PC Problem - Windows 8 related

[lil chris]

I have two PC's this one I'm on now running windows 7 and my railway room PC running windows 8 upgraded to 8.1. I prefer the windows 7 version any day but that's progress for you. The railway room is a old PC that was running XP but I got a cheap upgrade off Amazon. A point to note for any one with a NEW PC with a SSD Hard drive, DO NOT DEFRAG IT, it reduces there life span.

[DCCDave]

As promised I said I would post the remedy for clearing the stuck Windows 8 WiFi on/off software switch. I would never have though of doing this myself in a month of Sundays, so how someone worked it out I don't know. The solution was (and WiFi is still working this morning the lady tells me) :-

1. Remove battery and unplug
2. Press and hold the power key for 30 seconds
3. Leave battery out but plug power supply back.
4. Press power button and immediately tap F10 key a number of tumes.
5. The bios set up menu appears
6. Select default
7. Select save and exit.

How did someone work that lot out!?

First they figured that they needed BIOS access - and this means powering down the machine.

The removal of the battery and waiting for a while is to ensure that the laptop has fully powered off. Laptops can retain their 'memory' for a short while using energy stored in their capacitors. Waiting a while ensures the capacitors drain.

Hitting F10 a number of times isn't necessary, once will do it but it has to be at the right time. Keep whacking it and one of those will be at the right time!

Set default and save - tells the BIOS to forget what it thinks is configured and restore the factory defaults.

I'f you know how the power supply and BIOS work then this is a logical sequence, if you don't it looks like magic!

Cheers
Dave

---

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"
Arthur C. Clarke

[Tdm]

I have two PC's this one I'm on now running windows 7 and my railway room PC running windows 8 upgraded to 8.1. I prefer the windows 7 version any day but that's progress for you. The railway room is a old PC that was running XP but I got a cheap upgrade off Amazon. A point to note for any one with a NEW PC with a SSD Hard drive, DO NOT DEFRAG IT, it reduces there life span.

I would like to say thank you to all those who responded.
The comment about not Defragmenting is interesting - but how do you identify whether a Hard Drive is an SSD type or not?

The lady's PC that I had the problems with now seems to be working fine, but I warned her the Hard Drive may need swapping out at sometime in the near future, and she has bought a new one.

Things seem to get more and more complicated these days, it was all much more simpler when I.T. was in it's infancy. Must be a sign I am getting old, yet I don't feel old.

Time to get back to sorting out a few niggles with my Layout, preparing for my trip to Chester, and topping up my tan as haven't had time to go to the Pool for a while, and now that the kids are back at school I can enjoy a swim whilst it's quiet and am unlikely to bump into someone or something when doing a few lengths.

[Nick]

"Defragging" a new PC with an SSD fitted shouldn't be an issue. At least, not a Windows one. I know nothing about other OSs one way or the other.

The Windows 7 defragmenter didn't operate on SSDs, and the Windows 8 version, now called "Disk Optimizer" not "Defragmenter", contains routines specifically designed for SSDs rather than blindly defragging them.

(An SSD, being an electronic not an electro-mechanical device, can be distinguished by its silent operation. No spinning sounds, no head-seeking clicks. But TBH, I'd have expected a new machine equipped with one to be plastered with labels to that effect. The marketing men have to push the purchase somehow! There's probably a system tool that'll tell you as well. I intend upgrading my system drive to SSD in the not too distant future - I'll look then.)

[Tdm]

With regards Defragmenting, I never use the Windows supplied tool, but the "Smart Defrag" routine that is just one part of Advanced System Cares free software package, as Smart Defrag does much more than just defragmenting it optimises and prioritises your hard drive files as well if you ask it to for faster access to the ones you use regularly.

I run ASC (advanced System Care) at least once a month as part of my regular PC Tidy Up routines, in addition to Avira which is the Anti-Virus software package that permanently monitors activity on the PC on a daily basis.

[Nick]

I've now given up on third party security and maintenance tools. I used a variety of them diligently for years, but Windows seems to be much better at looking after itself now than it used to be. (Famous last words!  ) I occasionally run Disk Cleanup and that's about it.

So far, Windows 8.1 has been humming along nicely with no obvious performance degradation on both the machines I'm running it on, a tablet and a desktop.

[linuxyeti]

Hi the comment about other OS's and defragging is a bit of a misnomer. Unix, and Unix like o/s, or should I say, unix like native file systems, don't need defragging, as the the file formats behave appreciably differently to FAT/NTFS file systems.

Bit like 're-organising' data in databases such as Oracle, MS Access, MS SqlServer, whereas, other RDB's such as Postgres, MySQL/MariaDB , especially on Unix like systems don't need re-organizing.

Cheers

Tony

[lil chris]

I have just recently installed a 256gb ssd in my computer. The terabyte drive I had started to give error messages ( only 4 years old too) so I took the decision to buy a new 500Gb plus the above ssd,I already had another 500gb drive as well in the pc. I then copied all the data I needed and cloned the os off the 128gb ssd drive I had fitted with a copy of Acronis True Image supplied with the new drives. That did make things easy no reinstalling just swapped the drives over. The ssd drives do make your boot times quicker and with the prices coming down I took the oppertunity to upgrade, the bigger drive allowing me to add my fav games to the boot drive. Unfortunately I cannot use my old 128 ssd in my railway pc, the motherboard does not support AHCI, the pc is still good enough to run my railway if I decide to use it sometime in the future.