Re: [PLUG] Off-Topic Rant: Windows Install Really %%&**&#$

[Bill Patterson <patterson@computer.org>]

I, too, now see the light.

After using Linux for training or development since 1994 I finally made the switch to move my main administrative machine off of Windows.  I know many have done this well ahead of me.

The last straw from Windows was a blue screen appearing on my Windows 10 accessory computer (the one to drive hardware like a scanner that works best with Windows and to run software requiring Windows) telling me simply that "All your files are exactly where you left them" with nothing else to go on: nothing saying the message was from Microsoft although I expect it was, no way to remove the message, no footnotes, no website, nothing else on the screen and no way but waiting a long time to get the screen to change. 

If Microsoft wants to treat me as if I am as stupid as a rock (with apologies to rocks), I'm gone.  Merely the accessory machine and inconvertible laptops* will remain on Windows.

Bill

I have a tale of woe and intrigue on this score.

On 12/23/2015 10:18 PM, Casey Bralla wrote:

My daughter in college wanted a 64-bit windows machine. Her college laptop is 32-bits and won't run some games, Since I have a ton of old motherboards, cases, etc, I said "sure, honey. Let's build one".

We did some father-daughter bonding as we put together the pieces, and then I paid $110 for a download of Win10 Home from New Egg. I could have bought the OEM disk for $100, but would have had to wait for delivery of the physical disk. The download was 3.8 GBytes, but that was no big deal.

The install went along fine until we got to entering the activation code. I could not get it to accept the activation code (which was 100% legit). Some googling revealed that this is because I did a clean install. Even though it was never mentioned on the New Egg product page, ya gotta have an old version of windows already on the machine before you can install Win 10 from this disk.

Well. I've got an old, crusty version of Vista, but loading that is no picnic. We've been at it for several hours, and still haven't gotten the %%$#@@ thing to load. Is it a bad DVD burn? Problem with my iso image? Who the heck knows?

Oh, and as icing on the cake, Vista won't install from a thumb drive, or if the previous install crashed, so I have to use fdisk to wipe out the partition if I need a re-try.

I could have installed any version of Linux 4 times over by now. Heck, I could even have had Gentoo installed, recompiled, and at a text prompt by now.

I hope Bill Gates and company rot in you-know-where. (ooops! I may have just made the naughty list, and I had been so good all year, too.)

--

 

Casey Bralla

 

Chief Nerd in Residence

The NerdWorld Organisation

www.NerdWorld.org

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___________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group         --        http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  --   http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug