Out of Ambit
  • Home
  • Writing
  • Travel
  • Home life
  • Media
  • Obscure interests
  • Hobbyhorses and General Ranting
Borges and the Peryton
The Martini Rant
At the Young Wizards end of things: an...
2021 Hugo nomination eligibility: the Young Wizards series
Maluns
Owl Be Home For Christmas
Vintage Scots Christmas recipes: “Good Fare Christmas”
From the Young Wizards universe: an update
Irish life: The things you don’t discuss, Halloween...
Q&A: Why is my Malt-O-Meal lumpy and how...
From the Baking-While-You-Write Department: Spicy Apple Pie
Peter Morwood on Moroccan preserved lemons
Greek mythology, feminist reclamation of lost/ancient tradition, and...
Changes coming at YoungWizards.com: your opinion(s) solicited
Outlining: one writer’s approach
A project in progress: translating “La Patissière des...
  • Home
  • Writing
  • Travel
  • Home life
  • Media
  • Obscure interests
  • Hobbyhorses and General Ranting
Out of Ambit

Diane Duane's weblog

Tag:

windows XP

Computer stuffHobbyhorses and General RantingOnline lifethings that piss you offWindows

Do. Not. WANT.

by Diane Duane July 28, 2015

ETA: Thanks to those who set me straight on the non-mandatory side of the upgrade. I’ll take refuge in Rick’s excuse here: “I was misinformed.” As for the rest of it, the “download opportunity” still behaves like malware: you should be able to decline the download. Not allowing your users to make the choice themselves is abysmally bad practice. 

I don’t often get stirred up enough to go into full-blown editorial mode, but today is one of the days when that seems to be happening.

A lot of you who have Windows 7 or Windows 8 machines will have noticed the appearance, earlier in the month, of a little white Windows logo in your system tray. This, when you click on it, munificently offers you a free upgrade to Windows 10. Those of you who have experimented with the thing will probably have noticed there is no way to get rid of the impending update download — or at least, no obvious way. And that it starts rolling out tomorrow, July 29th.

For those of you who do not want the 3-gig download and would like to turn it off, let me point you at this webpage:

How To Remove The Windows 10 GMX upgrade nonsense

This cranky and civic-minded person has laid out, step-by-step, a method by which you can get rid of that pestilent little icon in your tray and stop the unavoidable downloading and implementation of three gigabytes of material you don’t want and have no intention of using.

Don’t get me wrong, here. I understand perfectly well Microsoft’s rationale behind this, or at least their stated rationale; to keep security upgrades consistent across all the installs of their new OS. That said, rolling it out in this particular way is really unsavory. It smacks of the behavior of malware installers, rather than that of any responsible company with any kind of interest in keeping its customers on board.*

(Also, it’s worth noting in this context that many people who have already updated to 10 — particularly users with Nvidia graphics cards — have been reporting horrific driver problems with the new Windows version, secondary to this ill-thought-out policy of “you’ll take what we give you and you’ll like it”. Only just now has the beginnings of a fix for this particular problem begun to propagate, but this strikes me as a sign of more bad things to come, a slow-motion trainwreck better watched from outside it than inside.)

Now who knows, over the course of the next six months or so, when I get ready to build my new desktop machine, I may indeed go for Windows 10 — once I’ve had time to make the choice, the informed decision, as to whether it’s right for me, and whether I can find alternatives to the various programs whose function I like and would like to keep. Or who knows? Maybe I’ll go whole hog and just switch over to Apple. (I know a lot of you who’re Young Wizards fans, considering the frequent appearance of hardware with the Biteless Apple on it in the books, will be surprised that this is an issue for me at all. However, in this as in many other parts of my tech life, I am an amphibian and have for a long time worked happily on more than one side of the divide at the same time. But this present behavior of Microsoft’s is trying my patience way more than usual.)

Anyway, I’ve used the method detailed in the webpage above on my present Win7 desktop, and it seems to work perfectly. I strongly recommend that if you are ambivalent about the prospect of this forced update of your software, you go over there and have a look at it and decide whether it’s an option you’d like to avail of.

*I also understand that in recent online talks, Microsoft upper-level management have let it be known that people who find ways of avoiding this upgrade will eventually be cut off from normal product updates. And you know what? I can think of no quicker way for them to drive me straight into what Euripides called “the apple-laden land.” Yeah, there’s just one of me, and I doubt my loss is going to break Microsoft’s corporate heart. (shrug) No matter.

Hits: 239

July 28, 2015
5 FacebookTwitterTumblrEmail
Computer stuffHobbyhorses and General RantingHome lifeIreland

The Calanda Saga Continues

by Diane Duane August 6, 2011

So I finally got into Windows XP recovery console a few times and took a look around. The error message I’d been receiving was this one:

“Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:

WINDOWSSYSTEM32CONFIGSYSTEM”

…which pretty much means a corrupted registry file. This can be fixed in the console, though the fix is a touch  complex: see here.

…Whoopee. So I log in again, with that list of instructions before me, ready to go, and get:

“Please type your administrator password.”

…I have NEVER used an admin password with this machine. Not once. Hit the carriage return, that’s always been the way. I now hit the carriage return in forlorn hope. “Incorrect password. Please type your administrator password…”

Gaaaah. The process naturally fails.

Rinse & repeat several times. Reboot the machine one last time and walk away in despair.

Behind my back, IT BOOTS INTO XP.

My machine is a drama queen. WHY am I surprised.

