…the computer failed a Windows update this morning.
My fault, probably. I told it to close the Update screen, since it listed that as one of the programs that was stalling its operation.
It didn’t like that.
Glory-oski. Jane helpfully got me an info screen on the office computer. I read that. It said give it 3 hours. Then I went back to my machine.
Update stayed frozen at 30% and holding. For two hours, before it finally went to’shutting down’. And froze.
Well, after a significant amount of time, I powered off the brute force way and intended to come up in Safe Mode. It went right ahead and booted, and went to a screen that confessed “Update Failed.”
At this point I transferred yesterday’s work to Jane’s computer, and rolled up my sleeves to run a fix.
I called up the Update screen, which, if you read carefully in such instances, offers you a path to fix it, by going into Windows’ guts, turning off Updating, and totally deleting the contents of two folders, which are the update records, then turning Update on again.
Writing every step down to refer to, I did the deed, and asked Update to perform.
It churned for nearly another hour…but found 7 updates it needed. Now, meanwhile, this being the detritus from Update Tuesday where everything Microsoft-linked decides it wants to interrupt your operations to update (Adobe, Java, Norton, you name it) —and swearing a bit—I got the updates installed, and the machine is slowly working its way back to normal.
Jane and I have decreed this is pizza day. It started early, with the Night Terror deciding to knock on my bedroom door, as Jane will do if she wants me to get up and help her in the yard. It was 5:30 in the morning. She was still asleep. I went back to bed, murmuring threats. Come 6:30 I gave up and got up. And we decided to take the chain saw to some piled-up limbs from a trim we did putting in the fence—things too big to be easy to dispose of, which is why I got the chainsaw. Then we have the stump out front where the city declared we had to take a juniper down. Which turns out to be some 15′ feet wide, and apt to denude the whole corner, but, hey, that’s the rules: it’s a corner. People need to see the traffic. So we’d taken out some, but the chainsaw is helping. It’s just slow.
Have I gotten everything done that I want to do? Well, I certainly wanted the computer to work.
Life is what happens when you’re making plans. That’s okay, gives the hind brain a chance to refresh all that creativity. But I’m pretty sure I would have sworn more that just a bit.
“Update Tuesday”? Wozat? You write that like it’s important, a birthday or something. Sounds like a “normal” one’d best be shut of. 😉 🙂
[/sarcasm]
Every Windows program updates on Tuesdays. All at the same time. And if one stumbles the rest freak out: What? You HAVE to update Adobe! it’s keeping the Martians away! No, no, no, Norton needs to update! Java needs to update! Your games need to update!
And if Windows doesn’t update, it will save fifty updates up and refuse to do anything until you let it run those. This usually happens when you haven’t turned your computer off for a week, but are now trying to make an appointment to get the car serviced and want to take your computer along…
Oh, I’ve heard about Patch Tuesdays. I’ll help friends who have Windows from time to time.
Which version of WP do you need? Linux’s Wine will support some Windows apps, though apparently Corel hasn’t been too helpful supporting that. Some do seem to work.
Likes Martians. Marvin the Martian. Willis the Martian. Flatcatsw? Well….
Dislikes Windows Updates. Shudders to think what his laptop will say when he fires it up and tries to update….
Dislikes Adobe’s subscription scheme immensely.
My sympathies. And have you heard that the upcoming Windows 10 Home will update itself automatically? In fact, you Won’t be able to control when it does? You have to buy the Pro version to get that ability. (Debating Filing Intent on M$…again)
I just read that. I was considering 10; 8/8.1 isn’t that bad. Having updates forced down my throat, though…! See below.
Using 7 – due to the XP machine dying. I’d consider 10, except that it doesn’t come with Minesweeper (WTF???) or any software that will play DVDs. Out of touch with reality in Redmond?
This is why I broke the bank to get a Dell Precision laptop, which comes with hardware upward mobility, with Win 7 pro with an option to ‘upgrade’ to 10. I’ll ‘let Mikey try it.’ The machine will have the ability to handle future upgrades, but I’m going to let Mikey try it for an extended time before I step off into that end of the pool.
I’m unsure, but I think I read that Win7 Minesweeper and a couple other usual games will be replaced by Win10 versions. Whether that means they’ll have tile interfaces, the article didn’t say.
One would think, running an off-the-shelf Dell computer, that Patch Tuesdays would be safe. One would be wrong. Microslop occasionally puts out a toxic patch. The first I encountered required me to talk with a level 2 tech in Pune, India while we uninstalled every Windows Exploder version ever back to the one in XP SP0 (IIRC), then reinstall them, one by one by one by…. Actually, the tech was nice: since I pretty much know how to do uninstall stuff, though I still boggle at the need to do it, we just chatted about Inja; he was surprised I knew where Pune is, south of Mumbai/Bombay. Another time I checked on a Windows news site before updating and didn’t do the update until Microslop had fixed it a couple weeks later.
Point is, it’s probably best to set Windows Update to, “Download updates but let me choose whether to install them.” You can check a Windows news site Wednesday to see if there’s any screaming or just install them just before the next Patch Tuesday. At this point, I tend to take the lazy way.
Avast isn’t the best AV out at this point, but it does have the nice feature that it monitors update status on all major and some minor software. It will come up and give you a list of software to upgrade. It’s a little ad-heavy.
