Had to nuke my Win 10 machine

This is why I don't like forced updates.  The latest version from MS caused my Win 10 box to go into a endless reboot.  I would turn it on, get to the logon screen and15 seconds or so the screen will go black, then blue, then reboots.  I went to the DELL tools when it started up and did a hardware check and it was all good.  Safe mode wouldn't tell me what the problem was, all it showed was 'hardware' failed according to the software.  Rather than working on what driver (if I could even find what was causing the issue) was at fault it was faster for me to restore the machine to its original state.  One of the normal tasks I had was backing up my data so that wasn't going to be a major issue for me (I thought).

I forced the system to go back to the original Win 8.1 installation and then went through the process of updating that.  I have made the decision that going Win 10 isn't happening on that machine.  It took me a few days to get things up-to-date and patched.  Removing McAfee was a bit of a pain as even when I said to remove it I was told I didn't have the authority (I was using the admin account).  McAfee did have a tool to do a complete removal and that worked.  So far the machine is running very well, no reboots!

The only issue I had was restoring my email (Thunderbird).  My latest backup of the mail folder didn't work, but, as I had multiple backups I could go back to an older backup.  All my other documents, videos and pictures restored without a problem.

Lesson learned is that I will now have checkpoints to restore back to in the case a future update messes up the system.  I turned it off thinking I wouldn't ever use it and I could use the disk space for other things.

A mini-rant on the state of store web pages

Too many stores don't take time to build a web site that is user friendly.  They are probably going with the experts who say it is perfect, but, take it from me they are far from perfect.  There are a few that I have problems with and it is frustrating in the least when I am looking for products.

I check out the online sites to see what products are available, their specs, reviews and prices.  When I see something I am wanting to buy I prefer going to the store to check it out the product before I purchase.

A few not-so-humble suggestions for your online sites:

• Allow us to pick online only.  Many people do order online, but, for those of us who want to be able to go into the store and check out the product so we can make the final decision before buying give us the option of seeing only what is in the store.
• Same goes for your affiliates.  Again, if I am interested I will click on the box to show them.
• If the product is not available allow us select a check box so as NOT TO SEE them.  If they are not available, or sold out, then I don't want to see it.  This is the equivalent of empty shelves in the store.  If it isn't there then I am not interested in seeing a pretty picture. If not available, give an option quickly inform us how long it would take for it to be stocked locally.
• This is a biggie and too many sites do this.  Check boxes are only that, you click on them and there is a check mark or it is empty.  Clicking on it WILL NEVER initiate an update, that is completely against what click boxes are for.  Allow the user to select what they want to see and then have a 'REFRESH SELECTION' button to present the user what they want to see (example below).
• When I tell you NO on my location respect it! There is a site that every page I go to it asks me for my location and I keep telling it no.  The same goes for asking for my postal code and not allowing me to see anything until I do.  When I want to tell you my location (to see if stock is available locally) I will tell you and not until then.
• Keep the scripting and fancy images to a minimum.  Not everyone runs the latest hardware that can handle all of the scripting quickly.  I have a high end machine for development work and pages there renders quickly, however, I have a netbook that I also use for development work and the same page sometimes takes up to a minute to render and that is not acceptable.
• Test your pages for IE, Edge, Chrome and Firefox.  Too often I have to open up another browser so that your pages will properly render.  Again, follow the W3C standards for your pages and thoroughly test your pages.

For those thinking these are small business the answer to that is no.  These are large multi-national corporations who I would expect to be able to afford great web developers with the skills and knowledge to build sites that make it easy for customers to quickly find what they are looking for, confirm that the product is available locally. 

Check out the W3C site for web standards and how to develop a website that should work cross platform and with different browsers. 

It has been a while since I coded web pages, but, if I remember correctly you can use the following as an example of how to do check boxes.  Change the { and } to < and >.  I changed the values so that you can see the code and not the form.

{form}
{div}
   {input type="checkbox" id="In Store" name="instore" value="itisinstore"}
   {label for="In Store"}Show product that is in store?{/label}
   {input type="checkbox" id="Online Store" name="onlinestore" value="itisinonlinestore"}
   {label for="Online Store"}Show product that are in the online only store?{/label}
   {input type="checkbox" id="Out of Stock" name="outofstock" value="outofstock"}
   {label for="Out of Stock"}Show product that are temporarily out of stock?{/label}
{/div}
{div}
   {button type="submit"}Refresh your selection{/button}
{/div}
{/form}

A new midrange laptop for me and what I use for specific jobs

Some people may think that three laptops that I have are too many, but, I don't.  I have machines for specific tasks.  The netbook is an old machine that I bought years ago on sale and the HP is a refurbished model.  The Dell machine is the only new laptop and I bought it specifically for gaming and to store a lot of digital images.
 

Netbook:

I have the netbook set up with LUBUNTU.  That is great distro for a five year old netbook with 2 gigs of memory.  It allows me access to web mail, Facebook, Twitter and a few other things when I travel and it is very light and the battery lasts about 4-6 hours depending on what I am doing which is great when traveling.  If I am doing light digital editing it isn't to bad, a bit slow, but usable. 

HP Laptop

I picked up a nice mid-range laptop for my every day work at home.  It is a HP EliteBook 8440P.  Eight gigs of memory and one hundred and twenty-eight gig SSD.  I originally had LUBUNTU, but, something in how I did and configured caused the screen to go 'nuts' at times.  I put on PCLINUXOS and it has been rock solid.  This machine is my daily machine rather than my high end gaming system.  It allows ready access to social media (Facebook and Twitter), email and light gaming.  It also is used for digital editing and other daily work.

PCLINUXOS installed a lot of software I don't need and it was easy to remove them. I like the distro and I used it years ago and I see it has gotten better over time.  The desktop is KDE and it is close enough to Windows that anyone accustomed to Windows (up to 7) will be at home using it.  It is light enough on system resources that it is snappier than windows.  As an example this laptop launches in about thirty seconds (including the time for my to type in my password) and shuts down in about five seconds.  My gaming system takes about a minute to launch and about two minutes to shut down.

I am now playing Old School Runescape on the machine and it is as fast in a browser as when I am using my gaming system with the Runescape client software.

Todo

• I transferred my various Bash scripts from the netbook here, but, I had to make minor tweaks due to the difference in terminals and the options used to compile Bash.  My next mini-project will be to look at the scripts and figure out how to rewrite them so that run on both systems without changes.
• Set up and configure the Brother network printer.
• Set up and configure the old scanner to work on this machine.
• Install and configure additional software to play DVD movies.

Dell Gaming system

My high end machine is a Dell.  Right now it is running Windows 10.  I use this for heavy duty gaming and software that runs only on windows (income tax).  This machine has eight gigs of memory and a one terabyte drive.  This is my main machine for all of my digital photos and scanned documents.  Anything I do on the HP for digital images gets transferred here and once a month the files are backed up to an external one terabyte drive.