Gosh.

I must have a rant now.

Probably won’t even be that amusing.

I had to buy a new hard drive recently, because the one I was using had ceased to function at all.

It had a lot to do with the upgrade to Windows 10 that I unfortunately inflicted upon it. I am not entirely sure what happened, but I quite eagerly clicked on the upgrade button one Saturday lunchtime. I got to have a go at Windows 10 for a bit, for the rest of that Saturday anyway. But then, apparently, the computer restarted overnight. That meant that when I switched the computer on again, on Sunday, it got to one of the start screens, but no further. I didn’t even see a way to get into Safe Mode. I was able to run all the HP diagnostic scans and all of that, but the problem didn’t actually seem to be anything that any of that stuff could deal with.

So my best guess now is that there was something wrong with one of the drivers, probably the Texas Multi-USB Controller, because there was definitely something wrong with that driver before the problems started, and doing research I found that Windows 10 has reacted badly to crappy drivers. Something like that. I’m not that experienced with the dissecting of the innards of Windows.

As it happened, the Monday after that weekend was a Bank Holiday anyway, so other than imploding the time available on that Monday, while I went to buy a new computer and spend an hour putting it all together, there was no lasting problems because I’d luckily saved all the PDFs and Word docs onto external hard drives, which appear to still be working.

I later realised that I do appear to have lost a copy of Adobe Dream Weaver (that I got as an execute file when I was doing a website design course), and a load of Audible audio-books that were still on the hard drive. I wasn’t likely to ever make use of that stuff though. So in a sense the problems caused by the Windows 10 upgrade merely reminded me that I had already wasted money, rather than being the cause of the loss of money. I had already cancelled my subscription to Audible anyway.

So that whole mess has soured me a bit on Windows 10. My memory of actually playing around with it is of something that is clearly designed for these touch pad devices, like I’m using a mouse pointer to do something that a finger tip is meant to do, and also a kind of speaking element called ‘Cortana’, that reminds people of meetings they have missed, and looks up how to get to the auditorium or the conference room for you. I guess they’ve taken the name Cortana from the ‘Halo’ series of computer games.

When I looked at what I used that hard drive for, it was mainly the Internet and occasionally reading PDFs on Acrobat Reader. The old hard drive was actually supposed to be used to play games on; it was at the expensive end of the personal computer range, and I had in fact sprung for what was the newest graphics card at the time, but I wouldn’t really describe it as a ‘gaming computer’ as such. So the new computer I bought was only about two thirds of the cost of the old one, because I didn’t really intend to play games on it, or do anything particularly RAM consuming on there.

The new computer has Windows 8 on it.

Now the first thing to note is that the new computer with Windows 8 on it does not appear to implode when I do a restart, or hasn’t yet. It also has by far the less redundant icons on the desktop, just by virtue of being a new machine.

Something I have noticed however is that the new computer seems to really take its time loading web pages, and has a huge problem loading more than about two Youtube pages. I don’t know why anyone would need to load more than one web page at a time, but the fact is, the new computer does have a problem with it. It also needs to do upgrades quite often which is slightly annoying.

Anyway. I started off wanting to rant, then I finished the bit about Windows 10, then I had a shave, and now I’ve lost momentum. It just seems like Windows has shat the bed somehow. The old computer had Windows 7 on it, and that worked fine.