…and it is a real old desktop.
I get a weak, weak, unhappy ‘yayyyyy’ from Jane, who believes it may be sort of working.
The morning has not started well…the desktop accidentally upgraded from Win 8 to Win 10…
by CJ | Mar 9, 2016 | Journal | 35 comments
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I would NOT be happy. I’d be on the phone to Redmond, and telling them that you want it OFF. I was getting reminders to upgrade to Windows 10 because I mistakenly agreed to do so when it was time. I found a way to get rid of those reminders. Now, I’ll upgrade when “I” choose to, not when Microsoft thinks I need to upgrade. It’s not that I’m paranoid, but it’s MY computer, and MY comfort zone, not theirs. “New and Improved” isn’t always the case… look at the kerfluffle with Windows 8.0 when it came out…..look at Windows 98 (first edition), or Windows ME…..
If I have to ditch Windows completely, I can do that……I’ll just have to buy a new hard drive and set it up with Linux…..
Didn’t you read the fine print?
Why buy a new drive? Linux can blow off Windows when installed.
This one is mine because I put together the hardware and software from FOSS!
because I don’t configure my computers that way…..
I’ve heard that it’s free into June…beyond that…
OTOH, it is running. Finally. The hangup was its inability to auto-recognize the desktop’s (which is our banking machine, mind) video card…which is a GeForce, not off-brand. Getting into the case and getting the model and brand apparently satisfied it.
We are now officially testing 10 on one of our machines, and a pretty critical and elderly one.
Oh crap. I’m sorry; I’ve heard from DH that Windows 10 is very pushy about installing itself, even when you haven’t explicitly said it may. You CAN reverse Win10 to Win8, but I’m not sure of the procedure; I just know DH has done it on clients’ computers. There is a piece of relatively small software (about 3g) that will prevent Win10 from doing the autoinstall until you authorize it; look for GWX Control Panel, an ugly yellow page.
This might help….
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2960692/windows/how-to-uninstall-windows-10-and-go-back-to-windows-7-or-8.html
Well, thus far it seems to be behaving itself. Jane’s testing it on GW2, which is a pretty severe test. Games tend to be that. As if she isn’t in there having a good time.
I’VE got to go grocery shopping, and fortify ourselves for another week of diet WITHOUT Nutrisystem’s help.
I’m still testing out my win10 upgrades. So far got three more toons to level 80 and another 200 WvW levels. But I think I need more time to prove GW2 is okay before I stop testing it and go back to playing 😉
🙂 We know exactly what you mean. 😉
From all I’ve read, Windows 10 is (or can easily be configured to be) less resource-hungry than Windows 8 or even Windows 7—if your hardware is properly supported. And the fact that Windows 8’s miserable UI is gone means I’d encourage an upgrade. Just… make sure you have a spare computer for working on in case something goes worng.
Windows has always been a pig. I’ve used since 3.0, the first version that was usable–given three tries. And then every other time or three they screw it up bad again. The fact is there is better software out there. It’s not prejudice, experience. My career has been in computing–I’ve said from time to time I’m a cyborg, because I use computers to augment my thinking. I’ve programmed since ’66, made my own hardware since ’76, because I had to to get the computing resources I want.
The #1 thing to know about Microsoft is you are not their customer! Their customers are the companies that make the applications that run on them. In the military they call it “force multiplication.”
I guess in that sense my current avatar is most appropriate. 😉
One would also check your other machines and make sure they are set to only download but not install new updates (at the very minimum). I hear that M$ is going to actively push Win10 automatically to any system set for automatic updates. I have machines running xp, vista, win7 and a brand new gaming rig with win10. My Win7 machine has to stay that way, I’ve programs not supported on Win10. But so far, a few minor problems only with 10, and the start button’s return makes it better than 8 by far.
BTW, Penguin Random House has posted on their website a “sneak peek” at Visitor, with the first ten pages…and half of page 376. Thought you might like to know.
If you have third-party security software, you have to manually check for updates. MS ‘fixed’ Windows so it will ignore your notification settings if you aren’t relying on their security.
So MS shouldn’t complain about people not installing updates: they broke Windows themselves.
Third party security software you have to pay annual subscription fees for? What’s that?
I’ve upgraded several of my machines to W10, and the ones that were stable running W7 are running W10 with no problems. DH has a laptop that must stay on W7 because he uses software for work that will not run under W10. The 2 machines I had that were flaky running W7 will no longer boot after the upgrade to W10. Sigh. I’ll worry about them after April 15th (or actually April 18th this year).
We actually upgraded a Dell Optiplex 760 from XP to Windows 8 when MS quit supporting XP, and that machine is perfectly happy running W10, so your desktop will probably be okay. Like J. C. Salomon, I’ve also heard that W8 and W10 use less resources than W7, which is why our old desktop was still on XP.
And we do have one laptop with Ubuntu installed and it mostly sits because trying to cope with Ubuntu Linux drives us both nuts.
