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Miscellaneous Purchasing Advice/Recommendations

Black Hole said:
So... do they claim Win10 can update a Win7 or Win8 system, import all the installed software, and it will all "just work"?
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In essence, yes.
It sounds as though it will actually port the current W7 (in my case) software installs across, or substitute the W10 system into the W7 slots. How that will work in practice I have no idea, and I'm sure some systems will get trashed.
The checker tool on the PC I've checked says there are no device issues and only one 'app' (piece of software) is flagged as 'may not work after upgrade'. (That is one I rarely use and haven't paid to upgrade for a couple of years, so a more recent version might well be OK.)
 
I'm not convinced and haven't any idea what the W10 checker tool is supposed to have checked. I have Win7 Ultimate and routinely use Office 2003. According to Microsoft Office 2003 is not compatible with either W8 or W10 but the checker tool says everything is fine. I think I might just wait a while....
 
Ezra Pound said:
I have to say that offer seemed too good to be true to me, I was even wondering whether it was a hoax of some kind, however after a bit of Googling, I found this :-
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2873...a-free-upgrade-for-windows-7-and-8-users.html
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Agreeing to reserve Windows10 may well get you a nasty little extra called Diagnostics Tracking Service ahead of full upgrade, you may well already have downloaded it as they sneakily added it to important updates recently, it comes as standard on Windows 10 but its purpose is dubious. It is quite simple to disable.

http://www.ghacks.net/2015/05/12/how-to-disable-the-diagnostics-tracking-service-in-windows/
 
trog said:
Agreeing to reserve Windows10 may well get you a nasty little extra called Diagnostics Tracking Service ahead of full upgrade, you may well already have downloaded it as they sneakily added it to important updates recently, it comes as standard on Windows 10 but its purpose is dubious. It is quite simple to disable.
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"The Diagnostics Tracking service collects diagnostics about functional issues on Windows systems that participate in the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP)."
So if you haven't enabled the CEIP on your system (which I think is the thing about sending usage, etc, statistics back to MS) then you shouldn't have got this.
On the other hand, if you haven't enabled CEIP you may not get the W10 update tool anyway - but that's just an idea.
 
I didn't think I was in CEIP, but I found the Diag. Tracking service running. Not any more though. Haven't had the update tool but then I caught KB3035583 before it got installed.
 
MikeSh said:
"The Diagnostics Tracking service collects diagnostics about functional issues on Windows systems that participate in the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP)."
So if you haven't enabled the CEIP on your system (which I think is the thing about sending usage, etc, statistics back to MS) then you shouldn't have got this.
On the other hand, if you haven't enabled CEIP you may not get the W10 update tool anyway - but that's just an idea.
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Not so, I am certainly not in the CEIP but the Diagnostics Tracking service was bundled in with a batch of so called important updates a couple of weeks ago which I downloaded, I removed it last week and still got the option to reserve Windows 10 a couple of days ago. This is what is said in the info on reserving..................................
"What happens when I reserve?
When you reserve, you can confirm your device is compatible with Windows 10. Between reservation and when your upgrade is ready, the files you need for the upgrade will be downloaded to your PC to make the final installation go more quickly. Then, when your upgrade is ready after July 29, 2015, you get a notification that lets you get started with your upgrade."

...................................... I suspect that the Diagnostics Tracking service will be included in the
" the files you need for the upgrade will be downloaded to your PC to make the final installation go more quickly" MS are being very shady about what exactly it does and seem to be trying to force it onto people, it was at one time an optional update prior to being "important" and many people on the net are wary of it.
 
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My PC really is struggling. I have tried rolling back a few months to a configuration before I noticed these problems (I have a disk journalling system which runs above Windows), and it was no different - so it's not malware causing it. There just seems to be a lot of disk thrashing, even with the Internet turned off. And yet, right now, it's fine.

Good excuse for a new one I reckon, I'm currently on a dual-core Celeron and it is a good few years old. I just hate the idea of the set-up.
 
