For the past 2 months I have been bombarded by a request to upgrade my windows 7 to Windows 10. In the past 5 days the computer was warning me the the available free space was very low. I tried to defrag but nothing. Finally took it to a computer service place and asked about it. They looked at it and said it was coming from Windows 10. I didnt accept windows 10 to be put on what gives? He really said it was just trying to get onto the system (worm its way in) was my understanding. In so doing it takes a lot of memory to do that. However nowhere does it appear that windows 10 is on the system.
He mentioned a lot of people have been coming into his shop with the same problem. Has anyone here run into this problem and if so what did you do?
It depends on your automatic update settings in the Windows Update control panel. There are four options:
In the first two cases, a Windows 10 upgrade package (about 3 GB if I remember correctly) will be downloaded automatically before you are even asked to accept it.
I was going to ask for advice from some people on this forum who are more computer tolerant than I. For the past 2 months I have been bombarded on my computer by a request to upgrade my windows 7 to Windows 10. In the past 5 days the computer started warning me the the available free space was very low. I tried to defrag but nothing. Finally took it to a computer service place and asked about it. They looked at it and said the problem was coming from Windows 10. I didnt accept windows 10 to be put on my computer so what gives? T told hum. What he said it was just trying to get onto the system (worm its way in) was my understanding. In so doing it takes a lot of memory to do that. However nowhere does it appear that windows 10 is on the computer system.
He mentioned a lot of people have been coming into his shop with the same problem. Has anyone here run into this problem and if so what did you do?
My girlfriend who loves playing with her computer absolutely hated 8 and actually brought back a brand new computer and switched to Mac.
From her experience I decided to pass on 8 and 10. I hate the time it takes me make fixes as well as figure things out. These D*mn things are suppose to save time not the other way around. Im not even mentioning the aggravation.
So any advice would be appreciated.
Want advice? For a person like you, who is not interested in what goes on “under the hood” and who has some budget (if I picture you right!?), do like your partner and get into the Mac stuff. Might take some getting used to, perhaps. But as we say here, it is not hard to get used to an improvement.
Working among IT professionals, most of whom are supposed to duck under some corner of the hood more or less frequently, I observe more and more of them switching to Apple. Some do so for the decorum only, though.
I once worked for Microsoft and other PC companies, but about about 8 years ago I switched everything completely to MAC, two offices and my desk at home, mobile communication and internet, all synced via iCloud and Dropbox. And everything works perfectly. On average one of my Macs crashes once in six months, but after a simple restart everything is back to normal. I cannot imagine going back to Windows.
On any computing device I get my hands on for myself, which needs to “work” properly, I disable every possible automatic update.
Under Windows you find this stuff under Control Panel and it’s probably called something like Automatic Updates. That is just the M$ stuff. Then there are other bits spread around the place e.g. Java (auto updates of that stop a lot of stuff working, though it isn’t as bad as it used to be), Adobe Acrobat, etc and these are spread around the various apps themselves.
Exceptions to my no-update policy are Android phone/tablet apps which I let update themselves, and PC browsers which are getting continually patched for exploit back doors.
However Eugene if the win10 background download buggered your PC then you need to get a bigger hard disk, because you will run out of space sooner or later. You should try Ccleaner (the free one) which is pretty good at deleting the junk which fills up all computers over time.
