Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.
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@Lorne-Kates said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
- disable the USB ports. With a soldering iron, if necessary
Without breaking the warranty seal?
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@FrostCat said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
@Lorne-Kates said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
try to use a computer without a mouse
If only (1) Windows still is technically usable without a mouse, at least mostly, and (2) MouseKeys didn't exist.
Yes, Windows is technically usable without a mouse. I can go blazing fast in Windows keyboard only.
Do you think Microstore Sales Drones can do that?
And yes, Windows installer can technically be done without a mouse. But it's been getting more and more difficult as the assumption more and more becomes "everyone has a mouse and graphics is pretty".
And again-- do you really think a minimum-wage earning Mizzysoft front-line sales clerks are going to know anything other than "CLICK Next To Continue Until Windows Is Installed"?
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@Scarlet_Manuka said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
@Lorne-Kates said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
- disable the USB ports. With a soldering iron, if necessary
Without breaking the warranty seal?
You're trading in the computer anyways. Who cares about warranty? Do the MS rules say anything about that?
Even if so-- yes, yes you can easily break a USB port without breaking the warranty seals. That's-- like that's kinda the entire point of a warranty.
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@Lorne-Kates Yes, the rules do require that. You even quoted my summary of them upthread which says so. I've bolded the relevant part for you:
Guess they thought of that one. (It also has to basically be in full working order, with all parts and accessories, and not have any modifications or a broken warranty seal.)
Yes, anyone can accidentally break a machine without breaking the warranty seal. We're talking about deliberate damage designed to make a port seem functional but actually not work, and I don't think you can do that as easily without opening the case.
The full working order bit would probably rule out the USB shenanigans approach anyway, though I'd have to check the fine print again to see exactly what the original wording was and I CBA at the moment. Probably you'd need to do something sneakier than just disabling the whole port, like writing a driver for it that misinterprets or drops every tenth byte of data or something.
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@Scarlet_Manuka said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
Yes, anyone can accidentally break a machine without breaking the warranty seal. We're talking about deliberate damage designed to make a port seem functional but actually not work, and I don't think you can do that as easily without opening the case.
Stick a hot soldering iron in there and jiggle it. Something will give eventually.
But if they're going to use vague terminology like "full working order" then fuck that rigged game.
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@Lorne-Kates Seriously, read with a little more attention to detail.
I just said, in the post you replied to, that I'd have to check what the precise wording of the part was that I had summarised as "full working order" in order to see whether the USB stuff would pass muster (and couldn't be bothered finding it). You can blame Microsoft for a lot of things, but don't blame them for my paraphrasing of their fine print.
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@Lorne-Kates I went to see if I could find the page with the actual wording, but since the offer is closed, the link in the winbeta.org article that previously went to the offer details now goes to a generic "find a Microsoft Store" kind of page.
However, I did see this in the comments on the winbeta.org article. Not sure if this was just one person's bad experience or representative, but for what it's worth:
Ellie Rivers • 12 days ago
I took the challenge today and was told BS. By the clause "one
eligible PC that meets Window 10 upgrade requirements" they don't mean
that your computer has to be able to run windows 10 or even can be
upgraded with some work to windows 10, they mean that your computer has
to have no problem upgrading to windows 10. This basically means,
trouble upgrading to windows 10, oh you don't meet the challenge
requirements! If you do meet the challenge requirements then your
computer will upgrade to windows 10 without no problem by definition.
This challenge is rigged so NO ONE will ever get a free laptop -_- And
the customer service is insulting if you ask about the challenge
insinuating you're only in it for the free laptop in a bad way.So, yeah, pretty much even more of a rigged game than was immediately obvious. I'm sure this doesn't surprise anybody much.
ETA: Another commenter reports his experience as "oh, your video card doesn't work any more, but the integrated graphics do, so the upgrade was successful". And then apparently his optical drives stopped working at a later update. MS's suggestion was to create a new user account to see if that magically fixes things...
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@Lorne-Kates said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
And yes, Windows installer can technically be done without a mouse.
Keyboard navigation while installing Windows 10 on my living room PC worked pretty well. I didn't have much of a choice once it got to the part where you turn off all of the stuff Microsoft wants to do automatically; our TV doesn't sync properly to whatever resolution the installer uses, so I was without reliable mouse usage until I could log into Windows and get the output fixed.
I agree with you about the store drones not doing much beyond clicking "Next". Brings back memories of working at an OfficeMax when Windows 95 was released: people would call the computer department to ask about installation problems, but all we could do is refer them to Windows tech support as we didn't know anything about it either.
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@Lorne-Kates said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
How to get a free Dell 15 laptop thing.
[snipped]
There is easier way.
- Go buy an old Samsung laptop that runs Win7.
- Profit!
I think that because these Samsung laptops do not have Win10 drivers available, literally any of them should fail to upgrade to Win10.
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@Lorne-Kates I think blocking installation with faulty hardware won't count. You can just intentionally overheat and fry the CPU of some laptop to cause similar effect.
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@cheong No, because the promotion specified that the computer had to be running Windows 8 (successfully). According to the linked article, most of the Samsung Win 8 computers would upgrade successfully to Win 10, it's only the Win 7 ones that had a high rate of incompatibility issues.
