cascaderailroad
New member
A PC shoppe might be able to re-install an OS for a small fee
Keeping computer in good shape
- Thread starter malikrthr
- Start date
Thanks, apparently the way to do this is download Avast Uninstall then run it in Safe Mode. I did so but it still hasn't got rid of it. It's not a big deal because the HDD failed it's SMART test (the seller mentioned this) so I am going to replace it with an SSD anyway. He also said the WLAN card and USB ports weren't working, but as I thought, they were simply missing the drivers, so they are all working now.
johnwhelan
Well-known member
Three common methods often there is a separate partition which can be used to restore the laptop. You can always buy a couple of flash drives I think win 8 needs 32 gig ones and create a bootable back up from that. Run Belarc and get the windows serial number then you just need the appropriate set of DVDS ie home premium or professional and dump the serial number in from belarc. Print the belarc out though don't leave it on the drive.
Cheerio John
masontaylor
Assetz frae Scotland
It's also usually possible to download a matching, legitimate, ISO file for your specific version of Windows from Digital River (Google it to find pages with the specific links, since the original site has been taken down). You can then burn this to a DVD to use in place of your (nonexistent) disk. It must match the exact version you already own, as you'll need your existing serial number to revalidate it once you're done. Worth doing now and keeping somewhere safe, just in case....
Thanks' for the reply's guys; So if I have this correct that means as soon as I buy one the first thing I must do is back up the OS before I do anything at all to the laptop, so as to get a uncluttered OS, saved to either DVD or USB stick.
One problem I can see with that is I will not know if I have done it correctly until I have to use it to restore the laptop.
It all seams like a bad deal and a lot of unwanted trouble to the customer in my eyes. I would sooner have the OS hard wired with something like an eprom chip, where all you had to do was reset the chip with a flick of a switch, and WAHLAAAH! back to factory settings.
One problem I can see with that is I will not know if I have done it correctly until I have to use it to restore the laptop.
It all seams like a bad deal and a lot of unwanted trouble to the customer in my eyes. I would sooner have the OS hard wired with something like an eprom chip, where all you had to do was reset the chip with a flick of a switch, and WAHLAAAH! back to factory settings.
Jonathan,
I agree it's a pain in the backside. Current machines from the famous makes come with the capability to create the system (OS) DVD and drivers DVD. The problem is most people don't bother until it's too late to worry about that and end up SOL. In some cases, the machines come with the disks, in addition to this capability, but people again lose the disks and don't bother. This becomes an issue when it comes time to restore the machine since one can't install a standard off-the-shelf, copy of Windows. This has to be an OEM version, meaning the configuration code is different even though the product looks the same, so if someone tries to use a boxed copy of Windows, the install will fail. Companies like DELL will sell a copy of the original disks for a fee. There is also their website which has the updated drivers and other stuff necessary, but overall the process is a pig in a poke with the reliability of the older hardware to begin with. Having said that, I do agree it's much easier to purchase a brand new portable machine than it is to risk a lot of money on a clunker.
RE: I actually thought about this some time ago after I de-teenagered a very infected machine.
The OS on an EPROM. I would love to see that too, perhaps just a read-only device so that nothing can write to it unless a special code is entered or multiple keys pressed at the same time to initiate an OS update. This would prevent the data from being trashed. For temporary, or scratch space, this could be placed on a user-accessible drive of some kind. The OS could use this for temporary space and the user could use this for storage. Any malware that happens to be downloaded, would have a difficult time working its way into the operating system. If for some reason things get stuffed, a refresh, again by some set key sequence, could be initiated to bring everything back to factory settings.
When do you want to setup manufacturing for our malware proof systems?
John
I have the Windows 7 Pro 32 and 64 bit discs but I lost the 64 bit disc a couple of years ago (I think I sold a DVD drive and left it inside). I looked around on Ebay and found that someone (OEMworld I think) was selling Dell branded W7 Pro 64 bit discs for £14.50 so I snapped one up and that was that.
Well John that's uncanny, after I wrote this , I thought of having a ROM chip for an untouchable OS to draw from, that meant replacing the ROM chip for an all new OS but you can still load upgrades to the EPROM chip. but Your method sounds much better.
What computers were these? There were some small portable devices that had that, but they were limited.
