Backyard Advice Won’t Cut It
Running the shop here each week one of the points that always strikes me it the number of people that come in asking for XYZ product or software as their nephew’s best mate told them it was the bees knees. Unless the nephew’s best mate still works full time in the IT industry then you can most likely value his opinion alongside a grain of salt.
I know that mechanics often have to put up with the same advice because someone knows someone that actually changed their own tyre once and they said to fix it like this…. Technical industries are full of ‘experts’ and then there are people that know what they are doing.
Still one of the most popular myths is that ‘Windows 10 broke my PC’. This is essentially not true and we need to examine more closely how this myth is propagated. You need to also consider for a minute that if this were true then Microsoft would have near a billion unhappy customers.
Windows 10 when installed on a new computer runs fine and especially runs well if you know how to turn off some of the unnecessary features and remove all other junk software. This is no different to how Windows 8 was and no different to how Windows 7 was. It is when you are upgrading from Windows 7 or Windows 8 to Windows 10 that you can come unstuck.
Upgrading and operating system is a lot like changing the motor over in your car – it is a very complex job. Microsoft has tried to automate it as much as possible however the automated upgrade relies on several assumptions – especially if you are trying to keep all of your existing data and software.
The assumptions the need to be correct for a successful upgrade include a lack of existing viruses and malware. The also include a lack of existing hardware faults and a lack of existing software corruptions. If your PC has any of these above things going wrong then it is likely that an upgrade to Windows 10 will only bring further hurt to you.
We rarely do an upgrade to 10 without getting a manual copy of all customer data, obtaining a list of all of their required software and then selection the upgrade option to install Windows 10 freshly without keeping any previous settings / software / data. These options bring about the most effective and trouble free upgrade solution, however it also involves a lot of manual work to reinstall all necessary software and data.
The other positive thing about a ‘fresh’ installation of 10 is that we can choose to install the 64bit versions of Windows regardless of the previous version and then also make sure that the device has 8GB of ram. This has become important as the 32 bit versions of Windows are limited to 4GB of ram and now-a-days this is simply not enough for the efficient running of a modern computer.
In the field of IT nothing stands still and if you want to be safely connected to the Internet then you can’t afford not to have a modern operating system and the latest anti-virus software. Alternatively if you have a PC that you don’t want to connect to the Internet then Windows 98 will most likely still satisfy you.
Future Byte Me topics can be emailed to [email protected] and Bruce is contactable at Kerr Solutions, 205 Musgrave Street or on 49 222 400.
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