W10

[jhwalker]

Dinosaur that I am, the only software that I have actually made money with during the past 5 years is excel. That is a little funny because at the office I had a little group of excel monkeys who did all of my hard-core stuff for me, but once I quit doing any real work, I found myself playing with excel - as a labor-saving tool -- and then found that the deeper you got into what could be done with excel the more (perhaps the wrong word) interesting it became, and ended up taking on some financial projects for a start-up that I was working with. Only purpose was save the money we would have paid a "programmer". I became the programmer ie my own monkey.
There is a guy, Dave Bruns, who is teaching really good (thoughtful) stuff at ExcelJet. This is a tool that I hated in the production environment 10 (12?) years ago, but I am kind of fond of it now. We developed the scoring modules for the gun club here in excel and now no one can remember how "hard" it used to be to score a 30 person, 6 event meet.

[Tetge]

My brother works with Excel constantly as he has to due to all his clients using it. He is a statistician and Excel can be used to display nice charts and tables and the like. I do not think that he likes anything that Microsoft makes, but, he uses it because he has to. So, when I need something done, I just ask him as I never have learned one thing about Excel as I never have had any real use for it other than storing my drag strip runs or keeping track of my weight and having excel also calculate the BMI for each weight entry. Of course, I don't have a current version of Excel, as MS Office is not cheap and new versions are churned out frequently, so, I use the LibreOffice office suite, which is open source, freeware. But, LibreOffice can deal with current Microsoft files, so, since I am not in business exporting to clients, it works just fine, and it has a version for Windows and Linux, so, if I ever switch to Linux I will have a good office suite to install.

[SonicVenum]

I now have a Windows icon in my system tray. When I hover over it, it says, "Get Windows 10." I want to click on it, unfortunately, my anti-virus software has not yet updated to be compatible with W10. I know this because the software has popped up a notification advising me of this, and assuring me that they will have a compatible update in the next few weeks. I'm guessing they were just dragging their feet until it was closer the W10's official release date of July 27th. In anticipation of the upgrade, I have created a system image using the Windows image tool. I tried using Clonezilla several times, but kept getting an error. I tried 4 different times, both from a bootable USB, and from a bootable DVD. Each time, I got an error saying one of the partitions on the source drive was not successfully imaged. I'm guessing it's the small partition W8.1 makes during installation. I didn't get this error with the Windows tool. Unfortunately, Clonezilla's website is a labyrinth, so I can't really find any help there.

Having the image of my current set-up, which is running quite well, is nice, but what I really want is a back-up SSD. I've been checking discount-compiling sites lately, and I've seen some pretty good deals on SSDs. I think I paid about $130 for my 250GB Samsung SSD a year ago. I regularly see it on sale for ~$90. A friend of mine wants to replace his old, slow PC, so I found him a great deal on a DIY kit. It included a nice case, AMD FX-4300 quad-core 3.8GHz processor, MSI 760GM-P34 MicroATX mobo, MSI Radeon R9 270 Gaming 2GB GDDR5 video card, 8GB DDR3-1600 RAM, 1TB 7200RPM HDD, Thermaltake 600W PCU, and an 80mm CPU cooler. To top it off, I found him an OCZ 240GB SSD for $70. So, he'll now have an awesome system. All I need to do is find myself a killer deal on an SSD, and have two bootable SSDs. One with my current W8.1 set-up, and one with W10.

[Tetge]

I got an error or two with Clonezilla, so I selected the slower backup which does a sector by sector backup without regard for the format or anything else. This worked. I think that at this point the default settings work for me but, Clonezilla should back up practically. I also use old fashioned platters for back ups, including a large 3TB, USB 3.0 exterior WD HD that I only plug in when I need it. In my experience backing up to an SSD did not save significant time. So, I just start a backup and come back a few minutes later.

