Username change caused serious problems  

Hello dalchina,
Comparing CPU clock speed to perceived speed, subtracting the extra effort needed for the nice graphics we get nowadays, there is still a large margin. What can the computer be doing? The little lights in different places never stop blinking. Oh yes, yes, sorry... it´s always checking all´s well.

Old computers were considerably slowed down by anti-virus even when they were new. Nowadays they are rendered unusable, and can only be run off-line without antivirus, if needed for old programs that can´t handle modern hardware. Even a top range souped-up Pentium 4, once winning the Grand Prix, creaks and groans now. All this checking that all´s well must really be a hard job.

It must be complicated and difficult to program this modern, multi-use OS, for all this open-architecture hardware. I get the impression that modern computers should run much faster than they do, but are programmed to do too many things we don´t need. And then, after a couple of years, the average user who doesn´t know enough to prevent his machine from getting bottle-necked, gets fed up, trashes it and buys a new one. What´s the point? Sell more and collect more data, I suppose.

Cheers,
Van

Hello Gentlemen, again! dalchina, Ztrucker, Navy LCDR,

I´m pleased to say the Win10 laptop you counselled me with, is going flawlessly, without any updating problems. It´s behaving so well that my wife decided she wanted Windows 10 too, also because we got Age Of Empires Definitive Edition for her, which we didn´t know only works on Windows 10.

Now, the following may be of interest to Ztrucker, and others, possibly:

Upgrading a legal Win7 or Win8 licensed machine to Windows 10 by using Windows Media Tool is still possible - my wife´s computer just upgraded to Windows 10 Home Edition a moment ago.
It seems the Validation Servers have not shut down altogether (yet...).

Although it asked for the license Key (I had to get a program to extract it from the BIOS), it wouldn´t accept it, but I read it could be inserted later, or that it might not need it and read the BIOS itself.

In effect, it finished upgrading and didn´t ask for it. In total it was only perhaps three hours. Great stuff!
It started up with her old user account - and I did remember to switch off as many of the espionage and tracking options as possible. Now it´s doing some upgrades.

Windows 10 is certainly better than Windows 7 or 8, in my opinion, (although I personally prefer Windows XP but it´s slowly getting more difficult to stay above the water.)

Thanks again, and I´ll keep in touch.
Cheers,
Van

Hello dalchina, hello Ztrucker,

I called victory too soon perhaps... The laptop being upgraded this time from Win8.1 to Win 10 Home is a 4-year-old AMD A10 Acer Aspire V.

After getting all the drivers and starting up several times, everything seemed to be perfect with the upgrade, including the first group of perhaps 7 Win10 updates, and I thought I´d try a further batch before saving a disk image. Never a worse decision...

During the manually started next batch of updates, after about 24 %, Win10 decided it needed restarting, announcing that the hardware wasn´t working and that the update reeded a restart to take effect.

The Restart is now a total fail. For over an hour there has been a black screen, with the only indication
of any Bit-life being sporadic blower-on periods, and the red optical mouse-light flashing like a hard-disk led.

The big question now, is if this is normal, and how long one should wait before doing anything like trying to restart it again, or pressing F8, or maybe trying to factory restart it to Win8.1 again, and forget about Win10.

So, frustrating Win10 again! I won´t trash the computer, though, but I´d like to trash
something else, like Microsnot.

What´s the point? Beats me...
It´s like a roller-coaster, isn´t it, and a hate-hour won´t help.

Once again, I´d deeply appreciate any ideas...
Thank you in advance.
Cheers,
Van

OK, dalchina, thanks for your advice.
As soon as I got the chance now, when it didn´t say it wanted yet another restart,
I got the external hard drive and it´s putting a disk-image on it.
Relief at last...
Cheers,
Van