I HATE MICROSOFT!

Just need to get that off my chest.

You're the only one, Howard.

I doubt that.

Delicious.

Microsoft's plan to give away Windows 10 is laudable. The idea of shoving it down your throat isn't.

There is a very simple way to keep the automatic "upgrade" from happening. Of course, Microsoft doesn't tell anyone about it. My computer will not automatically upgrade.

I have a perfectly fine Windows 7 system running. But I wanted to fart around with Windows 10 without removing the ability to run Windows 7.

Because of the restrictions on free upgrades, and the fact that I have only OEM ID numbers for my operating systems (I have disks from Dell for both Windows 7 Pro and Windows 10 Pro), it can be a hassle to create a system drive.

I disconnected the SSD where my system resides and plugged in an old 500GB HDD. Then I set about installing Windows 10. Everything went fine until about ninety percent of the way thought the install. Then it failed, complaining that it could not find a file (cmd.exe) on drive F.

Okay. Removed the HDD and plugged in the Win 7 SSD and booted. All is well (I thought). I plugged in the Win 10 HDD via USB to see if I could figure out why the install failed. The HDD was empty.

I have two other hard drives in the box for data files. I use the SSD for system only. I checked the other drives and all the E drive had was the files that the installer had placed there. For some reason, the installer had decided to use the E drive rather than the empty HDD I had plugged into the LUN 0 connection where the system belongs. Have no idea why it decided to do this, or why it did not tell me about it.

So it was my fault that I had not disconnected the other drives before trying the install. Of course, I had done the same thing with other versions of Windows, including Server systems, in other boxes and never had this problem. I decided to leave the system files on the E drive to see if I could find the problem. Another mistake. The E drive had been backed up the day before, so it was easy to restore the files that had been deleted by the failed install.

After realizing I could not find anything to show me why the install failed, I deleted the unnecessary system files. Well, I tried to. Turns out that the security settings on Windows 7 would not allow me to remove the files. Took me a while to figure out how to beat the security and then deleted the 250,000 files the installer had left. Had I expected a problem, I could have simply formatted the E drive and removed those files in a few seconds.

Plan B: I cloned the system SSD to the HDD. Unplugged all of my drives and plugged in just the cloned HDD with Windows 7 on it. Then I upgraded the system to Windows 10. Successfully. Now I have a valid copy of Windows 10 on the old 500GB HDD. For some bizarre reason, it is possible to do a clean install of Windows 10 on that drive after having done the upgrade. One of these days I will mess around with it again. But for now, I have just put everything back in place with the Windows 7 SSD.

So between my mistakes and Microsoft's stupidity, I wasted about three hours.

And. no, I am not ready to buy an Apple or convert to Linux (but the latter is very appealing).

Stockholm Syndrome. You can look it up.

Perhaps you should look it up. Might prevent misusing it in the future.

Is there such a thing as "Cupertino Syndrome"?

Went back and did a clean install of Windows 10 (on the spare drive, of course). Got rid of all the shit that Dell stacks on their computers.

Fucking thing is uglier than I remember.

I will probably wait until someone develops a decent user interface for it before continuing.

While "Stockholm Syndrome" is not applicable to my efforts, perhaps "masochist" may be appropriate. Yeah, I'll go with masochist.

Yeah. That.

Scrounging around the web, I find that the latest Windows 10 has a revised display. That's why I thought it was uglier - it is!

I've been reading articles about how to install Mac OS on a non-Apple PC. Maybe I'll give that a try.

Is that your new avatar? Nice.

It's the new face of Microsoft.

Installing OSX on a PC is like putting a Mercedes steering wheel in a Yugo. It won't make it run any better.

It's the same fucking hardware! Same processors. Same memory. Same USB hubs. Same every-fucking-thing. If you install Apple OS on a PC, you have an Apple!


I'm downloading Linux now. Let's see how that works. I haven't used it for several years, and it was pretty much a hobbyist's OS then.

I downloaded XUBUNTU, a version of Linux. I've got it on a USB flash drive and can run it in a virtual machine, so it shows up as a window in my native OS.

It's a nice, uncluttered display; typical use of icons and a drop-down start menu. It comes with several useful utilities as well as Thunderbird and Firefox. It detects my internet connection and works fine. I can't do much with it as I have it currently set up, and also I need to get the 64-bit version (I wasn't paying attention and I downloaded the 32-bit version).

It's certainly worth looking at further, I think. I will see what application programs are available and, if satisfied, will do a full install on a hard drive. What could go wrong (as the man in the Tesla said)?

I thought I had resolved all the problems that led me to start this thread, but oh, no.

I had restored all the lost data on the drive that Windows 10 had selected for itself, and I had deleted all the Win 10 files. Thought that was it. There's a text file on the root on the drive that I occasionally use for tracking. When I tried to use it, it would not let me save the modified file. I made some changes in the permissions settings and fixed that. But I found that I could not create any files in the root of the drive. I could delete files, write to existing files, create and delete folders, and I could do anything I wanted in the sub-directories. But the root of the drive would not allow new files to be written.

I spent far too much time looking for an easy fix to the problem; no one on the internet forums had any valid advice for this. I looked through the root directory and found a couple of hidden system files that Win 10 had left there, and which I was unable to erase. So the OS thought the drive was a system drive and there is absolutely no way around that. Viewing the configuration of the disk in Disk Manager, I saw that it had a 100 MB EFI partition (you should be familiar with that, NoCo).

Fuck it. I used a command line tool to absolutely destroy everything on the drive (the Disk Manager was powerless against it). Then I created one simple volume for the entire drive, using MBR rather than GPT which Win 10 had used (without asking me). A quick format and restore of 90 GB of files from the backup disk and all was well.

All of these problems are created by the lengths that Microsoft goes to in an effort to prevent assholes from inserting viruses, especially root kits, on the computer. Did I mention that these people are assholes?

I'm getting really frustrated with mine.
I tried Ubuntu once and it didn't do too bad and at this point I'm considering it since the most I do is business-y type stuff, no major editing or audio anything. It wasn't as slick as Windows but at this point that is not a bad thing. I despise Windows 10.

There are a lot of different versions of Linux. Some are designed for special purposes, such as video editing. Unfortunately, I have some programs that I really want to keep that only work with Windows.

The French hate Microsoft too.

Microsoft given 3 months to fix Windows 10 security and privacy

If Trump wins, France may be my destination. I only speak pidgin French, but he could easily be the final straw.