This particular thread was provoked by a series of issues, all of which had me swearing at the pain of dealing with Win10 (as opposed to Win7).
I've just about recovered now, but.......
Originally, my wife's laptop died abruptly with a hard drive failure. No warning, no degradation, just immediately dropped in use into BIOS with a graphical warning "unable to locate boot drive".
It doesn't really owe us anything, and gets a lot of use, so after considering rebuilding it, I instead looked online for a decent replacement, and found a magnificently specced Lenovo going for an unbelievable price at PCWorld (in stock locally). So £550 later I (or SWMBO) was the proud owner. (PCWorlds pricing structures are very odd, the machine I bought was several steps up in spec from more expensive ones in the same range - I note it with a good few of their products, and if you are careful, they can be competitive with online suppliers on some things)
Now, I do nightly automated backups, so any data-loss was going to be minimal, but re-installing all the programs etc. and bringing the machine up to the current level of windows was going to be time-consuming. I subsequently got it to the point where just about everything was back to normal (programs and data) when Windows "broke". (It was failing in a module that the Edge browser uses to render pages, but is also used by a large number of other Microsoft and third-party products for the same purposes). Net effect was that, amongst other things, all invocations from the Start menu, and even Lenovo's own update program simply fell straight over.
Research indicated that it was not an uncommon problem, but the only way anyone had found to resolve it was by re-installing Windows, which I could certainly do, but didn't want to as it removes all Lenovo-specific "enhancements" (which, from experience, I know can be difficult to re-install). Luckily, I had an inspired moment, and in checking Windows Update (by the back-door, since otherwise I fell foul of the problem described), the machine had queued the next "feature" upgrade for Windows, which is virtually a full install, and I let it, long-windedly, complete that.
Voila! problem solved. Working machine, programs and data - and very fast to boot! (If you'll pardon the pun). The current Mrs nE was very impressed.
So, as is my wont on doing installs and major upgrades, I delved off into the Event Viewer to check if everything was OK. Now the current version of Win10 is
very poorly configured, and attempts all sorts of things that really ought to be inhibited on most machines (and certainly most non-work machines) so there is quite a lot of ignorable noise in the events list, (if you didn't know it was ignorable, you'd have a heart attack!) but, this particular machine was also throwing 10 warnings a second on "correctable" errors on the wireless network card. Disable the card and they stopped, plug it into mains and they stopped! That's 36,000 errors per hour, all invisible unless you look at the event log, but all affecting performance.
Research indicated that this (at least at a "noise" level) was not uncommon on certain hardware combinations, but not at this order of magnitude. Back to PCWorld, explained the problem, looked at some other very similar machines from the same range on display, which were all either clean, or showing only a couple of occurrences on boot-up, and agreed I could swap the unit for the other one they had in stock. Delayed whilst I went home, scratched the data, reset to factory settings and demonstrated the problem was still there, and, on return to PCWorld decided I didn't want to risk the same issue with another box, and was given a refund.
I have to say, the manageress on the tech desk at PCWorld was excellent, knew what she was doing, knew what to check, and promptly offered an exchange or refund.
So, having tempted SWMBO with a nice, faster machine, I now decided to chance my arm with a £30 SSD replacement for the hard-drive and rebuild the existing machine. Somewhere in the midst of doing so, it broke in the same way (Edge-related) as the returned laptop (but I overcame this by doing a repair install of Windows), Win10 installed an arbitrary set of drivers that meant bits of stuff didn't work (and I spent a good few hours rolling them back to versions 3 to 4 years old), but now, we have a machine that is fully fixed, is (much) faster than the old hard-drive version, and SWMBO is just about happy with it.
I lost a weekend and a bit though.
Having seen the performance improvement, and having an even slower hard-drive in
my laptop, I decided to reinstall a fresh Win10 image, and then clone that onto an SSD.
That was another couple of days I lost!. It should be fairly simple, but Win10 makes very odd decisions on driver installs - and it isn't at all clear from most manufacturers support pages which versions one
should be using. Even when you roll them back, Win10 will then decide it knows better, and promptly reinstall the ones it initially nominated (this is my main bugbear, as Win7 gave you virtually complete control over OS and driver updates, whereas Win10 gives you virtually no control, it simply thinks it knows better, even when it doesn't! This is behaviour that has been made more and more difficult to inhibit).
So, after much messing behind the scenes, inhibiting certain driver updates, I now have a machine running much faster from SSD, and in the process I seem to have resolved a long-standing problem with the touchpad (that will have been a driver update that Win10 decided it wanted to use).
It all took far to long though, and it really shouldn't be that difficult.
So, following on from the but.... on the second line; as Win7 goes out of support at the end of the year, and I don't want to be playing catch-up, I've ordered the bits to build a Win10 replacement for my trusty, 10 year-old and still fine, Win7 desktop.
I may be a little while.........
