Author Topic: Stuff that peels your potatoes with paring knives of ANGER.  (Read 770648 times)

Bobbias

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Re: Stuff that peels your potatoes with paring knives of ANGER.
« Reply #2505 on: February 14, 2017, 12:32:41 AM »
Well the job is the one thing that isn't changing. I got pretty lucky as far as factory jobs go. Unionized, pays well, and not obsessed with hitting a quota. I'm planning on staying there for a while.
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vladgd

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Re: Stuff that peels your potatoes with paring knives of ANGER.
« Reply #2506 on: April 11, 2017, 11:15:02 AM »
What level does my technomancy have to be in order to competently use linux?

People shit on Windows Vista, but I had no issues with it personally. Windows 10 is fucking cancer and it's gotten so deep it's preventing me from even installing my physical copy of Windows 7.

I'm in an endless loop of installing updates, restarting, updates failing, uninstalling updates NEW UPDATES RESTARTING, and its driving me nuts. However it is preventing me from installing win 7 from the desktop, or going into the bios and booting to update it fails, or FORMATTING MY DRIVE FAILS SO I CANT FRESH INSTALL. I've tried multiple things to fix the problem, the automatic tool doesn't work (i dont think any microsoft tool has ever helped me in my entire life tbh), and ive tried things involving going into the .cmd, which didn't work.

The only solution I can think of is to physically remove my SSD, to remove the cancer from my computer, install a brand fucking new SSD and install win7 fresh on that thing.

Spectere

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Re: Stuff that peels your potatoes with paring knives of ANGER.
« Reply #2507 on: April 11, 2017, 03:34:31 PM »
Let me just say that there is a very good reason that people make "Oh, THIS will be the Year of the Linux Desktop" jokes year after year. The Linux desktop ecosystem feels flakier to me now than it did in 2005. There are too many geeky alpha males vying for dominance right now for me to recommend that option to anyone (sysvinit vs systemd, Xorg vs Wayland vs Mir, and both of those are absolutely HUGE parts of the user experience and OS). If all you want to do is browse the web, grab a Chromebook (Linux-based, but it's a very tightly designed system). If not, and you still want to move away from Windows, look into getting a Mac.

If you're trying to do anything from within Windows 10 itself it's definitely not going to work. You can't format the OS drive in any version of Windows while the system is running since that would lead to Critical Existence Failure of the environment that's currently loaded. You also won't be able to initiate the Windows 7 install from within Windows 10, as in-place downgrades aren't supported (and even if they are, they'd be a very bad idea--I'm even skeptical about in-place upgrades).

That certainly doesn't mean that Windows 10 is preventing you from installing an operating system. It's a safety measure. Trying to install an older version of Windows over a newer one can cause a ton of problems. There are a lot of subtle things that can change regarding the disk layout and filesystem that can cause the older, outdated Windows 7 tools to not work properly against newer installations.

To install an older system, your best bet is to boot directly from disc, clear the system of all partitions (not just formatting, as that will keep the newer, likely incompatible boot and recovery partitions intact) and reinstall from scratch.

First and foremost, make a backup of any data that you care about.

Next, to actually wipe the partition table and more or less start from scratch, you'll have to boot from the Windows 7 media. Your system will probably have a key, such as F12, that you can press to get a boot menu. Failing that, you can rearrange the drive order in the BIOS config so that your optical drive is above your SSD in the boot process. When the disc starts to boot, tap a key to boot from the disc.

When the setup program loads, do a custom install. When you get to the section where you configure your partitions, click on the "Drive Options (Advanced)" text. This will add some additional buttons that allow you to add and remove partitions. Click on each partition on your system disk, click Delete, and accept the prompt. If you're at all uncomfortable about this step and are worried about deleting the wrong ones, power your system off and disconnect your other hard drives or SSDs.

When you're done, the only item that should be left for that specific disk is "Unallocated Space." As long as that is selected, Windows will take care of everything else when you click the Next button. You won't have to create or format the partition manually. After that's finished, you'll have a fresh drive and a new Windows 7 install.

