Tech issues that are really screw-ups

[farlymac]

What with all the different sites such as RFF and places I shop at or bank at or anything else at doing upgrades or updates to their online presence, I was reminded today about something that happened a few years ago.

Some of you may remember when Microsoft started doing updates to WIN10 that they had one particular version that wiped out peoples photos from their computers. I went through many an update afterwards with the fear of this happening to me, and thought it actually had. During one such update my hard drive decided to give up the ghost, so I took it in to get repaired.

When I got it back all my files that had anything to do with images (photos, graphics, drawings) were gone. I talked to the tech who did the work and he said it must have happened during the update. So I figured 14 years of work was gone, though I still had all the scanned files and memory cards if I needed to pull any of the images out sometime. Plus all the processed files were on Flickr, so at least I had a catalog of what there was.

So today I was trying to figure out just how much space was left on my hard drive, and the laptop was getting kind of sluggish (turned out it was just another Update from MS downloading). Anyway, I came across a reference to One Drive, MS's cloud service for working across several platforms with your original files. I never used it because it meant leaving your computer running and online 24hrs a day. Didn't think that was a good idea for a laptop.

Found there is a dedicated folder in the File Explorer for the One Drive, and since there was over 190gb in it I might want to see what it was before deleting it which MS recommended since the files had not been used in a long time.

Long story short, there were all my missing image files in the three sub-folders who's names I immediately recognized. And to think I almost deleted them!

I remember the tech setting up a link on my laptop to be able to back-up to the Cloud, and I suppose he was giving me a head start by positioning certain files to send into the aether. Thing was, instead of copying them to the One Drive folder, he moved the folder contents by drag-and-drop to save his time. I'm also guessing he forgot about that part.

So I can now figure out what photos I may want to re-process with the software I'm now using, or whatever I may switch to later on (there are some things about Affinity that really bug me).

I am not looking forward to the RFF upgrade.

PF

 

[charjohncarter]

I don't like updates either. Windows 10 did something called a Centennial update. I lost the ability to access my two external hard drives. They still work but I'll have to take them to a tech to rename so I can use them with Windows 10. My wife losses some of her music every time her iPhone is updated, I guess they are in the cloud but only if they were purchased through the Apple store.

 

[DownUnder]

This may or may not fit this thread, but my first experience with Windows 10 was in 2018 on a laptop I bought from a computer shop in Indonesia. The shop was (and still is) very good and they have done many repairs for me, but as it somehow turned out, the Win 10 on the laptop was 'illegal'.

This caused me no end of seemingly technical problems when I returned home to Australia with the laptop and started using it on the internet. I was using mostly Word on MS Office but this began acting very oddly - some keyboard functions worked differently from what they should, the laptop often worked slowly for long periods of time and finally began freezing up. Then messages began to pop up warning me that MS couldn't 'access' my Win10.

Not being a technical person, I basically ignored all that. A well-meaning friend visited one day and after I had told him what was happening, he decided to go OL and connect to MS to see if any sort of download could be done from them to fix the problems.

Almost immediately I had a series of flashing messages warning that the installed Win 10 was not a legal copy. I stopped using the laptop immediately and decided to buy a legal copy, but as with everything else in this country, it was too expensive for me to do here.

To make a long story short, I took the laptop offline but some 'bug' had planted itself in my illegal windows and the warning messages kept popping up. I stopped using the laptop and eventually took it back to Indonesia with me. In Surabaya I had the shop install a legal copy which I bought and paid for and registered. No more messages or any tech problems since. And all is now nice and legal with MS and Windows. My conscience is clear and I sleep much better at night.

I had lost a few documents and photo folders but the shop tech in Surabaya ran a program in-house and somehow retrieved all those missing files for me.

I've not used One Drive or any other cloud services and I likely never will. But like farlymac, I too am curious (and a little bit apprehensive) about what may happen when RFF first turns on the upgrade. I hope there won't be any disasters such as happened to one photo site some years ago when (so I was told at the time) an upgrade wiped out all the archives.

Let us all cross our fingers and wish happy and positive outcomes. A little hope and some prayers may serve us all as well.

PS The Win 10 laptop is still working fine. My main computer is now a Macbook Air which has not given me one problem since the day I first turned it on. Just saying.

 

[View Range]

I had endless problems with Windows 7. Eight years ago I switched to Macs. While I would prefer to have a Dell Precision Workstation rather than picking from the limited set of offerings from Apple, I will stay with macOS as long as I can. I run Windows XP, Windows 7 and Windows 10 on VMWare Fusion and Parallels virtual machines for a variety of old programs. These Windows virtual machines work better on an Intel Mac than they do on a Windows PC.

 

[Richard G]

PF. Wow. That is so fantastic to have rediscovered all those files. Good techs often have habits that are old school and deeply conservative and clever. They can't help it. I have one like that.

 

[Sonnar Brian]

I'm running DOS 7.1 on a 2.7GHz I5. It is fast, and I don't have to worry about updates destroying the machine.

One Windows 7 update almost fried a machine. I had to pull the plug and battery- the AMD based machine just kept heating up. This had to do with the Intel CPU microcode error a few years ago regarding the cache-line timing attack.

 

[farlymac]

I really haven't had many issues with WIN10, except that MS has taken away most of the user controls that made it easier for me to keep the OS in top shape. Now I have to trust MS and their automatic maintenance system to do that.

My path to WIN10 was from DOS 3.22 to WIN3 to XP to WIN8 to WIN8.1 to WIN10, up to version 10.0.19043 now. So I got to miss all the hassles folks had with 98 and 7.

I once hotroded a 386 machine into a 386DX, quadrupling the memory, and adding a second hard drive, a CD drive, and updated SVGA graphics. I also had a switch box to control printer output to either a dot matrix or inkjet.

Those were the days!


PF