The Empire Strikes Back

Microsoft, the evil empire, has struck back at my efforts to keep my computers running. I have a desktop and a laptop running Windows 10, and both have tried to update to the newest, greatest iteration of Windows, cleverly named 1903, and both crashed and burned due to bugs in the installation software. Microsoft support people actually spent a couple of hours on the phone with me, but they couldn’t solve the problem (though they did acknowledge that there were a lot of people having problems).

I’m back in business, though, with the older version of Windows, thanks to full disk image backups I’d run to external hard drives. Not quite as recently as I’d wished, but recently enough.

If you have a major Windows update coming, do yourself a big favor and get yourself a fat external drive if you don’t already have one, and back up your whole system before the update! You’ll be glad you did.

Even if the emperor isn’t.

4 Responses

  1. Old Bald Guy
    | Reply

    I too have had problems with Windoze problems through the years. I began using “ShadowProtect” backup and restore program years ago because of it. when Win 10 came out, I soon heard horror stories about its problems, so it took me … perhaps … a year before I actually installed it permanently. What I DID do, however, was that I learned how to totally TURN OFF their update scheme.

    I dual boot Windows (one is purely for backup operations) and NEITHER gets updated by Microsoft. Period. They don’t touch my systems. I turned them off.

    In spite of what they tell you, it can be done. My PC hasn’t been updated for at least a year now..

  2. Fran
    | Reply

    Thanks for the advice on Windows 10. I back up my files to iDrive. I am loving Reefs. My bro finished it and called it “good stuff”. Tell Tor your fans say it was worth the wait!

  3. Keith Power
    | Reply

    I feel your pain. Having been a part of the evil empire as an IT expert of over 20 years, many of those as a Windows engineer, I grew tired of their tyrannical rule over the operating system. Rather than go over to the other (fruity) empire which employs a similar but different dictatorship, I became a bit of a double agent and began to fraternize with the enemy resistance. For a long time ran both Windows and Linux on my system. A while back the evil empire became aware of this and through one of the many unwanted updates, completely eradicated the rebel OS and all its data leaving only Windows intact. As you can probably imagine, I became enraged at the empire and removed Windows entirely and switched to the Linux side completely, but being a freedom fighter is quite difficult as you have to remain vigilant and fight an endless war of incompatibilities. To add to the complexity of the situation, the rebels are not nearly as organized as the empire and they are split into many factions (distributions) and without the power and financial backing that the empire has, we rebels must constantly search out and discover clever ways to perform many of the simple things the empires control and monopolize. I can only hope that you are able to overcome your system failures and continue your journey, and look forward to a happy ending to this story, and the Chaos Chronicles. I think both you and John Bandicut could use a rest from fighting all the evil in the universe.

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