one monkey typing

I've moved my main PC from Windows 10 (which I have run for about 2 years now) back to Windows 7. The two main reasons:

1. I can't stop it from rebooting for updates (it doesn't even really give much warning) which has resulted in ruined 3D prints (wasting hours of time and much filament) and aborting downloads that had in one case been going on for over a day.


2. I can't shut up Cortana. There's no facility for it. Even if I shut off ALL the Cortana options, it still pops up windows saying things like "I can tell you when you need to leave to make it to appointments" - windows that pop up when I do have appointments, leading me to believe that despite turning everything off, Cortana is still sending my personal information into the cloud.

There ARE things online about how to disable Cortana, but it apparently involves basically pithing Windows - Cortana is into the OS and now provides the basic search capabilities, so if you disable it, you're back to essentially Windows XP level of user experience. Ain't nobody got time for that.

Anyway, the only real reason I was on Windows 8.1 and 10 was to use Storage Spaces to mirror a large drive. After the last time Cortana bugged me, I decided it was worth $300 to me to shut it up, so I bought a Synology RAID box and one more 5T drives, bringing my total to three. In RAID5 mode that gives 10T of space. With that I was able to get a bunch of stuff that had been offline back online again.

I don't want to give the wrong impression. I think Windows 10 is a good operating system. Better than Windows 7. But the above baggage kills it. Dating a supermodel sounds like fun at first too, until she/he turns out to be insane or a complete idiot. Or worse yet, an Amway salesperson. Some things just can't be tolerated.

Anyway, back to Windows 7. Updating a fresh Windows 7 SP1 install has long been a problem due to it getting stuck in "Checking for updates..." for hours. There have been many fixes for this, along the lines of "install this KB update or that one and it'll be fixed." Well, whether by design or accident, as far as I can tell, none of those work anymore. I installed every KB update that was suggested as a fix for this issue, and then rebooted my machine and left it in "checking for updates." After 28 hours and no movement, I gave up on that.

I had previously tried running the April 2016 "all updates since SP1" update, but it said "does not apply to your computer." This time I read some more and a Reddit thread revealed that it meant "all except that one thing" - there is a prerequisite to running it. Good grief.

Anyway, I did the prereq, then installed the big one, then every rollup release up through December, and NOW Windows update works, finding an additional 54 updates. So finally, I think I have an up to date Windows 7 install to run for hopefully another 4 or 5 years. When I get to the point where 7 is no longer viable, I'm not sure where I will go. I've tried Linux and for my purposes, it's a complete non-starter. Every one of the 5 times that I have tried moving to Linux on the desktop in the past, I've spent FAR more time than I did here on Windows, and in the end it's always been useless, I wound up with a machine that I still couldn't actually get my work done on.

Anyway TL;DR, here's the sequence to get up to date on Windows 7 64 bit:
Install these things in this order:

• Windows 7 SP1 (or update to SP1 if your install media is that old)


• Windows6.1-KB3020369-x64.msu - prerequisite to the April 2016 rollup


• Windows6.1-kb3125574-v4-x64_2dafb1d203c8964239af3048b5dd4b1264cd93b9.msu April 2016


• Windows6.1-KB3156417-x64.msu May 2016


• (no June 2016 - it was superceded)


• Windows6.1-KB3172605-x64.msu July 2016


• Windows6.1-KB3179573-x64.msu August 2016


• Windows6.1-KB3185278-x64.msu September 2016


• Windows6.1-KB3185330-x64.msu October 2016


• Windows6.1-kb3197868-x64_b07be176e165c11b9ccbcf03d014b2aef9a514b6.msu November 2016


• Windows6.1-kb3207752-x64_ae76c47886acadcbe337b7b565f63f0991afc7be.msu December 2016


• Google for Windows 7 rollup (month year) for future security updates

Then run Windows Update. Once the above was done, I was able to run it quickly.

Also, unfortunately at this point it's probably a good idea to turn off automatic updates, because you never know, Microsoft could sneak down the pipes and start shoving Windows 10 down your throat in the middle of the night again without warning. Do remember to check at least once a month or whenever the internets make scary noises about vulnerabilities. Set a reminder in Google Calendar or whatever; be careful but don't become part of the problem.

