Multiboot update issues

They are expensive and difficult to repair.

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But very useful when you travel.

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I have one older Dell laptop, that I bought from my neighbor, and installed W11 on it, it is mostly used while I am watching TV. My wifeā€™s sister gave us a pretty decent laptop, that I updated, but we gave it back, just did not have much use for it. For travel we use our phone
As for me, I prefer my 27 inch monitor, when on the internet. To each their own!!!

I find an Android tablet better than a laptop, if you just want internet and email.

Perfect for that.
In this brave new world with zero carbon footprint, travel is likely to be one of the things we have to sacrifice. .

I got three 32" gaming curved monitors, but only using two at the mo, due to finding space to put the third.
Like Laptops as handy when working night shift, but miss 1440p resolution on my desktop. Just installed KDE Manjaro Community edition on it and it is rock solid. Itā€™s only used for some light video editing and doing my online training for work. The sound on this machine is superb, as it has settings for full frontal, to the back, to the left or to the right, panning sound around.

RYZEN 5 Processor mobile chip 4 cores 8 threads, 32GB of ram, as it had only 8GB, so forked out for itā€™s max. 15.6" screen, but only 1080p resolution. Made by ASUS. Originally had Windows 10 for gaming on, as it comes with NVIDIA 1660Ti mobile card too, but gave up gaming on it, as it makes a racket with itā€™s fan noise ramping up and down, it literally wakes the dead. Now it has KDE Manjaro on it though it looks cool and feels really nice. Everything working as intended. 120HRtZ refresh rate too.

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clatterfordslim
ā€˜Just had to configure the clock in Windows, so it keeps the right time.ā€™

I keep my GNU/Linux distrobution set to UTC, then in Windows, I set the system clock to UTC in Windows with a registry hack:

In regedit, I navigate to ā€˜HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformationā€™, then add a new DWord key ā€˜RealTimeIsUniversalā€™, and set its value to ā€˜1ā€™.

After that, both my GNU/Linux distrobution(s) and Windows use the system time in harmony.

I hope this helps someone,

Ernie

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How do you stop all that spyware and crapware making at least the inexpensive ones unusable within a month or two? They sometimes turn up at our walk-in free repair shop but we geeks canā€™t always do much for them and they end up back in the cupboard.

In my opinion the whole BIOS/boot system should have been redesigned many years ago and made into an ISO or similar international standard thatā€™s the property of no-one and works the same way whatever the OS. A major difficuly would be to make it backward-compatible.

Of course that will never happen, given the commercial pressures and the legislative void in international affairs.

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Me too. But we and others find that many families donā€™t have enough space for desktop machines. There may be several children, each needing their personal computer for school work. A common complaint is that education authorities tend to be wedded to Microsoft (for reasons we all know about), which makes recycled older machines unpopular.

Just flush it clean once a week. Use device management, or one of the antivirus apps. Delete all the useless apps.

So what is stopping us having a GNU Bios? There is a software solution for everythingā€¦ must be something about the hardware interface that makes it difficult?
Before PCā€™s, there was no BIOS at allā€¦ To start a computer you entered a primitive bootstrap into ram, pointed the program address counter to its location, and pressed the GO button.
A modern BIOS does little more than thatā€¦ it knows about disks because thats where it gets its bootstrap. There are some fringe things like temp sensing and clock rates, but does it really do anything else important?

Part of the problem is that ordinary users donā€™t know how to do that. Inexpensive tablets and PCs tend to have loads of spyware and crapware pre-installed by the manufacturer. Just the other day I couldnā€™t remove booking.com and McAfee, two of the causes of the machine (Celeron with 60 Gb soldered-in SSD, otherwise adequate for its intended purpose), being useless from the start. The web is polluted with solutions that donā€™t work. Presumably the intention is to incite the victim to put it in the cupboard and buy something more expensive.

Re-initialising Windows just added more junk, enough to occupy the space needed for the updater to work. A fresh install with a usb key downloaded from M$ got it working perfectly, but I donā€™t think the majority of people who are concerned have access to the necessary information and knowhow. Of course our diverse and wonderful governments appear to be totally absent from this field of consumer protection.

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Yes even my moderately expensive samsung tablet has a number of useless apps that cant be deleted. They can be inactivated and returned to factory levelā€¦ but they still,take up space.

But stuff added by the userā€¦ cache files and user added apps can always be deleted