One thing to bear in mind is that Windows 7 is no longer receiving mainstream support--it's currently in an extended support window until January 14, 2020. It will continue to receive security updates during this time, but feature updates are not guaranteed.
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vladgd

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Re: Stuff that peels your potatoes with paring knives of ANGER.
« Reply #2508 on: April 11, 2017, 05:57:57 PM »
Well they aren't exactly giving me a choice, ive tried multiple attempts at fixing this "updates failed uninstalling updates" problem. Only thing I can think of that "should" work is reinstalling the OS. It won't even let me reset the pc.

I'm also aware they're going to cut support for win7, but that's years off and by then maybe they'll have an operating system that works. Seeing how win8 turned out and went to win10, I'll probably have to learn linux by then.

Anyway what you're saying is



This little partition needs to be removed before I can install win7? All of the stuff I care about is on my other two drives so I have no issue wiping the C drive clean, just need to reinstall drivers and a media player or two.

I'd take another option if I had it. Might look for another solution or two to this windows update problem, but I haven't had any luck. I have had some error when I go to shut down (because win 10 won't let me use sleep mode LOL) it gives me an error "the exception breakpoint has been reached blablabla" that i have to click out of before it'll shut down. Perhaps that's the root of all of these problems?

Spectere

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Re: Stuff that peels your potatoes with paring knives of ANGER.
« Reply #2509 on: April 11, 2017, 09:19:50 PM »
It's really not a matter of learning Linux, it's a matter of waiting for people to figure out what the hell they're trying to make it into. That could take decades. It looked like things were starting to stabilize in the late 00's, but good god. It's more of a fucking mess now than it ever was. The only reason that I even run it is because I have the choice to use a more advanced distribution (Gentoo) that doesn't chain me to any particular thing and gives me the flexibility to move back and forth.

If Gentoo (and similar distributions) didn't exist, I wouldn't touch Linux with a 100 foot pole--I'd be using BSD for what I currently use Linux for. This is from someone who used it on my oft-used laptop exclusively for a few years around 2005-2006.

And yeah, I'm kind of a cynic about it now. I've already documented a little bit of my experiences with systemd (a staple of so-called "modern" Linux) in one of the news posts on this site.

I wouldn't completely discount Microsoft, either. They've been making rapid improvements to Windows 10 since its inception. The Anniversary Update installer was problematic (I experienced moderate to severe performance issues on two of four machines, but a clean install fixed them entirely), but every update I've installed beyond that has been solid. Crossing my fingers that the Creators Update installs without much hassle. It seems like it's legitimately getting better with every update. If you used the original Windows 10 build and have been following it through since the beginning, you might still be seeing echoes of the Anniversary Update's wonkiness. A reinstall may very well permanently resolve the update issue (if you decide to do that instead, use Microsoft's Media Creation Tool to either burn a disk or build a bootable USB stick).

Regarding the sleep mode situation, the number 1 reason that Windows has issues going to sleep is because of 1) drivers and 2) software. The OS doesn't really have much to do with that. All it basically does is go through the installed drivers (just about all of which are of varying quality, written by third-parties) and tell each driver to put the hardware that it controls to sleep. If the driver says LOL NOPE, Windows can't safely put the system to sleep. For example, at one point I was foolish enough to buy and install a Creative X-Fi in my last PC. The Creative Audio driver consistently prevented my PC from falling asleep. It was perfectly fine before that.

It goes beyond that, too. I've fixed countless PCs and can say that with my experience in the NT line (which includes 2000 all the way through 10), almost all of the major issues I've seen have been caused by either hardware failure or by third-parties (whether it be software, a crappy default OS install, or drivers). Inevitably, Microsoft always get blamed for it. It's just like when the exploding battery debacle happened around 2006-2007. Sony didn't get blamed for producing faulty cells, Dell got blamed for performing due diligence and being the first (of many, mind you) to recall the unsafe product.