It starts running chkdsk. WTF-I-DON’T-EVEN, for this now starts throwing errors the likes of which I’ve never seen as it proceeds through the various virtual drives into which C is partitioned. “Correcting error in index.” “Deleting index entry.” “Recovering orphaned file.” And what gives me the twitches, “Insufficient space to recover…” Yes, the virtual C “drive” is very full. That’s one of the things that this has been about: emptying it out a little — specifically getting the guts of iTunes out of there.

(moan / headclutch)

So on we go. Calanda does this three or four more times. And then it once more fails to boot correctly (just to keep me interested) and once more shows me the “Windows Could Not Start…” herald. I sit down in front of it, humbled low on the little hassock I dragged up into the bedroom so I wouldn’t have to sit on the effing FLOOR in front of the machine to which I have always been very kind, and once more go through the routine to boot from the CD. Once more make it into Recovery Console. And once more get asked for a password that doesn’t exist.

…Seriously, it’s starting to feel like some weird IT-based version of The Quiet Man around here. All I need now is some little old lady running up to me and curtsying and saying “Here’s a nice hammer to beat the lovely machine with.”

BTW, thank you to all the nice people who have gone over to the Ebooks Direct store this morning and bought things, for whatever reason. You have cheered me up, because YOU ARE BUYING ME A HAMMER.

…Oh, look, Calanda has booted again, and without my blue Jupiter wallpaper! Why, this time it’s destroyed my entire user profile! And look at the notice it’s showing me:

“The system has recovered from a serious error.”

NOT AS SERIOUS AS THE ONE IT’S ABOUT TO HAVE.

Seriously, this machine is starting to make the TARDIS look well-behaved.

GAAAAAAAAH.

(ETA: Just after lunchtime, it also ate the contents of the “F” partition of the C drive, just to show it could. That’s where most of the music was. Unless I can get the backups to work, I now have to re-rip more than 200 CDs.   …[sigh])

Hits: 210

August 6, 2011
5 FacebookTwitterTumblrEmail
Computer stuffHobbyhorses and General RantingHome life

Note to Calanda

by Diane Duane August 5, 2011
Glass of Calanda beer. I wish I had one right about now.

Ah, gently aging XP machine that lives upstairs… Today I thought I would relieve you of a little of your burden by finally getting my old iTunes installation moved into the newer desktop machine downstairs via home sharing.

So I spent an hour and a half, or it might have been two hours, downloading iTunes 10 on our dodgy too-rural wireless broadband and had just barely got it running on you  when suddenly you began complaining that you needed chkdsk run on the F drive because something was corrupted. Then you refused to boot and explained to me that I was going to have to run Windows Repair from the original CD to fix the corrupted config file. And no sooner had I begun doing so than then you explained sweetly to me that you couldn’t see any hard drives to fix. (This being because they’re plugged into their own controller, for which the CD perhaps understandably doesn’t have a driver.)

Now you’re crouching by the TV going BWAHAHAHA at me inside your little nearly-invisible computer thought balloon. Laugh while you can, you naughty creature. Tomorrow morning I yank your guts out by handfuls and remind you who built you in the first place. I will fix your drives, and in the process I will fix your wagon, and I shall have my iTunes in your despite. So BWA-de-ha-HA to you too.

(Note to self for the future: do *not* name any more computers after demon-haunted mountains even if the name is also that of a very good Swiss beer brewed nearby.)

Hits: 10

August 5, 2011
4 FacebookTwitterTumblrEmail

The blogger


40 years in print, 50+ novels, assorted TV/movies, NYT Bestseller List a few times, blah blah blah. Young Wizards series, 1983-2020 and beyond; Middle Kingdoms series, 1979-2019. And now, also: Proud past Guest of Honour at Dublin2019, the World Science Fiction Convention in Dublin, Ireland.

Archive

On sale at Ebooks Direct

Recent comments

  • Women in SF&F Month: Diane Duane | Fantasy Cafe on From the (theoretically) forthcoming CUISINES AND FOODS OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOMS: Whitefruit
  • At the Young Wizards end of things: an update report - Out of Ambit on From the Young Wizards universe: an update
  • From the Young Wizards universe: an update - Out of Ambit on Changes coming at YoungWizards.com: your opinion(s) solicited
  • Review: <em>A Wizard Alone</em> by Diane Duane – Disability in Kidlit on Young Wizards New Millennium Editions: a little more info
  • Top Ten Tuesday ~ Books that Make Me Hungry – BookWyrm Knits on Seed cake: a recipe

Now at Ebooks Direct

 

Feel like buying the writer a coffee?


That's kind of you! Just click here.

Popular Posts

  • 1

    What part of the cow does corned beef come from

    March 16, 2006
  • 2

    Lahey No-Knead Bread recipe: one baker’s experiences so far

    December 9, 2006
  • 3

    Seed cake: a recipe

    January 1, 2013
  • 4

    Young Wizards New Millennium Editions: a little more info

    May 30, 2011
  • 5

    The Affair of the Black Armbands (or, The Death of Sherlock Holmes and How The World Took It)

    January 17, 2012

Associated websites


...all divisions of the
Owl Springs Partnership

Previously on “Out Of Ambit”…

Borges and the Peryton

The Martini Rant

At the Young Wizards end of things: an...

2021 Hugo nomination eligibility: the Young Wizards series

Maluns

Owl Be Home For Christmas

Vintage Scots Christmas recipes: “Good Fare Christmas”

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • Flickr
  • Tumblr
  • RSS
Footer Logo

(c) 2020 Diane Duane | all rights reserved | WP theme: PenciDesign's "Soledad"


Back To Top