As for W10, I suppressed the downloads that put the mechanism into the current system to upgrade to W10. But, I will load my image of 8.1 bring it completely up to date and then make another backup of that and load W10 for free, sometime after W10 is released. I will then make a backup of W10, after playing with it for a bit and getting disgusted, and then I will throw W7 back onto the computer. And, I do all this on my secondary computer since it is pretty powerful and it makes a good test platform for Windows and Linux. I already know that I am staying with W7 on my main computer for the immediate future as it still is a Window's world in spite of all the mumbling.

[SonicVenum]

Hmm, I supposed I can try messing with the options, though I selected all the defaults. It can't hurt to have another image that doesn't have to be accessed via Windows. While I was messing with the Windows system image backup, I also created a recovery drive on a USB stick. So, I should be all set if something goes wrong.

Which OS will you go with when W7 is no longer supported? Which will be sooner rather than later.

[Tetge]

Hmm, I supposed I can try messing with the options, though I selected all the defaults. It can't hurt to have another image that doesn't have to be accessed via Windows. While I was messing with the Windows system image backup, I also created a recovery drive on a USB stick. So, I should be all set if something goes wrong.

Which OS will you go with when W7 is no longer supported? Which will be sooner rather than later.

W7 will be supported for a number of years to come. And, who knows where the desktop will be by then, and what OS's will be available. Linux is close even now, but, there still is an issue with lack of support for some devices under Linux, and, Wine will not run some of the programs that I want to run. But, with years to go, there still is time for Linux to close the gaps and become a fully operational desk top alternative.

Once W7 is truly churned out, as with XP before it, I suppose that I will have to switch to W10, which supposedly will be continued forever. But, by the time I will be forced to switch, many of the kinds of programs and utilities that I wish to use will have been ported to W10, or an acceptable W10 compatible freeware program will have been released. I do not like any of the W8 on versions of Windows. I could also keep a W7 box and isolate it from the network so that I still would have a computer to do certain tasks on and the lack of security updates would not pose a threat to my network.

But, as it stands, I am not concerned yet about W7 being phased out as the end of extended support is 01/14/2020, and that is still 4.5 years from now.

[SonicVenum]

Oh, okay. For some reason, I thought W7 was supposed to lose support a lot sooner than that. I thought it was within the next year or so.

[Tetge]

Oh, okay. For some reason, I thought W7 was supposed to lose support a lot sooner than that. I thought it was within the next year or so.

One needs to know stuff if one wishes to really keep their computers working properly and properly configured.

[jhwalker]

Oh, okay. For some reason, I thought W7 was supposed to lose support a lot sooner than that. I thought it was within the next year or so.

One needs to know stuff if one wishes to really keep their computers working properly and properly configured.

My credit card solves many of those problems. Having a working wife does wonders!

[Tetge]

.....My credit card solves many of those problems..........

I am not quite sure how a credit card helps? Perhaps you are saying that you can simply purchase a new desk top, or laptop, or whatever you might consider a computer and that it would come all configured? But, it would take me weeks to clean up any of the current commercially available computers as they tend to have bloat ware and activated free trials of other nasty software, such as anything from Symantec. And, these days they come with W8.1, which I despise.

I also realize that many now use smart phones and tablets and that desk top computers may no longer be necessary. But, I need a giant monitor (I keep watching for a larger one that the 27" one that I currently have) as I am blind. And, I need to use a wired mouse, or I am not happy. I also need a real keyboard as my fat, numb, fingers, can not handle touch screen stuff.

So, I still build, configure, and maintain all my computers, and I couldn't pay to have that done, as I have my own ideas about how things should look and feel, and, in my case, that means that if I could have been transported in time from when I was using Windows 3.0 or 3.1 for workgroups, the desktop on that ancient computer would have matched the one on my current computer, both in Linux Mint and Windows 7. And, by the time Win95 came out, it was even a lot the same under the hood, although there were still some DOS related things that needed to be addressed until W2000.

But, for those that can adapt and those that are fans of touch screens, I suppose that buying a new device could solve any issues with the old one.