Vista has been out of support and vulnerable since April 2017. You really should not be using it any longer, it's a liability for you and potentially many others.

That was probably the Meltdown/Spectre patch - mine took hours to install. The older the CPU, the worse the performance hit will be.

Not entirely. You can set a Group Policy to block if you have W10 Pro. There is also a MS utility called Wushowhide that you can use to prevent installation of MS driver updates (which has caused me all kinds of problems and re-installs on multiple occasions). I was able to fend off the 1703 Creator's Update for 6 months until the Meltdown patches. Below are a couple of links which you might find useful.


https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...ling-in-window

https://www.howtogeek.com/224471/how...ading-updates/

Have a rethink - you can get Linux distros which look and perform almost identically to Windows if that is what you feel comfortable with. Personally I hate Microsoft products with a passion specifically for the update sagas that you highlight and rather than fight against the tide perhaps you should consider just changing your OS.

You can then spend your time using your PC for work and play rather than fighting Bill Gates.

I'm afraid that hasn't been my experience. Mr brief flirtations with the penguin have pretty well all been cursed with recurring updates. Sometimes the "updates" quarrel with the current kernel version. Sometimes the updates required a different driver than the one in use - wireless cards are usually singled out - not to mention bluetooth. Eventually after some months one is advised that this version of Linux is no longer supported and one needs to update to the latest version, only to discover that it's a complete rehash of the interface and nothing one used previously can be found.

I liked the idea of Linux and I tried. I really tried, but in the end it became an endless source of frustration. I won't expand upon the frequent times one has to resort to the command line and it's totally foreign, nay alien language.

Mind you, I'll admit to qualifying as a grumpy old sod these days, and over the past 35 years or so, I've had to wrestle with quite a few different operating systems starting with TRS-80 cassette (CLOAD - any remember what that was like?).

But Linux beat me. These days I sit here as a total slave to whatever Micro$oft throws at me. Most of the time it works. Even Windows 10. (I can hardly believe I wrote that) :bored:

FOR

I was told by a computer salesman, that you must uninstall whatever you're using, THEN, install W10 from scratch; "updating" to W10 is a nightmare; if that's what you're talking about, it's worth a try...

There is a huge difference between an OEM Microsoft distro of win 10 and one you get when buying a PC from a name. Its faster and no bloatware.

Now some claim that it its illegal to kill the installation that comes with a PC because the "price" reflects the bloat wear and advertising income.

And if you want to control when the updates download turn your internet connections to metered then it will tell you when they are available but won't download them. You won't have control over what it downloads when you trigger it but at least you can trigger it before you go to bed and its done its thing by the time you wake up.

I suggest you try Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon. The interface is quite similar to Win 7 & Office 2007-13 for day to day use & you can load and test drive it from a CD or USB memory stick (the better option). However you may have to tweak your BIOS to allow booting from a CD or USB memory.

It updates cleanly between releases with no major changes to the interface & I have not experienced the problems you are having with kernels & drivers, however generally if there is an issue googling it will find a solution.

Win 10 was installed on one of my laptops and after repeated fights to get it to load as part of the free upgrade from 8.1 I was successful, but since then it hasn't been used. However I also have a legal copy of Win 7 installed as a virtual machine in Linux Mint to allow me to use the few essential programs & communicate with hardware that insist on Windows (e.g. Garmin Base Camp).

Another vote for Mint Cinnamon - smooth as a tomcat pissing on glass…

As with most of the mainline Linux distros, it'll pretty much look after itself if you're not computer smart, while (of course) letting you tinker to your heart's content if you are.

[still trying to get my head round systemd, but that's MY problem…]

Mac

" it'll pretty much look after itself if you're not computer smart"

You know that "pretty much" isn't exactly reassuring.......

I believe that translates into 'less likely to screw up your computer with a random update than Windows 10 is'.

