OT: Win10 installation hiccups
28 views
Skip to first unread message
dmccunney
May 19, 2016, 8:21:55 PM5/19/16
to VDE_Editor
(Off topic, but various folks here are up under Windows and may find it useful)
MS has released Windows 10, and is pushing it hard on everyone. They
make noises about it being the *last* version of Windows, which is
actually possible, but another matter entirely.
I previously updated an old travel laptop running Win7 Home, and a
friend's newer Win8.1 laptop to Win10, and it was relatively painless.
My SP updated her Win7 Home laptop, and she had no problems doing it.
(She simply said No to all of the things MS suggested in the upgrade.)
I'd held off on my Win7 Pro desktop, because I dual booted Win7 Pro
and Ubuntu Linux, and I wasn't certain what effect the upgrade might
have on that. I finally pulled the trigger and did the upgrade.
Dualk boot wasn't affected at all. Things went to Hell in a
handbasket once I *had* upgraded.
Win10 on my desktop had two critical problems. One was inability to
shutdown/restart. It would simply hang if I tried, and require a
power cycle. A bigger one was application hangs. At some point, the
machine was guaranteed to hang and become unresponsive, regardless of
what I happened to be doing. It might even happen if I wasn't doing
anything. I uninstalled a few things that I thought might be
problems, but to no avail. After multiple power cycles and the sort
of language you don't use on a family list, I booted into Ubuntu,
which still worked fine, the Look Stuff Up.
A developer I once dealt with classified problems in four types:
Easy to find, easy to fix.
Easy to find, hard to fix.
Hard to find, easy to fix.
Hard to find, hard to fix.
As expected, my issues were an example of the third class. Simple to
fix, once I understood what was going on.
The shutdown/restart woes were a side-effect of a new feature in
Windows called "Hybrid shutdown". The implicit assumption is that
Win10 will be run on a mobile device like a laptop, where the scarce
resource is battery life. "Hybrid shutdown" is a way of turning off
while preserving the current state of the system, like open
applications, and is reportedly faster at closing down and restarting
than the earlier "Hibernation" method. But it's *not* a complete
shutdown, and on systems like a 24/7 desktop or server running off an
outlet, it's not what you want. Turning *off* hybrid shutdown fixed
the shutdown/restart issues.
The hangs were a consequence of booting and running off an SSD. The
fix was going to device properties and turning *off* Windows write
cache buffer flushing on the SSD. Doing so cured the hangs and the
system behaved as originally expected. It's fast and stable.
The usual attitude about Windows is that every *other* release is
decent. That's true in my experience. I was happy with XP, but
carefully avoided Vista. I was happy with Win7 but avoided 8.1. I'm
happy with Win10.
One thjng that that made various folks happy was that Win10 brought
back the Start menu Win 8.1 had dropped. The new interface is a
hybrid of Start menu and tiles. But in typical MS "WTF?" fashion,
they fixed what wasn't broken, and the Start menu was significantly
different from Win7. That's and easy fix: the open source Classic
Shell brings it back, defaulting to Win7 look-and-feel, and runs fine
under Win10.
And Win10 finally added something I've been using third-party
utilities to get since Win9.X - multiple virtual desktops. I had used
an open source VDM called WindowsPager. It lacked the bells and
whistles of some other products. But the win for me was displaying
desktop thumbnails in the taskbar, letting me switch between them with
the mouse, and letting me move stuff between windows by drag and drop
on the taskbar thumbnails. It *runs* under Win10, but *doesn't*
display in the taskbar, so it went away and I use the native Windows
capability.
Bottom line, Windows 10 doesn't suck, and I'm glad I made the switch,
but I'd have been gladder had I known about the "gotcha's" before
doing so. I spent a day or so being very unhappy before I got things
squared away.
______
Dennis
https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519
MS has released Windows 10, and is pushing it hard on everyone. They
make noises about it being the *last* version of Windows, which is
actually possible, but another matter entirely.
I previously updated an old travel laptop running Win7 Home, and a
friend's newer Win8.1 laptop to Win10, and it was relatively painless.
My SP updated her Win7 Home laptop, and she had no problems doing it.
