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Trenton-Bennett
AskWoody Lounger@Rhino – I get it! I understand your frustrations.
I do love this discussion though, and I’m glad you posted this.
I had an interesting situation a couple of years ago: when a Windows 10 update erased about half of my device drivers on an older system (including some really important ones like the SATA controller) and the OS wouldn’t allow me to manually install the correct drivers, I ended up pushing Windows 7 back onto the machine and having to use it again after some time away.
Boy, what a difference it did and didn’t make! I loved me some Windows 7 back in the day, but just like Windows 10, I realized it’s still always going to be a love/hate relationship. On the one hand, technologies like SSD and Bluetooth weren’t quite ‘ready for prime time’ when Windows 7 first rolled out, and it shows. But then on the other hand…well, I used to joke that Windows 10 was like using Windows 7, just having to learn how many more clicks it takes to get you drilled down into the Windows 7 tools you’re used to working with. The new way to manage system-level things like networks seems to get more buried beneath annoying ‘Modern UI’ style buttons and switches.
With that Windows 7 machine, I ultimately realized I just needed to scrap it. I’d rolled myself back to the various Windows 7 instabilities and quirks on that machine that were what drove me to Win 10 in the first place, and Microsoft made it clear that I wouldn’t be able to just hang on the last known good Win 10 build (unless I’m okay with a format/reinstall every 6 months followed by disabling Updates at a low level).
If I could wave a magical Microsoft wand, I’d get the kids at Redmond to put all those cute new features on hold, like ‘My phone’ and a bonkers Start Menu that’s slowly creeping back into Windows 8-ish territory, and just stabilize and bug-fix…and repair whatever’s gone wrong in their release testing process that’s caused crummy builds to go out to the masses and break things.
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Trenton-Bennett
AskWoody LoungerA lot of this article focuses on the cloud in the context of apps and the individual user experience. In that sense, it does explain why Microsoft views the cloud as a Windows appendage (OneDrive, Windows Store). The Windows OS has to be all things to all people and Microsoft’s version of Cloud implementation for that is fairly “day-to-day” in nature. But when it comes to business, the game changes. The way you could use Azure for SharePoint, for Visual Studio and/or Team Foundation Server, or simply for content hosting, is extremely robust–the fact that I hate using the word ‘robust’ should emphasize the point–it’s laid out for businesses as a stepping-stone to take as far into the Cloud as they are willing…and Microsoft deserves credit for trying to make this affordable to smaller businesses too.
And yet, we have Office 365 sitting somewhere in between, because it has to have a foot in both worlds. And as a result, it’s probably the best place to look if you want to see where Microsoft intends to go with Cloud implementation of apps: it is a fairly big suite of apps, their most heavily consumed product outside Windows, and I get the impression it hits all of the rough spots of Cloud implementation for Microsoft.
Personally, I keep waiting for OneDrive to get easier to work with–and yet both it and the Windows Store apps are just as the author describes them–not well written to the user’s experience.
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Trenton-Bennett
AskWoody LoungerContent.IE5 is usually Temporary Internet Files, which means if you open your browser, got to Tools–>Options and delete temporary files–don’t be surprised if it appears to freeze and takes a long time to complete!–this may fix the problem. Once done, while you are there you can change the maximum temporary file size to 50MB and IE will run just fine (temp file size is not related to things you do like downloading, it’s just about all the files that make up the structure of a web page you are viewing).
The Windows Disk Cleanup utility can also do this.
Windows 7 and above are better about preventing this, but on Vista I have seen Temporary Internet Files balloon up to many GB in size and eat up the disk. I hope this helps, and after you DO clear up the space, be sure and defragment to get some performance back too.
Good luck!
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Trenton-Bennett
AskWoody LoungerOn a side note, if you do get all your files and decide to do the reformat you’re asking about, that should work–since you say the disk has multiple partitions on it, I just wanted to add that when I run the installer and have decided to format the drive and create a new blank partition using the Windows setup interface, I try to track down any other partitions on the disk and wipe ’em out, just so that I have one clean hard drive that the installer is not scanning for previous versions on.
I delete any partitions on the disk, create just one, and let Windows then do its thing (which usually involves creating its own small partition and then doing the install on the rest of the disk).
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Trenton-Bennett
AskWoody LoungerI don’t want to get into the war (I’ve seen both sides, I promise), but I do want to offer some suggestions to our original poster in the hopes that they help.
I’ve noticed Windows Update problems can happen if Windows 8 does not correctly activate. If you can confirm whether your Windows 8 is activated, that’s a great start. If it isn’t activated, then do that first.
How to tell – nerdy command-prompt version:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2806745(PDF) visual, easy-to-do version:
http://download.lenovo.com/pccbbs/thinkcentre_pdf/how_to_determine_if_windows8_is_activated.pdfSometimes, for some reason, the product key entered during installation isn’t used and some sort of built-in one is used…and this Win 8 won’t activate. When this happens, you can force the correct product key like so:
http://superuser.com/questions/463208/change-the-windows-8-product-key-after-installationIf neither of these apply to you, I’d like to recommend that you try starting from Windows 8.1 and going from there. Windows 8.1 is a much better update, and it can be had through the Microsoft Store, which means you don’t have to use your currently-broken Windows Update to nab it. It is a rollup of critical updates, so it should move you forward to a better footing any may even fix your problem (I hope!).
