Windows 10 Upgrade: Hey Microsoft, kiss my patootie

If anyone has read my recent posts on Microsoft, then it is apparent that I have stopped drinking the Micro$oft Koolaid and have gone over to the Linux OS both to save my sanity and my soul.

Today, my subject is, “Kiss my patootie Microsoft” !!!

Dateline Atlanta, Thursday February 11th.
A friend had contacted me to request my assistance in loading an OS onto a used corporate notebook she purchased for $35. I was told that the reseller had installed Windows 7. She wanted to upgrade it to Windows 10 and was concerned that she did not have the technical expertise to do same. (I’ve known this person for years and I was aware that she was right – she does not have the technical expertise to click a button…” I reluctantly agreed.

She arrived at my home around 10:30 and bought her purchased Dell with her: a rather nice dual-core with 4G RAM, a 500G harddisk, B/G/N wireless 2.4/5MHz networking, 100MBpS Ethernet. The story of the machine origins were discussed as I evaluated the machine, “One of two machines purchased by her sister who works for said company through an employee lottery of limited inventory of notebook replacements.” I was looking at the jackpot in the lottery because eBay is selling this Dell for $150 – $200 used and the machine I was holding was pristine, no damage whatsoever. The downside is that the IT department wiped the harddisk and installed Windows 7 Enterprise and did not activate the OS; thus, it was in “evaluation” mode when booted. This was not good as the online Windows 10 upgrade tool wanted a validated license installed. This is where things started to get ugly.

A weebit of history…
I’m running Linux on this Acer but it used to be Windows 8 and was upgraded to Windows 8.1 and I had purchased a retail 32/64-bit license key with DVD media which was being unused. Feeling somewhat cornered with a machine and OS that would take her nowhere, I offered her my license key and she accepted.

I installed Windows 8 without issue. Then I went to the Store and was refused the Windows 10 upgrade as the error code indicated I needed to be on Windows 8.1.

I went to the download section to install Windows 8.1 only to be met with an error that I could not upgrade until the Windows 8 installation had all of the patches applied. 144 patches later, I was allowed to start the upgrade to 8.1

Somewhere in the Windows 8.1 cycle, the machine just sat and sat and and sat and over an hour later I get one of of those dreaded 0x by 0x errors. Curses Microsoft!!! absolutely no Google reference for this code… The damn OS rolled back to 8.0.

2030 hours on Thursday, I gave up for the evening and had 3 beers with a home-pizza delivery.

Dateline Atlanta, Friday February 12
0800
Armed with a pot of strong coffee, I started the Windows 8.1 upgrade process again and it completed. Yep, Windows 10 would not install because 8.1 needed to be patched. Finally, after Windows 8.1 was patch, a visit to the Windows Store allowed me to start the Upgrade to Windows 10 Professional download.
1330
Finally, the last reboot and Windows 10 came up. Looking over the device manager, all of the devices were installed sans the RFID device under the keyboard. I was OK with that. The 64-bit OS seemed nimble. I did a few power-off and reboots. I did a couple of sleeps by closing and opening the notebook top/screen. All OK. I removed the backup Windows 8.1 installation and did a few housecleaning chores.
1830
I delivered the machine to the owner. Yes, I drove the darn thing 17 miles to just get it out of my house. The experience was a terrible one. What insanity is there to patching and upgrading an OS before installing a new OS? Microsoft states Windows 7 can be upgraded to 10 directly, but why must Windows 8 be morphed into 8.1 first? I have the answer: insanity… Microsoft is completely insane, IMO. Such bull-crap.

So, Kiss my patootie, Microsoft…

KissMyPatootie.jpeg (6.95 KiB) Viewed 669 times

I told the Gatesian Empire to pogue mahone many years ago. Not a single copy of the Windoze Virus to be found in my neck of the woods.

I used to work with it for a living.

Windoze…feck if I had a dollar for every time I rebooted Windoze, I’d be a rich man. Even if I limited myself to just rebooting because “Windows update demands attention, so reboot me” or whatever the message is… I’d still be in the uber high tax bracket.

Micro$oft Exchange…. a crazy mental database (yes I do mean database) that would break in unfathomable ways, requiring hours of painful repair and mysterious incantations… I ask you a piggin’ database, just to handle a mail application… not even a micro$oft SQ database, that would make some kind of sense… but no… some bastardized mish-mash of home grown twaddle database, that required a 5 day (and therefore very expansive) training course, just to master the basics (i.e. to figure out what a load of old pigs trotters the whole thing was).

Outlook… .PST files… need I say more..

