Posted on 09/17/2025 10:49:42 AM PDT by Paul R.
Oh, boy. My Dell Win 10 Pro desktop suffered a MS Update last night, and won't reboot. None of the Dell repair / restore options have worked so far: I'm holding off on a complete "recovery" which would involve repartitioning the boot SSD & losing all the data on it, then reinstalling the OS, etc. Luckily, all my documents, images, etc., are saved to another HD, but, I would lose the programs on the boot drive and have to reinstall them, which means losing lots of settings and so on. So far as I can tell, I may be able to pull the boot / OS / programs drive and extract my Brave and Chrome bookmarks (I have a ton of them), and, I MAY be able to retrieve the Windows and Libre Office dictionaries, which would be hugely helpful.
Meanwhile... It appears the USB (flash) boot drive I'd made ages ago has become corrupted. No problem, I'll just download a fresh copy of Win 10 Pro and save it to an unused USB Flash drive, using my Win 11 laptop, right? Well, wrong. The process hangs at the actual download step where the little progress notification shows up. Progress shows "0%" and stays there, for over an hour.
I tried reformatting the flash drive to exFAT, no dice. I tried a different (new) flash drive, no dice.
What the heck? Microsoft says nothing about this support already being ended, and all the steps up to this point work fine.
I am just saying what worked for me.
Wow. Not providing further updates, support, and such is one thing. Actually disabling the computers is quite another.
I’d better tell wifey she’s gonna have to bring her work laptop (Win 11 Pro) home from work from now on. (She teaches at a local Catholic school & does a lot of the work @ home — her average work day is 6:30 am (head in) to ~10:00 pm (sleep) with breaks for meals.) I just now paused her desk machine’s updates for the maximum (35 days).
I have one other old Win 10 Pro laptop to pause updates for now, too. My other old machines are Win 7, XP, and even one DOS machine still going out in my lab, and they do not need to be connected to the web.
Good God, Microsoft is going to have literally hundreds of thousands, probably millions of people a LOT meaner than me, mad at them. How on Earth is this a good long term strategy?
Oh, I would normally agree, and have done same, but, this looks to be a lot more insidious, the further I get in to it.
:-(
I was just thinking I’m going to HAVE to devote some serious time to put Linux on an old machine and freaking learn it. This Microsoft crap is just too much... She won’t be happy, as she’s having a hard time just adjusting to me slowing down as I get old. (Me too!) :-(
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Go to Amazon, get a refurb office desktop, load linux Mint on it. They’re cheap, $150 - $180.
I have four refurbs here of varying ages (out to 8 years) and have had to replace one hard drive. All still working.
There are a whole lot of cows going to come home soon. Folks are waiting until the last minute to prepare for it... MS tried to deny it, but one of their Win 11 updates a couple months ago was killing some solid state drives according to the gaming community.
Apparently their business model is to test how much abuse their own customers will put up with... And folks continue to do so because they fear change. They tend to stick to that same old family recipe even though it has been absolutely terrible for 50 years...
It bewilders me when there are indeed better options if they don’t mind a minimal amount of personal effort to do it.
Good God, Microsoft is going to have literally hundreds of thousands, probably millions of people a LOT meaner than me, mad at them. How on Earth is this a good long term strategy?
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They’re locked into the microsoft silo.
You at least are willing to poke around elsewhere.
A couple of Linux Mint machines here, wife is on one and she’s happy I don’t have to fix “Stuff” anymore.
Also have three FreeBSD machines but you ain’t ready for that yet (grin).
I rather liked Win 7 Pro, although there were a couple things... (Most of which continued from there on.)
Thanks for the advice on storage, but I have a couple extra SSD’s, and a small pile of USB flash drives up to 128 GB. Storage should not be a problem so long as I can do the retrievals / backups without issues.
Oh, I have plenty of old machines around.... :-)
Oh, I can agree with that last...!
Maybe daughter-san (I have a college age daughter despite my age) can take on FreeBSD first.