And finally, get a disk imaging program - Macrium Reflect Free is good. Image your boot disk and keep it safe. Then if Microsoft does do something unpleasant to you, you can just restore the boot image immediately.

I'm doing a photo project and have to do some light editing and showing photos to others. My current software is extremely old and while they have been maintaining it, for whatever reason it's ludicrously slow. Flipping from one photo to another on a quad core modern machine with 8GB of RAM takes 2+ seconds. It's years past when I should have replaced it.

I looked around a bit and, surprisingly, decided on ACDSee Ultimate 9. It's very fast, has good organizational tools, and has enough functionality similar to Adobe Lightroom that I'll likely not need anything else to do the kind of editing that I do. The latest version even does layered editing.

Also I need to learn some 3D modelling software apart from OpenSCAD. It was tempting to try Solidworks since I can get a license via FIRST Robotics, but in the end I decided to play with Autodesk Fusion 360, it seems to be what all the cool Makers are using. Seems pretty powerful and a little more open than I was expecting.

My laptop came with a 750G drive, all one drive except for a boot partition (which probably contains an image recovery system, I guess), and a couple of small (15 and 30GB) partitions up high. That's 4 partitions so I couldn't make any more.

So I decided to try to do things the Windows 7 way and store all my data below "My Documents"

Over the weekend I got to where I just couldn't take it anymore. I want to know exactly where my data is at all times. I want a user area that I can write to, always. I don't want to have invisible soft links associated with my data. Most of all, I want to have a physically separate partition for user data, so that I can back up my C: drive once a week or so (full drive image) and if I ever get to where I have a non-viable Windows install for any reason (virus or just decay) (I've never had a virus but with XP decay set in about every 1.5 to 2.5 years) I can just re-image the C: drive on demand since there's never any data there to worry about. And I definitely do NOT want hundreds of directories with thousands of files with everything from CAD work files to video editing projects all below "My Documents."

Upon further examination, it turns out that the 30GB upper partition was an NTFS drive in an extended partition, just there to hold the installations for the software that the computer shipped with, and the drivers for all the devices (this is actually quite nice) so it was easy enough to resize the drives. Now I need to move my user data to D:

Neat, the power supply I picked out yesterday went on sale AND had a rebate start today, so $25 instead of $50. I was debating a full refresh versus just getting the thing going again, and had to step back and realize that this machine is at least twice the machine I actually need, so I should just get it going again. 4 cores and 4GB of RAM is vastly more than I need 98% of the time, and is perfectly adequate the rest of the time. Heck, 98% of the time the old single core machine with 1GB of RAM is plenty, though the RAM is a bit skinny.

Once I decided to just fix, I realized that all of the socket 775 / DDR2 mainboards used the Intel G31 chipset, and they all look like they were designed straight from the Intel Reference sheet, so it hardly matters which one I grab. I picked the ASRock at $40. There was a Jetway at $38 but bad reviews, and 4 or 5 others for between $45 and $90. I guess ASRock is Asus plus some other company merged. I'll give them a try.

I think this is the first time I've had a mainboard fail on a clone that I built. Up until now the only thing I've really ever had fail was equipment that came on a purchased PC. We had some RAM fail on the family's current Dell last year, and last week the power supply on it failed (this power supply is to replace that one, it's currently running an underpowered spare out of an old Compaq). I had a hard drive fail that shipped with a Compaq a few years back. I had a mainboard on a laptop fail once. We had the hard drive on Kate's laptop fail last year. I can't recall ever having any parts fail that I'd installed afterward on purchased PCs, or any on machines that I built, except if they had been damaged by external forces (lightning, dropping).

Totally failed to do anything with the concert video last night. The high def that I shot is about 300 MB per song, so it needed downconverting before going to YouTube (100MB upload limit). The backup computer has 1GB of RAM and a 900 MHz single core Athlon. It just refused.

I'll have a new video card for the better machine tomorrow, so hopefully the concert video will go up after that. I have to make a couple of DVDs of the whole thing too when I get the proper machine back in operation.

Died well and truly today. Diagnosed as a bad video card; any computer it is plugged into will no longer even power up (the fans just twitch a bit).