The only real issue I've had with updates to our Linux PCs at home was when a kernel change made it incompatible with the onboard-chipset video driver that AMD hadn't updated in over five years. But if the driver had come from the distribution rather than AMD, it would have been fixed before the update was pushed out (AFAIR the fix was a one line change to the code).

So I'm thoroughly puzzled by all the people who report that they had zillions of problems getting Linux to work. Unless they're installing random software from source code and expecting not to have to keep it up-to-date.

Meanwhile, my VR headset is currently dead because the manufacturer apparently let their driver-signing certificate expire and Windows won't let the driver run.

Thank you HowardB for your well considered word of encouragement, and apologies for the delay in getting back.

I did give that combination an honest try a little while back, and yes it was appealing in a far more attractive way than the (mostly) Ubuntu variations previously tried.

What it did prove to me was that I was locked into several Windoze applications which I needed to perform first up every time without having to either fiddle with settings or learn to do things in a completely new way. Most of these were Amateur Radio programs and this was also the computer which drives the Canon scanner - that didn't look like an adventure I would enjoy.

I think it boils down to the rather cruel fact that one is wired to work either with Linux or with something else. My age probably is an influencing factor here - something about an old dog learning new tricks. As mentioned earlier, I've had to learn quite a few operating systems since I first sat down in from of my very own computer somewhere around 25 years ago. Perhaps NOSF (New Operating System Fatigue) has well and truly set in.

I did set up a new W10 system this morning for long term connection to the WW in an Amateur Radio role. My old Win XP machine still did it all, but .... well ... you know the rest.

So thank you again; clearly for those who both understand and type the language Linux uses, it's an excellent and versatile alternative to those mainstream alternatives.

Long may it be so.

FOR

Again, for the overwhelming majority this is not what they experience. The overwhelming majority upgraded using the free upgrade (not a fresh install) which just loaded and installed in 1-3 hours (depending on particular machine hardware and available internet speed). They then found it just worked. Over the succeeding years they've had updates, and while some of these may have taken a while they were warned that it would happen and offered the choice of postponing it, and once installed it (again) just worked.

Certainly in my case the 8(ish) assorted PCs and laptops we have in this house did the update/install without missing a beat, and installing their various updates since has been the same - the machine just gets on with it without any drama. After the W10 upgrade all the existing applications were available for use afterwards (a big improvement over previous upgrades One of the laptops hadn't been used for a year or so and was rather behind on its W7 updates, so the W10 install decided to do the "full install" rather than the "upgrade". This took a bit longer, but the result was identical to the others.

I'm not saying the claimed problems didn't happen - I'm just saying that in everything I've observed (my own and those of friends and colleagues) they must be a lot rarer that some like to suggest.

I'm not. In my experience even the so-called "non-geek" distros often require "under the hood" knowledge to either install or keep running. And there is still the issue that it can often take months of searching to find drivers for new hardware because the equipment OEMs see no business case for writing and maintaining drivers for such a small userbase. And when you find it that driver is often one written by some random enthusiast - often from a russian, chinese, korean or similar. You may be happy to install random code of unknown origin on your machines, but I'm not!

PDR

I "own" four laptops, I have two and have passed two on to a friend; two are six or seven years old and are now "reserves" for each of us, one is four years old, the other a year. I successfully upgraded three of them to W10, the newest W10 came as standard.

I've rebuilt the newer two, stepped on one (oops) and knackered the HD (rebuilt this is now my friend's primary laptop), on my newest one W10 committed digital suicide at Christmas. It's now working great again...

For some reason one of the original pair (my friend's) won't now accept updates - a particular one just hangs and has done so since late last year - and nor can I find any way to repair or reinstall W10. Looking on Google, it seems to be widespread problem which MS have not resolved. The other one works just fine.

As it should be more or less identical to my spare, plan is to swap the HDs when I have some time and see if it works; if so then copy good HD to the other. No idea if that's a workable solution...

