Windows 10

[likesToLick 10,216]

Hi folks.

If you can feel an uncomfortable blast of heat coming from the general direction of Australia,  don't worry.  It's just my blazing hatred for Windows 10.

I installed it yesterday,  and after hours of farting around it still barely works.

Right now it won't recognize my portable hard drive on the USB ports,  Won't even admit that anything is plugged in there.  I have already tried four solutions from the internet that don't work.  HATE HATE HATE.

The interface is all different and all the configuration stuff that I had previously learned where it was hidden is now hidden in different, but equally stupid, places. MORE HATE.

And Microsoft, you know what?  If I had wanted you to irritate me by flip-flopping irrelevant "tiles" in my face all the time,  I WOULD HAVE ASKED YOU TO!

Don't even get me started on that stinking "ribbon".

Still need to re-instate most of my anti-malware and privacy software,   and haven't tried to connect the printer yet.

If it's this awkward for a professional software developer,  god knows how a normal person copes with it.  If there's one thing worse than being forced to install a new operating system,  it's being forced to install a new operating system that breaks everything.

 

Whoever reads this, thank you for your patience in putting up with my rant.

 

[likesToLick 10,216]

Progress report.

Apparently Windows 10 needs portable hard drives to be plugged into a powered USB hub before it will talk to them. Didn't know that one. 

That's one thing fixed.

[norfie654321 69]

12 hours ago, likesToLick said:

Progress report.

Apparently Windows 10 needs portable hard drives to be plugged into a powered USB hub before it will talk to them. Didn't know that one. 

That's one thing fixed.

I'm not sure who is giving you your information but thats utterly and completely bogus...if the USB HDD is a standard 3.5 inch laptop hard drive then ANY USB slot on a desktop/ laptop should power the drive for it to be talking to the machine, if its an older style desktop HDD then you will need to plug it into mains AND a USB port for it to talk to the machine...if you are attempting to attach it to your machine with an external USB hub with more than 4 extra USB ports on it then the hub itself will need to have mains power connected to it so the desktop/laptop and the HDD have enough power to draw on...

[likesToLick 10,216]

15 hours ago, norfie654321 said:

I'm not sure who is giving you your information but thats utterly and completely bogus...if the USB HDD is a standard 3.5 inch laptop hard drive then ANY USB slot on a desktop/ laptop should power the drive for it to be talking to the machine, if its an older style desktop HDD then you will need to plug it into mains AND a USB port for it to talk to the machine...if you are attempting to attach it to your machine with an external USB hub with more than 4 extra USB ports on it then the hub itself will need to have mains power connected to it so the desktop/laptop and the HDD have enough power to draw on...

Sounds good in theory,  but here is what actually happened:

Plugged drive into PC directly - Windows 10 can't see it

Plugged drive into an unpowered 4 port hub - Windows 10 sees the hub but can't see the drive.

Plugged drive into my laptop running Vista - drive works fine.

Plugged a 7 port powered Targus hub into windows 10 PC, then plugged drive into that hub.  Drive then works fine in Windows 10.

I wouldn't have believed it either,  but that is what happened.   I wouldn't have thought to try the powered hub,  except that a google search turned that up as a fix for the fault.  Go figure.

Drive is a WD passport 320GB.

[norfie654321 69]

3 minutes ago, likesToLick said:

Sounds good in theory,  but here is what actually happened:

Plugged drive into PC directly - Windows 10 can't see it

Plugged drive into an unpowered 4 port hub - Windows 10 sees the hub but can't see the drive.

Plugged drive into my laptop running Vista - drive works fine.

Plugged a 7 port powered Targus hub into windows 10 PC, then plugged drive into that hub.  Drive then works fine in Windows 10.

I wouldn't have believed it either,  but that is what happened.   I wouldn't have thought to try the powered hub,  except that a google search turned that up as a fix for the fault.  Go figure.

Drive is a WD passport 320GB.

Then it sounds as though you don't have the correct USB hub drivers installed on your Windows 10 machine. Or that theres a hardware error within the ports themselves. I have no idea how old your machine is, but did you install any driver utilities from your MOBO supplier? Usually the machine drivers get downloaded automatically through that, or alternatively there should've been an installation disc supplied with your MOBO that had USB drivers on it.

[likesToLick 10,216]

 

35 minutes ago, norfie654321 said:

Then it sounds as though you don't have the correct USB hub drivers installed on your Windows 10 machine. Or that theres a hardware error within the ports themselves. I have no idea how old your machine is, but did you install any driver utilities from your MOBO supplier? Usually the machine drivers get downloaded automatically through that, or alternatively there should've been an installation disc supplied with your MOBO that had USB drivers on it.

