Today I are mostly swearing...

Bought a new computer yesterday.

Some bozo has decided that windows 8 should be installed... I'd just like to say that W8 is a complete and utter pile of poo. Unfortunately, to have W7 'downgrade' capability I must first purchase the 'pro' version for about seventy quid and then I must also purchase the discs for W7 for a couple of hundred... so that's not going to happen.

The same bozo also decided that he/she/it should use UEFI as a boot method. Shame my preferred linux won't install that way - hell, I can barely get the USB to boot at all. Windows won't boot in legacy bios; Mint won't boot in UEFI (even after turning off secure boot).

Fortunately this laptop has space for two hard drives, so that's the next thing to try... the previous laptop's hard drive won't fully boot in either windows (sits there being unable to repair itself) or linux (wrong video drivers and no default graphics - no doubt fixable but I haven't chased yet...)

Bah. And likewise, Humbug.

windows 7 is available on Software for Students for far cheaper. I agree W8 is utter crap. But then so is every other MS release. Windows ME was poo, XP was great, Vista was then poo and W7 great and now we have W8.... and guess what...

p.s. if you want a Vista Code to upgrade from I have a legit copy and code you could have.

Thanks, John.

I'll see how it goes, first. Mint has been sitting on 'configuring hardware' for a suspiciously long time...

*voices off in a whispered tone* imaaaaaaaac.

How is having smooth legs going to help?

It can't hurt though!

Bad luck Neil; I sympathise.

Today was a completely wasted day for me. A veritable comedy of errors and unbelievable dysfunction. And I'm not just talking about me now.

Got a virus that warned me the police were demanding £100 to unlock my PC. Simple. Download something-kicker to a flash drive, plug it in, and boot up with it, to seek out and destroy.

PC doesn't recognise usb as a boot up device.

Even if it had, the PC won't even go into safe mode.

Right - I'll repair Windows with the OEM CD

Nope. I repair it, boot it up, and the police are still there.

I know – I can simply generate a recovery from my Easeus backup image. That's what it was for.

Consider it generated.

Whoa! – Doesn't reboot. Easeus has knackered it. So now what?

Got to go through the 'repair' Windows process again.

Once done, log in under a different user, and Bob's your uncle. It works.

But no. I can't type anything into emails, and search doesn't work, and so on. All sorts of files missing. Well done easeus!

Obviously need to go back to the repaired version, which works but has none of my settings, and copy across my settings using Windows Files and Settings Transfer facility.

In order to boot into that, I spend an hour working out how to edit the boot.ini files so that I can choose which version of XP I boot into. It works!!

Two hours later, I have it. The files and settings backup file.

Does it work?

Obviously not. The Windows service packs are different, and incompatible. So let's download service pack 3 and transfer it across to the PC.

Excellent, sets up a treat, so now I have two SP3s and can use Windows Files and Settings to transfer everything.

Nope. Backed up image not recognised, still.

OK – enough. Suffice it to Say that this is less than half of the story. It's ongoing.

I think it's a conspiracy. There should be a button labelled "press to restore to original", or "Reset". With technology being what it is, I just do not believe this is not possible.

Problem is a combination of the intel 4000 graphics chipset and the UEFI - I can get past the UEFI but I haven't found a way yet to get any output while I install the bloody drivers.

Bleedin' edge; so sharp you cut yourself.

btw - how on earth do you stop the ridiculous animations on W8? It seems my version lacks the system editor...

Him MRS, he waxeth lyrical

Brian, didn't see your message last night... you have sympathy since I had almost the same symptoms trying to get an existing W7 installation to run on this laptop yesterday. Eventually I gave up...

Nonetheless, success of a sort has just about crowned my very efforts: this is being written on linux on the new box.

To be fair, it's a beta version ofthe latest redhat; I still have to use the bios to boot between W8 and Linux, and Gnome 3 is almost as bad as W8 in terms of user interface. Also, it's using a very strange video mode with minimal acceleration, but at least it is using it... There's a way of installing Cinnamon which I'm about to try, but I'd really prefer to find out how to install Mint 14 which is what I wanted to do in the first place...

For the advice of linux types here, as of today on an Acer V3-771, i5-3210, 2.5GHz, 6GD, HD4000 graphics, and a separate disc for the installation - a combination of CD, DVD, and USB installation media were attempted.