Great description :ok:

I actually prefer the look and feel of Mint KDE but have stuck with Cinnamon as it just fells that everything operates 'sharper'

Boot from a Win10 installation DVD or USB flash drive and you'll be able to reinstall. Just make sure you use the same language, type (as in Home or Pro) and bit-ness (32- or 64-bit) as you have installed.

Your plan to copy drives may work provided the installations were the same types as above - Win10 activation relies on "digital entitlement" stored on MS servers, not serial numbers/keys so the fact the hardware has had Win10 previously installed means it's "entitled" and doesn't care that the drive is from another laptop. FWIW I've successfully transferred a Win10 drive from HP to Lenovo.

Tell that to all the people whose scanners stopped working when Microsoft disabled them in a compulsory update. Or my Windows 7 PC where 'Windows Update' started permanently sucking up the whole of one core to do... some kind of stuff... until I downloaded a magic fix from Microsoft to make it work properly again.

I'm constantly being asked to help people fix their broken Windows PCs. Fortunately, since I mostly use Linux these days, I can just tell most of them 'sorry, I don't know about Windows'.

Weird. I put an M.2 SSD into my laptop to replace the hard drive, put the Ubuntu DVD in the DVD drive, booted up, clicked 'install' and it was done in half an hour.

And another. I dual boot my desktop with Serena and Win 7 and my laptop with Win 10 and Sylvia. Extremely easy to use and so far, all the sound and video utilities I want (for free) as opposed to what I had to pay to add to Windows.

I'm with PDR here - I know a lot of people like "working under the hood" and I'm willing to believe they may get a better product than vanilla W10 - but the same applies to cars

I COULD spend hours and have fun tweaking my motor - but I choose to get my kicks elsewhere and all I want is for it to start every morning. Not exciting but it works 99.9999% of the time

Same with computer systems - and I go back to ALGOL..................

Damn, I'm not used to people agreeing with me. Can I have another go at it?

:E

That's an excellent analogy. When I went to uni I had all the usual young man's aspirations - fame, fortune, fast cars and hot babes. But as I was an engineer by temperament as well as by education choices the fame, fortune and hot babes weren't an option so I was left with just the cars. I modified cars (ever seen what a Mk4 Triumph Spit is like with 200bhp? I still have the scars to prove it!), I had "special" cars (lotus elan S4SE with the 26R back end), and I built kit cars with moronically high power-weight ratios. I had a machine shop and used to get withdrawal symptoms if I spent more than 24 hours away from it. I always modified the engines of any car I owned, and usually had at least one spare engine so I could have one in the car, one being modified and (ideally) one rebuilt and ready for installation. There was the occasion when I dropped a valve on the way home, got towed in by the AA and did an engine swap in under 45 minutes making me only 15 minutes late picking up my blind date (she wasn't impressed) - that's a different story altogether.

In those days I was very familiar with the under-the-hood stuff with DOS and Windows. Part of my job was creating automated PC-based test and measurement systems for the NC machines, so I was writing low-level code in C and ASM86. The last one I was fully familiar with was WFWG3.11 - I could look at, tinker with and actually understand all those curious statements in the WIN.INI and SYS.INI, seeing a memory exclusion statement and thinking "Yes, of course it needs that".

But the arrival of Win95 coincided with my meeting a hot babe who was a particularly poor judge of character, and at that point the enthusiasm to learn a new OS and even the workshop withdrawal symptoms faded, and when we moved into a larger house to provide room for ensprogment the machine tools and car spares were sold off. Now that said sprogs have reached uni-stage I have re-established the workshop, but I'm no longer that interested on building cars or in computers as a hobby - they are just tools which I use. But I still have a life, and I don't feel the urge to waste any of it doing pointless under-the-hood messing about any more. YMMV.

I go back to commodore PETs, but I do remember at Uni the more complex assignments were done by punching a pile of cards and taking them over the the data-processing building to put them in the queue for running. And I amd still very much of the view that all proper engineers can write Fortran in ANY language...

PDR