How to obtain Windows Update 1 (skip to step 3 on this page):
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/update-from-windows-8-tutorialIf you can update to Windows 8.1, the UI is a bit nicer, but then there’s a slightly later update cleverly called “Update for Windows 8.1” that tweaks things just a bit more. I recommend it because my Windows 8 experience got better after using it.
One other thing: if you’re totally using Windows 8 through a Microsoft account (meaning, “one you made out at Microsoft.com for Outlook/Hotmail/Xbox/Live/Whatever”), try creating a Local user on the machine who is set up from the get-go as an Administrator, logging on as them, and trying to pull down the updates. Heck, for that matter just try creating another Administrative user on the machine and seeing if the new account works.
How to create a User (click the one that says “My Computer is in a Workgroup”):
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/create-user-account#create-user-account=windows-7Balaji Kundalam’s post here also describes how to do this:
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_8-security/how-to-make-an-admin-account-on-windows-8/371a47a1-1188-4b93-9d81-7faae48a0cc8I hope that helps our original poster. I’m sorry to hear that Acer’s support wasn’t able to help either–that’s kind of crappy of them, given that this is a new product. :-/
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Trenton-Bennett
AskWoody LoungerGreat article! Your bit at the end about privacy is an important one, so I thought I’d add one tidbit for you: right now Microsoft is trying not to invade users’ privacy, even when the government comes knocking:
challenging a request to turn over a list of Office 365 users:
http://www.viralglobalnews.com/technology/microsoft-challenged-legality-national-security-letter/8172/refusing to hand over e-mail from a user in another country:
http://time.com/2857103/microsoft-data-email/Other companies join in the battle:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/microsoft-and-other-tech-giants-fight-u-s-right-to-seize-cloud-data-1.2677688Google might also be trying to do the same; I just thought this was worth mentioning because it was the Office 365 case that drew my attention to it.
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Trenton-Bennett
AskWoody LoungerBobdog, lifespan is a valid concern, but these days the reliability of SSDs has dramatically improved. For example, I believe the Samsung EVO 840 series the author mentions notes an average of one and a half million hours Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF). I do know they offer a three-year warranty.
As far as performance degrading, it depends on how much you use it, but a degraded SSD will most likely still perform better than spinning platters.
Personally I use PerfectDisk to manage my SSDs and thus far (knock on wood) have had no failures. But either way it’s still a dice roll: I’ve had some (physical) hard drives last longer than I would ever need them to, while others fail within 2 or 3 years.
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Trenton-Bennett
AskWoody LoungerFor the bit you mention where you have problems knowing which is which drive in the BIOS, depending on the motherboard you may be able to tell with a quick peek in the case. Some motherboards will label each individual SATA controller with a number, and so the first number in the chain of cables will appear first in the BIOS. Follow the cable for each drive, make a note of which socket they plug into, and what the number is, then examine the BIOS.
What can sometimes snafu that is when the label on the motherboard is 1-based (e.g., “1, 2, 3, 4”) and the BIOS is 0-based (e.g., “0, 1, 2”) It’s just something to watch for…for example, if you see the cable in Socket 1, and the BIOS says “Drive 0”, that may be the same thing.
I then tend to use a sharpie to mark the drives, so in future I know which has which OS.
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Trenton-Bennett
AskWoody LoungerI periodically experience this issue because some (random) USB device is holding up the boot process–like my PC decided this time that the USB hub is a bootable drive, or some USB device I have is critical to loading the system. These above steps are excellent for troubleshooting, but my first one (that sometimes saves me having to do the rest) is to try booting with only keyboard and mouse connected.
Hope that helps too.
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Trenton-Bennett
AskWoody LoungerGreat article! I’ve been enjoying SSDs for a while now, and like the author says, you never want to go back. I thought I’d add some additional thoughts for the laptop user, since options are a little more limited.
If you don’t have multiple drive bays, you *may* still have an unused mSATA port and can buy an mSATA SSD. This is a bit more technical of a route and can be a bit pricey, but it is a solution that worked really well for me.
When purchasing an SSD specifically for running Windows 7 or 8, 64GB won’t be enough room because while you *can* move some things to another drive (like programs, document libraries, etc.), you will lose some space to paging, the hibernation file, and your user profile(s); the latter two cannot be moved and with profiles, the more programs you install on your laptop the larger the profile gets. You might also find yourself having to aggressively clean up old files, such as error dump files or Windows Update installation files, and that can get tedious.
Some of the people I’ve worked with have to do presentations running one or more virtual machines from a laptop, and their products have to run well or else the people watching will get the impression that slow performance is their product’s fault–so another solution that can give you space, performance, and a bit of a price break against SSDs is the purchase of a ‘hybrid’ drive. Hybrid drives contain a small SSD component and then large storage for speeds faster than a normal disk, just slower than an SSD. They tend to work pretty well.
Right now I’ve got a 128GB AData SC300 mSATA SSD running Windows and in the two drive bays my laptop has I’ve placed a pair of 500GB Seagate hybrid drives in a RAID 0 Array, giving me close to a Terabyte of room. Not everyone will want a solution like that, but for what I’m doing it works very well.
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