Stay with me for a bit as I go through the back story and then into the rest of the story where I take on the computer head to head.
I am always astounded by how persnickety computers can be. They insist on things like syntax being perfect and they just can’t figure out what I want to do. All computers work off ones and zeros. Those 2 things are all they recognize and operate from. Strings of ones and zeros control our world. There are 8 ones or zeros used to make 1 single character. It takes thousands of ones and zeros for a single email. A basic windows 10 operating system takes 18,000,000,000 times 8 ones and zeros to just be able to light up the screen on a windows computer. That is before we can begin to add a single program. Now imagine what happens when just one 1 flips and turns into a 0. One program quits working, or worst case, one computer stops being functional.
My 12 year old windows laptop was driving me crazy after I got my Chromebook because my Chromebook is up and running in 10 seconds, while my windows system takes 10 minutes or longer to settle down and operate well. I started researching and decided to put a solid state drive in the windows laptop, but having never done that before, I was extremely hesitant to try and do that, so I called my old buddy Kevin to get some information. Kevin is the master of all things windows computers. He encouraged me to do it and even helped me find the right place to get a solid state drive. I wish I could give you Kevin’s phone number to his help desk, but if I did he would be busy 24/7 with calls, and then how would I ever be able to contact him? I would get a message something like, “Hi, this is Kevin. Your call is important to me. All operators are busy at the moment; stay on line you are 128th in line and I will get to you within 5 business days.
The drive arrived yesterday and I was eager to dive in and start the transition. I had been studying tutorials for 2 weeks and thought I was ready. I removed the old spinning drive and installed the new solid state drive, other than the tiny screws to remove the back off the laptop, it was a piece of cake at that point. I put my windows media flash drive (which I had downloaded from a windows site) into the USB port, turned the computer on and started leaning on the F2 key to bring up the BIOS (basic input output program). From there I could instruct the machine to boot up and use that drive to install my windows 10 operating system. It seemed so simple at that point, until I got a screen displaying some mumbo-jumbo that was basically “no go”. I dialed up Kevin and he suggested trying the flash drive on another windows computer to see if it worked there. Kevin, being the good grandpa he is, was heading out to his grandson’s soccer game, so he said he would call me when that was over. I tried what he said to do and the flash drive didn’t work there either. Evidently there was a 1 or a 0 in the download from windows that had flipped. I was stuck and Kevin was going to be gone for hours, what to do, what to do? I was distraught, wondering if putting in the solid state drive was not a good idea after all. I remembered Kevin had told me to create a windows 10 boot drive when I first downloaded windows 10. I raced over to my library of flash drives to find that boot drive. I followed the same routine, leaning on the F2 key and bam, I was in the BIOS. I selected boot up from the flash drive, restarted the computer and it was ready to install the windows 10 operating system. I got on my Chromebook to refresh my memory on what to do next. I found a tutorial and started following it on the windows machine. The next thing I found was I was in an endless loop of doing the same thing over and over again. I scratched my head and wondered what was wrong. The solution that immediately came to mind was, stop, have a beer and think about it while I went through the tutorial again and again. I had missed one step. I corrected that and the operating system loaded, but then the tutorial never said to remove the flash drive after telling the BIOS to go back to loading from the solid state drive. As long as that was in the machine it kept loading from the flash drive. I was in a dilemma. I had to remove the flash drive while it was still being accessed, not a good thing to do. Once I did that everything started working.
Now one might think that is the end of the story, but no, there was more. I had created the boot drive over 2 years ago and as anyone can tell you windows 10 has updates all the time. So I had to download over 2 years worth of updates. Once done though, my windows 10 machine starts up and is ready to run in less than 35 seconds, so much faster than having a spinning drive in the computer. Now it is like having a brand new computer, yea! This is the best thing ever for a windows machine. No matter what happens from this point, my windows machine will always be 20 times faster than ever before. If only my internet speeds were faster, (nothing to do with my computer) I would be so happier. It does not matter how good or fast a computer operates, the site you download from operates slower than the computer does, especially those sites that constantly download advertisements while you want to watch a video or read an article. Life is great, internet downloads, not so much. Thank you for your help Kevin!
