The Last Moonrise of 2017

Happy New Year

More Upgrade angst

There haven’t been many blog post of late, any free computer time I have available has been spent just patching up, re-installing or watching with fingers crossed yet another update. Somewhat fortunately I think I am finally moving forward.

That was until I wanted to do a bit of work on my studio computer (more that just listen to music, or control a chromecast). I wanted to change the display (to suit an old TV, a Sony Bravia, it has nice natural colour, good resolution and a big screen). Well it might be easy if I can change the settings (and the setting tab no longer works, thanks microsoft!)

After a while I manage to get to the settings (by doing a right click on the start menu) and the settings seemed to be working. Then I got a notification about an update status, so I went and had a look. Damn its still trying to update, at least now it realize it can't, before I have to go through that frustrating upgrade loop. I wonder if it will ever realize I really don’t want to upgrade , I’d rather  just fix what I have now.

When will this madness end? 

Damn I can’t find a display setting that takes advantage of the Bravia big screen

Windows 10 Update woes continue :: Catch 22

After struggling through a couple of weeks with three of my computers effectively unusable because of the windows 10 update loops and related update problem, I bought out and old HP desktop (old being about 5 years , its 64 bit has 8GB of RAM) and was using it to give me capability top work email and do some photographic work. It did update itself twice without any problem to 1703, then the dreaded update loop started and it lost access to the setting app. Which was a pain as I wanted to print something and could set up a printer. I got over that issue by writing my word document to my google drive converting it to a google doc and printing it to the printer from my android phone via WiFi.

Please note Microsoft : the lack of microsoft tools used in this totally unnecessary work-around.

In the last days of last week I was able to nursed my newer computer back into usefulness, I had my computer access back so I should have quit while I was ahead. Instead before I put my old reliable computer back in the studio driving my copy stand and sometimes a music playlist I figured I should to should try an “in place” reset, which turned into a Windows fall update (version 1709) and took over 9 hours (at one stage it may have been waiting up to 30 minutes for me to hit return n “the update now” prompt). It finished late last night and I had a quick look and it seemed ok. So I shut it down and went to bed.

It wasn’t Ok of course, now I have a different problem a lot of the standard apps are greyed out on the start up menu.  They can’t be run from the all apps list either. That sounds easy enough to fix just download them again from the App Store. Wait the app store doesn’t work either. Oh Dear, Yet another Catch 22!

Where is your Shame Microsoft?

Did Windows 10 have an accomplice?

I have slowly got my two very sick Windows 10 computers back to health (one by a full reset and the hassle of reloading all my software and data and the other by a in place reset). Its taken the best part of four days and a decent amount of angst. I’m none the wiser of the cause, but I’m slightly worried one of the software packages I’ve recently installed (or more particularly related drivers) might have cause some incompatibility. I had really only installed a number of photo software Luminar (as a windows beta version) On1 RAW Photo 2018 (as a trial version) and Aurora HDR 2018.

The Windows beta of Luminar didn’t seem a real candidate because I had been using it for a while and it was installed on the another windows 10 computer that didn’t exhibit the update problem. Aurora hadn’t been installed on this computer and when I tried to install On1 Photo RAW 2018 it reported that the computer was not compatible with Open GL 3.3 (yet I use mining software on that machine that relies on Open GL and currently uses version 3.3). On1 Photo Raw also proved essentially unusable on the HP spectre small screen and frequently froze in tablet mode. Frustration overload

I have purchase Aurora HDR and love it, so I’ll be making sure it works fine before I try reloading either of the other programs. I do like Luminar but it doesn’t yet do any file management or cataloguing so I’m still stuck with lightroom for the time being. I also like On1’s stuff, especially its layering, masking including great luminosity masking tools and blending, but if it only works on one of the three machines that I will be using, it is definitely off the potential purchase list for now (so I’ll stick with On1 Photo 10.5 for now)