@&$!!ng Windows update

I’m currently wading through a fresh install of windows 10 and all my audio software after the last windows update ... had all my projects backed up but not my system drive, stupid me, but still I’d like to kill someone at Microsoft right now...

Honestly it's not a bad idea to  purge the daemons once in a while. And while your at it, put all of your data on an external SSD drive.

Yea I keep a samples drive and a projects drive and a system drive, so nothing important lost, and I should have backed up my system drive as well...

And yea you are correct about purging, it’ll prob help a few things to run smoother starting from a fresh install.  I would like to have chosen my own timing though.  The blue screen of death never gives a good feeling

It's fun to do a dual boot with Linux if you think of it.

desol said:

It's fun to do a dual boot with Linux if you think of it.

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I love Linux, I wish more software companies would support it...

Time to move to a decent operating system - Linux.

Cheers

Ian

Seeker said:

I love Linux, I wish more software companies would support it...

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Linux already has almost all the free software DIY pro audio person needs.  KiCad for schematic capture and PCB design. Ardour for recording and mixing, some of the free LADSPA plugins are as good as or better than plugins you have to pay money for. Then there's freeware like Room EQ Wizard for audio measurements and with wine you can run LTspice for circuit simulation. 

Best thing to do, if you can afford it, is to never connect your recording computer to the Internet.  Hard to believe, but there are even worse things than Windows Update out there.

(yes, Windows Update sucks.  The concept is nice, but the Microsoft version seems to manage to always be stepping on your feet)

Just a small positive story:
Had increasing BSOD's from an older 7 box that would occur (of course) at the most inopportune times...  Figured a thermal/hardware failure, so decided to upgrade to 10 just to play around before rebuild.  First few days after 10 I did get the equivalent of a single BSOD,  but afterwards-- been about 6 months now, and...no crashes.  I imagine it's either luck, nefariousness on behalf of windoze, or there's some extra  self-corrective behavior added to the win10 kernel.

boji said:

I imagine it's either luck, nefariousness on behalf of windoze, or there's some extra  self-corrective behaviour added to the win10 kernel.

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Or win 10 just does not happen to use the dodgy few bytes of the hard drive that caused the problem with Win 7.

Cheers

Ian

Or win 10 just does not happen to use the dodgy few bytes of the hard drive that caused the problem with Win 7

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Maybe so!  The returned error was hard to track down- I think it was a driver making calls to something on the motherboard that by replying, put things in a tailspin. However the OS is on a fairly old SSD... I've not had one fail yet mid-use, but it has to be the case given its age that ram blocks have been retired due to surpassing the r/r limit.

Heikki said:

Linux already has almost all the free software DIY pro audio person needs.  KiCad for schematic capture and PCB design. Ardour for recording and mixing, some of the free LADSPA plugins are as good as or better than plugins you have to pay money for. Then there's freeware like Room EQ Wizard for audio measurements and with wine you can run LTspice for circuit simulation.

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Well For me I won’t use Linux on my main system until there is full support from Native Instruments, UAD, and Steinberg... which is not likely to come anytime soon.  I might set up something on a mobile rig though.

As much as windows pisses me off I do have to say windows 10 was rock solid for several years... until the update and then the never ending blue screen of death.

Don't run as Administrator. When I setup a new machine I make the initial default account "owner" (but not "admin" since that would be something easily guessed). Then I create a new "regular" non-Administrator account with my usual username and use that for day-to-day stuff (although my main workstation is and always has been Linux). When I want to install something important I temporarily login as "owner", install it and then logout. If something requires Administrator to run correctly, you can almost always just right click on the icon and select "Run as Administrator" and put in your "owner" credentials. That alone could extend the life of the machine 10x.

squarewave said:

Don't run as Administrator.
...
That alone could extend the life of the machine 10x.

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Thought I undertood your message, (in view of safety?), but the last line was surprising... so I might haven't understood the motive for not running as admin after all. Curious, could you explain a bit more?

Thanks

The most likely preventable premature death of a machine is from an exploit installing malware such as from browser visiting a malicious website or installing a browser extension or plugin of questionable origin (aren't they all?) or installing some software that has an exploit in it or plugging in a USB drive with malware on it, etc. If you don't run as Administrator, the damage that code can do will be limited and the life of the machine will be extended significantly.

I have one Windows 8 machine that I use regularly for all things that require Windows like Office and LTSpice. I do EVERYTHING as a regular user and it's been going for almost 7 years now. IIRC Windows Update got stuck once a few years ago and I had to manually install a collective update. But otherwise, it's been fine. It still gets and installs updates. A little slow at times maybe but LTSpice runs fast enough.

My primary is Linux and it actually gets stuck once in a while. The mouse will move but I can't click on things. But technically I can recover if I recycle X so I'm not going to blame the OS. And unlike Windows, it's not rebooting all the time. It happens after running for a few months.

Thanks for the response, I see, extending the running-without-hassle time for a machine.

(So nothing hardware related, which _would_ have been surprising ;-) ).

Thanks

Interesting idea, I never really thought of not running as administrator being a safety thing...