(She simply said No to all of the things MS suggested in the upgrade.)
I'd held off on my Win7 Pro desktop, because I dual booted Win7 Pro
and Ubuntu Linux, and I wasn't certain what effect the upgrade might
have on that. I finally pulled the trigger and did the upgrade.
Dualk boot wasn't affected at all. Things went to Hell in a
handbasket once I *had* upgraded.
Win10 on my desktop had two critical problems. One was inability to
shutdown/restart. It would simply hang if I tried, and require a
power cycle. A bigger one was application hangs. At some point, the
machine was guaranteed to hang and become unresponsive, regardless of
what I happened to be doing. It might even happen if I wasn't doing
anything. I uninstalled a few things that I thought might be
problems, but to no avail. After multiple power cycles and the sort
of language you don't use on a family list, I booted into Ubuntu,
which still worked fine, the Look Stuff Up.
A developer I once dealt with classified problems in four types:
Easy to find, easy to fix.
Easy to find, hard to fix.
Hard to find, easy to fix.
Hard to find, hard to fix.
As expected, my issues were an example of the third class. Simple to
fix, once I understood what was going on.
The shutdown/restart woes were a side-effect of a new feature in
Windows called "Hybrid shutdown". The implicit assumption is that
Win10 will be run on a mobile device like a laptop, where the scarce
resource is battery life. "Hybrid shutdown" is a way of turning off
while preserving the current state of the system, like open
applications, and is reportedly faster at closing down and restarting
than the earlier "Hibernation" method. But it's *not* a complete
shutdown, and on systems like a 24/7 desktop or server running off an
outlet, it's not what you want. Turning *off* hybrid shutdown fixed
the shutdown/restart issues.
The hangs were a consequence of booting and running off an SSD. The
fix was going to device properties and turning *off* Windows write
cache buffer flushing on the SSD. Doing so cured the hangs and the
system behaved as originally expected. It's fast and stable.
The usual attitude about Windows is that every *other* release is
decent. That's true in my experience. I was happy with XP, but
carefully avoided Vista. I was happy with Win7 but avoided 8.1. I'm
happy with Win10.
One thjng that that made various folks happy was that Win10 brought
back the Start menu Win 8.1 had dropped. The new interface is a
hybrid of Start menu and tiles. But in typical MS "WTF?" fashion,
they fixed what wasn't broken, and the Start menu was significantly
different from Win7. That's and easy fix: the open source Classic
Shell brings it back, defaulting to Win7 look-and-feel, and runs fine
under Win10.
And Win10 finally added something I've been using third-party
utilities to get since Win9.X - multiple virtual desktops. I had used
an open source VDM called WindowsPager. It lacked the bells and
whistles of some other products. But the win for me was displaying
desktop thumbnails in the taskbar, letting me switch between them with
the mouse, and letting me move stuff between windows by drag and drop
on the taskbar thumbnails. It *runs* under Win10, but *doesn't*
display in the taskbar, so it went away and I use the native Windows
capability.
Bottom line, Windows 10 doesn't suck, and I'm glad I made the switch,
but I'd have been gladder had I known about the "gotcha's" before
doing so. I spent a day or so being very unhappy before I got things
squared away.
______
Dennis
https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519
Eric Meyer
May 20, 2016, 5:10:29 PM5/20/16
to vde_e...@googlegroups.com
dmccunney wrote:
> (Off topic, but various folks here are up under Windows and may find it useful)
> MS has released Windows 10, and is pushing it hard on everyone....
> (Off topic, but various folks here are up under Windows and may find it useful)
Thanks Dennis, very useful information.
Do you know a good information source for Win10 when I eventually need to face
it? I always used the O'Reilly "Annoyances" books (had to love the title) to
find out how to turn off stupid or dangerous features and manage others.
-- Eric.
dmccunney
May 20, 2016, 5:47:19 PM5/20/16
to VDE_Editor
On Fri, May 20, 2016 at 5:10 PM, Eric Meyer <xor...@gmail.com> wrote:
> dmccunney wrote:
>>
>> (Off topic, but various folks here are up under Windows and may find it
>> useful)
>> MS has released Windows 10, and is pushing it hard on everyone....