I have just had the “dropbox” discussion with my part-time IT specialist at work and we had a laugh at how different things are between him (fibre internet, 100mbits/sec down and 20mbits/sec up) and me (5mbits/sec down and 0.4mbits/sec up) and how almost completely useless the whole “cloud” paradigm is to me as a result. It could easily take all night and all day to upload a sizeable file to dropbox and our ADSL is almost unusable while that is happening. On top of that we are limited to 6GB/month down by the ISP we use at work (uploads are unmetered) and we use them for special features like a 3G backup with auto IP remapping to 3G, for when ADSL disappears (often). But that would be heresy to any IT marketing man…
As for switching to Apple, it depends on whether you can get the software you need to do your work. Most people can change because they use a computer only for messaging, browsing, multimedia consumption, and maybe even writing. But there is a vast range of PC programs which don’t exist on a Mac, or don’t exist in any similar form and by the time you have re-educated yourself you have wasted yet another chunk of your life which could have been more rewardingly wasted doing something else 
Ultranomad wrote:
It depends on your automatic update settings in the Windows Update control panel. There are four options:Install updates automatically
Download updates but let me choose whether to install them
Check for updates but let me choose whether to download and install them
Never check for updates
In the first two cases, a Windows 10 upgrade package (about 3 GB if I remember correctly) will be downloaded automatically before you are even asked to accept it.Last Edited by Ultra
Ok so thats what happened. I have automatic updates selected. Why? Because I trusted the bastards to do the right thing. It was recommended. Wrong… never again.
I clicked on the 3rd option and deselected all of the options below. For example software notifications Microsoft update recommended updates etc.
Funny I went into update history and Windows 10 wasnt in there. But Im sure if the computer guy said thats what has been happening I would rather trust him then Microsoft.
I almost bought another PC last August from the States but it had windows 8 and 10 was just about to be released when I came back. Now Im going for a Mac. Ill sit in the apple store in Munich until I learn it.
Anyway thanks for everyones help.
You will still fill up the hard drive on a Mac, however.
It’s easily done – I have 182GB of photos, most of them from trips. Each trips adds 5-10GB. And videos can be huge…. most people fill their computers with multimedia, not “computer data”. A Mac is an IBM compatible PC in hardware terms. They do look prettier, for sure.
And with that much data sitting on your hard drive, you need to think of how to back it up. Unless it is stuff you don’t care about but then why not just delete it? I reckon most “non IT” people eventually lose all their photos and videos because their computers crash. A Mac has a smoother backup path for backups than Windows (for non IT users) but the basic issue remains especially if you have so much stuff that it filled up a modern-sized hard disk.
IOW, a Mac won’t solve your problem unless you find out what the problem was. And most people working in a computer store don’t have a clue.
FWIW, win10 is unusual because every earlier windows update (except for winNT back in 1996 or so) would wipe the computer, so it could not be applied “automatically”.
Most of all a Mac is an operating system that works better and has a much nicer and more intuitive UI. It is more stable too.
Back-ups are a non-event with Macs. Connect a HDD of 1.5 the size of the internal HDD via USB, Firewire or Lightning, go to System Preferences and set “Time Machine” to ON. That’s it. If your Mac ever crashes or has a HW failure, open Time Machine, go to the date you want to your Mac be restored and press enter.
If you are a photographer it makes no sense to store pictures or movies on the internal HDD. If you are serios about it you need an external solution. I have a 18 TB Promise Pegasus R6 RAID system with 6 × 3 TB HDDs, setup as a RAID 6 system, which means that 12 TB can be used for data and up to 2 HDDs can fail without losing ANY data.
Before that I used to experiment with all kinds of backup solutions, which were cheaper of course. But this is the best i ever had: set it up and forget it.
up to 2 HDDs can fail without losing ANY data.
Until the HD controller itself dies, you can’t find the exact model on Ebay (and possibly can’t remember what exact RAID config you set up in its EEPROM), and maybe the hard drive controllers died too…
Happened to me Sept 2014 – 2 days before the fly-in to Corsica. The RAID controller was a 300 quid ADAPTEC top of the range job, too.
A power supply blew up and took the whole lot with it. Well, almost… some data got recovered because whenever I built a RAID machine I always bought a spare RAID controller. I had automatic daily email etc backups so nothing really important got lost. The motherboard went, the CPU too. I wasted a whole week of my life getting back to work.
Nowadays I don’t use RAID and nobody I know who builds machines uses it either. A single drive and a regular backup is the way to go.
Apple have a slick and impressive software solution but it doesn’t protect against a proper hardware failure.