“We will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary…[for what we want, essentially].”
–Microsoft Windows 10 policy
I think that may have gotten toned down, but nothing stops them from “toning it up” again. The privacy settings in Win10 are scattered to make it hard and time consuming to preserve your privacy. Here’s an RPS article:
rockpapershotgun.com/2015/07/30/windows-10-privacy-settings/
I have less confidence in Boy Genius Report, but this gives some automated tools to change everything:
bgr.com/2015/08/14/windows-10-spying-prevention-privacy-tools/
BUT, Microsoft is also slipping spyware into Win7 and Win8, so my thinking is now to go to Win10, where the anti-spying tools should be kept up to date. And hope it doesn’t turn my computer into a brick. Sigh.
The big problem with Windows 10, from what I’ve experienced, is the fact that it decides when to download and install its updates, and one can’t schedule those oneself. I used to have my laptop set to warn me about updates, but ler me decide when I want to download it and when I want to install it. That setting no longer exists, Windows just decides on its own when to do this, and hogs the entire bandwidth when it does.
Apparently, if it’s connected to the Internet and you don’t do anything for a few minutes, it thinks it’s allright to start updating.
This causes a lot of trouble for me and others at work, as we work through a virtual desktop over the wifi, and while Windows is hogging tge bandwidth we get thrown out of our work-sessions, have to log in again, etc., several times in a row. It’s very disruptive.
It was even worse for my neighbor’s son, who has to make his exams on his laptop, when the thing started to update in the middle of an exam, and he lost 10 minutes to waiting on Windows before he could contine. Just sitting and thinking instead of typing or mousing for a few minutes is enough for Windows to consider itself free to update: very disruptive!
If you tell Win10 that your WiFi is metered, it won’t use the connection without permission.
I had an eMachine and W10 didn’t like my graphics card and refused to download. When the graphics card started to go on me, I couldn’t replace it because if I did, I’d have to replace the motherboard, which didn’t have enough juice to run a decent graphics card. A friend got me a reconditioned Dell, cloned my 500 GB eMachine hard drive which had W7 on it onto a 1 TB hard drive and then wiped the 500 GB hard drive. I got a like new machine for peanuts with 1.5 TB of hard drive, a killer graphics card, and 8 gobs of RAM. I run two monitors off it no problem. Does what I need it to do.
1st Computer: Amiga 1000
2nd Computer: 386
3rd Computer: AMD DX40
4th Computer: 486
5th Computer: Dual 1.6 Mac
6th Computer: Mac-intel 486
7th Computer: Mac-intel 586
8th Computer: iMac 27″ 5K w/ 5 five-terrabyte drives in two cabinets on the side, 3 slots left over…
At Work: Will be riding Windows 7 Pro until 2020 on Dell XPS’s… After that? Maybe I can switch to Mac there as well…
It’s running well on my Dell XPS machine. My Win 7 laptop (Thinkpad R400) has hardware encryption on the drive so that the Win 10 can’t install. I could get someone to take it apart & fix it but it’s not worth it to me so it’s going to stay on Win 7 for the foreseeable future.
I haven’t had my Win7 laptop on in a long, long time. I’m on my iMac desktop these days. … I need to check the laptop over, though.
Off-Topic: Languages: I have had iTunes playing music since I got on the compy this morning, with a few foreign language songs on there, languages I really don’t speak, only a couple of which are related to languages I do speak.
As someone with a brain wired for language talent, I wonder — How much is my subconscious working on parsing those foreign language songs? How much is my mind, subconscious, able to parse and decode and translate of that? At least the grammatical structures? How much can a subconscious (or conscious) mind guess at, when the listener knows a related language? Is it more than we ordinarily think of consciously? What about the language sampes that are completely unrelated (other than that they are human languages)?
A great deal of language is carried in the tone of voice and the body language. We can still get a partial sense of meaning from *how* a person says something, as to what they mean and the emotional content and thinking behind it.
Sometimes, we can even get a sense of meaning as far as parts of speech or certain nouns and verbs, or again, the emotional meaning.
If a language is closely enough related, or some words are, we can also get a halfway-sense of the fuller meaning behind the words, further toward a meaningful translation. Even if someone isn’t so attuned to languages, they can sometimes pick up portions of meaning from cognates and structures.
So I wonder how much my mind’s been working on that, this morning, behind the scenes, beneath my conscious thought.
Besides all the English songs, there’ve been a few in Icelandic from Sigur Rós, a couple of Japanese songs from anime, an Italian cover from Pink Martini, and there are certainly others in my music library. I would guess my brain should be able to make some good guesses at the Icelandic and the Italian, based on English and French and Spanish, and a bit of German. But I don’t know enough Japanese, for instance, to know what my subconscious could do with it. I once attended a friend’s grandson’s bar mitzvah (really neat experience) and was surprised to be able to pick up words as I went through the service, and it built a little as the service continued. That was truly a surprise to me. I don’t speak Hebrew. But familiarity with the English language Bible passages meant I could pick up a few Hebrew names and nouns, and began to guess at some of the repeated mnemonic phrases meant for oral tradition. So it makes me wonder how much a person with some language training and talent might be able to do with any given human language samples, subconsciously, if not consciously, if given repeated exposures, and some contextual clues.