That said, if you had gotten one with Win 7 and shoved Win 8 on it, and it still ran OK with 8, you could have tried it. Though chances are you'd have just gotten it back with Win 10 sort-of working.
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@Lorne-Kates said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
Do you think Microstore Sales Drones can do that?
I dunno, probably some can.
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@cheong said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
literally any of them should fail to upgrade to Win10.
...then none of them would be eligible for the challenge, though.
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@flabdablet said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
Rolling release distros:
Sometimes rub my the wrong way. But I get the appeal.
INB4
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@boomzilla So far I've only got one package (keepassx) pinned.
I do have to admit, though, that unexpectedly having GNOME 2 ripped away and replaced with the execrable GNOME 3 did come as a shock.
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@flabdablet said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
I do have to admit, though, that unexpectedly having GNOME 2 ripped away and replaced with the execrable GNOME 3 did come as a shock.
Yeah, I'm facing the same thing with KDE 4 to 5 "upgrade."
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@FrostCat said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
because they'll have to pay for an upgrade.
Unless they decide to start using assistive technologies.
Filed under: I use the screen magnifier from time to time, and the on-screen keyboard occasionally, so I qualify.
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@boomzilla they fixed the
libnotify
compatibility issues recently, so other than aesthetics I really can't think of a reason not to upgrade. I also like it way more than KDE4. YMMV, as per usual.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
they'll cry fowl
shame. if they were smart like a they would eat the instead of crying at it.
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Speaking of Windows 10 - I found last night that the upgrade on our office computer apparently ate all our music files. The main documents folder was OK (or we would have noticed it much earlier), but everything that was in My Music, My Pictures, or My Videos is gone. (And no, they're not still in Windows.old or anywhere else on the drive; I checked.)
Fortunately we don't store our photos in My Pictures, so we still have them. :) We did lose all the stuff we've scanned in, but that's basically stuff we didn't care about anyway. Stuff we cared about would have been put under My Documents and that area is OK.
The backup I did before upgrading was a system image one, so to get my music back off that I'd have to backup the current system, restore the Windows 7 one, copy the files onto USB, restore the Windows 10 backup, and then copy the files from the USB. This is probably not worth it, given that most of the music is just rips of physical CDs we own and the majority of it is copied on USB drives for use in the car. My own ones are mostly also on my work PC – I lost my MP3 player a few weeks ago, otherwise I'd just copy them back from that.
There are a few that I digitised from cassette tape that I may not have another copy of, and the tapes are gone now because that was the point of digitising them. Not the end of the world, but it does seem like an unnecessary problem. Would it have been so hard to check that the files were copied to the new folder correctly before deleting them? (I'm guessing that was the problem, somehow, but who knows.)
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Your files will be right where you left them :)
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@Scarlet_Manuka said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
My Music, My Pictures, or My Videos
What are those? Was this PC running XP originally?
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@Magus Had to do a clean install of Windows 7 because it wouldn't upgrade from XP. So the old structure is all from 7.
FWIW these folders also exist on my Win 7 Pro machine at work. They're subfolders of My Documents.
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@bb36e said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
Your files will be right where you left them :)
Apparently, something went wrong. :(
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@Scarlet_Manuka said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
Apparently, something went wrong.
:<b></b>(
now that's a sneaky way to keep nodebb from emojifying your smileys! I've been inserting zero-width spaces, but this seems much easier.
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@Scarlet_Manuka said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
The backup I did before upgrading was a system image one, so to get my music back off that I'd have to backup the current system, restore the Windows 7 one, copy the files onto USB, restore the Windows 10 backup, and then copy the files from the USB.
You should be able to restore individual files from an image backup IIRC.
Imma try it though, just so I'm speaking from my nose.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
@Scarlet_Manuka said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
The backup I did before upgrading was a system image one, so to get my music back off that I'd have to backup the current system, restore the Windows 7 one, copy the files onto USB, restore the Windows 10 backup, and then copy the files from the USB.
You should be able to restore individual files from an image backup IIRC.
Imma try it though, just so I'm speaking from my nose.
Yeah, in theory if you have permission to enter into the WindowsImageBackup folder of wherever you backed up the PC to, it should consist of .vhdx files which you can just mount (using the Disk Management tool) and recover stuff from there.
Snapshot of an in-progress backup I'm making to test:
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so can we finally close this thread? or will there be a surprise free upgrade period coming soon?
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@Lorne-Kates said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
And yes, Windows installer can technically be done without a mouse. But it's been getting more and more difficult as the assumption more and more becomes "everyone has a mouse and graphics is pretty".
Oh it's very easy to use without a mouse. I do it all the time.
Once you boot Windows, life is a bit tougher. But the installer is super-accessible.
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@Magus said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
What are those?
Those are the made-up names that Windows still displays for those folders because of the desktop.ini files they contain.
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@Scarlet_Manuka said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
@bb36e said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
Your files will be right where you left them :)
Apparently, something went wrong. :(
ಠ_ಠ
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@Scarlet_Manuka said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
So the old structure is all from 7.
