A chimpanzee and two trainees could run her!
A little over a month ago, I had the opportunity to upgrade a whole slew of Win 10 machines.
Back then, I wrote this article: Reactivating Windows 10 after a second major hardware upgrade
Now, I thought I had everything figured out in terms of re-activing Win 10 after a hardware upgrade.
However, it seems things have changed in even more ways than I thought.
SIGH (again)…
If you’re running Ubuntu or another linux shell in Windows 10 via WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), you’ve probably wondered about using cron.
Cron is super-handy for doing things, like, running a backup.
You see, as useful as WSL is, it stores all the linuxy files in a way that is not exactly easily backup-able by File History or anything else… as far as I can tell.
Worse yet, even when you try to set up a cron job to run a backup, it doesn’t work!
What to do, what to do?
So this is a fun one!
You have a file on your desktop. It can be anything: PDF, Word Doc, text file, whatever.
You try to delete it.
Instead of going into the Recycle Bin, you just get the “deleting” dialog box with the progress bar, and then…
Nothing happens! YAY!
I recently ran into a little problem: I upgraded a puter that had Windows 10 on it, and Win 10 refused to reactivate afterwards!
Now, you might have read my guide here: Upgrade your motherboard without reinstalling Windows 10
Well, it works.
But… It appears there is a limit to the number of times you can upgrade the hardware in your puter before M$ will insist on a call to their beloved Tech Support line.
SIGH…
The Windows 10 “April 2018 Update” version 1803 was released a few weeks ago… in May, not April.
Go figure.
Initially, there were some serious problems with 1803, but those seem to have been ironed out now.
Chances are, if you don’t have it already, you’ll be getting it soon.
Given my past articles on improving the privacy and security of Windows 10, what do you need to know about this new 1803 version of Windows 10?
In the olden days, there was only “Bash on Ubuntu on Windows 10”. This little gem gave you something like reverse WINE.
You got an Ubuntu linux install that’s running on top of the Windows kernel – with full file system access, the ability to install and run all kinds of linux command-prompty stuff like git, and even graphical linux apps like gitk.
Fast forward a few years, and things have changed…
What if you’re still running Bash on Ubuntu on Windows (Ubuntu 14.04) and you want to upgrade to the latest Ubuntu 16.04 without reinstalling everything?
Or, what if you want a different flavor of linux?
Back in October 2017, Microsoft released the Fall Creators Update for Windows 10.
For most people, all was well. But for a surprisingly large minority, the Start menu just sort of stopped working.
Clicking the Start button did nothing, and neither did right-clicking it. Sometimes, open apps won’t even show up on the taskbar.
Apparently, it’s still not working right for some people 5 months later!
There have been a variety of fixes for this issue, but there is one that I have found always fixes the problem…
Way back in 2009, I wrote this article:
How to Determine the Master Browser in a Windows Workgroup
I also released a tool called LAN Scanner that lets you see all the puters on your local network, their IP addies, MAC addresses, and which puter is the Master Browser.
That’s great… except that recently, it stopped working!
While digging into this problem, I discovered that the traditional “Network” browsing in Windows has kind of become broken since Microsoft has officially poo-pooed (and disabled) SMB v1.
What that means for you is that if you have a home network with Windows 10 machines, you’re going to want to switch to using a HomeGroup – but there’s a catch!
It’s been several months since Windows 10 1709 was released. Even now, not all puters out there have received the update. As with all versions of Win 10, Microsoft rolls them out slowly over time.
Sometimes, you might not get the latest version because of some incompatibility or other issue. Other times, maybe your internet sucks and it just takes a long time to download 3GB in the background!
In any case, you’ll get the update soon enough – but that doesn’t mean it will work.
The following is my collection of fixes that usually work to convince a puter to successfully install the latest flavor of Windows 10…
In the olden days, your puter had a BIOS.
Nowadays, the BIOS is rapidly giving way to UEFI, which provides all kinds of benefits.
At the same time, hard drives have sort of evolved, so now we’re supposed to use GPT instead of MBR.
Well, okay… First of all, what does all that mean?
And second, how on earth do you convert your MBR drive to the new GPT format without having to reinstall Windows?
It turns out Microsoft has made the process really easy!