I am always astounded by how persnickety computers can be. They insist on things like syntax being perfect and they just can’t figure out what I want to do. All computers work off ones and zeros. Those 2 things are all they recognize and operate from. Strings of ones and zeros control our world. There are 8 ones or zeros used to make 1 single character. It takes thousands of ones and zeros for a single email. A basic windows 10 operating system takes 18,000,000,000 times 8 ones and zeros to just be able to light up the screen on a windows computer. That is before we can begin to add a single program. Now imagine what happens when just one 1 flips and turns into a 0. One program quits working, or worst case, one computer stops being functional.
My 12 year old windows laptop was driving me crazy after I got my Chromebook because my Chromebook is up and running in 10 seconds, while my windows system takes 10 minutes or longer to settle down and operate well. I started researching and decided to put a solid state drive in the windows laptop, but having never done that before, I was extremely hesitant to try and do that, so I called my old buddy Kevin to get some information. Kevin is the master of all things windows computers. He encouraged me to do it and even helped me find the right place to get a solid state drive. I wish I could give you Kevin’s phone number to his help desk, but if I did he would be busy 24/7 with calls, and then how would I ever be able to contact him? I would get a message something like, “Hi, this is Kevin. Your call is important to me. All operators are busy at the moment; stay on line you are 128th in line and I will get to you within 5 business days.
The drive arrived yesterday and I was eager to dive in and start the transition. I had been studying tutorials for 2 weeks and thought I was ready. I removed the old spinning drive and installed the new solid state drive, other than the tiny screws to remove the back off the laptop, it was a piece of cake at that point. I put my windows media flash drive (which I had downloaded from a windows site) into the USB port, turned the computer on and started leaning on the F2 key to bring up the BIOS (basic input output program). From there I could instruct the machine to boot up and use that drive to install my windows 10 operating system. It seemed so simple at that point, until I got a screen displaying some mumbo-jumbo that was basically “no go”. I dialed up Kevin and he suggested trying the flash drive on another windows computer to see if it worked there. Kevin, being the good grandpa he is, was heading out to his grandson’s soccer game, so he said he would call me when that was over. I tried what he said to do and the flash drive didn’t work there either. Evidently there was a 1 or a 0 in the download from windows that had flipped. I was stuck and Kevin was going to be gone for hours, what to do, what to do? I was distraught, wondering if putting in the solid state drive was not a good idea after all. I remembered Kevin had told me to create a windows 10 boot drive when I first downloaded windows 10. I raced over to my library of flash drives to find that boot drive. I followed the same routine, leaning on the F2 key and bam, I was in the BIOS. I selected boot up from the flash drive, restarted the computer and it was ready to install the windows 10 operating system. I got on my Chromebook to refresh my memory on what to do next. I found a tutorial and started following it on the windows machine. The next thing I found was I was in an endless loop of doing the same thing over and over again. I scratched my head and wondered what was wrong. The solution that immediately came to mind was, stop, have a beer and think about it while I went through the tutorial again and again. I had missed one step. I corrected that and the operating system loaded, but then the tutorial never said to remove the flash drive after telling the BIOS to go back to loading from the solid state drive. As long as that was in the machine it kept loading from the flash drive. I was in a dilemma. I had to remove the flash drive while it was still being accessed, not a good thing to do. Once I did that everything started working.
Now one might think that is the end of the story, but no, there was more. I had created the boot drive over 2 years ago and as anyone can tell you windows 10 has updates all the time. So I had to download over 2 years worth of updates. Once done though, my windows 10 machine starts up and is ready to run in less than 35 seconds, so much faster than having a spinning drive in the computer. Now it is like having a brand new computer, yea! This is the best thing ever for a windows machine. No matter what happens from this point, my windows machine will always be 20 times faster than ever before. If only my internet speeds were faster, (nothing to do with my computer) I would be so happier. It does not matter how good or fast a computer operates, the site you download from operates slower than the computer does, especially those sites that constantly download advertisements while you want to watch a video or read an article. Life is great, internet downloads, not so much. Thank you for your help Kevin!
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