FWIW these folders also exist on my Win 7 Pro machine at work. They're subfolders of My Documents.Very odd. They were supposed to be
C:\Users\you\Documents
,C:\Users\You\Music
, andC:\Users\You\Pictures
unless your IT did something completely bizarre. And I don't get how copying the documents folder could lose subfolders either...
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@Magus said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
@Scarlet_Manuka said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
So the old structure is all from 7.
FWIW these folders also exist on my Win 7 Pro machine at work. They're subfolders of My Documents.Very odd. They were supposed to be
C:\Users\you\Documents
,C:\Users\You\Music
, andC:\Users\You\Pictures
unless your IT did something completely bizarre. And I don't get how copying the documents folder could lose subfolders either...I think there's Documents the library and Documents the folder, and also My Documents somewhere out there junctioned for legacy purposes. It's all rather confusing really.
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@Maciejasjmj said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
library
This.
My guess is that they are still on disk but the library pointing to them is missing or pointing to a different folder.
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@FrostCat said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
@cheong said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
literally any of them should fail to upgrade to Win10.
...then none of them would be eligible for the challenge, though.
At least the Win10 upgrade assistant said these laptops are fine to upgrade to Win10. :P
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I'm surprised it's so low given how much they tried to push it...
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@Luhmann said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
the library pointing to them
Yeah, upgrading 7 -> 10 really fucks up your Libraries. I had a whole setup where I had some network drives included in my Libraries and it just barfed over the whole thing.
I fixed it by buying a new PC
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@Maciejasjmj said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
I think there's Documents the library
Yes.
@Maciejasjmj said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
and Documents the folder
Yes.
@Maciejasjmj said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
and also My Documents somewhere out there junctioned for legacy purposes
Not unless you or your IT forces there to be.
@Maciejasjmj said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
It's all rather confusing really.
Not really, no.
I just checked in 7 at work: the folder locations in Documents includes 'My Documents' which is just the normal User\Documents folder. The subfolders have been dead for a long time.
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@Magus said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
Not unless you or your IT forces there to be.
See, it says "My Pictures" right here:
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@Yamikuronue Yes, which is exactly what I said, and is also notably not a 'My Pictures' subdirectory in a 'My Documents' folder, also like I said.
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@Magus said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
@Maciejasjmj said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
and also My Documents somewhere out there junctioned for legacy purposes
Not unless you or your IT forces there to be.
I didn't do anything the slightest bit unusual when setting up the Windows 7 VM I took this screenshot from:
Those "My *" folders show that way in Explorer because they contain desktop.ini files designed to make Explorer use different names for them. The actual underlying names are new-style:
So far so good.However, if you turn on displaying hidden and system files, you get this:
Those things that look like shortcuts are actually junctions:
Everywhere the pre-Vista tree had a default spot for a special folder - like C:\Documents and Settings, My Documents, Application Data, Local Settings and so forth, the post-Vista tree has one of these hidden+system junctions for compatibility with the kind of badly written shit code that blakey regularly and rightly flames.Try to open one and you get this:
That's because the NTFS ACL on all those junctions is set up like this by default:
It's done that way so that attempting to open C:\Documents and Settings\Admin\My Documents\My Pictures\Awesome.jpg will actually succeed and open C:\Users\Admin\Pictures\Awesome.jpg instead, but search and backup programs unaware that junctions are a thing don't see infinitely nested folders when they try to walk the tree (some of the compatibility junctions create cycles by linking to parent and grandparent folders). There's at least one utility available to help long suffering sysadmins fix those permissions after curious fiddlers break them.
Again: this is not something that IT does for fun; it's been completely standard since Vista, and as far as I know the whole mess is still standard in 10.
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@Luhmann said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
@Maciejasjmj said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
library
This.
My guess is that they are still on disk but the library pointing to them is missing or pointing to a different folder.You've been OneDrive'd! (Seriously, fuck that shit OD. I DON'T want my doc/etc folders automatically associated. That shit stays local until I share it.)
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@flabdablet And they still aren't subfolders of My Documents. So I don't know why you bothered writing all of that. Moron.
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@Magus said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
@Maciejasjmj said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
and also My Documents somewhere out there junctioned for legacy purposes
Not unless you or your IT forces there to be.
@flabdablet said in Pressure to upgrade to Windows 10 ratchets up. AGAIN.:
Those things that look like shortcuts are actually junctions:
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@error And they aren't in the My Documents folder. I don't care what they are. I said "These do not exist in this location" and you guys are saying "Well ACTUALLY they do:" and showing a different folder. Good job.
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@Magus Not sure if or just reading comprehension fail from @Maciejasjmj's post. "Somewhere out there" doesn't mean "subfolder of My Documents."
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@error I don't care about his post. You're trying to argue with me, yes? Try arguing with things I actually say.
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@Magus You said it in direct response to him, even quoting his post directly, so yes, that is the context in which I will judge it.
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@Magus you're replying to the wrong person, @Scarlet_Manuka mentioned subfolders but most people missed that, and @Maciejasjmj didn't mention subfolders.