Upgrade issues from 8.1

Hi,

I upgraded two Windows 7 machines a couple of months ago when they were selected to install the upgrade. My home built desktop upgraded fine and it retained my login and applications just fine. My wife's laptop also went well, although she was unhappy with the changes.

They finally got around to pushing the update to my HP Windows 8.1 laptop yesterday and I started to try using it this morning. It did not give me my login, but asked me to enter my email address and password. I did, and it created a new user account based on my email address and I no longer have my account based on a user name. This is not good because most of the application data and libraries are all stored in directories under c:/ussr/username. It seems Win 10 does not really accept me as it puts things into TEMP for me. I have no Start menu nor can I bring up pc settings using the Win key + I combination. It was even more frustrating because the mouse cursor was flashing a busy circle at about 100 Hz. I cannot launch most applications as the icons are not on my task bar (e.g. Office 13). I ran "outlook" and had to enter all my email address info and it downloaded all email from the server, but it of course did not recognize me, so no saved files were there. Each time I log on I need to re-enter everything because it is being stored as TEMP. I managed to use Windows Explorer to find the HP SimplePass application, ran it and turned it off; that solved the flashing busy mouse cursor.

So, being unable to bring up the pc settings, which Control Panel says I need to access to create a new account (planning to use my old account name), how can I re-create my former Win8.1 account name and if I do that, will my existing libraries be connected and will Outlook find my mail file? I also need to figure out how to enable the Start Menu as it seems hard to do much without it. I cannot access the Charms, including the pc settings.

Given how smoothly my upgrade from Windows 7 went, I thought the move from Windows 8.1 would also go smoothly, but I'm finding that to not be the case. Any helpful suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I have wasted much time on Thanksgiving day attempting to figure this out. This was not a good time for them to push this out to me.

Brion

Sorry that no-one has answered your request. Are you still needing help?

philc43 said:

Sorry that no-one has answered your request. Are you still needing help?

After not being able to get anywhere, I took my laptop in to the Geek Squad at Best Buy. They promised to fix it for Around $150. Two days later they claimed it was a hard drive problem and installed a new hard drive. I picked up my laptop with only Windows 10 installed and have been working hard to restore my other software. I have been able to copy files from my old hard drive, so I have not seen any issue with that so far. They were able to confirm the Windows 10 install was not right and there was no way to get to PC Settings to either add a new user or revert back to Windows 8.1. I think a new hard drive was a better choice than a re-install over top of my old hard drive. Total cost was $250 with a blank drive that has taken me over 40 hours to try to restore to what I had before. It did not help that the MS Office registration page had me registered for the Brazilian Portuguese language version of Office and it will not let me or MS tech support change that. It also did not help that Outlook out configured my email as IMAP intead of the POP3 it used to be. Then when I read in my old email from the file copied from my old drive, it then proceeded to Sync with my server all of the older emails from the past 2 years and cause me to run out of space on my server. I then had to create a new profile for Outlook and manually set it up as POP3, which it then proceeded to download all those old emails back to my laptop and they showed up as duplicates of the emails already in my .pst file but they were now showing as unread. It took a long time for me to manually delete them both on the server and in my Outlook local copy. I estimate it will be a total of 60 hours by the time I get my laptop back to where it was, but with Windows 10 on it. I did consider buying an Apple laptop for a while during one of my depressed moments.

Brion

This has not been a good experience and I hope that you get on better with it now it is sorted. Let's also hope someone from here can get to you quicker if you do ever have a problem in the future!

Some lessons learnt are no doubt to make sure you have a system image taken regularly as a backup so that you can restore to a working laptop whenever you need to. Also make sure you have a recovery disk that you can boot from in case your laptop ever gets to a point where it will not start. You can find details on how to do all this in the tutorials section.

All the best :)

Thanks. Backups of my files I have, but not of system info. I need to look into how to back that up in a way that would allow me to restore the OS and software installed state of the system.

Brion said:

Thanks. Backups of my files I have, but not of system info. I need to look into how to back that up in a way that would allow me to restore the OS and software installed state of the system.

Macrium Reflect Free:
Macrium Reflect Free


Very sorry for your bad experience.