Linux Mint is almost just like Win 7. So you should be able to fly right away then. All the folders are the same, Documents, pics, etc. All the right click menus are the same... Copy, paste, open with, properties, compress, Etc. Same drag and drop features, Etc. It will feel and operate like Win 7 right off the bat.
Now here is the cool thing. It only happened to me once but it was my own fault. But if you end up in the same situation you are in right now with Linux, all you have to do is boot into that initial stick you made and select repair mode. It will go and self diagnose your main system partition for any issues and then repair them without the need to reinstall the whole system, it just fixes only what it determines needs to be fixed and leaves all your personal/home files and partition alone.
That self diagnosis and self repair is the best feature of Linux I have found yet... Why MS stuck with wipe and reload all these years I have no clue...
Here’s a question for anyone still checking this thread:
Windows Update says the download of the “latest updates” (would be the update to the copy of Win 10 Pro on my desktop’s E: [data]drive) made it to 87% downloaded B4 I got the web connection pulled. Is there a way to find and delete that download? It is not in the “Downloads” folder (not surprisingly).
Because that copy of the OS was so old, Microsoft will only let me pause the update 7 days. On Wifey’s machine and my Win 10 Pro laptop, I was able to pause it the full 35 days.
Time to take your losses and rebuild. Backups always...
What I got back for, for example, "Wavosaur" was a bit mixed, with a bit (not awful) of added complexity, and reports of "crackling" or "distorted" sound from some users.*
That said, I'll still have this laptop and my new Win 11 Pro desktop machine soon, to handle most of my web based work.
*From Brave Search:
Yes, Wavosaur can work on Linux Mint, although it is not a native Linux application. It runs using Wine, a compatibility layer that allows Windows applications to function on Linux systems. The software has been successfully tested on Linux Mint Maya and other distributions like Ubuntu and Zorin. To run Wavosaur on Linux Mint, users typically need to install Wine, download the Wavosaur Windows executable, and place the required mfc42.dll file in the same directory as the executable to resolve dependency issues. Some users have reported success with this setup, noting that VST plugins also function within Wavosaur on Linux. However, audio playback issues, such as crackling or distortion, have been reported by some users, potentially related to audio configuration or the specific hardware setup. While Wavosaur is not officially supported on Linux, its functionality on Linux Mint via Wine has been confirmed by multiple users.
At the other extreme(?), DosBox will apparently run fine under Linux, which definitely helps with a couple old DOS programs I still use.
Well, as noted, I have all the data that was on my “data drive” and it’s backup. It’s just time consuming with the apps when there’s no restore point to work from, because, evidently, Microsoft somehow killed the restore points. :-(
MS deletes restore points after some updates, plus Windows 11 24H2 System Restore points now expire after 60 days, Microsoft confirms
I use Macrium, not for commercial use, to do system back ups on a removable drive, I used to use AOMEi, but its EULA says "LICENSEE may use this SOFTWARE in compliance with all applicable laws and..use, display or distribution of this SOFTWARE together with material that is promoting hatred, displaying prejudice based on religion, sexual orientation is strictly forbidden. "
Well this is one of those special cases where if you try it in wine and it doesn’t work, you may have to learn to use a native Linux app that is an alternative for Wavosaur.
https://alternativeto.net/software/wavosaur/
But yes DOSbox works... I have tested it with quite a few apps.
Oh wait... Someone ported Wavosaur to linux... :)
https://blog.wavosaur.com/vst-speek-beta-for-linux/
Noted. I’ll look at both options once I get over this, uh, hump. Wavosaur has a couple limitations I’m not thrilled with, but, OTOH, I’m familiar with it. Thanks.
Right now I’m trying to sort out the multiple instances of Chrome my wife has on her desktop.
Ah, if only FR had emoticons. I’d be using “eyeroll” all the time. ;-)
That 3rd commandment is a tough one to keep sometimes...
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