Windows for the scrap bin?

I was skeptical of Linux at first, but after loading it onto my laptop with a USB stick, I never looked back.

What was a slow laptop seemingly fit for the bin, became fast, and with a bang up to date operating system too. lots of very tech savvy people out there for support too. Granted, there's the usual clowns, but most are very happy to help, and will walk you though most issues asking for nothing in return.

I've never had any problem whatsoever with virus issues.

Most distros (operating systems) have a vast amount of software, and to be honest, I've never had any issues finding what I need. Often (for e.g Open Office) it is so close to the Windows equivalent it's hardly noticeable.

People worry about using the command line, but mostly it's 'sudo apt-get install' and the name of the thing you want to add. I only use it when I want to really speed things up.

I'm no expert, but it just seems to work really nicely for me. if you run it off a USB you can try it, and if you don't like it, simply pull the USB stick out and keep on with Windows. I have to admit a small thrill when I installed it over the top of Windows and pulled the licence sticker off the back...

Linux is one of the best kept secrets that's actually no secret at all.

It's interesting. My 7 years old desktop takes a couple of minutes to boot up.

My less than two year old laptop boots in less than 10 seconds.

Both W10.

Main difference is that the laptop has an SSD.

Neil

You can switch off defragging for an SSD, it doesn't speed one up as there's no seek time with an SSD.

After 25 years of using Microsoft Windows and becoming unimpressed with it, I jumped ship last June and went over to a 16" MacBook Pro and wished I have moved across earlier. I found it easy to adjust to it's differences.

Ordinary SATA SSDs are so old hat

Recently built a high-spec PC for a friend and used one of the latest NVMe SSDs for the operating system drive, the difference is remarkable.

Quoting some figures (although, like with most things, these don't translate directly to real life) an ordinary mechanical hard disk drive (HDD) has a seek time of 2 to 5 milliseconds, a SATA SSD 0.2 milliseconds and a NVMe SSD is only 0.02 milliseconds.

Of course, the drawback is you need a motherboard that can cope with the new hardware, but I would expect newer laptops will soon start to use the faster drives.

Rob

Neil > "You can switch off defragging for an SSD, it doesn't speed one up as there's no seek time with an SSD "

Exactly ~ and of course as mentioned above, regular defrag procedures are detrimental to the life of a SSD, which is anyway less than that of a HDD.

Though others may well have had better experience, I recently HAD to buy a new drive as the old HDD gave up the ghost. OK, more expensive but I'll get a SSD.
No anticipated problems in configuring the SSD I naively thought - I have a weekly Windows backup on an ext HDD and everything will copy over OK.

It does not. "Gotcha No. 1"
As multiple searches online via a laptop confirmed, a Win10 backup keeps a copy of your personal files only - not the OS + your progs.
Ah well then, there's plenty of guidance on d/loading a copy of M/soft Media Creation Tool and from there, the creation of a new, up-to-date Win10 OS.

"Gotcha No. 2" is that it is hellish hard and takes many hours to try and incorporate all those personal files into the new OS. Docs, images and music etc are no problem but reinstalling emails, e-addresses via .pst files and your progs are a subcategory of Gotcha No 2. I gave up on that after many hours.

Naive thinking Chapter II
I also had taken a disc image of my old, defunct HDD. It was about 3 months old but "it'll be dead easy to just recreate the image onto the new SSD".

Wrong again = Gotcha No. 3.............
As further online searching revealed, M/soft will only allow a disk image to be restored to the original disc from which it was taken !!!
(Expletives deleted)

Eventually discovered that you can partially defeat Gotcha No. 3 by a tedious process which will "mount" it. This produces a huge, multi Gb file of everything in the image. (Yes, you find you need a high capacity ext drive).

I can appreciate M/soft don't want to invite litigation for allowing the easy copying of commercial, copyright progs. This would be the case if it were possible for the unscrupulous to sell copies of disc images or backups loaded with pirated s/ware.

But I will be truly delighted to read of others' easy solution to this not-so-unusual need to reproduce your entire, up-to-date but failed HDD on to a new one. Perhaps one of the commercial progs have been proven to accomplish this within a few hours without tears or constant monitoring so that you finish with a fully working, 100% restored main drive. I'll gladly buy a license if so.
If it's suggested that a total clone of your HDD is taken onto a 2nd HDD every night, then that doesn't satisfy the criteria above !

There's an old saying "You'll never know how good your backup is until you really need it"

When I bought my laptop, it had a 1tb Seagate hard drive which was quickly replaced by a Samsung EVO850 500gb SSD. That speeded up the boot somewhat. Another feature of laptops is that they are normally configured to run slower when on battery power to make a charge last longer. That can be disabled at the expense of shorter times between recharging.

Anyone fancying Linux would find Ubuntu to have a similar desktop and be quite easy to migrate to.

Edited By old mart on 18/03/2021 15:49:02

Hi there, again, all,

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to try 'Windows Reset' to get over a very, very slow Windows 10 boot-up and also a very slow shut-down as well as a few other niggles.

