I have had to roll back the most recent Windows update twice now because for some reason, actually getting it on this computer has been the most difficult process… and this thing doesn’t have bad specs, so it confuses me as to why the process of updating it seems to be the most cumbersome and difficult. I’ve tried to follow the advice of tech blogs and tech message boards that I have found, and have tried different ways to download the update, so we will see how that goes since I am now doing the lattermost of those things…

I mean, when this new computer works well, it works great. Don’t get me wrong.

However, when it decides to throw random errors, they are some of the worst that I have seen, and I thought that I liked Windows 10. As this continues to bother me and give me migraines, I am beginning to rethink that given the sheer difficulty of updating a computer that should effortlessly be able to update (from a fresh Windows 10 load a few days ago, no less!). I’m still thankful that the system restore that I attempted when everything seemed absolutely amiss with this computer actually worked… thankful, and equal parts surprised that it actually did restore nearly everything, to include my files and some of the most important settings on this computer that I wanted to keep. Hopefully at some point I can actually update this thing…

For some reason, when doing one of the last Windows updates to this laptop, it completely froze at 27% and just… sat there, so I had no choice but to power down the computer, start it back up, and have it “undo” the update. Now I’m following the advice of some tech blogs to see if this can’t be fixed, because I see no reason why this Windows update shouldn’t seamlessly install. I know that sometimes Windows updates can take a really long time to install (the infamous “blue screen”), but this one absolutely hung on 27%. I’m going to run Disk Cleanup, make sure that this continues to be as defragmented as possible, and continue to do some research into this to… get it not to hang, although I may also just wait until I can purchase a replacement USB since our last one stopped functioning due to old age and make a backup of Windows, which this actually suggests, in the event that this tries to brick this computer. But I really don’t want it to hang again…

Once I get this final update successfully on this computer though I am done with setting it up!

Okay, but that was how many migraines that needed to be medicated between now and then though?

Now that all of this is loaded to my liking, the hard drive is compressed and defragmented, the only thing that I have to do left is drop one 8GB stick of RAM into it to max it out and everything will be precisely as I want it to be. Sadly I can’t drop the 16GB stick of RAM from our previous laptop into this one because that one ran DDR4 RAM and this one runs DDR3, but the specs are otherwise nearly comparable and in some aspects actually exceed the previous laptop that we owned. I just need to get used to the slightly different keyboard schematics that this one has because our previous laptop was a Lenovo and this one is a Hewlett-Packard (and at that, the first Hewlett-Packard laptop that I have ever owned… not that I have anything negative to say about it, of course), but once I get past the minor changes in how the keyboard is set up, I think everything will run completely smoothly. And while I’ve been doing that, to save myself some space and some trouble, I’ve been uninstalling some of the apps that have come with it that I have no need for.

I also came to the surprising conclusion that this has a fully functional touchscreen. I did not realize that until I accidentally touched the screen and something moved. You weren’t supposed to do that, computer! I haven’t gotten around to disabling it yet because the kids actually have not noticed it yet, but I think I will.

Did you know that after compressing one’s hard drive, it gets fragmented like… well, whoa, though?

And that the best thing is to go back in and defragment it all over again? I don’t understand this one bit.

I seriously had some files that had fragments as high as in the six thousands. Luckily not a whole lot, but…