Day: 2017-11-29

Dynamite


OK, guess what I did yesterday?

Yes, I did walk the dog but also did some computer stuff.

This computer has been around for a while.  When I bought it, it was running Windows 7 and was good.  However, I was bitten by all the hype of Windows 10, I upgraded in place and liked it.

For a while anyway.

Then, like every Windows computer that I’ve ever owned and worked on, it became slower and slower and slower.  In fact, it got to the point where it was so slow that I was tempted to recycle it.  But, I didn’t.  Instead, I created a second partition on the hard drive and installed Ubuntu.  Then, I got rid of Ubuntu and installed Linux Mint.

In effect, I had two operating systems on this computer – Windows 10 and Linux Mint.  Windows was slow and painful.  Mint was fast and so enjoyable.  Without it, I might have just limped along with Windows, but I switched.  Everything was there.  Every now and again, I would boot into Windows just so that it could update and hopefully do something that would fix things.  It never did.

So, yesterday, I decided to “Dynamite” it.  Or, at least the Windows 10 equivalent – Resetting the PC.

There were two options and I opted for the seemingly easiest way – delete all the applications and settings but keep my files.  It seemed to go well.  As with Windows installations, it rebooted a couple of times and I learned that I needed to be within keyboard distance since Grub starts first and gives the option to boot into Mint or Windows, the default being Mint.  I had to override the default.  Not a biggy, and a couple of hours later, I had a refreshed version of Windows.

I decided that I would take the high road and not go whole hog and install a million applications like I had before.  After all, I’m probably the one who shot myself in the foot.

Then it starts

The very first website that I go to wouldn’t work because it required Google Chrome.  OK, I’ll indulge and install one program.  After all, you can’t have too many browsers.  I’ll probably get around to installing Firefox and Opera too.  Yeah, it’s starting.

I forced myself to work in the default Microsoft environment for the most part.  And, for the most part, I was pretty happy with the way things went.  The hard drive light keeps flashing but it’s not something new – I only have 4GB of memory so there might be a bunch of swapping happening.  However, the computer itself isn’t running hot with the fan blasting.  That’s a good thing.

I was going to conclude this blog post on a happy note.  I still hope that I can but, and I suspect it’s going to be a big but, I started the computer to see this message.

I’ll admit to being surprised.  Windows was good enough to preserve my files for me during the reset; I would have thought that it would have remembered that I had activated it when the big push to upgrade came along.  I guess it didn’t.

So, I guess my big project for today is to figure out how to get Windows to recognize that it is a legitimate version.  I shouldn’t have to go into the store, as suggested, and purchase another key.

I know that Mint is smiling noting the proximity of the message to the Recycle Bin.  I hope that it doesn’t come down to that.  I love this computer and it even came engraved with my name on it.

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OTR Links 11/29/2017


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.