. From Microsoft's point of view it worked a treat. UEFI makes it harder for people to switch to Linux or to perpetuate XP on a new machine. It's a decent earner because many find it easier to take W10 rather than to swim against the tide.

UEFI may need to be switched off in the BIOS before XP can be started. Beware, if you turn UEFI off, then Windows 10 won't start in Legacy boot mode.

The other option is to install Linux plus a Virtual Machine like VirtualBox. You don't have to learn or use linux itself, just use it to host XP in a VM. As such it can be a minimal installation. Equally possible to host XP from W10 in the same way.

VirtualBox (other products available) makes it surprising easy to do. At the cost of some drop in performance you can bypass all the boot/BIOS obstacles. Linux and VirtualBox for Linux are both free.

Dave

If I go on holiday for two weeks I expect my car to start when I find it in the car park. Why should you expect a computer to be any different. My desktop computer boots and is ready to use in 45 seconds using Linux Mint and just a little longer using Win 7. Why can't Win 10 do the same?

Russell

My laptop with W10 Home boots up in under a minute. Perhaps it isdue to the solid state drives.

Certainly. But I'd also suggest the way Linux handles updates is superior. Windows can be quite annoying:

• without asking it sometimes applies updates during boot, which can greatly extend how long it takes to do user things
• sometimes applies updates during shutdown, less annoying unless you need to turn the machine off because you're going out
• often requires at least one reboot to complete or progress the update process. (My record number of reboots for a single installation required is 7. )

In comparison, Linux always asks permission before applying updates. It also maintains a much clearer separation between user-space and the system, which means that updates rarely require linux to be rebooted. Typically, application updates don't require a reboot. Only security changes deep inside the kernel, or a new kernel, require linux to be restarted, but again, you have the choice between restarting immediately or waiting until the next natural break. In contrast, Windows is much more likely to need a reboot when an application is updated, and it is much more likely to walk over the user when doing so.

That Windows has a flawed update system is more obvious to Linux owners who use Windows occasionally. If you use Windows regularly, updates are less obviously intrusive because they're spread over several days. They're even less obvious if you leave your computer switched on overnight and it updates while you're asleep.

Linux users (like me) tend to use Windows irregularly, which causes big queues of updates to build up. Next time I fire up Windows, I'm likely to get at least 10 minutes of compulsory time-wasting, likely a lot longer. Not just Windows updating, but the virus checker and other utilities will do the same, often bombarding me with adverts in the process. Not entirely Windows fault. The thing I most dislike about Windows updates is that in their desire to push services some upgrades override my security/privacy settings. I always have to check Windows updates haven't switched things I don't want back on, another time-waster compared with Linux.

I'm not trying to sell Linux; if you rely on a Windows only application like Fusion360, or you're an old-dog with better things to do than learn new tricks, or you're happy with Windows, stick with it.

Dave

Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 09/04/2018 12:05:42

Oooh, is it broken?

Me gaming tower does 14 seconds from button press to desk top.

Bit of a s*d to carry around though.

Regards

Lofty

Posted by FMES on 09/04/2018 12:05:30:Me gaming tower does 14 seconds from button press to desk top.

O.K. if it's a competition, my laptop is up and ready in just under 3 seconds. Running Linux Mint 18.3 without a SSD drive. It goes into suspend when I close the lid and wakes up when I open it. It hasn't been rebooted for 12 days, not since I last ran Windoze on it

Russell

Edited By Russell Eberhardt on 09/04/2018 13:13:50

My lap top is a bit slow starting up, 7 seconds on average.

Ian S C