Office… proprietary formatted files..[Start]=>Run=>WORD.EXE… 5 minute wait till it loads all the bells and whistles…. None of which are in the same places as they were in the previous version… then… Dear Sir… <File> <Save> and another 20Mb of your disk vanishes… come back a day later.. try to open the file… it has mysteriously corrupted itself… feckityfacketyfecketyfecck!!!

MS SQL… Another standard, unstandardised by Redmond.

Internet Exploiter… whole bunch of standards, unstandardised by Redmond.

IIS – a bunch of standards unstandardised to allow Internet Exploiter to function.

.. I could go on… but I’d just sound like greetin’ faced old windbag…

LOL I do get fed up with a lot of dumb things MS does. Over the years I’ve had to play both sides. I was a Unix system admin for 18 years and supported HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, and Linux but also has to support MS. Now that I’m free of the corporate mandates I’ve been wondering about ditching the MS junk. Every version re-engineers where everything is at and how it works. Nothing is in the same place ever. It’s no wonder people get fed up and the stuff throws up all over itself. Not to mention every version is like a virus eating up memory and resources just to keep itself from drowning.

With my background I can be just as comfortable in Linux. I guess what I need to is to find out how to do what I do now in the Linux world. Since I kept both sides segregated based on functions and never gave it a second thought. I know it may be ugly but I could run a VM with a Linux load and just go through what pieces I need to have working on the Linux side that I haven’t used.

Michael

.. oh and just for the record… Friday… I decided to upgrade Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04 (beta) (because I’m a masochist obviously).

This is not a standard upgrade path, so you need to tick a box to allow it..

One minor issue… I had some non standard .debs installed. The updater warned me of the problem, disabled them, told me about it, and upgraded everything else without any issues.

Updates took about an hour including downloading over ADSL… Ubuntu now reports…

Ubuntu Xenial Xerus (development branch)

Everything works… Nothing broke… I didn’t need to update to the latest drivers for anything.. I didn’t need to throw away my scanner, phone, camera or printer because it wasn’t compatible… I didn’t need to reformat my hard disk, or talk to a bored call centre minion. I didn’t loose all of my photographs… nothing interesting happened.

It just worked..

All of it…

.. and its a development version…

.. and the latest release version also works…

.. I have 15.10 on my clapped out old HP DV-1000 from 2004 with 1Gb RAM … It works perfectly well.

The *ONLY* thing that doesn’t work 100% is Skype.

I’m not making this up.

The only remaining item of micrapsoft software I am forced to associate with, due to my workplace insisting we use it… has missing features and a tendency to crap out silently and sulk… but then again Skype for Linux hasn’t been updated for 3 YEARS!!...because.. well… you decide why.

Ray

I Just downloaded the W10 iso from MS using their downloader tool.
Burnt it to DVD, booted off it. Used a serial number off a copy of W7 and it was happy.

Ps. Im only using it, because its now a target platform for some software I wrote.

And because the software doesnt run correctly on W10 despite it working fine of w7 8 and 8.1

Its got some strange issue where data posted from a browser component to a local mini web server intermittently has no data in it.
actually its mostly empty, but in 10% of the time it does contain the data that was posted.

aaarrggghhh.

RogerClark wrote:Ray

I Just downloaded the W10 iso from MS using their downloader tool.
Burnt it to DVD, booted off it. Used a serial number off a copy of W7 and it was happy.
<…>

Hi Ray

I didn’t try 8 or 8.1 to W10 as I’m now exclusively running W7 after I finally managed to get W7 installed onto my laptop (when I figured out the issues with USB HDD drivers during install)

Re: Microsoft Edge

Yes. I suspect thats the issue, as the SW I wrote uses the Windows browser component, which I presume will be Edge on W10 machines, where as it was IE on W7 and W8.

I’ve checked to see if JQuery supports Edge and supposedly it does, but this may also be the issue.

Last few years, I never *have* to use IE as we used to. So I stick with Firefox. On LInux, I tried to run Firefox but it was a no-go for me. Flash is still too prevalent. Had trouble in Linux getting even Adobe Reader going. (Mint).

Win 10 and Edge? Nah. It’s for the Facebook crowd, I guess. That’s not me.

stevech wrote:Last few years, I never *have* to use IE as we used to. So I stick with Firefox. On LInux, I tried to run Firefox but it was a no-go for me. Flash is still too prevalent. Had trouble in Linux getting even Adobe Reader going. (Mint)…

mrburnette wrote:Worst, is developing for multiple customers with only similar environments, not exact.
Ray

RogerClark wrote:Re: Microsoft Edge

Yes. I suspect thats the issue, as the SW I wrote uses the Windows browser component, which I presume will be Edge on W10 machines, where as it was IE on W7 and W8.

