Installing Windows is such a pain

September 23, 2014
3 min read

In the previous post I’ve wrote about hardware side of things when your hard drive fails. It’s definitely not the greatest experience in the world, as you realize you’ve lost all of your data. Fortunately, we live in the world full of clouds and the data is mostly safe. All of the photos, work documents and files for school were backed up to some kind of cloud solution. I could instantly remember couple of files I’ve lost, but not anything important.

How do you return everything back to normal? If you didn’t have some kind of hard drive clone (and I didn’t), you start by installing OS. Here Microsoft doesn’t make it easy, at least for me. In Latvia, installing Windows for most of the people is easy, you just download the copy you want with some sort of “activation” and install it, easy enough. I’ve went the legitimate rout. I’ve bought my laptop with Windows 7 and when 8 came out I’ve paid what was small amount then (about 30€) for the update. It seemed like a great deal at the time.

When you try to start from scratch, as I did, you can’t just install Windows 8 from scratch using your key, because your key is not good enough, it supports only updating from previous version of Windows. That means, I had to install Windows 7 first and then update it to Windows 8. Fortunately, I didn’t have to install all the updates for Windows 7 and could just go straight to upgrade. In addition, it’s worth mentioning, thanks to the speed of the SSD, it takes far less time than it used to, to install the OS.

Windows 8 is with us for a long time already and so it got many updates and there are some drivers updates, that means you have to download and install, in my case, 140 updates, before you can upgrade to Windows 8.1. That takes a long time. Nevertheless, tens of minutes and two or three restarts later you are ready to download Windows 8.1 upgrade. I’ve went to Windows Store app, where the big tile was waiting for me, but when I clicked “Download” it just showed an error message, which said something about not being able to download the update right now. Not very useful, considering the true reason of the message was not entering the code for the 2 factor authentication. How someone supposed to just know that is beyond my understanding. I’ve downloaded and installed Windows 8.1 and thought I could start downloading apps I use, but not too fast. There are couple more updates about 200MB in size. Why can’t they include all of the updates in to Windows 8.1 upgrade?

After you have your OS running, everything else is easy enough. Kudos to Microsoft for the new Office, all I had to do is go to the website and click Download button and in about 10-20 minutes I’ve had full Office suit running on my laptop, ready for typing this complaint. Clicking the second button, I’ve deauthorized previous install. Office 2013 is truly an outstanding product. 

Just do the backup. Right now!

September 22, 2014
3 min read

It started like an ordinary day. I was working on my laptop, connected to the big screen. Everything seemed fine when I turned it off and went for a walk. But then I’ve returned home and pressed the Power button on my laptop. BIOS started checking all the devices there are inside and stopped after it found processor. “That’s unusual” I though at the time and restarted the computer, thinking it was some kind of a bug. But this behavior persisted. The only good thing I could see – it wasn’t frozen, I pressed F2 and got to the BIOS settings screen and there was the answer. There was this word “None” right after “HDD:”. That couldn’t be good. As it turns out, it wasn’t good. That means SSD had died on me. I’ve purchased it more than a year before and it seemed to work just fine. There was just one unusual experience couple of months ago, when it did some kind of reset removing everything. The only difference between that time and yesterday was the price of the new SSD, as in both situations all the data was gone.

The SSD in question was Kingston V300 120GB Solid State Drive. I bought it on recommendation of my friend, who used it in many computers – his, clients and at work and never had a problem. And it was (and still is, as far as I can tell), the cheapest SSD on the market. This time I’ve decided to look at something else, I wasn’t ready to pay a lot more, but about 10 euros premium was fine for me. The other thought I had was upping the capacity to 240GB, but it meant doubling the price, not only the storage. Also, I wasn’t ever hitting the limit on the previous SSD. After looking for what was a very short time, I’ve decided to buy Samsung 840EVO 120GB SSD.

The first thing I’ve noticed was the package. It was much nicer than plastic Kingston one, which you have to battle with scissors. Then I’ve opened the package and got the SSD out, it felt much lighter than the Kingston one. I’ve later checked and it was indeed lighter. SSD by Kingston was 86 grams and Samsung one is 53. It may not seem as a big difference, but I think there is some kind of psychological border. Samsung’s SSD feels like it is a little empty plastic box. Of course, you won’t even notice the difference when you put it inside the laptop, it’s just an unusual feeling getting it out of the box.

There was also CD in the packaging, no idea where to put it as my laptop doesn’t have the drive. I believe everybody should stop putting CDs in the boxes, I know, the cost of including it is almost zero, but it’s pretty much useless.

After I’ve installed the drive, it was time to get the Windows up and running. And that’s whole different story for another post and I’ll leave it for tomorrow, probably.