Posted on 01/05/2020 6:31:29 AM PST by CatOwner
I don’t need a disc drive. I did buy a portable one for this laptop. Was very inexpensive. I never use it. Good luck.
Thanks!
“ost powerful ThinkPad ever
Lenovo’s most powerful 17.3” mobile workstation
9th Gen Intel® Core™ or Intel® Xeon® multi-core processors
Most powerful NVIDIA® Quadro® RTX graphics
4K UHD and Dolby Vision™ display options
Tackles the most demanding workflows
Starting at:
$1,619.00”
“Not cheap” is an understatement...
backup, wipe, install fresh. not a big fan of in place upgrades
There was a time when new Dell computers contained a ton of trial programs often referred to as "crapware," leading to the popularity of the Dell Decrapifier program:
https://lifehacker.com/de-crapify-your-new-dell-166692
That article is from 2006. Those times are gone. Dell responded to the complaints by greatly reducing the amount of crapware on their computers. If you have to uninstall a few programs manually from your new computer, that will take MUCH less time and effort than installing to a blank drive. I uninstalled nothing from a new Dell Win 10 laptop I set up a few months ago.
The computer Dell ships you will basically work. This is a VERY GOOD THING! If esoteric drivers are required for your hardware, Dell will have already installed and tested them. With a just-Windows installation, you had better hope that Windows Update notices that a driver is missing, and that Windows Update locates the correct driver to download.
Dell will already have correctly partitioned and formatted both your (SATA) hard drive and your (SATA) SSD drive, and will configured your SSD as the boot device. Yes, you can do that yourself -- I have done it many times -- but there is no good reason for you to bother.
In short: Don't reinvent the wheel. There are serious downsides to installing Windows from scratch, and the upsides are not what they used to be.
As for setting up Windows 10 after the computer arrives... You will be asked many questions during setup. The one word to remember is "No."
If you want for Windows 10 to look like older versions of Windows, the venerable "Classic Shell" program still works in 2020, though its author, Ivo Beltchev, has abandoned the project. Classic Shell has a fork, "Open Shell," that is still being maintained. Eventually the avalanche of new Windows code will break Classic Shell, and when that happens I hope that Open Shell will still work.
If you are not familiar with Win 10, and you want to be immediately productive instead of being stuck at the bottom of a learning curve, install Open Shell.
After Open Shell is installed and you need help how to do something in Win 10 that is not in the menus, type your key words in the search box in the lower left.
U have it exactly!
Except to be sure on the original Windows Key on his new laptop.......discover this with Magic Jellybean and email it to yourself.
Windows Key should be embedded in the BIOS so he probably won’t need it....And his Win 10 from MIcrosoft will activate automatically. But I still want to know it! It might be needed!
Several of you are more knowledgeable than I.
Anyway, I did several Win 7 to 10 updates back when MS advised they were free. No problems, other than a bit of a learning curve with 10, and a couple programs stopped working - one in particular, Wavosaur, that was a very good fit for me in terms of capability vs. complexity. But, that’s a minor issue now, because today I tried upgrading my “main” machine (Win 7 Pro) as I was discussing with 100American above (also recommended by CNET as recently as yesterday), and...
BLAMMO. The 1st attempt failed & advised to try again. I did, but then I was advised updates were needed (eh, I’d just run them yesterday) — when I then went to restart the machine it would not even get past BIOS. The error message says the Boot Configuration Data file is missing required information, and to retry with the System Repair Disk, but, the System Repair Disk (I have a new one and an old one original for this machine from HP) do not do anything. I just get the same error message again. I took a look in the BIOS and don’t see anything wrong - resetting to factory defaults has no effect, and neither does changing anything else.
I DID back up all my data and can “rebuild” my entire folders & programs structure on my reserve / lower use machine (gets a little messy due to other data / folders / programs already on the reserve machine) - dang - that’s gonna be a 2 day project. Plus, I made the mistake of also using a Dell utility to back up my wife’s Dell machine, some time back, so, now the external backup drive has some idiotic ultra-hidden-I-can’t-find-it automatically executing-repairs-on-startup-and-make-loop-only-exitable-by-restarting file on it when connected to other machines: I darn well have to be sure not to somehow get THAT crap on my reserve machine...
Any advice is appreciated. Except that I won’t shoot myself. Am already past that phase. (And my wife gave me a hug.) :-)
I think this was similar to the message a coworker (non-tech-type) had with the December updates after updating to 1909 on her Toshiba laptop. Ultimately, after our main PC installer took a stab at it that morning, he turned it over to me around lunchtime. I worked on it for several hours trying to repair/rebuild the boot files and I couldn’t get it to take. Ultimately, I reinstalled Windows 10 from a USB and was able to keep her user files in place but it didn’t keep the installed programs.
You could try and get a clean Windows 10 ISO/DVD/USB and try to repair install and leave programs and files in place. Next option is to reinstall 10 and leave user files and programs in place.
Ironically my Yoga 910 laptop takes freaking 8 minutes to boot after the December update. My desktops PCs are fine though they had completely clean installs using a 1909 image.
Sorry I can’t be of more help.
If you’ve upgraded you probably need to go to Windows “Recovery” and go from there.
Since you have everything backed up (smart), I would do a clean install
Download Windows 10 onto a new or empty 8GB or larger USB stick and boot up the machine you want to reload it on and go from there.
I don’t know what happened, could be a bootloader issue or even your hard drive died on you.
Thanks - I can make a bootable USB flash drive on the reserve machine, but I don’t know if that’s going to be any more accessible than the DVD drive. I’ve never even heard of an instance where the DVD drive would not “go” after an upgrade (etc.) attempt, or any other OS failure. The DVD drive, SSD, and HD were all working just fine up to that point.
Looking online, instructions to make a bootable WIN 7 flash drive look fairly complex. Maybe I’ll try Win 10 1st and see what happens, or see if I can make “just” a Win 7 repair USB drive.
I can’t even get close to that. The machine stops @ the error message, and is then totally unresponsive, except it turns itself off a couple minutes later.
I can get into the BIOS early on by hitting F10, but nothing I do in BIOS has any effect. In all instances even attempting to boot off a bootable DVD disk fails.
The corrupted(?) BCD file DOES reside on the HD, but even if the HD failed, why does the machine not boot off the bootable DVD repair disk? That has me totally flummoxed.
“even attempting to boot off a bootable DVD disk fails.”
Woah!
Beyond me these days! I hope someone can help you.
If you have tried this already the please disregard. In order to boot off a DVD you often have to either pull up the boot up menu or tell BIOS to check the DVD drive (or USB) as a boot device before the HDD\SSD.
The DVD player DOES appear to be reading the repair disk, but with no effect.
Yes, I made the DVD drive the top item on the boot order in the BIOS.
No effect on the error message / problem.
I even rechecked the BIOS to make sure the DVD player as 1st choice “took”. It did.
How the bleep can a failed upgrade do THAT?
Or, should I say, how can it do THIS?
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