So I need to find a reasonable nVidia dual-DVI card. I've got a backup computer here so I will probably just order one from Newegg. The only danger is that this machine is running XP and I may remember how much I like XP more than 7 and want to stay.

We are going to be in Farmington this evening and Dearborn tomorrow, I could look around there but I doubt they'll beat Newegg prices. Probably the only place left is Best Buy anyway, and I wouldn't buy shoelaces from those crooks.

Feh, replacement cards are $80. I need to decide whether to do this or punt and pick up a laptop. I was looking at them this morning anyway, and for about $400 I can pick up a dual core machine that I think will work fine for the minimal amount of stuff I do these days, assuming I can do dual monitor.

Feh 2, laptops that can do dual montor are more like $800 than $400. Guess I'll get the card.

As discussed on the GT list, lastpass.com - a very well thought out and complete and seemingly pretty darn secure password storage system. Your passwords are stored at their server though in encrypted form (they get encrypted before leaving your PC, using a password that never leaves your PC, so they can't find out your passwords). There are plugins for all major browsers on all major platforms (Windows/Mac/Linux) plus versions for every current smartphone platform, plus portable versions for running from a thumb drive or locally (data still encrypted). There's a version in their paid package that supports passwords for non-web-based systems, though I just use an encrypted note to hold my truecrypt passwords.

If you are using a browser with the plug-in installed, and you're logged in (click the * icon, type in your master password, you're logged in), user IDs and passwords are just automatically entered for you. And there are multiple interfaces where you can see and edit passwords and other info, and again, the stuff is encrypted everywhere except on your own computer or device.

I have note entries with all the emergency "stolen card" info for all my credit cards. It has pre-defined forms for things like credit cards, driver's licenses, etc.

It can generate one-time passwords, I have 5 of them printed out and on a piece of paper in my wallet. With them I can access the site from a public PC like a library, and if the password is sniffed with a key sniffer, doesn't matter, the password only works one time. So if I lose my wallet I just need to get web access somewhere to get the info to cancel/replace cards.

You can set up common web form info such as shipping address, etc, and click on it to auto-fill as much form data as possible.

There's a bunch of other stuff too but I haven't gotten into it that far yet.

This article tells how to disable auto-sort in Windows 7.

I was also relieved to find that, when I googled for it, I found lots of people just as fed up with auto-sort as I am, for the same reasons.

The other thing I discovered today was how to get the icon size down farther. I already had them turned down to "small", but apparently Microsoft thinks I'm blind, "small" is still huge. But it turns out you can click on the desktop, hold down Ctrl, then use the scroll wheel to change icon size. It's now to a reasonable scale.

I've pretty much got Windows 7 looking like an actual operating system instead of a toy now, though it took a while.

The family PC started flaking this morning. It would boot usually and maybe run for an hour or two, but then reboot at random without warning.

Windows 7 even diagnosed the problem as probably memory related, and offered to run a memory test, which it rebooted into (in character mode video). It didn't find anything after about 15 minutes of testing (2 passes and it gives up).

Just in case it ever comes up, Windows 7's memory test is worthless. We DID have bad RAM, and Good Ole' Memtest86 found it in about 15 seconds. Narrowed it down to one DIMM, out of 4 identical 1GB Crucial sticks bought at the same time as 2G pairs. Now to get an RMA.

And if you ever need to test memory, use Memtest86, just download the free ISO. I imagine it'll work fine on Macs too, though I've never tried it.

FWIW, I did run Memtest for about 6 hours when I installed the RAM a few weeks ago. Apparently this is a case of infant mortality.

EDIT: Got the RMA. Part of Crucial's RMA process is to go download Memtest86 and run that, so you might as well get it over with.

I bought a cheap Rosewill wireless router for $25 a few months back to replace our ailing WRT-54GL. It's OK but I couldn't get it to run Tomato (it's advertised as doing so). This morning Newegg's flier advertised one of the nicer Asus routers for $38, so one of those is on the way. Those are pretty well reviewed as lasting a while.

For whatever reason, it seems to be the norm that wireless routers last 2 or 3 years and then die. I suspect mostly of bad capacitors. The old Netgear 514s that I bought several of all died of bad capacitors.