- gentoo won't even show a text window.

- Mint will boot in the alternate graphics mode, and will get partway through the installation, but locks up at the 'configuring hardware' stage and does not thereafter boot.

- Fedora 17 will fire up in either UEFI or BIOS mode from the installation medium, with slightly different effects, but won't give anything useful in either; sooner or later it black screens and goes silent.

- Ubuntu 12.4 won't do anything useful: black screen in either boot.

- Ubuntu 12.10 is marginally more useful; there are a few moments of either graphics (BIOS) or text (UEFI). Then it black screens.

- Fedora 18 Beta seems to work, though it crashes - white screen just to be different - after the second boot; thereafter it seems to work.

Time to hassle some developers...

Yup - it just goes on and on.

Today I have a working machine again, except that now I can't install the sound drivers (Sound Max Digital Audio D865GLC). It tries to install them, but just at the end I get the blue screen of death. Anyone know how to interpret the information on that? Something about Portcls.sys

The only solution for me is to make a regular disc image using xxclone. Must try to be more disciplined.

I just make a copy of all user data every month. Everything else can be installed.
Then do a fresh W7 install on a newly formated drive and do not use ANY virus protection software other than spybot and MS defender.

Yes and No...
In terms of user interface... its not great. I hate the fact there is no start menu and the metro interface just sucks.
However if we look at the actual OS its very good. Ive been using it for over 6 months now. Boot time is superb, the OS is very stable and runs beautifully.

Hopefully Microsoft will listen to the consumers and make some changed in the next service pack or version...

We will see

I agree about Windows 8, boot time is nice and speedy, and if you don't like the Metro interface, you can just pull up the normal desktop. Create a few shortcuts and pin some bits to the desktop, and you can treat it pretty well like W7.

Still not entirely sure what it is "for", if you get my drift, but for the boot time, I'd not go back to 7.

How much different is the boot time?

I really like W8 so far. Amazing boot time. Looks nice. The new Start/Metro window is a bit redundant on a PC, but still looks nice, though I just go to the desktop.

I skipped straight from XP to 8 because I f**king HATE Vista and 7 - Nearly as much I hate Word 2010; broken piece of crap. docx my arse...

Given that I use windows only when I have to, I'm unlikely to do anything significant with it except perhaps rip it off and try again with W7.

The most irritating thing about it is all the bleedin' visual nausea-inducing animations. Everything fades and slides and spins and folds over and generally gets in the the way of doing anything useful. It's only half a second, but it's a thousand times a day... like a million animated smilies every time you use it.

And by the way - didn't microsoft have a requirement to offer a choice of browser on first boot? That's gone - and from a recent W7, too...

There's no warning, for example, that the low-security password on the throwaway email address that you *must* use to start the program will be used as your login and password... and just exactly *why* is it necessary that the OS wants to pass your location details to Redmond? Why do these things come laden with 'free for a month' process heavy and expensive virus checkers, backup thingies, and other crap? Do I really want netflix and all the other stuff?

It's not difficult. An OS is there to let me *work* - windows 8 is intended to let me *play* - and *pay* at the same time.

Meh.

Got Intel i5 and, er, some gigs of RAM (you can tell I take notice of these things!) and boo time is literally like 30 secs after pressing the power button. That's from power on, to sat idling.



Er, I don't have any of that??
Oh yeah, slightly off topic but what you said reminded me. Get Adblock It makes teh Interwebz like it used to be 10 years ago - not covered in bloody adverts!

And what was it before, on which os?

I think mine is already faster than that tbh and I rarely switch it off fully anyway.

I don't even *start* a browser without adblock+ and noscript... in Windows, recommended AV is Avast free. Norton hasn't been any use since Norton sold the company.

The bad news is that the W8 supplied with the system doesn't supply tools to turn *off* the animations...

2nded

hmmm boot time is sub 10 seconds on my windows 8 laptop

Probably 10-20 secs is the boot up time on my Hp probook in windows 8.

I have an ssd installed though which makes lots of difference.

i dont have ssd but do have a pretty decent spec inc 8gb ram

I honestly cannot stand windows 8, I still run office 2003 and if it wasn't for such poor driver support on xp64 then I would likely still be using that. That all said after windows 7 has all the shiny bits removed its OK.

