Computer in for repairs

For those of you who haven't yet updated to Windows 10 I have one word:

Don't.

I took my desktop computer in for repair today. As soon as the service guy heard I had installed Windows 10 he grimaced and said that's the problem. It will cost me $125 to go back to Windows 7.

Backing up a bit...

I upgraded to Windows 10 in July (just before vacation), close to the end of the year when it was offered for free. Things went pretty well, though my camera no longer talked to my computer to allow copying photos. Not a big deal. I figured if I had a bigger problem in 30 days I could revert to Windows 7.

The problems began 60 days after the upgrade.

First, the playback cursor on my music program (that's Finale) disappeared. It became awkward for me to listen to the music I wrote. The cursor has since come back without me doing anything.

Last week as I turned off the computer for the night it updated new Windows 10 files. The next morning it took 20 minutes to configure those files before giving up and spending another 10 minutes undoing what it had done.

Yesterday as I was using the computer it shut itself off. It then tried to reboot. It failed after 3 seconds and tried again. And again. And again. I had to turn off the surge protector to get it to stop.

Some of you with computer smarts would say I should check the BIOS. But it didn't get far enough into the boot process to allow that.

After the surge protector was off for a couple hours I tried again. The computer stayed up for the rest of the evening. But after using it for perhaps an hour this morning it shut off and began its rebooting cycle again. Each time I let it rest for a while. After being up for a while it would quit, sometimes saying, “Your computer has a problem and needs to reboot.”

After it was down for the first time this morning, each time it was up I did a bit of backup, copying to my external drive. But it did only 7% of the third set of folders before the copy froze.

I talked to the repair guy for a while, making sure he knew where my email and calendar stuff was. He's pretty sure he can set aside and restore all the rest of my files, though not the programs. I'll probably spend the week rebuilding the system (like I didn't have anything else to do this week).

The repair guy also told me a bit about Windows 10. He says its primary purpose was to go through my system and report what it found back to headquarters. I'm not on Facebook because it routinely violates privacy. Then I find I installed an operating system that is designed to violate privacy.

In addition, said the guy, Windows 10 is quite buggy and Microsoft is being slow in resolving the bugs. I had waited the year in hopes all these bugs would be resolved. They were able to wait even longer.

As for the half-hearted promise that I could go back to Windows 7 within 30 days, well, Microsoft almost always found a reason to delete the files that made that possible well before the 30 days were up, meaning if you didn't like 10 you had to buy 7 again.

So I'm annoyed with Microsoft for: 1) violating my privacy, 2) releasing a buggy system on me, 3) causing me to spend $125 to undo the damage, and 4) spending a week to recover.

I'm writing this on my netbook computer, still running Windows 7.