From Seven to Ten, with a Stopover at Eight
5 months ago
I thought this would be a short recap. Instead it became "Story Time" :)
By that title, I mean Windows versions.
My main stay-at-home laptop, where much of my digital art is spawned, is a 17" screen Toshiba Satellite S70-A (Core i5-3230) laptop. Not a barn-burner by any stretch, it was purchased directly from Toshiba America Information Systems' website. I had it configured with Windows 7 at the time because Windows 8 was (and still is) a hot mess, however this option did not extend to the restore media, which was Windows 8. Originally equipped with a 750GB hard drive, I never managed to fill it more than halfway since much of my important data resided on external drives.
This system served me well over the years, and over time received memory upgrades from 8 to 12GB to keep pace with the growing memory footprint of various applications (and the habit of leaving browser tabs open "for later"). Then one day the fire nation attac---no, wait not that. Running Win7, as well-regarded an OS as it was, long beyond it's sell-by date introduced minor annoyances that grew harder to ignore, in the form of applications that started dropping support for it. But the big issue cropped up November 2022 when out of nowhere this system started throwing up dialog boxes stating that "You may be a victim of software counterfeiting" as well as a little notice in the corner of my secondary monitor stating that "this copy of Windows is not genuine". Weird...this system was legit from the factory for more than a decade. But an in-depth investigation showed that where one would normally find their Windows license key turned up...bupkis. I kinda-sorta put up with the three or four times a day pop-ups and the lack of ability to set a wallpaper, but another issue was starting to grate on me...
Normally I leave my system on and simply set it to turn off its LCD after a half-hour or so of idle, and system sleep ensues after a couple of hours of inactivity. I would leave home for work, return in the evening and wake up the system by jiggling the mouse or tapping the space bar. But with the advent of these MS nag-boxes, came a concerning inflation of the time needed to reach a login prompt upon system resume. I clocked it at upwards of eight minutes. Amazingly, I put up with that too for way too long. Poking around the system some more led me to Event Viewer, which showed me that my hard drive was throwing "NTFS Error" literally every day going back to...probably late 2022 when these oddball happenings first started. Still I kept using the system, even after Krita became unusable. I'm talking drawing a line, and nothing showed up till you bumped the screen in any direction or zoomed in or out. This app was perfectly fine before whatever happened to screw it up, and neither reinstalling or updating it helped. I switched to using Clip Studio in the meantime, but the situation with Krita bothered me.
Finally in November 2023, having missed the deadline to secure a free upgrade to Win10, I finally got off my duff and did something. By that I mean researching places to buy Windows 10 license keys. An increasing number of dead-ends (M$ was really pushing Win11 by then) finally led me to Play-Asia, where I was able to buy a key for about $15...after dilly-dallying with their website for a couple of days. I had an account there before, but I had forgotten my password long ago (I was basically using them to buy aftermarket Dreamcast games) and had to spark up a new account when their password recovery function failed repeatedly to email me a reset link. What their site didn't tell me (and they acknowledged it as a problem) was that new accounts had to be verified by clicking a link in an email. Pretty standard stuff...but the issue was that Play-Asia's site didn't tell you about that step...while allowing you to make purchases before you're verified. So my license key didn't show in my purchase history until I found the email and clicked the verify link, after which the license key appeared.
Then I sat on my purchase for almost another year while I slowly collected a terabyte SSD (Crucial), USB-SATA cable, system restore disks, an additional 4GB of RAM for a total of 16GB and my Win10 installer on a thumb drive...which turned out to be the Win8 recovery media I made for my venerable Surface Pro 2 (which died from a video-card malfunction), so I had to clear files off another 8GB thumb drive so I could make the installer. Owing to the condition of my existing HDD, I didn't want to clone it to the new SSD, so I installed it in the system (along with a new watch battery for the CMOS) and restored the Win8 system image to it, insuring that the full complement of Toshiba drivers was installed to the system before running the Win10 installer. Restoring the win8 image took the better part of two hours installing from four DVD's, after which I was presented with the Win 8 desktop (ew). Surprisingly enough, the Win10 upgrade on top of 8 took only about 20 minutes. One benefit of starting with Win8 -- it doesn't try to strong-arm you to create/use a Microsoft account, and as such the local account created in 8 carried over into 10 without the 'modern' insistence to use a M$ account.
I made some observations as I reinstalled the apps I used most often on the Win7 iteration of this computer. Maybe I'll talk about them in a future journal after I've re-imposed some computing normalcy. (as in, "why is Micrografx Picture Publisher displaying scrambled images?--I have too many projects done on that app to retire it now)
By that title, I mean Windows versions.
