Just for grins & giggles, another tale of something or other ...
Started the quest for Windoze 10 on my Photoshop computer yesterday morning at 4:00am. If I'm going to have insomnia I might as well get some use out of it. Again following the procrastinators guide, I made an image backup before starting. That went smoothly, even better than it did on this computer. But then I ran into problems with Windoze 7. Somehow I'd hosed it up. First hint was when I plugged in the thumb drive with the Windoze 10 installation program & couldn't open it to run setup. Couldn't eject the thumb drive, couldn't shut down. Finally had to resort to using the power switch to kill it. Started again & chose safe mode. Got a screen telling me a Windoze Update had failed & was being reversed to status quo ante. "Do not turn off your computer!" By then it was time for me to leave for my Wednesday morning photography brunch. Arrived back home around 2:00pm & it was still showing the same screen. Decided "EFF IT!" and went out again to buy a 256GB Solid State Drive with a 10 year warranty. Replaced both the boot drive and the 120GB 2.5" drive I was using for Photoshop's scratch disk with solid state drives. I have a bunch of 120GB & 128GB solid state drives I bought for $20 each when Tiger Direct was closing their local store here in Raleigh. Did a clean install of Windoze 7 PRO 64-bit w/SP1 from DVD. While it was doing its thing, I used this computer to load another thumb drive with motherboard drivers (audio, USB, PCI bridge & LAN), latest Nvidia driver for the video card, latest Firefox stand-alone installer & a couple of Microsoft Update MSU files that effectively add up to "Service Pack 2" (although Microsoft doesn't call it that, it's a "convenience roll-up") Everything went swimmingly, although the "convenience roll-up" takes about 4 hours to install. But install it does. I'm prepared. I have several library books close to hand to while away the hours while I wait. Finally got started with the Windoze 10 install around 9:00pm. I have the standalone installer on another thumb drive. Inserted it and double-clicked Setup. It told me my Windoze 7 wasn't registered & I needed to provide a product key. The guy at the computer store had warned me to expect that & that I could just use the Windoze 7 product key. No joy! So I exited & found where to register the Windoze 7 installation with Microsoft & that was one of the few instances where something from Microsoft has worked correctly without my having to beat it into submission. Second time ... everything seems to be going along well. I chose not to install updates because that took a long time when I did it on this computer. So, it's going along & doing its own thing - purple screen "Installing Windoze 10" - until about midnight the screen just goes blank. Hit the space bar, move the mouse around & click the left button a couple of times. Nothing! But the activity light on the computer is still steadily blinking, so I let it keep doing whatever it's doing. After about half an hour, I get a mouse pointer. Around 1:00am, it comes up with the screen with the big circle "Upgrading Windows" 0%. Down in the lower left it says "Copying files 0%". I'm guessing that even though it's supposed to be a "stand-alone" installer, it's downloading those updates I told it I would install later. *AND* I'm guessing that all the OTHER procrastinators who waited until the last minute are also downloading & installing Windoze 10 today (deadline is tomorrow) and Microsoft doesn't have enough server capacity to handle the current load. I just took a look & it's now "Upgrading Windows 23%" and "Copying files 77%". Damn! I'm glad I didn't wait until the Friday deadline. I just hope it finishes before that deadline. Still have to download & install anti-virus software, and I have to install Photoshop, Nik filters, etc., plus all the other little programs I use on that computer. Not mad or anything. I expected a long, involved, EFFED UP process & it hasn't disappointed. -- Science - Questions we may never find answers for. Religion - Answers we must never question. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
