Warning about HP Laptops - incompatibility with Win 10 Creators Update

[Mouse]

Voolf - stick with Win 8.1. I wish I had!

I've never messed with my registry before, so from my point of view (and now historically) there was no way to stop the updates.

Red - thanks again for the extra info. I'll get hold of that stick, download the ISO and try to boot from it. Then I'll let you know if it worked, or if I have the same problem as Straf

[Voolf]

Try to disable the Windows Update service (they could already protect this, but worth a try), its very easy, and if it won't work you can turn it on again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akF0EiQF5jM

[Mouse]

Ok - thanks. I'll look into that, Voolf

Red - you saying that about upgrading the memory?

This is a screen shot of my Task Manager, taken 10 minutes after I opened my current Guild City map. I've selected 'disk' to show that the disc is still active 100% of the time, even though I haven't drawn so much as a dot on the map - haven't even moved the mouse across the screen for the last 10 minutes, so apart from the fact that Krita is open and displaying the City map, the system is idle.

I'm pretty much a dunce at how systems work, since when I was at school we were never taught a thing about them, and I've only ever been a user (apart from a brief foray into programing simple stuff in various Builders about 20 years ago), so I just don't understand the architecture, or even the terminology, but... shouldn't the RAM be used up before the system is forced to resort to using the disc as extra memory?

As you can see here, there is still a little bit of RAM left for me to dab lines and what-have-you onto my map, but the disc is working full pelt. To me, its as if the system is treating the disc as RAM, and the RAM as a memory reserve.



Is this normal?

[Straf]

I bought this PC second hand last week. It came with Windows 10 pre-installed. As soon as I fired it up it and got it connected it immediately started the upgrade. After it had all finished (most of the day) I then found that the machine was overclocked and had custom RAM settings. I wanted to put 8GB of RAM I had into it so I reset the BIOS back to failsafe and everything seemed OK. Now I can't get into the BIOS at all. It just hangs. Any other settings it seems the USB sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.

The PC that died on me the other week happened just after I'd installed Windows 10 CU onto a second hard disk. Suspected corrupted BIOS.

Therefore I suspect that Windows 10 is flashing the UEFI ROM with its own version of something.

[Falconius]

Try what Voolf suggested and unplug the windows drive. Or try booting with just the original RAM (which I'd try first actually). Maybe you just got a bad stick?

[Straf]

It seems to be the RAM as I have the same thing going on as this thread and I have almost the same RAM - HyperX Fury but 2 x 4GB. So I'll try the swap in a bit.

[selden]

Mouse,

All of that disk activity suggests to me that your system might be paging, although you'd need to look at the task manager's detailed memory window to be sure. In other words, the memory used by all the programs in memory has grown larger than the amount of physical RAM, so it has to use a paging file on disk to make up for the shortfall. That'll cause your program to slow to a crawl.

One of the options in the "advanced" Windows settings is to configure a fixed-sized paging file, which has somewhat better performance than having the paging space dynamically allocated (the default). Of course, it'll still be much slower than having more RAM. I'm not sitting in front of a Win10 computer right now, so I can't show the details. I can do that later today, if you're interested.

If you haven't already done so, you should look to see what programs are running and shut down all of the ones that you can. That'll free up some RAM, which should help a little.

[Mouse]

Thank you Selden

I would be most interested in seeing how you fix the size of the paging file. It may help while I'm getting myself organised to at least have a go with Linux.

I only had Krita open at the time I took that screen shot, and the numbers at the bottom of the screen indicated Krita itself was using 1.3 GB with the City map open but idle. So I guess the rest of the RAM is Win 10. That's 2.9 - 1.3 = 1.6 GB RAM just for the OS. Which effectively reduces my usable RAM to a maximum of just 2.4GB when idle

I expect things will be a lot easier once I've converted to Linux. At least I hope a Linux OS won't be using 1.6GB of my RAM just to idle.

[Straf]

It was my RAM. Apparently the 1866MHz modules don't work properly with the motherboard. I'll have to look for some compatible modules because 4GB just isn't enough these days.

[Mouse]

I'll vouch for that! 4GB RAM is inadequate - except that I'm hoping it will be sufficient with an OS that doesn't leach nearly half of it away in an idle state!