Start Menu/Windows won't work

windoz said:

Night Hawk,
My wife's computer got an "upgrade" 10 install from 8.1 and has been glitchy, freezy and generally slow ever since. This computer was purchased in late 2012 and originally came with 8. My non-tech-savvy wife went ahead and did some method unknown to me upgrade to 8.1 and the machine has never been right.

My thought, at this point within the 30 days, is to downgrade back to 8.1 and then do a clean install of 10. I'm thinking this may undo the botched "upgrade" installation, as opposed to just putting bandaids on the thing. I'm new to Windows Land and want to know if this is a good plan, or if I'm simply asking for even more trouble? Computer is:

HP Pavillion g7 Laptop
AMD A8-4500M 1.9GHz with Radeon HD Graphhics
4.00 GB memory

The current 10 version is Build 10240

Thank You,
Gene

As far as both machines go you can easily slap a clean install of 10 on each and solve any number of issues especially for the previously bugged up 8 to 8.1 likely "Anytime Upgrade" option many desktops and laptops have been seeing over the last sever years for Vista even as well as for 7, 8, likely 8.1 as well. With 10 however the ball game will be changing a bit.

As far as the laptop I had an HP 7 model here I ended up wiping the entire drive clean after removing the OEM 300mb, 3rd party 400mb, and System Reserved partitions but was unable to grow the OEM primary let alone move it any. That got dumped fast for a fresh primary with a nice clean install of 10 to finish that one off! That was after the upgrade, first 32bit clean install followed by the 64bit cliean install when that came up. I was trying to shrink the 7 to 10 primary down to see a new second backup partition when that came up.

Upon returning it to the owner it wouldn't connect to the web for some time and then one day it suddenly was on Bing! It took a first start ups at that location to get 10 to properly detect the WiFi there since the upgrade was seen to here connecting by way of the router.

As for the machine you pulled apart 10 may be seeing that as a major hardware change and deactivated itself as part of a new security measure MS put in. Rather then seeing the old watermark of "This is a counterfeit copy of Windows" as seen with 7 the main functions are locked out even when arriving at the normal looking desktop. Trying to boot up in Safe Mode however might allow you to get things going again if you are able to bring up the F8 options.

The first thing whenever going to try out any newer version or other new OS is not to have anything on in first place not knowing if the new will be buggy and need replacing even multiple installs in order to get working correctly. The average seems to suggest about 66% buggy to 33% smooth sailing at first.

Other problems as a result of being the brand new release are to be expected as time will gradually see the necessary updates patch things up. And that seems to be the average findings for 10 so far. With the better half's shaky upgrade from 8 to 8.1 not actually being any concern note since a clean fresh install of 77 still saw a Buggy upgrade to 10 out of the two desktops and laptop seeing 10 given the test the second desktop with light use only since built as a spare, remote, and test this or that on type of machine saw 10 go as smooth as silk!

The first desktop already had seen the two storage drives see boot files and temp installation folders end up in wrong places as well as leaving traces from the multiple fails behind immediately resulted in the need for a clean install that was actually put off during the first week with the second upgrade install used to repair the first. That wouldn't activate however at the time which was the first week 10 was out.

The second desktop saw the clean install go on before the upgrade to rule out the hype about being able to simpy take 10 around and toss it on anything without worry about the need to upgrade first. That was suspected as flawed thinking from the start and simply confirmed when the clean install wouldn' activate until the upgrade took place over the existing 7 Pro install. 10 couldn't connect by WiFi however since no 8.1 driver even was available for the usb adapter used to connect and sync with the router.

As for the icons being spread over the task bar that is determined by the grouping or not grouping or not combining icon when in the Taskbar and Start Menu Properites screen. You click on the taskbar buttons option to choose which option you want and then the apply button to put into effect for that.



The default setting was apparently changed with the hoo blah of problems coming up on you explaining why that happened.

Well if the 10 install came out buggy the bugs are now revealing themselves! I think you are going to end up seeing a clean install take place since something didn't go on right! I saw a similar problem with the laptop I upgraded resulting in a problem soon to be replaced however by the clean install I was expecting would be needed anyways!

The symptoms there resemble a bit too much "buggyness" as it could be called. More like "Buggy Mess"! While the settings may have been found to combine taskbar buttons for example that's not how 10 is acting there! And when I showed you what to look at and you found it the way it should be that only further sums things up. I know it's a royal pain but the unfortunate necessity at this point. The ghosting of a new popup window only goes to further illustrate the continual problems you will see until the fresh install of 10 is seen to in order to clean all that up!