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Saturday, December 26, 2015

Lenovo ThinkPad Dead

Will not even get to the BIOS.  I am a bit reluctant to buy another Lenovo because of this, but I have a very cool multidisplay docking station for the Lenovo.  Groan.

Fortunately, my antique HP laptop is in the process of installing hundreds of Windows 7 upgrades right now, so that I will be able to resume work.

Weirdly, the antique is now shutting down until I move to another outlet.  Water through the wall damaged the electrical?

Fortunately everything is backed up to two external hard drives so this is more annoyance than catastrophe.

Very odd.  I plugged the Lenovo into a different outlet and why it still isn't working, at least the BIOS sort of starts.  Not enough battery? After an hour plugged into a known good outlet the Lenovo can at least run BIOS diagnostics.  But there is no hard disk diagnostic:  hard disk not responding?

Curiously, my wife's Toshiba Portege is making bad hard drive noises and refusing to boot.  Ever wondered what different hard disk noises mean?  See here.  At least I know what this is: just order a replacement hard drive, maybe SSD to boost performance.

6 comments:

  1. Be careful. there are at least a dozen Windows 7 updates that are purely about gathering telemetry about your computer and sending it to Microsoft, and about forcing you to download Windows 10, even if you don't want to upgrade.

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  2. How do I make sure that I don't get my machine updated to Windows 10? I assume I have all the latest updates. It nags me to update to Windows 10 but it doesn't install it for me. I'd like it not to install it.

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  3. None of my Windows 7 PCs have auto updated to 10. All ask me to do so, but they have been polite about it.

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  4. It won't auto-update, but it WILL keep nagging you, and it WILL suck up your bandwidth pre-downloading all the install files, and it does add stuff to send data back to MS about your computer.

    Search for a thing called GWX Control Panel. It's a program that turns off the nag and the forced update items. (Yes, if you have automatic updates, it will automatically download Win 10. If you do manual updates, it will automatically checkmark itself. If you uncheck it or hide it, it will automatically unhide itself and check itself off again.)

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  5. Here is the current list of Window downloads you want to refuse:

    KB3022345
    KB3035583
    KB3068708
    KB3075249
    KB3080149

    These are the ones that will cause win10 to load at some point.
    Note: they may not show up in that order.
    One of them still hasn't shown up, yet, on my "to be downloaded list".

    I hear that at some point, if you allow some of these to load, you will not be able to stop win10 from fully loading, and will be unable to reverse to an earlier OS. This is why you don't want to allow auto updates, but want the system to display the list of updates it is ready to download, and ask for permission.

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  6. Lenovo is now owned by the Chinese. They bought the Thinkpad line from ATT? a few years ago. I hear that the robust quality has not carried over.

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