Windows Reset proceeded steadily until the progress bar reached 68% when it stalled. I waited quite some time until deciding the process had failed. A web search (different computer) revealed that stalling at 68% was not uncommon - it always seemed to be 68%. One poor soul had waited at 68% for eight hours before giving up.

Rebuilding the machine is not yet complete and some features which worked well before the event seem not to be rebuildable! I flinch at the mention of .pst files.

My Windows 10 'sits on' an activated retail copy of Windows 7 - since Windows 7 is no longer supported, we had to persuade a high pay-grade member of the MicroSoft activation team to activate Windows 7 before we could proceed to reinstall Windows 10. I doubt whether I could persuade them to do that again.

Windows Reset was 'billed' as having the option to preserve one's personal files and applications. The 68% stall, and/or my guess-work attempts to recover from it, precluded that. I did export various files from key applications when I 'upgraded' to Windows 10 back in February 2020. Obviously, using these exports to rebuild the machine leaves me with a blank 2020 history and, in any case, has not been without problems.

Doubtless, some folks enjoy the challenge of dealing with Windows at the 'nuts & bolts' level - I do not. I want the use of applications that work supported by an Operating System that works.

To sound such a positive note as I can, my Windows 10 boot-up and shut down are now lightning fast compared with what they were before.

Best regards,

Swarf, Mostly!

Edited By Swarf, Mostly! on 18/03/2021 16:14:05

What you need is cloning software. I use Acronis to back up all personal files and system. Changed from hard drive to M2 NVME SSD with no problems.

Do you have "Fast Startup" enabled in Windows (it comes enabled by default but may be turned off).

If, as expected, it is on then you should realise there is a difference between "Shut Down" and "Restart.

Shutdown saves a copy of the current kernel state to disk plus a bunch of other stuff then shuts the machine off. It then recovers that information when the machine is turned on again allowing for a "Fast Boot". It is effectively the same as sleep mode in that respect. It can be very fast particularly if your boot drive is SSD.

Restart does none of that. It is a "normal" closing of the system, any kernel information is lost followed by a reload from scratch. That can take quite a bit longer.

(The way the terms "shutdown" and "reboot" are used is counter-intuitive to me but that's Windows all over).

Note that:

1. Holding down the shift-key while doing a shutdown will pre-empt the kernel saving and force the machine to load from scratch when you next turn it on.(i.e. no Fast-Startup)

2. If you run any kind of boot manager, it is imperative to turn off Fast-Startup or you risk data loss.

Noting the comments on 'Fast Startup", it may be worth noting that many BIOS systems also have a fast-boot option. Some of them have an 'extended' and 'short' boot sequence. On many of them, it is also possible to disable various functions - for instance on older motherboards, they would carry out a search for attached drives every time the machine was switched on - this could be disabled with no ill effect, because who changes hard drives every tie they turn on? Some machines can be configured for the length of time that the 'Flash' screen is displayed (if at all). This usually shows you which keys to press to get into the BIOS or Boot Menu. If these options are disabled, or set to the shortest option, then many seconds or even minutes can be cut from the boot time, and this is before it even tries to start Windows - There are more options than I have mentioned, but a web search for your motherboard can help with this.
I frequently have to make new Linux installations (friends, enemies, relations ), and even using 'old' hard drives, it only normally takes about 30 to 40 minutes to make a complete new installation of (say) Linux Mint, and restore the previous browser and e-mail settings.

Linux Mint has had a configurable backup facility to save essential data for some time now, and if you use Firefox and/or Thunderbird, there is a directory which can be copied over which will restore all your passwords, add-on configurations and bookmarks.

For my own machines, I use an external USB hard-drive (the old technology is perfectly adequate for this) and backup all the stuff I couldn't bear to lose onto this - byte for byte, hard-drives are about the cheapest way to store bulk data.

Linux also has the advantage mentioned by people on this thread that it is free - you are not tied to an expensive application relying on Windows, which may cost you money when Windows lets you down - you can just download it and install it again from the Linux repositories.

There was also a mention of using the command line to install stuff in Linux, and the poster mentions it is fast. Quite true, but for those scared of the (non-existent) complexities of the command line, almost all Linux distros have some GUI application to choose, download and install software (The Linux Mint Software Manager currently has over 60,000 'apps' (horrible term) available.

There are comments of not having access to Windows for hours while it carries out software updates. Linux Mint and Ubuntu rarely (if ever) take more than 10 or 15 minutes even for the largest updates in my experience - and if you have an SSD, the same update may be one or two minutes. Recently, in a moment of madness, I installed W10 on a netbook for a friend - it took hours, then it wanted to do an update, and spent the rest of the night doing it. Ok, not a fast machine, but also a waste of time.

Still - its your choice.

I spent an hour this morning looking at why the latest (March 2021) Windows 10 update causes our PC's at work to flash when the start button menu is selected.

Eventually figured out that transparency in the display settings was the culprit. Disabling it has restored the PC's to a usable state and they're even a little faster in use, as would be expected.

Ed.

Edited By Ed Duffner on 18/03/2021 18:58:49