Shoulda known better

I’d been putting off installing the free upgrade to Windows 10 for many months. News that if I didn’t do it by July 29th it would cost £99 forced me into action. I’ve said many times “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it”. I should have listened to myself. I thought it said the upgrade would take one or two hours. On my relatively new laptop it took TWELVE HOURS to slowly download the upgrade and even more slowly install it.

For a day or two everything seemed fine but then the machine slowed to a crawl. I had jumped up and down on my previous laptop in frustration that it would take 30 minutes to boot up and had to pause and think twice about every keystroke I made. Now my shiny new machine was no better showing nigh on 100% CPU or Memory or Disk usage most of the time. Various solutions were recommended such as turning off M*cr*s*ft stuff running constantly in the background. There’s masses of it in Windows 10. I don’t want to synchronise my phone, fridge or cuckoo clock with my laptop. I just want to check my Email and sometimes add comics to the Collectorz.com database. One major problem was definitely a Windows update (KB3172985) that was trying to load at least four times a day, always stalling at 54%. There is no “delete” or “refresh” button in Windows 10 for this issue. There really ought to be. The only solution is via ye olde “Command prompt”. I have spent the last 24 hours virtually learning to be a programmer, to hack into the Registry and various other arcane places deep within Windows just to get the laptop back to some speed of operation I can live with. I thought after all these years M*cr*s*ft would have got their act together by now.