If you do decide to stick with 7 then yeah, wipe out both of those partitions. Windows 7 won't understand what the Recovery Partition is (that was introduced as an OS feature in Windows 8) so it's basically pointless to have, and wiping out the system partition is always a good idea when reinstalling just to make sure that the old system is completely wiped out.
« Last Edit: April 11, 2017, 09:28:44 PM by Spectere »
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vladgd

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Re: Stuff that peels your potatoes with paring knives of ANGER.
« Reply #2510 on: May 16, 2017, 05:24:38 PM »
Well I've been randomly trying these fixes involving command prompt, and sometimes something different will happen, but the result is always the same. OOPS COULDNT INSTALL UNINSTALLING LOL WANNA RESTART SO WE CAN FAIL AGAIN RESTARTING! Like it'll find corrupt stuff, but it never fixes everything, and every time I try it with whatever, command prompt stuff or ccleaner, it finds things, but then goes "oops didn't get it all captain, you're still fucked, hope you know what we didnt fix!" Which I don't because im not exactly that savvy, but no solutions on the internet seem to work either.

I'm to the point where on my next paycheck, im just going to buy a physical copy of win10 and install that thing fresh. Considering my computer seems to be so fucked right now that win10 refuses to even system restore or restart the pc, im literally afraid a fresh reboot with a new fresh physical copy won't work.

Should I even bother, or do you think its worth digging for an actual solution? If I blow $100.00 and it doesn't want to work, I'm going to live off the grid without internet or electricity or something.

Spectere

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Re: Stuff that peels your potatoes with paring knives of ANGER.
« Reply #2511 on: May 17, 2017, 01:54:21 AM »
I wouldn't recommend dropping $100 on it. If you're having trouble with the media creation tool, I can always prep a memory stick or DVD when I get back to Ohio (currently vacationing in Texas, will be back this Saturday) and mail it to you. You already have the license and the media is going to be identical regardless.

If you specifically don't trust running the tool due to the state that your install is in, there is an option to have it just download an ISO image for you so that you can burn it with another utility. You also have the option of running it on another computer and prepping the media from there. I believe the only requirement is that the computer that you run the utility on has to be running Windows 7 or newer.

When things get too finicky, I tend to lean towards reinstalling as opposed to trying to fix it. Modern operating systems, regardless of what they are, are complex to the point that major issues tend to be terminal in one way or another. The fact that both Windows and macOS have been heavily emphasizing in-place upgrades lately is a large part of why things tend to go sour, I believe.

We're a lot better off now than we used to be. In my experience, I can get back up and running within an hour or two if I start from scratch. Windows, in particular, just isn't as much of a pain in the neck to get back to a usable state than it used to be in the XP era.
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vladgd

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Re: Stuff that peels your potatoes with paring knives of ANGER.
« Reply #2512 on: May 19, 2017, 12:02:01 AM »
So as long as I have my windows 7 disc/key im good? Because I have that.

But yeah, if you could send stuff over I'd super appreciate it. Send me a PM whenever you get back and I'll give you the address, and send me your paypal so I can compensate any cost to you.

No rush, I've been getting used to it, but watching videos on malware and shit had me concerned about my security not having had any updates in months and all.

In the past when I have a big problem, I just reinstall windows. Problem this time, windows forced me into upgrading to a new windows, so my old option was taken from me.

Spectere

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Re: Stuff that peels your potatoes with paring knives of ANGER.
« Reply #2513 on: May 21, 2017, 09:35:33 PM »
Yeah, you'd use your Windows 7 key to activate Windows 10. My work laptop shipped with Windows 7 and I was able to just use that key to activate 10 when I did my last full reinstall. You won't need the disc at any point.

Also, I'm back home. PM sent! :D
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vladgd

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Re: Stuff that peels your potatoes with paring knives of ANGER.
« Reply #2514 on: May 28, 2017, 09:31:39 PM »


FINALLY

speccy-poo you're a lifesaver. I didn't even do anything crazy, just installed windows, kept all files, and the updates (at least as of now, cant say for tomorrow or the next day) worked.

