Windows 10?

[VictordeHolland]

Originally Posted by storm5510

When I start/restart, it is usually around three minutes of constant drive activity. Until that stops, I can't do much with it. I just have to sit and watch.

That isn't so bad? The PCs at my work take much longer than that (you can easily get a coffee, talk to a few colleagues and hopefully it has booted by the time you come back). Those PCs are still on W7 though.

My P95 minion (3770k, SSD), with only essential drivers/progams installed takes about a minute to restart (soft reboot), from the moment I press restart until it is back in W10 and CPU load has dropped to a few %. A cold/hard boot is actually a little faster since W10 doesn't need to close stuff first.

Anybody ever try to use a netbook (the 250-350 Euro laptops) with W10?
They have Celeron processors like the N3350 and 2 GB and 32 GB eMMC hard drives. When you update the system and install Office the disk is already completely full. The 2GB RAM is barely sufficient to run Windows, let alone any programs. The Celeron processors have 2 cores at 1.1 to 2.4GHz, 2MB LLC, but no turbo boost, no HT, no AVX. But the biggest problem with the N3350 Celerons is that it they're based on the Goldmont micro-architecture (think Atom) while there are also Skylake Celerons. This last difference is HUGE. I don't understand why brands the like of HP and ASUS still sell these and people still buy them, they are a joke. We've had so many customer complains/ service requests for them. W10 won't update because too little space, complains they're slow, customers think their netbook has crashed because they are stuck in the 'windows is loading screen' (usually after a big windows update), while actually the laptop is just very busy (after 1-2 hours it will finally boot).

[retina]

Originally Posted by VictordeHolland

That isn't so bad? The PCs at my work take much longer than that (you can easily get a coffee, talk to a few colleagues and hopefully it has booted by the time you come back). Those PCs are still on W7 though.

My W7 laptop with a weak E-350 CPU takes ~1 minute from power on to becoming usable. It has a slow and cheap 5400rpm HDD. I configured it with no extraneous vendor crapware and no unnecessary system drivers. The thing runs like a manic cheetah on speed with a red hot poker up its rear.

[Gordon]

Originally Posted by VictordeHolland

Windoz 10 decided I needed the Creators update. So after installing it, I noticed it deleted the AMD drivers that I installed myself (16.12) with 16.6!
C'mon Microsoft, version numbering isn't that hard!

Of course, number 6 comes after number 1 :-)

See, it's easy!

[mackerel]

Originally Posted by VictordeHolland

Anybody ever try to use a netbook (the 250-350 Euro laptops) with W10?

I got one for myself as an almost disposable unit. AMD E-series CPU, dual core Atom-like 1.7 GHz from memory. Originally with 750GB HD and 2 GB of ram. Even after swapping in a SSD and increasing it to 6GB of ram, the CPU limits pretty much everything now. I've disabled anti-virus to help a bit, but during Windows Updates it is unusable for anything. After the update and resulting disk activity, it is ok for light browsing. I'm thinking I should put some lightweight linux on it...

Oh, my work provided laptop is a different problem. Software. It as a dual core i5, 8GB ram, and SSD, but it is still incredibly slow. The culprit here is all the background "security" stuff they force on systems. It is enough to bring any system to its knees. I'm almost thinking I should have asked for a Mac... (I don't do Macs, but it is that bad...)

[Xyzzy]

Originally Posted by VictordeHolland

Anybody ever try to use a netbook (the 250-350 Euro laptops) with W10?
They have Celeron processors like the N3350 and 2 GB and 32 GB eMMC hard drives. When you update the system and install Office the disk is already completely full. The 2GB RAM is barely sufficient to run Windows, let alone any programs. The Celeron processors have 2 cores at 1.1 to 2.4GHz, 2MB LLC, but no turbo boost, no HT, no AVX. But the biggest problem with the N3350 Celerons is that it they're based on the Goldmont micro-architecture (think Atom) while there are also Skylake Celerons. This last difference is HUGE. I don't understand why brands the like of HP and ASUS still sell these and people still buy them, they are a joke. We've had so many customer complains/ service requests for them. W10 won't update because too little space, complains they're slow, customers think their netbook has crashed because they are stuck in the 'windows is loading screen' (usually after a big windows update), while actually the laptop is just very busy (after 1-2 hours it will finally boot).

We purchased one (Lenovo 100S-14IBR) for our feral teenager to take to school.

It works great for simple school tasks but it is worthless for playing video games.



We use an identical Lenovo 100S-14IBR as our primary "work" computer, but we run Debian Linux on it and we have installed an M.2 SSD. We put /home on the eMMC drive. It runs quite well and uses very little power. It is also passively-cooled, so it is silent. We like the challenge of making underpowered hardware do useful work.

[VictordeHolland]

Visited my grandparents today (both 85+) to help them with their W10 computer. It's not the fastest machine (Dell with dual-core and 4GB), but should be more than enough for their needs: checking mail once every week and some very light browsing and Freecell. After a few cups of coffee the machine was finally ready with updating to 17.09. Somehow one of the (many) updates broke their hotmail email sync that they use in Outlook 2016. I had to delete their account and re-add it to get it working again. Remember, Microsoft owns hotmail, they can't even get their own products to work together reliably.

[VictordeHolland]

After 5 failed attempts my fathers PC finally updated to 1709. Not sure what the issue was and why it worked the last time. The PC is quite old (dual core with 2GB ram), but with the SSD in it is still fast enough for most tasks. Possibly drivers related?

[EdH]

Originally Posted by VictordeHolland

After 5 failed attempts my fathers PC finally updated to 1709. Not sure what the issue was and why it worked the last time. The PC is quite old (dual core with 2GB ram), but with the SSD in it is still fast enough for most tasks. Possibly drivers related?

I don't know how this may relate to 10, but for other versions, including 7, I have on occasion had to turn off all non-MS services to perform an update.