Thursday, April 25, 2019

Heard About The Buggy Windows Update?

     I heard about Microsoft fouling up people's Win10 machines with the most recent update, but thought I'd dodged that bullet.

     Guess not.  Firefox (another source of bugginess but I'm fond of it) started getting weird last night and this morning, it was far worse.  Well, okay, thinks I, Edge will work--

     Edge wasn't much better.  Looking at local TV station sites for a short article on the foolishness of fretting over "an influx of people carrying guns" in a county with one of the highest proportion of firearms carry permit holders in the entire United States, Edge started to flake out badly.

     Malwarebytes just finished scanning and gives the machine a clean bill of health; I did a restart and it seems to be hung up.

     So I'm writing this on my "toy computer," a Raspberry Pi running Raspberian, their Linux variant.  Chromium (essentially a port of Google's snoopy Chrome browser) comes with the operating system and works perfectly well.

     What is it the high speed/low drag types say, "One is none and two is one?"  Yeah.  "Have a backup" applies in plenty of situations.

     And that Windows desktop is still trying to restart.  It may be time to push the developer switch.

7 comments:

Roberta X said...

After a brute-force shutdown, my big desktop seems to be happier. Sheesh!

Fuzzy Curmudgeon said...

Why I still use Windows 7 for work. Sadly those days are drawing to an end.

Fuzzy Curmudgeon said...

It would be nice if Windows 10 were as stable as Windows Server 2016, which I use daily as my remote “workstation” at the corporate colo.

rickn8or said...

Fuzzy, yes I too am content with Windows 7 but problems like Roberta (and others) are having is making the decision to go Linux sooo much easier. I'm tired of having to go back and put things back the way I want them after every update. Lately, Windows insists on doing a colonoscopy on any flash drive I plug into any machine, despite turning it off as per ancient knowledge. (Yes, I have more than one Windows machine; my house is where old computers come to die.)

I've put some clunker laptops together in a network with my everyday machine, got everything talking to everything else and am about to make the leap. Whereupon, I'll be able to offer someone a bargain in a Windows 7 with Office or XP Pro with office laptop if I don't wind up donating them.

Bill Gates, DIAF.

Fuzzy Curmudgeon said...

Sorry, I've been running Linux machines since the Slackware days and have no interest in running Linux for my daily work. :) Yes, it's gotten better, and some distributions (e.g. Ubuntu) are pretty outstanding, but I still dislike the unix model too much to work with it day in and day out.

I wouldn't run XP on the Internet today on a bet. I have one XP laptop left that I would upgrade to Windows 7, but it's 32-bit and I don't really need another 32-bit Windows machine. Windows 7 will be just like XP after extended support expires next year. Finally, I work for a Windows shop, and it just doesn't make sense to switch to Linux at this point, even if I felt Linux was a viable option.

Your mileage may, of course, vary :)

Eric Wilner said...

But why would I want updated windows for my buggy anyway?

(I've been avoiding WinX... so far. Got Win7 on one physical machine, for the lab, and a virtual machine, for running under VirtualBox under Linux. Unfortunately, that won't be an option next time I need a physical Windows box. (And my copy of genuine Microsoft Office is on an XP VM, just because that's what I had handy when i needed to install Office.))

rickn8or said...

Well Fuzzy, it is a lot like the mailman that goes hiking on his day off. But about all I use my stuff for is for word processing, spreadsheets, surfing The Internets and e-mail, so I won't notice much difference. FireFox is still FireFox, Thunderbird is still Thunderbird, etc. As long as Libre Office doesn't mangle my .docx and .xlsx files and I can exchange them with the rest of the world I'm pretty happy.