I have no idea if there’ve been studies like that. It’d probably make a bang-up research project. Songs, TV commercials, anything with clues in various forms a person could pick up on with a few viewings / hearings.
Just something that struck me to wonder about it.
@bcs I’ve found that if I am somewhat familiar with a language and its cognates, I can’t have it playing as background because my brain keeps on getting distracted trying to figure out what is being said. On the other hand, if I am unfamiliar with the language I have no problem just rocking out with the music.
For example, songs in French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, and German are just too distracting, but I can listen to songs in Gaelic or Finnish with no problems. Opera drives me batso, because I just have to know what is being said in the libretto, even though the emotion and the musicality press all the right buttons. I can listen to songs in English in the background once I’ve decided what the songs are saying (In a gadda da vida – In the Garden of Eden by Iron Butterfly drove me crazy until I learned that it was recorded while the band was high on drugs/alcohol and I would never understand what they were singing). I’ve found that songs in English are easiest for me to listen too in the background, if the band members enunciate and the music doesn’t drown out the lyrics.
And on a related note, many non-English speakers pick up the rudiments of English by watching commercials. My sister-in-law who taught English As a Second Language (ESL) said that her students did best if they did not watch television in their own language but rather watched only English. My two children learned Japanese by watching anime in Japanese with English subtitles, and started complaining about the poor translations on many of the shows.
Pink Martini? Local kids make good!
Good speculations. As native English speakers, we can hardly say anything at all without built-in references to precedence and order, past, present and future, or imaginary conditions contrary to fact (subjunctive case). Our (European) language is built on a strong verb structure.
It makes “Oriental” languages hard for us. They generally have weak verb structures. The example I’ve been given, “That tree [has] green leaves”, in Chinese leaves^H^H^H^H^H^H omits “has”. (Sorry, no pun intended!) So one wouldn’t be meaning “current posession”. It gives one a different appreciation of time, cause and effect.
Years ago, decades ago, in LA there was a local broadcast Japanese TV station. Some of the shows had subtitles, but many I found interesting, e.g. Women of the Shogunate, far more historical than Clavell’s Shogun. I think it takes a while for your “ear” to start picking out word divisions, the first thing you need to do. Wegenerallytalktoofastandrunourwordstogether.
I learned a very little Japanese, and because the concepts don’t exist in English, I just couldn’t lock down accents, which are tonal not volume, or long/short vowels, which are literally long (3 beats) and short (2 beats). Or I was told I wasn’t getting it right.
A friend told a story of a woman absolutely perfect in Mandarin, having grown up in China. She called a Mandarin restaurant for some take out, and had a completely clear conversation. When she got to the restaurant, no one could understand her when they could see she wasn’t Mandarin. Hm.
One limitation that may apply to all human languages is that when they express action or agency, they imply human values and choices. It is nearly impossible in English to explain Chemistry clearly because all our words imply human agency. Chemicals don’t bond in the human sense, nor are electrons shared in a human sense. Atoms have electromagnetic forces causing them to move until electrons are statistically with both atoms. This is a special problem describing evolution, which is all about lack of intention, planning, or any other human factors. As soon as you express a human-like action, you’re explaining it wrong.
But being an Aspie, with perhaps less understanding of the depths of “human bonding”, and a Chemistry graduate, I had no problem interpretting the behavior of atoms and molecules in somewhat human terms.
Well, while it’s pretty easy to strip emotion from Chemistry–no one gets very empathetic about electrons–it’s a lot harder with a bigger, more complex something, whether cat or computer.
Speaking of the latter, Google’s AlphaGo deep [complex] neural net (DNN) computer is now winning 2-0 in a match to 5 against a 9-dan player (top professional). This is a pretty startling development since go is far more complex than chess, and the “inhuman” strategies used in chess computers are not viable in go. Several experts have suggested this is ten years ahead of expectations.
The site Toms Hardware (qv) offers a way to manage Win 10’s driver problems. It’s a very good site, one worth consulting if you have issues. But Jane has perhaps figured the problem. She initially asked for ‘clean install’ and got no error messages; but she suspects that an unattended update put in newer updates that weren’t Win 10, so when she told it to go again, she didn’t ask for the clean install; now she has. Invidia seems to bear some responsibility for this, not aiming the Win 10 updater at the Win 10 drivers, but hey, It’s human beings.
NVidia GEForce is being blamed for a lot of problems. And there’s yet another update of that waiting for me to install it.
Cringe cringe cringe – sent from my iMac.
Lol!
I share the cringe from the (relatively) safe world of iMac.