God I hate windows.
The guy had put in AVG & CCleaner from somewhere it kept opening window after window - couldn’t do squat. So I msconfig’d to start just basic
Of course when rebooted, his PIN no longer worked and he’s what’s a MSoft account…
Reboot w a stick, won’t let me (netuser /add) as it oartially boots into his acct.
So looks like backup files and fresh install - hope he remembers his other passwords!
Grrrrr discover my big USB backup drive has left the planet entirely and the little one decided to fail so I had to reconfigure my USB-NVME one from ext4… 8:00 pm, now I csn get started…
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My daughter has a perfectly good Dell laptop with 16 GB RAM that had Windows 10 on it. When I was in PG I put Ubuntu 24.04 on it(Winders 10 expiring in October). I went into the BIOS to disable secure boot and of course Bitlocker kicks in preventing the unit to boot up. I hate Bitlocker. I enabled legacy boot and was able to get around it to install Ubuntu. I also hate Windows.
You can run Windows 11 on it no problem. Just back up any important files and wipe it from scratch. Use Rufus to create a Windows 11 USB that ignores requirements, etc.
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I’ll try that when I’m in town again in October if she wants Winders again. Thanks! 
OMG that guy’s PC reported it didn’t meet Win 11 CPU specs with a 7th gen i5…
the guy said no to Linux as he’s too old to learn a new OS. He’s gonna do some learnin’ whether he wants to or not with 11…
Yeah, those specs mean nothing. Rufus can override it.
I have Windows 11 running on stuff that’s 15 years old.
Meanwhile, this is how my morning’s going:
Just a load average of 903. No big deal.
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Alright. I did some digging and rufus seems straight forward enought.
Very cool! Is there any chance that M$ will play the a$$hole card and say: “Hey you’re not running Win 11 on approved hardware so we’re going to stop sending you updates.”
Yup. But it’s not because of the hardware. It’s because older versions of Windows 11 are just not getting updates, so you need to install a newer version when it prompts you.
There’s been 4 major versions of Windows 11 already. And the first two, 21H2 and 22H2, aren’t receiving updates. So it prompts you to install a newer version. No big deal. But if it’s older hardware, you just need to download the newer ISO and do the Rufus thing again. You can do an upgrade install.
Once it’s installed, it doesn’t care about hardware.
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Rufus pushed that nonsense out of the way. Unfortunately had to do a clean install to make it so. Got his docs. pix. etc,
Any idea how to pull the passwords/bookmarks out of appdata? I couldn’t run Win10 to export them from Edge.
Sad how no one backs things up or remembers their passwords. Two calls today driving to PG, where phone magically required passwords out of the blue.
So I tried the supposed trick of using ms-cxh: localonly on a brand new Asus all in one. As soon as I pressed enter it instantly rebooted and fired up to a Defaultuser0 login with no known password. No chance to add a user at all. Was stuck in that loop until I did a total reset.
They didn’t want me to use my Rufus stick and risk losing their valuable OEM junkware.
Didn’t know what their MS account was or what it was but they called their daughter at work and she had stored the old fool’s info on her phone.
Where’d the Mail icon go from the taskbar? Hunted it down and fired it up and yet another loop that said the account already existed but wouldn’t load his mail. Had to show him outlook.com webmail for the hotmail account he’s used since about 1999.
Doing it as a freebie for seniors. When I realized I’d been there 6 hours explaining Google was a search engine and the browsers were Edge and Firefox, as I was about to leave they insisted I take $100 for transferring all their files and web passwords, spending so much time with them, the last thing they asked was to show them again how to get to Google so they could use the Internet…
They also went Starlink and I could not believe their new machine was as slow loading as their old machine was. It speed tested 650K to 2.5 Mb… he’d just put the dish outside, no one told him you had to aim it.
Pulling my hair out, I told him there’s an iPhone app (no one told me!) and showed him it on my iPhone. I didn’t do anything other than open it to show him and when I’d loaded all the stuff off the external ba-ding, the page snapped up and speedtest was over 250 Mb
BTW the mail kept failing with a Onedrive full mssg and an endless MANAGE - BUY MORE loop. Had to use File Explorer, go to Onedrive and delete stuff one screen at a time for hours.
Of course One Drive, Copilot, Teams, Macafee are trashed now, Notifications offed and Privacy all No.
So I’m driving to PG the next day and realize I didn’t set up his printer! I spent 1/2 hour showing him how to clean the heads so he could print a medical form before I even began backing up and installing his own printer. No call, so his daughter must’ve come over and figured out that ADD PRINTER that old people can’t find.
OMG I tell you it was difficult to not to just buy that Macbook in PG and come home and Frisbee my i7 Win11 laptop.
Speaking about Starlink, I was in an online war with a local gamer kid. I was simply trying to say $150 a month was too damn much for most people to pay and that despite how he’d heard the dish was free, I dared him to go to Bestbuy or Costco and just grab one off the pile listed at $499 and walk out the door with it.
He insisted cable was shit because once it was out all day (a logging truck took out the fibre outside PG) and he “only” got 600Mb downloads on his Gig plan. 600 isn’t good enough, eh?
Now in ALL the speed tests I’ve even done on ppl’s Starlink I’ve seen about 250 kicking up to 300Mb reported. Anyone actually get better than that?
I have no regrets at all buying the 15 inch macbook air for my wife. She loves it. I’m completely done with M$. She’s using her mac and I use Linux. When one of my Linux units goes I’ll replace it with a mac.