GeckoFood's Journal: [geek] Windows 7 Again

My son has a laptop that finally got bogged down with crapware and other nasties under the hood and he asked me to reload it for him. He is usually careful online but he apparently found some aggressive adware buried in something else he wanted. He had updated it to Windows 10 from 7 which at the time had seemed like a good idea.

I spent two days reloading this system, using the 4 recovery DVDs that I made from the system (shoulda used CloneZilla and imaged the booger). After that, I made a terrible mistake and tried the WIndows 10 thing since I thought that was what he wanted. Box would not boot so I got to start all over again.

I am going through the process of dowloading all of the WIndows 7 updates right now. I had forgotten what a slow and painful process this is.

Yes.

[jawtheshark]

If you leave the PC to its own devices, and do not force updates, it can take up to three days(!!!) to get to patch current level. Do not trust it when it says "there are no updates". There are, but Windows Update remembers when it was last run and just says that.

Also, if you're really unlucky, it never even achieves patch level and you'll have to figure out why exactly Windows Update fails. For me it was a Internet Explorer upgrade that didn't want to pass.

Re:

[GeckoFood]

When it says there are no updates I have forced it to go check again... Every time it has resulted in hundreds of MB in updates. It has been chewing on a larger update for about a half an hour now, and while it seems to be progressing it is taking forever and a day (give or take a few minutes).

I get a lot of updates on my Linux side, but they never take that long...

Re:

[jawtheshark]

Exactly. Thing is, most people except for nerds like us actually *know* this. It's infuriating. It's really irresponsible to say "all fine and dandy" when it clearly isn't.

Also, with the initial install (starting typically from SP1), you might hit the Windows Update bug that causes a svchost to eat up all memory. Just just need to wait, and wait, and wait...

While you're at it, you might be interested in my blog entry [willekens.lu]. While you already did the 10 upgrade and as such the machine is registered forever

Re:

[GeckoFood]

Good article. That has given me an idea for when I am finally done updating my son's computer (I am on day three of Windows 7 updates and patches). When I have finally finished, I will make a CloneZilla image of the hard drive so that I do not need to go through this pain again as thoroughly as I have this time. This has been a true nightmare - every update reveals more and bigger updates and as a result the process is getting longer and longer. The current situation is that there were 207 patches and updat