>
> Thanks Dennis, very useful information.
You're welcome.
> dmccunney wrote:
>>
>> (Off topic, but various folks here are up under Windows and may find it
>> useful)
>> MS has released Windows 10, and is pushing it hard on everyone....
>
> Thanks Dennis, very useful information.
> Do you know a good information source for Win10 when I eventually need to
> face it? I always used the O'Reilly "Annoyances" books (had to love the
> title) to find out how to turn off stupid or dangerous features and manage
> others.
newsgroups maintained at Steve (Spinrite) Gibson's grc.com. Steve has
a security focus, and there are lots of discussions of security
related topics as well as more general information. GRC has Linux
focused groups as well as Windows, and I use both.
The hot button on the GRC forums concerning Win10 is privacy. Win10
uses telemetry to report back to MS on the health of the Windows
machine, and you can't turn it off. There are four levels of data
sent. The highest level includes memory dumps that might contain
sensitive data. But which level is sent by default is user
selectable. The lowest is purely about the current health of the
machine with no data that can be tied to a user. The highest level is
something you'll only turn on if you are having *real* problems you
need MS assistance with, and those likely to use it will be corporate
IT types with MS support contracts.
Another hot button there is that you can't turn off Windows updates
and choose not to get them in Win10. Personally, I prefer to stay
fully patched, and will settle for simply being able to have updates
that may require a reboot applied when I'm not in the middle of
something.
The GRC forums are handy sources of info, but there's just so much of
the tin foil hat crowd I can take. I'm at the point of saying "You
*wish* you were important enough that anybody could be *bothered* to
snoop on your PC. You aren't important, you don't matter, and nobody
else *cares* what you think." to some of the folks who hang out there.
Another site I read these days is the How To Geek, who covers a
variety of topics including Android, and has Windows 10 related
stuff.
A Google on "Win10 annoyances" will return a list of stuff likely
worth glancing at.
> -- Eric.
______
Dennis
https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519
Sheldon Isaac
May 20, 2016, 7:03:49 PM5/20/16
to vde_e...@googlegroups.com
On Fri, 20 May 2016 17:46:49 -0400
dmccunney <dennis....@gmail.com> wrote (at least in part):
> The hot button on the GRC forums concerning Win10 is privacy. Win10
> uses telemetry to report back to MS on the health of the Windows
> machine, and you can't turn it off.
Dennis, et al:
May I bother you for a comment on my situation?
A few years ago I got a used laptop with Windows 7 Pro 64-bit (not that I'm
sure what that means).
I was monkeying with it, and somehow made it unbootable.
Eventually I wiped the HDD and have been using Linuxes, mostly Puppy.
But I'd not been able to easily do the editing I wanted with Linux software.
I missed the ease of Wordpad and VDE. Although the latter I could do with
DOSBox.
But I always felt like "how can I get Windows back:?
Several attempts failed, let's not get into that now.
A week or two ago, I came across a link to a so-called Tiny Windows 7,
don't have the link at the moment.
The file was "Tiny7 (blackeyez007.blogspot.com).iso", about 700 MB.
I extracted it to a bootable USB drive, and did the setup to a hard drive.
Seems to work OK.
Both its Wordpad and Eric's VDE work fine.
Can I assume that if I don't have networking on during the few times a
month I run this Windows, I needn't worry about anyone snooping?
Many thanks,
Sheldon Isaac
dmccunney <dennis....@gmail.com> wrote (at least in part):
> The hot button on the GRC forums concerning Win10 is privacy. Win10
> uses telemetry to report back to MS on the health of the Windows
> machine, and you can't turn it off.
May I bother you for a comment on my situation?
A few years ago I got a used laptop with Windows 7 Pro 64-bit (not that I'm
sure what that means).
I was monkeying with it, and somehow made it unbootable.
Eventually I wiped the HDD and have been using Linuxes, mostly Puppy.
But I'd not been able to easily do the editing I wanted with Linux software.
I missed the ease of Wordpad and VDE. Although the latter I could do with
DOSBox.