One final thing, my windows.old folder, anything I should dig up on that fucker before I delete it for using up too much space on my small SSD? I want to say 95% of my important stuff is on my other HDD's, but there's random stuff that saves to C, and im unsure if certain things like drivers and whatnot are lurking on that folder or just omitted from that move and stayed where they originally were.

*edit*

found a little quirk, nothing major though. I have 3 drives, one SSD where I put my os and drivers, and two HDD's. So, C, D, E, drives. I went to boot up ye ole battle.net and noticed heroes and overwatch needed to be installed, and then figured out my D drive was missing. Not a hard fix, went into disc management and re-scanned discs, and it just started working instantly, but how odd it would lose my D drive but my E drive was fine?
« Last Edit: May 28, 2017, 09:52:12 PM by vladgd »

Spectere

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Re: Stuff that peels your potatoes with paring knives of ANGER.
« Reply #2515 on: May 28, 2017, 11:06:05 PM »
Woo! Glad to hear that everything went well. ;D I wouldn't bother trying to keep anything from Windows.old, unless you have a bunch of custom fonts that you want to keep. Drivers require too much TLC to try to extract from a dead install that it's hardly worth it in my experience.

When you delete it, however, I'd highly recommend using the Disk Cleanup tool (go into My Computer, right-click your OS drive, click Properties, then click Disk Cleanup--you'll need to also click the "Clean up system files" button). If you try to delete it from Explorer, you'll run into a ton of permissions issues, since a bunch of those folders and files are using security IDs from the old install. You can clean it up manually, but it's much easier to just let Windows take care of it.

I can't say for sure what happened with the drive assignments, but my best guess is that your DVD drive took over the D mapping during install and the drive was simply never reassigned after the controller drivers were reinstalled. I have seen that happen before, but it's so easy to fix that I haven't bothered to nail down the exact cause of it.

(Also, sorry about the super-grubby CD case. I was pressed for time since I had to get to work, so I grabbed the first empty one I found on my shelf :P)
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Bobbias

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Re: Stuff that peels your potatoes with paring knives of ANGER.
« Reply #2516 on: June 06, 2017, 08:08:00 PM »
Well my Sensei Raw mouse decided to call it quits today. Fucking unplugged my keyboard and suddenly the light started flashing and it just stopped working. I love being able to just say "fuck it" and buy a new mouse without thinking too much about the price, but still. I ended up buying the Sensei wireless because why not.
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Spectere

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Re: Stuff that peels your potatoes with paring knives of ANGER.
« Reply #2517 on: June 07, 2017, 04:06:01 PM »
I feel ya. My old SteelSeries 6Gv2 keyboard died a few days after its warranty expired. :/ My old WoW Cataclysm mouse (also by SteelSeries) seemed to have been made with extremely cheap microswitches. Considering I used it for one game (since it was way too big and heavy to comfortably use as a full-time mouse) there's no reason most of the switches should have died or started misfiring after a year of ownership.

I just wound up switching back to Logitech (mostly because of how long my Logitech Elite keyboard lasted despite it getting the absolute shit beat out of it). Currently using the G710+ keyboard and a G600 MMO mouse. No regrets, and both of those were both cheaper and more comfortable than the equivalent Razer/SteelSeries devices.
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Spectere

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Re: Stuff that peels your potatoes with paring knives of ANGER.
« Reply #2518 on: June 09, 2017, 01:18:15 AM »
873041237074366468[/tweet]]I had a bad time tonight.

But at least I'm in one piece at my destination now!
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Bobbias

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Re: Stuff that peels your potatoes with paring knives of ANGER.
« Reply #2519 on: June 09, 2017, 06:12:50 PM »
Holy shit, you out trumped trump with that twitter rant. Also, wow, that IS some shitty UX design.
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