My main stay-at-home laptop, where much of my digital art is spawned, is a 17" screen Toshiba Satellite S70-A (Core i5-3230) laptop. Not a barn-burner by any stretch, it was purchased directly from Toshiba America Information Systems' website. I had it configured with Windows 7 at the time because Windows 8 was (and still is) a hot mess, however this option did not extend to the restore media, which was Windows 8. Originally equipped with a 750GB hard drive, I never managed to fill it more than halfway since much of my important data resided on external drives.
This system served me well over the years, and over time received memory upgrades from 8 to 12GB to keep pace with the growing memory footprint of various applications (and the habit of leaving browser tabs open "for later"). Then one day the fire nation attac---no, wait not that. Running Win7, as well-regarded an OS as it was, long beyond it's sell-by date introduced minor annoyances that grew harder to ignore, in the form of applications that started dropping support for it. But the big issue cropped up November 2022 when out of nowhere this system started throwing up dialog boxes stating that "You may be a victim of software counterfeiting" as well as a little notice in the corner of my secondary monitor stating that "this copy of Windows is not genuine". Weird...this system was legit from the factory for more than a decade. But an in-depth investigation showed that where one would normally find their Windows license key turned up...bupkis. I kinda-sorta put up with the three or four times a day pop-ups and the lack of ability to set a wallpaper, but another issue was starting to grate on me...
Normally I leave my system on and simply set it to turn off its LCD after a half-hour or so of idle, and system sleep ensues after a couple of hours of inactivity. I would leave home for work, return in the evening and wake up the system by jiggling the mouse or tapping the space bar. But with the advent of these MS nag-boxes, came a concerning inflation of the time needed to reach a login prompt upon system resume. I clocked it at upwards of eight minutes. Amazingly, I put up with that too for way too long. Poking around the system some more led me to Event Viewer, which showed me that my hard drive was throwing "NTFS Error" literally every day going back to...probably late 2022 when these oddball happenings first started. Still I kept using the system, even after Krita became unusable. I'm talking drawing a line, and nothing showed up till you bumped the screen in any direction or zoomed in or out. This app was perfectly fine before whatever happened to screw it up, and neither reinstalling or updating it helped. I switched to using Clip Studio in the meantime, but the situation with Krita bothered me.
Finally in November 2023, having missed the deadline to secure a free upgrade to Win10, I finally got off my duff and did something. By that I mean researching places to buy Windows 10 license keys. An increasing number of dead-ends (M$ was really pushing Win11 by then) finally led me to Play-Asia, where I was able to buy a key for about $15...after dilly-dallying with their website for a couple of days. I had an account there before, but I had forgotten my password long ago (I was basically using them to buy aftermarket Dreamcast games) and had to spark up a new account when their password recovery function failed repeatedly to email me a reset link. What their site didn't tell me (and they acknowledged it as a problem) was that new accounts had to be verified by clicking a link in an email. Pretty standard stuff...but the issue was that Play-Asia's site didn't tell you about that step...while allowing you to make purchases before you're verified. So my license key didn't show in my purchase history until I found the email and clicked the verify link, after which the license key appeared.
Then I sat on my purchase for almost another year while I slowly collected a terabyte SSD (Crucial), USB-SATA cable, system restore disks, an additional 4GB of RAM for a total of 16GB and my Win10 installer on a thumb drive...which turned out to be the Win8 recovery media I made for my venerable Surface Pro 2 (which died from a video-card malfunction), so I had to clear files off another 8GB thumb drive so I could make the installer. Owing to the condition of my existing HDD, I didn't want to clone it to the new SSD, so I installed it in the system (along with a new watch battery for the CMOS) and restored the Win8 system image to it, insuring that the full complement of Toshiba drivers was installed to the system before running the Win10 installer. Restoring the win8 image took the better part of two hours installing from four DVD's, after which I was presented with the Win 8 desktop (ew). Surprisingly enough, the Win10 upgrade on top of 8 took only about 20 minutes. One benefit of starting with Win8 -- it doesn't try to strong-arm you to create/use a Microsoft account, and as such the local account created in 8 carried over into 10 without the 'modern' insistence to use a M$ account.
I made some observations as I reinstalled the apps I used most often on the Win7 iteration of this computer. Maybe I'll talk about them in a future journal after I've re-imposed some computing normalcy. (as in, "why is Micrografx Picture Publisher displaying scrambled images?--I have too many projects done on that app to retire it now)
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As for the OS itself, I use 11 at work and managed to adjust to its quirks, an admittedly limited experience since it being a corporate PC, there's a limit to how far IT allows you to poke around in it. I'm hoping that given the age of the above laptop's W11 install, that it may let me establish a local user account without too much effort instead of the M$ account they try to force you to use.