The Holidays Are Upon Us….

Happy Stuff Bread Up A Turkey’s Ass Day! Yes, I know it’s a day early but due to my work schedule, my brother decided that it would be tonight. And I wholeheartedly agree with him. So, we had Wal-Mart Manager tonight. It was just two of us, so he (my brother did all of the cooking) just did a turkey breast roast. Literally threw the whole thing into the crockpot with the gravy right when I went to bed. It was all ready when I got up. And it was good. Didn’t get any pictures of it, but I did get the requisite gravy volcano. And there are plenty of leftovers for the weekend’s turkey sandwiches.

So, after dinner came the post-Thanksgiving tradition: the Holiday Decoration:

As you can see, none of that distracting tinsel. And it has a great strength to weight ratio….

It’s coming around….

When we last left our hero, I had realized that the only viable option for my laptop was Windows 10. There’s also Linux (specifically OpenSuSE, but that’s going to wait)…..

So last week after my weekend, I pulled out my system restore flash drive. It took about 4 hours, but it got my laptop to a desktop. Eventually. More importantly, it had all the drivers installed that I needed (previous experience with Windows 7 was less than productive on this). The drawback was that it was 1511. So the mission was to get 22H2 installed on it. And it choked on the in place upgrade. So, the only option was to wipe everything again….

Side note: at this time, I also stuck a flash drive in it, and backed up the hidden directories in the root of the c drive that had all the installers for the included software and drivers. So I plugged in the upgrade flashdrive and tried it again. I had to leave for work at the time, so I unplugged the network cable to force it into create an offline account mode when it came time for the OOBE.

The next day, when I came home from work, I went through the OOBE and then immediately went to install a certain update (this was the one that choked my computer this first time I tried to set it up a couple of weeks ago). And I went to bed while it installed. 4 hours later, I woke up, and it had successfully installed. We’re making progress now. It had also installed the other updates from the initial visit to Windows Update, and then I installed the initial batch of drivers. At this point, I had passed the stage where I had given up all the other times I had tried to reinstall Windows 10.

Next up was the initial ‘move in’.  If you remember my attempt to trade in my last phone, when I got home from that trip, I decided to console myself with some retail therapy and I ordered some 256 gB flash drives from Newegg. Just needed one of them to copy all my files over to the laptop. And I set the folder structure so I just need to copy from root to root.

Another update (again while I was at work and/or sleeping), and I was ready to actually sign in with my Microsoft account. So I sign, and it turns out I qualify for extended security updates. Hooray! Though this means that since a patch Tuesday has passed, it means another 4 hour wait while it updates. So, fast forward to this morning, when I come home from work, and I finally can upgrade to Windows 10 Pro.

So, I’m now patched fully. I’ve installed Firefox, Chrome, and Thunderbird. The laptop is now ready for use as an emergency backup. I don’t have everything installed on it, but I did make sure that the installers are on it, and are available the next time my tower takes a fart on me, which actually has happened before. Twice….

Once More Unto The Breach, Dear Laptop!

When we last left our hero last week, I decided for my latest act of questionable judgement was to try and run Windows 7 on my laptop. Main issue was the fact that drivers for it weren’t being signed anymore, and after trying to ram all the patches from Legacy Update down it at one sitting, it ended up unbootable. Decided to give another shot last night. Got it to boot to a ui, and after using my Google-Fu, I figured out how to force the unsigned drivers to install. So I was able to even get Aero to show. Then it was to Legacy Update again. And there was a PSP driver that it tried to download from Legacy Update. I got it to install, but there were issues upon reboot. I got it boot to a desktop again, and I realized that there were still question marks in my Device Manager, meaning items with no drivers. And I realized that the laptop was designed only for Windows 10. So, once again, I pulled out the GParted and wiped it completely. Maybe next week…..

So I pulled my laptop out this morning….

So, I pulled my laptop out this morning. A BIOS change to enable legacy boot, and a couple of other steps, and I had Windows 7 running on it. I was able to get SATA/USB 3 running on it, but there were a couple of other drivers that were unsigned and I couldn’t get to install. I tried to get the display driver (downloaded straight from AMD/ATI) to install, but there were other issues. A trip to Legacy Update to get a servicing stack update, and the display issues cleared up. And then it came time to update. Spent about 6 hours downloading and installing, and then it came time to do the first reboot. And windows wouldn’t reboot. Oh well. It wasn’t going to be a daily driver.  I wasn’t going to use it at all. It was just trying it out to see if I could get it to work. Anyway, experiment is over. It really isn’t worth the effort, though I could make it work. So I downloaded the current build of GParted (mainly because I could find the usb flash drive that I had of it), and it’s been wiped and put away.

Now to order pizza and watch TV….

And yes I did call out Sunday night. This morning, I took out 2 cans’ worth of garbage, and realized we only had 1 garbage bag left. So a trip to Wally World. And then I realized nobody was using the apartment complex laundry room, so I did laundry. And thus all of my weekend’s adulting was done a day early….

More fun with the laptop

Took a sick day last night at work. I caught cold, and I was on the tail end of it, and I just decided it would be better to sleep it off. I don’t want to go into the holiday season sick at work…..

When we last left our hero I had set the laptop aside (wiped with GParted to prevent data from falling into the wrong hands). And I was toying with the idea of putting Linux back onto it. But I thought that would be too easy. No. I want to do something difficult. So I put Windows 7 on it. When I’m done with it, it’ll be just like the laptop I had back in 2013. But with a touchscreen…..