I have Windows update turned off - but maybe the slugging (it's working OK right now) is due to it downloading Win10 in the background? The hypothesis doesn't seem to hold water, because it was still slow (when slow) with disk thrashing even with the Internet turned off.

I am warming to the idea of virtualising Windows, just need to decide whether to go portable or fixed, and identify the hardware.

I also need to obtain a proper copy of Win7 I can install in a VM - I was thinking I should get Ultimate, but I think the only real advantage is that it has XP mode so maybe I only need Home Premium.
 
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Ours does a lot of thrashing of the HDD (can't tell if the SSD is involved too), but it's mostly in the 5-10 mins after starting.
I believe it's to do with indexing, though when I first researched the 'problem' I think I disabled that. I just ignore it these days I'm afraid.

I also allow auto-updates on the basis that a) many/most are security updates and MS aren't actually the bad(dest) guys, b) life's too short to be trying to work out what's 'good' or 'bad' in them, and c) ours aren't business computers, so being broken isn't the end of the world.
That said, in the few years I've been doing them nothing has actually broken (yet).
 
Right now, my notebook is going like the clappers - faster by a factor of 10. It must have heard I was looking into a new system via the iPad.
 
Suppose I go for a static PC (and hope my notebook continues to provide portable service). Minimum requirement is hardware virtualisation support, 4GB RAM, hardware video encoding. Do I go for a system built around notebook components because of economy of scale and low power requirements, or a full-fat 4-core hyper-threading power house with a thirst for electricity to match?
 
My electricity consumption went down from 70% (2 PCs with 5 spinning disks between them plus CRT monitor) to 11% (1 PC with 1 spinning disk and 1 SSD plus flat screen monitor) on my UPS. It's an i5 dual core jobby with hyper-threading, so looks like 4 CPUs to the OS.
 
70% and 11% of what?

How many cores / virtual cores could I reasonably make use of? Is it a reasonable assumption that any particular application (eg image processor, video editor, office suite, etc) will only make use of one core unless it has been specifically written to offload tasks to another core? I currently manage on two cores, four cores might be handy, eight cores seems excessive.

On the other hand, two cores with hyper-threading can only run half as fast as four real cores.

Analysis paralysis.
 
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Black Hole said:
70% and 11% of what?
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Of the rated power capability of the UPS.
How many cores / virtual cores could I reasonably make use of? Is it a reasonable assumption that any particular application (eg image processor, video editor, office suite, etc) will only make use of one core unless it has been specifically written to offload tasks to another core? I currently manage on two cores, four cores might be handy, eight cores seems excessive.
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Depends how many apps. you run and how multi-threaded they are. You can't really assume anything about this.
 
Oh lucky me!

The lawn is too wet to mow, and...

Because I wasn't mowing the lawn I have come across a brand new 1000GB external drive I bought discounted at Aldi and forgot all about!
 
It says 1000GB on the box, but we know that's not 1024GB... and I don't know how they define "GB" either...
 
prpr said:
And probably the CPU and the memory. And then you'll almost certainly need to 'buy' a new copy of Windoze. Depending on its age, your old installation may not work on the new motherboard at all or even properly. So you end up reinstalling everything from scratch. And you might as well replace your HD with SSD while you're at it. I got rather naffed off with all this, so I built a new machine, installed Linux on it and virtualised Windows, so that sort of cr@p won't happen again.
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So, having had to change my motherboard and power supply this week due to both blowing up (but the CPU and RAM were salvaged), I plugged everything back together and ran up Linux and it just worked (aside from a minor niggle of having to rename eth1 to eth0 because Udev got confused over the MAC address change). The virtualised W7 saw no difference of course and just carried on without a blip.
 
Lovely. Definitely on my wish list, but with a repaired PC and seismic things happening in other aspects of my life, it's going to have to take a rain check for a round tuit.
 
If a 50-pack of Tesco DL peel&seal non-windowed envelopes costs £1.50, what's the price for a 25-pack?
 
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