The EPROM would be a pain because it's easy to bend the legs on them as I've done so many times in the past. Having a flashable EEROM that is locked is easier to handle.
Great minds think alike.
John
I have a question if I may ask.
Does anyone have a simple, effective and reliable backup program they use? Prior to my last hardware upgrade I created what I thought were system backups but that failed miserably. My data (i.e. non O/S related) was mostly fine but I did lose a lot of stuff in MS OneNote, mail data, and other data "stored" by Windows. So I'm a little sceptical of Microsoft's backup services although it is likely I misread or just screwed it up. What I want is something simple.
My system is quite big so simplistic "backup everything" schemes just don't work. I'm wary of incremental backups and would prefer to use the old "grandfather, father, son" technique. I have a 2TB MyBook on my network which is set up as a personal cloud but I think it may be too small for a decent backup system. There are 4TB systems out there and I was thinking of buying of those just for backups and leaving the 2TB MyBook as a cloud.
Any thoughts?
Cheers
Does anyone have a simple, effective and reliable backup program they use? Prior to my last hardware upgrade I created what I thought were system backups but that failed miserably. My data (i.e. non O/S related) was mostly fine but I did lose a lot of stuff in MS OneNote, mail data, and other data "stored" by Windows. So I'm a little sceptical of Microsoft's backup services although it is likely I misread or just screwed it up. What I want is something simple.
My system is quite big so simplistic "backup everything" schemes just don't work. I'm wary of incremental backups and would prefer to use the old "grandfather, father, son" technique. I have a 2TB MyBook on my network which is set up as a personal cloud but I think it may be too small for a decent backup system. There are 4TB systems out there and I was thinking of buying of those just for backups and leaving the 2TB MyBook as a cloud.
Any thoughts?
Cheers
Hi Paul,
It appears you have run into the inevitable trap of Microsoft's data location issues. Content for Mail, One Note, and that from other MS-related applications is not always saved in Documents. Located under Users/{your login name}/App Data/ for these application folders, or just in Users/{your login name}/. MS also keeps some of this stuff now up on SkyDrive. I found this out when I had to reformat my C: drive. I thought I had lost my favorites, which is no loss really, however once my system was reinstalled, all the favorites reappeared.
For my data, such as documents, pictures, and what not, I have actually moved my Documents folder and other more important defaults to another hard drive. This has saved me when performing system reinstalls since I lost nothing and only reconnected (repointed) to the folders again. To avoid the trap with MS Outlook's pst file, I moved mine to my documents folder located on my data drive. Once the application is installed, I then choose that data file instead of letting MS create a new one in its long lost path.
For my backups, I use a program called FastCopy which has various file-copying schemes ranging from straight file copy to differential backups. One of the features I like about this program is there is no "calculating files" first before copying - it just does it when started.
You can get it here and it's free:
http://ipmsg.org/tools/fastcopy.html.en
John
It appears you have run into the inevitable trap of Microsoft's data location issues. Content for Mail, One Note, and that from other MS-related applications is not always saved in Documents. Located under Users/{your login name}/App Data/ for these application folders, or just in Users/{your login name}/. MS also keeps some of this stuff now up on SkyDrive. I found this out when I had to reformat my C: drive. I thought I had lost my favorites, which is no loss really, however once my system was reinstalled, all the favorites reappeared.
For my data, such as documents, pictures, and what not, I have actually moved my Documents folder and other more important defaults to another hard drive. This has saved me when performing system reinstalls since I lost nothing and only reconnected (repointed) to the folders again. To avoid the trap with MS Outlook's pst file, I moved mine to my documents folder located on my data drive. Once the application is installed, I then choose that data file instead of letting MS create a new one in its long lost path.
For my backups, I use a program called FastCopy which has various file-copying schemes ranging from straight file copy to differential backups. One of the features I like about this program is there is no "calculating files" first before copying - it just does it when started.
You can get it here and it's free:
http://ipmsg.org/tools/fastcopy.html.en
John
I had a Texas, it was a little more than a scientific calculator, with a type of basic programing, it was pretty useless, I programed it to get a random number, then you had so many go's to find the number.
Apart from being a calculator that's all it was good for.