But I always felt like "how can I get Windows back:?
Several attempts failed, let's not get into that now.
A week or two ago, I came across a link to a so-called Tiny Windows 7,
don't have the link at the moment.
The file was "Tiny7 (blackeyez007.blogspot.com).iso", about 700 MB.
I extracted it to a bootable USB drive, and did the setup to a hard drive.
Seems to work OK.
Both its Wordpad and Eric's VDE work fine.
Can I assume that if I don't have networking on during the few times a
month I run this Windows, I needn't worry about anyone snooping?
Many thanks,
Sheldon Isaac
dmccunney
May 20, 2016, 7:34:41 PM5/20/16
to VDE_Editor
On Fri, May 20, 2016 at 7:03 PM, Sheldon Isaac <sheldo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 20 May 2016 17:46:49 -0400
> dmccunney <dennis....@gmail.com> wrote (at least in part):
>
>> The hot button on the GRC forums concerning Win10 is privacy. Win10
>> uses telemetry to report back to MS on the health of the Windows
>> machine, and you can't turn it off.
>
> Dennis, et al:
>
> May I bother you for a comment on my situation?
Sure.
> On Fri, 20 May 2016 17:46:49 -0400
> dmccunney <dennis....@gmail.com> wrote (at least in part):
>
>> The hot button on the GRC forums concerning Win10 is privacy. Win10
>> uses telemetry to report back to MS on the health of the Windows
>> machine, and you can't turn it off.
>
> Dennis, et al:
>
> May I bother you for a comment on my situation?
> A few years ago I got a used laptop with Windows 7 Pro 64-bit (not that I'm
> sure what that means).
installed. There are some differences between base Win7 Home and Win7
Pro (and between Pro and Enterprise, and Enterprise and Ultimate.)
You probably don't have to be concerned with them.
(I was happy my desktop came with Pro, because Pro includes the Group
Policy Editor. That lets me specify scripts to be run on startup
*and* shutdown. the latter was my need. Stuff can be done on startup
via task manager. Doing them automatically on shutdown is another
matter.)
> I was monkeying with it, and somehow made it unbootable.
> Eventually I wiped the HDD and have been using Linuxes, mostly Puppy.
and FreeDOS. I actually spent most time on it under Ubuntu. Ubuntu
is about the closest thing to a standard desktop Linux these days, and
Puppy is about as non-standard as you can get. (Among other things,
the "single-user, always run as root" design gave me hives.)
> But I'd not been able to easily do the editing I wanted with Linux software.
> I missed the ease of Wordpad and VDE. Although the latter I could do with
> DOSBox.
an Android port of DOSBox. Works nicely. I've never been a fan of
Wordpad.
> But I always felt like "how can I get Windows back:?
>
> Several attempts failed, let's not get into that now.
>
> A week or two ago, I came across a link to a so-called Tiny Windows 7,
> don't have the link at the moment.
>
> The file was "Tiny7 (blackeyez007.blogspot.com).iso", about 700 MB.
>
> I extracted it to a bootable USB drive, and did the setup to a hard drive.
>
> Seems to work OK.
>
> Both its Wordpad and Eric's VDE work fine.
>
> Can I assume that if I don't have networking on during the few times a
> month I run this Windows, I needn't worry about anyone snooping?
would, and why?
The big question, looking at the blog link, is whether this is a
legitimate copy of Windows. The blog post talks about "activated", so
this presumably passes muster and won't be flagged as illegal by MS.
Windows needs to be activated with a valid serial number. Unactivated
copies stop working after a bit. MS won't come knocking on your door
over an illegal Windows install, but you'll be back to running Linux
instead.
I don't know how you reach the outside world. In my case, I have a
cable modem provided by my ISP. The modem is a combo modem/wireless
router. The router portion has a hardware firewall, turned on, and
secured by WPA2 encryption. (That was the default out of the box.
All I had to do was set passwords.) The machines served by the router
have software firewalls enabled, and the network is locked down. I
don't worry about snooping, by MS or anyone else.
> Many thanks,
> Sheldon Isaac
______
Dennis
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages