On the Road Again!

With two ancient laptops and a work one that has many many restrictions on what I can do and sites I can visit the time was to buy something new. Claire has had a Microsoft Surface 2 Go for over a year and has been using it almost daily. It was so successful I have bought one too.  Of course, the tablet isn't the only thing that needs buying. There's the keyboard I am using now. Then a mouse. Then a bag to carry it in. All done. To be different I have chosen the tomato red keyboard and cover. It looks very nice.  I hope it is east to clean! It was all very easy to set up and I opted to go to Windows 10 rather than Windows S. I am used to "proper" Windows! As well as using it to replace the old laptops, it's also to take with me when travelling. It has only a 10" screen and should easily fit in the top box of either bike. The bag I bought is a "buy again" option in "my orders" or Amazon just a change of colour! No confusion between my kit a...

Thanks to Patrick at work we now have a working laptop with Windows 10 installed.  After the problems when Windows Update decided to do the usual security fixes for Windows and Office, and lobbed in the Windows 10 upgrade at the same time, it is good to have it back. Mind you. The original upgrade failed on October 26th and it took until November 16th to get it fixed.  Days in my life that I will never get back thanks to Microsoft and their half arsed upgrades. On top of that there is the MS tech forum that suggests all sort of fixes and bodges that are way way outside the technical know-how of the average home user.   Patrick though is a technician and network manager at work and even he struggled to fix it. In the end we had to backup what we could of the user data and then blast it, installing Windows 10 from scratch, I am lucky he saw it as a challenge as I gather from the internet and forums that others, and many of them, have had to pay a lot of...

Well, that came as a surprise... I turned on the Dell Inspiron and it started to download the latest updates to the OS.   It was on the dining table and I let it run as this operation seems to kill the machine, making it impossible to do anything else.  Returning an hour or so later, after taking Reggie (the dog!) for a walk, and it was about 25% the way through installing Windows 10.   That was yesterday. I know I had requested this "free" upgrade some months ago, but I thought I had the ultimate control on when I wanted to run it.  I let it run as it seemed the lesser of two evils rather than cancel it. Sadly, my first inclination may have been the right one as over the next twelve hours it installed and welcomed me to Windows 10. I then logged in and after a few minutes the desktop disappeared and this was it.  Just the weather widget! No toolbar and no "start|" button. The only way I could get the desktop back was to restart t...