Paul, if the Steam Machine takes off, attacks on Linux may increase.
At least it is back up and working. Our power supply died the death of old age (I guess) which naturally happened over a weekend. I think it is a rule that these things happen on weekends, or, better yet, HOLIDAY weekends…
Shall I bring out my chain saw with me???? It’s not very slow…..
Why this may have happened: When you buy a new computer, the hard drive, with Windows pre-installed, has usually been sitting on a shelf somewhere for a few months. If you bought a Windows 7 computer, it may have been sitting on the shelf for a couple of years. Or else the manufacturer may be installing an old disk image. So there may be a huge backlog of updates, and it will try to do them all at once. This may amount to a couple of hundred updates and several gigabytes to download.
Take control of the update process: Go to Control Panel, Updates, and set the updates to ‘notify me’ rather than ‘download automatically’. When it notifies you, take a look at how many updates, what they are, how large the download is, and do it at some time that’s convenient. It’s probably best to start the updates last thing at night, and leave it running till the morning. BUT… make sure to set the computer not to go into sleep mode after a while – set this in the Power Options.
Why does it take so long? Because modern Windows always allows you to roll back any individual update, or set of updates. To do this requires a complex set of backups of the operating system.
When it tells you ‘do not switch off your computer’, then do not switch off your computer, or it WILL give problems. It may churn away for ages, it may reboot one or more times in the process, it may show a blank screen for a long time, but it hasn’t hung, leave it alone.
I recently bought a Windows 8.1 machine. One of the first things I did was to set the automatic updates off. In due course it notified me of 112 updates amounting to over 3GB. I waited until I was going to be doing something else the whole morning before I started the updates. After downloading them and asking to restart, it still took abut 40 minutes to finally reboot completely. Later it found about a dozen more updates, presumably ones depending on the ones it had just installed.
On AV: I just use Windows Defender. It’s built in, it’s free, it requires minimal interaction, and doesn’t slow your computer down too much, and it’s adequate and about as good as any other major antivirus system.
On Windows 10: Here’s a good recent article, Windows 10 reality check: Separating fact from fiction.
It will probably be a good idea to delay upgrading to Windows 10 for a few months after its release, to be sure that there are no glitches. We have a whole year after July 29 to get a free upgrade. After that you have to buy it.
“There is another system,” to quote “Colossus,The Forbin Project.” You don’t have to go through all this! And most Linux distributions understand that Windows is universally installed, so will squeeze some space out of Windows to install themselves in a dual-boot situation. Mint is one of the currently most popular.
“… Windows is universally installed…”
Yes, and there’s a good reason for that. The reason is that despite all the moaning and complaining, and despite all the glitches, Windows is still actually the best OS around, especially for serious work. Which is why almost every business has standardized on Windows, even though Linux is free. Linux is great if you are technically minded and enjoy tinkering with software, but the vast majority of users aren’t and don’t.
The reason Windows is universally installed is that computer manufacturers get it for a very low price if they do so. If they don’t, the pay the same price as Amazon or Newegg.
I think, and many users will agree, that all I want is my software to work and my files to be found and, frankly, yes, I also game. Because my business involves simply dropping letters and spaces into a file, it’s not as affected by the changes in tech as some that rely on calculation, imaging, and integration of data, or even complex data retrieval. All I reasonably ask is that the files I create stay intact and accessible.
And damn! it seems all too often this simple requirement seems too ‘out there’ for tech to manage.
Thus far, and fortunately, Carbonite has proved to be beyond a convenience or a backup for bad habits. It’s proven to have good personal service, in which, when you have a problem, you can reach a Person who can fix it. Dell also has managed to do that for me, despite some recent troubles. I have at long last found one mouse I can use, but alas, that darned hand tremor I’ve had since childhood makes it hard for me even to manipulate the scroll-slide accurately on a small display, so thank goodness the trackpoint mouse still exists. [The tremor never shows until I’m trying to do something like mouse, or fit a screwdriver into a slotted screw. Go figure. But it’s pure annoyance with a lot of screen-movement options.]
Anyway, both laptops are working, and the novel is safe. Progress is happening.
As I read this on my iMac, I shudder.
Windows updates: – I didn’t worry about them until I found out that the updates plug security holes in the operating system; now I update all my machines every Patch Tuesday. It’s almost always the 2nd Tuesday of the month. I tell Windows to notify me then go out and download and install them. If one of the updates doesn’t install I re-try and sometimes that works. I’ve also had success going to the Microsoft website and downloading the KB file directly.
Windows can be annoying, but I’ve messed about with Ubuntu and I find it takes a lot more fiddling with than I’m willing to do. We’ve got one old laptop with Ubuntu installed that DH uses for a mathematics server.
Anti-virus: I’ve been using ESET NOD32 for a couple of years now and got my husband using it as well. Unfortunately, its not free, but it works better than any other AV software I’ve ever tried, and I’ve tried many of them. It’s got a small footprint and doesn’t seem to drag down the machine at all, and it does find malware and doesn’t advertise itself on all my emails. It’s spendy unless you wait for it to go on sale at NewEgg; I recently got 5 copies of the 2015 version for $14.95 each, so when I need them they’ll be ready. Since I run 3 computers every day and DH has 2 he uses daily, it won’t be that long.