I have no experiance with uefi none of the boards I have support this? Is it worth avoiding?

It's fine with an OEM Windows installation. Anything else... see those rats, coughing?

For my use its windows only, if I want to do anything in Ubuntu I just jump in to a vm

Honestly - this thread just reminds me why I'm an Apple fan these days. Kudos to you guys for having the patience

Each to their own, Rich... in my defence, I haven't had a problem like this with Linux for perhaps fifteen years.

The issue is not that Linux isn't working, but that a new chipset isn't yet supported, and doesn't react in a standard way to default code.

It'll be fixed.

You've got more money than technical ability?





Sorry, couldn't resist

PMSL - no, life's just too short to be fighting all this stuff. There's nothing I want to do on a computer that's worth the effort. Switch it on, do what I want, then switch it off. Then I have more time for cycling or fighting my race car

Which is why I like linux...

So why bother with W8 at all (or any Windows OS)?

Because that's what the laptop comes with.

I do have a couple of useful applications which need Windows to run, but I think that once I've got this system sorted I'll probably just wash it off and run Windows in a virtual machine. Though that will require me to buy a further copy of Windows, which rather goes against the grain.

I'm with MRS on this. As an ex IT techy, there was nothing I enjoyed more than hours of tinkering. But gradually over time I found it more and more frustrating leading to extended bouts of computer rage, finally I woke up and realised that the computer is just a tool to do stuff with, and the time for doing stuff was eaten up by trying to make the damn thing work. So i went from a confirmed PC, anti Apple person to an instant convert. I bought an iMac roughly a year ago, I switched it on, connected to my wireless network and that was it. Since then I have never had to tinker once, can't honestly remember the last time I went near to any settings!

As Neil says, each to their own, but when I think of the hours, days, weeks and probably months of my life I have wasted trying to make various MS products work properly.....

It's a bit like a car, I just want to drive the bloody thing without having to change the parameters on some obscure sensor just because I chose to wear red socks that day!

Yup, MrB, you're coming from exactly the same place as me. I could save the "premium" Apple products cost me doing other jobs I pay for just with the time I've got back.

I fear we're fiercely agreeing with each other, gentlemen.

My argument for Linux has *always* been that it does what I need better than the alternatives. That I like the open source software philosophy is a benefit, as is the general (though I appreciate not complete) lack of virus attacks.

The fact that I have had serious issues - down purely to new hardware - is no reason to change my views.

I can fully understand such a desire but feel I must question why such logic deserted you when buying a car. Almost everyone knows that all Italian cars would fail to offer such a simple function to almost all of their owners.

Did you get sorted in the end Neil. Surely it will be some super fast Linux machine? Are new Linux install#s that demanding?

It will be a very quick machine, which is what I'm after as I do a lot of optical character recognition and if I can get that down from a minute or so per page I'd very much like to...

It's not yet fully resolved. I've found a distribution - Fedora 18 Beta - which at least recognises the video system (with a 3.6 kernel) and runs, and stuck cinnamon on it, but there are still issues (as you'd expect with a beta). At present it's doing software compositing for the screen graphics - which isn't too bad as the first thing I do is turn off all the eye candy - but I haven't resolved that yet.

I have been given a couple of pointers as to internal settings which I hope to try today.

It's not that the installation is demanding - it's just that few recognise the video system and don't even have a visible text output, so I can't use them once they're on. I can't even SSH from a remote machine since I don't know the IP (though I could find out from the router DHCP log).

Might be worth giving Sabayon a bash (no pun intended) its gentoo based but has support for UEFI secureboot out of the box, also has the usual array of desktop managers to choose from.
Having said that it sounds as if you are getting there with Fedora 18 beta, which has a newer version of Shim than Ubuntu 12.10 apparently.

As for window 8............

We seem to get in to this argument alot, for what its worth I do not have to "fiddle" with my OS, I built a system and have continued to use it with out issue since install.
I worked out that the PC case for this system is over 10 years old yesterday!

What argument is that ?

I think Sam is talking about people going on about OS & machine choices. There is clear difference of opinion on this but it is far from an argument, it's all just a debate and a bit of a giggle. Each users choice is based upon many factors such as Tweak ability, costs and ease of use. What suits one person will probably not be what another wants, or can perhaps afford, so such discussions are futile. We still have them though.