I started with the Atari 400 and upgraded to the Atari 800. This was my first computer where I learned BASIC and some 6502 Assembly. After that it was real PCs... All of which didn't run MSDOS either. 2 ran CP-M; one of which ran CP/M 3.0 and the others were a Unix like OS and then finally MS-DOS. The other OS's were interesting with similar features to DOS, which took some getting used to because of the confusion. Even today I still remember CP/M with PIP for copying files...
I do remember the TRS80 M1. It was a nice machine in its day.
John
I started with a Texas Instruments TI 99/4 closely followed by the TI 99/4A. The A version had a nicer keyboard and, I think, a better version of basic. Back in those days I used to transcribe programs (games) out of books line by line. The TI 99/4(a) came in glorious colour - no B&W for me. Apart from basic, you could also write assember programs. This rather humble beginning led to about 25 years of professional (paid!) software development.
The system wasn't exactly portable. The expansion box, with its very dubious interface cable, included a floppy disk drive (5 1/4"), RS232, parallel output, and some extra memory. The whole thing was powered by 115V (brought in that way from the U.S.) so I had 240/115 stepdown transformers as well. I recall the TI 99/4 cost about $2k all up which a huge amount of money for the time (~1980). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A
There were quite a few manufacturers around before IBM blew them all away with its PC.
And, yes it played Space Invaders as a plug in cartridge. :hehe:
Cheers
The system wasn't exactly portable. The expansion box, with its very dubious interface cable, included a floppy disk drive (5 1/4"), RS232, parallel output, and some extra memory. The whole thing was powered by 115V (brought in that way from the U.S.) so I had 240/115 stepdown transformers as well. I recall the TI 99/4 cost about $2k all up which a huge amount of money for the time (~1980). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A
There were quite a few manufacturers around before IBM blew them all away with its PC.
And, yes it played Space Invaders as a plug in cartridge. :hehe:
Cheers
I remember those too, Paul. The TI 99A cost about the same here back then as well. That was quite a system bundle with the floppy drive. The old Visual V-1050, which was a bundled system cost around $2500 USD, and the old Visual V1083 (Commuter Computer) was close to $4000 with no other software other than the OS. When IBM dropped the price of the PC and came out with the PC-XT, the bottom fell out on many of these companies which had put too many eggs in a single basket. Visual, where I worked, never recovered and continue to decline for the rest of the decade. They closed around 1990.
John
Hot_Box_Detector
Member
Here's one thing I didn't see mentioned in all of this discussion. Use Apple's Safari browser. I've used Win PC's for years ( my 1995 Dell with Win98 still runs some specialized audio software I use occasionally ). In 2009 I took a leap of faith and bought a little Apple iMac-mini. I've used it for the past 5 years with no problems. I have a small partition for booting Windows XP3. I run Trainz from an external drive thru USB2. As support for XP has ended, and T:ANE just around the corner... I thought it time to get a new PC. Another Dell ( I think this is my 4th ) i5 CPU, 8GB ram, & a bottom end Nvidia video card, ( so I can upgrade as needed ). I downloaded Apples Safari browser for windows, as I am familiar with it and never had any invasions or breaches for the past 5 years. I sometimes use Opera as a browser and haven't had any problems with it either. YMMV, Thanks, Mike
PS: now that I'm back on a windows machine, I see they are still living in the stone age
PS: now that I'm back on a windows machine, I see they are still living in the stone age
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johnwhelan
Well-known member
Here's one thing I didn't see mentioned in all of this discussion. Use Apple's Safari browser. I've used Win PC's for years ( my 1995 Dell with Win98 still runs some specialized audio software I use occasionally ). In 2009 I took a leap of faith and bought a little Apple iMac-mini. I've used it for the past 5 years with no problems. I have a small partition for booting Windows XP3. I run Trainz from an external drive thru USB2. As support for XP has ended, and T:ANE just around the corner... I thought it time to get a new PC. Another Dell ( I think this is my 4th ) i5 CPU, 8GB ram, & a bottom end Nvidia video card, ( so I can upgrade as needed ). I downloaded Apples Safari browser for windows, as I am familiar with it and never had any invasions or breaches for the past 5 years. I sometimes use Opera as a browser and haven't had any problems with it either. YMMV, Thanks, Mike
PS: now that I'm back on a windows machine, I see they are still living in the stone age
Unfortunately not every one can afford Apple prices and some of us have strong reservations about security in the Apple world. It depends how much cash you have and what your priorities are.
Cheerio John