Motherboard is from 2010.  (A core 2 quad processor,  so I'm not keen to chuck it out just yet.)  I haven't installed any new drivers, but I believe Windows 10 is supposed to find drivers online and load them.  It did that for the video card.

Thanks for the suggestion.  I will follow it up.

[norfie654321 69]

12 minutes ago, likesToLick said:

 

Motherboard is from 2010.  (A core 2 quad processor,  so I'm not keen to chuck it out just yet.)  I haven't installed any new drivers, but I believe Windows 10 is supposed to find drivers online and load them.  It did that for the video card.

Thanks for the suggestion.  I will follow it up.

By todays standards your MOBO is ancient. They get progressively better each year and are now on generation 8 cores and MOBO's. W10 installs new system updates but ignores hardware firmware. So it most likely is that you're running out of date drivers. It could also be that your MOBO is still running USB1.0, which wont supply enough power to USB 3.0 devices. USB 2.0 is fine although transfer speeds will be affected.

[likesToLick 10,216]

11 minutes ago, norfie654321 said:

By todays standards your MOBO is ancient. They get progressively better each year and are now on generation 8 cores and MOBO's. W10 installs new system updates but ignores hardware firmware. So it most likely is that you're running out of date drivers. It could also be that your MOBO is still running USB1.0, which wont supply enough power to USB 3.0 devices. USB 2.0 is fine although transfer speeds will be affected.

You're certainly right, and I would love to have a nice new i7,  but it's hard to justify spending a thousand dollars when the old box still does everything I need.  I'm not into games or heavy video processing,  so if I can get most things working on here  I will defer my upgrade for a couple more years.

[Scot_Lover 1,876]

Hmmm, I've never had issues with Windows 10, works well on my home built desktop and the Alienware Luggable. One older PC is running FreeBSD, which also works well. I've put a few people onto TrueOS (formerly PC-BSD) and those people are happy with it. 

 

If you want a Windows 7 style start menu (with all the settings in normal places) have a look at Classic Shell at www.classicshell.net, a small simple program that brings back Windows 7 look and feel.

[likesToLick 10,216]

4 hours ago, Scot_Lover said:

If you want a Windows 7 style start menu (with all the settings in normal places) have a look at Classic Shell at www.classicshell.net, a small simple program that brings back Windows 7 look and feel.

Thanks for the suggestions

I probably should just bite the bullet and get used to it,  as I may have to use it in the workplace at some point.  

Feeling a bit more charitable towards it today as my new laser printer installed without a hitch.  (This was what prompted me to make the jump from XP at last,  as the printer was not guaranteed to be compatible.)

Installed Libre Office last night.  OK so far.

Firefox has a weird bug that means some special Unicode characters are not rendering (get a box with 4 digits instead.)    Tried three remedies for that so far, but none have worked.

Word on the net seems to be that I should still install a 3rd party antivirus because Windows AV is allegedly not up to the task.   What do you think?

On the last box I had AVG, Spybot, Malwarebytes and Crapcleaner.  So far I have only reinstalled Spybot onto Win 10.

 

Cheers. 

[Scot_Lover 1,876]

I only use Windows Defender, nothing has gotten onto the PC, have had several warnings that a web page is not safe, and don't go there. I did have Avast, but any AV will disable Defender, it's one or the other. My internet comes though a firewall (FreeBSD again) which has clamAV installed, anything that comes in or goes out is checked on the fly, and this includes phones and iPads on wifi. ClamAV also reports nothing, so I must only go to safe places, lol.

 

The UNIX desktop also does Dark Web, Tor network, no problems there either, guess it all comes down to personal preference and whatever you feel comfortable with. The most dodgy thing that happened was a random phone call from someone claiming to be from Microsoft, and asked for remote access to "fix" my Windows. She got a little abusive when I offered her a guest account on my BSD system, lol.

 

 

[likesToLick 10,216]

I did cop some kind of trojan on XP a few years back.  It got past spybot, AVG and the windows firewall.   I noticed Firefox acting funny,  (videos would pause unless I constantly moved the mouse.)  Got nowhere until I installed MalwareBytes and scanned the system with that.  It found and deleted the trojan, and Firefox returned to normal operation.  

I would never have known it was there if it hadn't caused that Firefox fault.  I've no idea what its actual purpose was. 

 

[P-Spud 1,352]

I run Win10 on my tablet. I connect an unpowered 4 port hub to it so I can use a mouse along with a thumb drive and have never had that problem. 'course I never tried an actual hard drive :-)