Indeed, fair enough, horses for courses and all that !
I've always been a "pop the bonnet, look under the hood" kinda person so Linux is more than just an OS, it's one of my hobbies.
I'm not blinkered however, I'll use whatever OS I need to get the job done, after I've made damn sure it ain't going run under Linux first though !

That's why the Italian one is sat in the garage and the German one is the one on the drive that gets used

Ditto!!!

Ah, but for me, the Italian one doesn't get used not because it's likely to break, or unlikely to start, but simply because I live too far from work... a matter of cost. The coupe was used daily for fifteen years!

Currently, I'm building a gentoo image, having found a way to get it started. This has been described as 'first, find an oil well, an iron mine, and a rubber tree. From these, build a car...'

In fairness don't you have another Italian in its place for the daily runner? No German machinery is there?

On the windows 8 note. One feature I notice which I liked a lot is windows 8 can open images files as they are without being burned off etc. (just tested an iso file) so can actually check the files inside the image without waste time and a cd.

No need for demontools and mount the disc

ISO is like a zip file, you can uncompress it as such. No doubt another feature Microsoft has "invented"

They will say they would of course.Just no need to bother with a third party bit of software which should of course been in earlier versions of windows.

Yep, I do commute in another fiat!

Compiling the kernel for the second time, having built it once while forgetting to include the network controller module!

I may have to do it again to include the wireless network, but I can live with that. And I have it working on the frame buffer, too... watch this space. It's a bloody quick compile; I did this once and it took (literally) three weeks...

Interesting thread - so you decided to keep W8 and install gentoo alongside? If so, how was the hard drive partitioned from factory? Only ask because if the W8 partition needed to be resized to allow space for gentoo could that maybe cause issues?

A lot of the PC's I have used have either never come with an OS or have Windows on them so I just run a linux live disc, shred the drive (if necessary), repartition it to have some allocated to Windows, swap and the majority for mint. install windows and then linux so I can have the grub menu at boot. I use virtualbox a fair bit but it's a necessity to have the option of windows at startup too as the missus uses it a fair bit and I have done so for games and other bits of software.

good luck with the install. I'm currently working on a bash script in work to decomplile android apks and then I need to get involved with the source code. Only just starting to learn java so this isn't going to be pleasant journey

This laptop has two drives; windows is untouched on one and linux is on the other.

At the moment I seem to have painted myself into something of a corner; my previously usable-but-with-no-network-modules kernel won't talk to me, I think because the locale has changed (US->GB) since setting the passwords, and the new improved kernel which *should* have the network active won't start because it doesn't believe the root partition is where I tell it it is!

It doesn't help that the definitions are based on sdb as the second (linux) drive from the bios, but (hd0,0) from grub...

Once the linux is working nicely, then the windows is coming off, I think. I might stick w7 on for the rare occasions I need it.

I tried gentoo once and can appreciate the difficulty. Without a friend who knew it all I would have got nowhere. These days I run Ubuntu Studio and Mint. I did convert wifey's Vista laptop to a VM which re-activated using the same key - but was the same cpu/machine just a different disk/SSD.

Reubs
I also like the fact you can now also mount an iso within the OS so no need for deamon tools etc...

You have always been able to see inside isos with the later versions of win zip although I always preferred .7zip

Right, sorted... I now have the excellent Mint 14.1 on this laptop up and running... it's not dual booting to W8 (I need to play with rEFInd, I think) but as I have few plans to use W8 this isn't an issue.

It turns out that for some odd reason, the video driver wakes up with the backlight on minimum - aka 'off'. This is a state pretty much indistinguishable from 'it's buggered'...

Turn up the backlight and everything's fine. The installation took all of ten minutes after discovering that tiny fact!

Well, that gave the local network a bit of a hammering: half a terabyte of data transferred across a 100Mb/s line, to get the stuff off my old computer and onto the new... shiny shiny!

Well done on sorting it all. How did you transfer the data? Doing the same with mine later on using scp and a crossover cable.

Two computers, wired to a 100MHz switch. Share with samba (windows SMB protocol) and just copy from the share - that way I could pick and choose and not just replicate the whole data structure.

7 hours at 10MB/s...