I’ve checked to see if JQuery supports Edge and supposedly it does, but this may also be the issue.

Guys

I have not totally confirmed this, but the problem I was having with Edge may have been something to do with running W10 as a virtual machine under W7.

I rebuilt everything on a real W10 installation and the issue vanished.

One other thing I came across was https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

It claims to turn off a lot of the nasty Windows data collection, but Im not sure how effective it is. But its possibly better than nothing if you really must run Windows 10 aka Spynet

I really think you should read this, expecially Linux Mint users

EDIT:
RogerClark wrote:One other thing I came across was https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

It claims to turn off a lot of the nasty Windows data collection, but Im not sure how effective it is.

I’m still in a job where Windows is king. At home, I’d prefer to go all Linux, but my Wife isn’t ready and my hobbies are tied to Adobe Photoshop and Sony Vegas which are pretty much exclusively Windows (at least my licenses are for Windows).

That said, I didn’t have too much issue with Windows 10. I run with a local user account instead of a Microsoft account, so of course a lot of stuff like Cortana doesn’t really work. I did go through privacy and security settings and then watched the network traffic for a long time to look for all of the phoning home people note; No problems (well I did set up a live tile for weather and found that). I would imaging that an out of box new setup using an MS account probably has a lot of traffic across the network.

My biggest annoyance is that I only use my laptop every few days, so it inevitable needs to be rebooted t finish updates or else it runs slow for some reason.

mrbwa1 wrote:I’m still in a job where Windows is king. At home, I’d prefer to go all Linux, but my Wife isn’t ready and my hobbies are tied to Adobe Photoshop and Sony Vegas which are pretty much exclusively Windows (at least my licenses are for Windows).
<…>

Unfortunately for me, I am using some specific Nikon RAW software and also some specific plugins for Photoshop that aren’t available in the GIMP. It’s always been an annoyance of mine that Adobe won’t look at a Linux version.

That said, I find windows 10 to be a strange dichotomy: With everything turned off and running as a local user, it’s pretty speedy on older hardware (other than the constant updating). The windows 10 I have tried on newer hardware with people’s MS logins seemed much slower and bloated.

It also doesn’t help that I have been doing a lot of tinkering with the Raspberry Pi lately, so I’m constantly switching back and forth. Perhaps it’s time to set up a dual-boot environment and/or set up an old box so can teach the kids about Linux.

mrbwa1 wrote:
<…>
Perhaps it’s time to set up a dual-boot environment and/or set up an old box so can teach the kids about Linux.

Maybe kids should understand why Android is so important. More so than Linux.

stevech wrote:Maybe kids should understand why Android is so important. More so than Linux.

Some years ago a professional photographer explained in a forum that Gimp lacks good work using CMYK that it is used for printing.

zoomx wrote:Some years ago a professional photographer explained in a forum that Gimp lacks good work using CMYK that it is used for printing.

My understanding is that you can run earlier versions of Photoshop in WINE pretty well, but I don’t know about the plugins.

I thought the plugins ran in the context of the application… but, with Windows applications… I do not know.

HOWEVER, this author says that Photoshop plugins will run under GIMP.

And, of course, Windows + Photoshop can be run in Linux OS as a VMware Player.

Of course, it all is a bit of trouble to set-up…

Ray

I was using VMware until 2010 when they decided not supporting VMwareServer anymore.
I’ve then switch to VirtualBox since then, I’m using it not only to keep VMs of almost every Windows flavors, but also Mac OS X flavors.
VirtualBox is pretty easy to install.
I’m also running those VirtualBox VMs under PhpVirtualBox dashboard and accessing their RDP/VNC screens with Remmina.

mrburnette wrote:stevech wrote:Maybe kids should understand why Android is so important. More so than Linux.

stevech wrote:
Yeah, I should have said something like “Maybe kids that aren’t in a constant pot-haze and mostly into self-worship, meaning those with a healthy curiosity about math, science, and other useful future-majors”, …

There are a lot of these kind.

ahull wrote:
…
Just as well, those future geeks have to keep the world functioning so the pot heads, and Hugo Boss suited and Prada handbag waving types can sit about doing nothing but preening their egos and worshipping their navels.

ahull wrote:
Just as well, those future geeks have to keep the world functioning so the pot heads, and Hugo Boss suited and Prada handbag waving types can sit about doing nothing but preening their egos and worshipping their navels.