New Windows 7 install

[www.GymRatZ.co.uk]

Hope all I can still see here (not filtered out) are keeping well. Just catching up after time off doing never ending D.I.Y. projects.

I had/have a 10 year old Samsung "all in one" P.C. like a huge tablet on legs. Originally installed with Windows 8.1 which was a disaster so I installed Linux which was an even bigger disaster! The only way it was useable was to boot into safe "graphics mode" otherwise it would divide the screen into 6 teeny squashed screens and as much as I searched and tried to configure it to over-ride it's "I know best" settings, or no matter what variety of Linux I tried nothing worked, it was unusable and it didn't have the old windows serial number or a physical W 8.1 install disk, and the recovery partition was "removed" by Linux. (my doing). Besides which The Ham Radio prog. I use for logging contacts is Windows only so for the "radio shack" P.C. Windows was the only option.

I still have several windows 7 Pro installation discs as I still run W7 on 3 main PCs at work and home.

To cut a long story short, last night I installed W7 from the disk and used one of those "found on-line" W7 Pro 64bit serial numbers and blow me, it worked without the slightest complaint.

Downsides... I had to step back into the 90's to try and find drivers for all the hardware that wasn't recognised by W7 including WiFi, USB, LAN and something else but once it was hooked up to internet it found

166 essential Windows updates worth over 1.5GB and kept its self busy overnight.

Today it's rocking along perfectly although it keeps nagging me that a HDD failure is imminent so a 500GB SSD to replace the spinner and it looks like a winner.

:)

Only problem with W7 is many sorftware folks aren't supporting it now. Brave Browser has dropped it, and ProtonMail desktop "Proton Drive" is also W10 and newer, but those are minor inconvieniences compared to having a formerly dead" PC having a new lease of life and significant purpose once again.

Cheers Pete

[Theo]

Supposedly there are Ways, although I'm not clear if this is hacking the registration or just patching the 'activate now' feature (I think the former?):

Theo

[www.GymRats.uk]

Thanks Paul. it found another GB of updates yesterday. I also let it run through a full backup and create a system image on the NAS device. No data on the machine to worry about but I'll take another system image now it's got more updates and patches, drivers and stuff. That was the biggest problem. I had to use a USB LAN interface as neither WiFi nor LAN onboard devices had drivers.

I do wonder how true the windows reporting of failing HDD is or whether that because it can't find the original recovery partition it might be flagging up a fault.

Either way, the cost of a 500GB SSD is between £20 and £30 now so no reason not to.

Cheers Pete

[www.GymRats.uk]

I did but didn't want to spend money on W10 if the hardware wasn't suitable and these days it seems physical install disks don't exist so I'd still have to get the machine on-line with a working operating system.

No the touch screen didn't work under Linux but when installing from W7 disk only the USB mouse worked and the USB keyboard didn't but the touch screen worked perfectly so that helped. Some issue with "host controller" or something and USB hub all flagging up with unable to start or not recognised.

Bizzarely I had to use a the XUbuntu USB drive to boot up the machine into safe graphics "live" mode (not an option once Linux was installed to HDD) so I could run hwinfo --short from terminal to find exactly what I needed to get drivers for. So Linux did have a useful purpose.

I have a mini p.c. fanless Intel NUC also around 10 + years old that was updated from W7 to W10 a number of years ago and that has been faultless.

Last nights wave of updates on the new-old W7 machine added Microsoft Edge but that crashed the system with a blank white screen and the first ever "Blue Screen (Of Death) crash report I've seen since windows 95 so something wasn't happy.

Cheers Pete

[www.GymRats.uk]

That's what I would have done but W10 was a few years away at the time and no-one was using the PC (family machine) as W8.1 was such a horrendous cacophany of flashing tiles and invasive media that it was almost impossible to do the simplest of tasks so I installed Ubunto and it was fine for a few years then something changed with a later Linux update and it was never to work again.

I did wonder if I could go from W7 to W10 after install success but now it's all but working on W7 unless something major stops working I'll stick with it. I have 3 active W7 machines and 2 on W10 so there will come a time but for now all is good. :)

[SteveW]

You can use any Windows machine and Microsoft's Media Creation Tool to download and write an installation USB or disk and then boot from that (via BIOS options) to install on the target machine.

[John Rumm]

Normally it is because the drive SMART data is indicating something out of order, like a reallocated sector count...

IME worth taking notice of before is too late.

Indeed... I have a shed load of HDDs in good working order that will likely never get used for just that reason.

[www.GymRatZ.co.uk]

Thanks John, I'll get on and order one up now.

Still only got Windows and Firefox installed on it though so I'd best do it befoer I install too much else. :)

Cheers Pete