L
Leggir
Guest
So I started my own company after **** off from a multinational.
One of my pet peeves was the infernal IT security policies that were blanket designed to work equally for the president to the field service people like myself. This of course was a frustration in of itself because suddenly they'd force you to restart without more than a 30 second warning. From a service perspective I had sometimes been waiting for system updates to install while a client is trying to get his elevator going so people can get off, or get a conveyor working in a plant. Another annoyance was bitlocker which would always say my password was invalid and force a boot from the USB Key. Bitdefender was always blocking every install, even just updates to system apps.
So starting fresh, I decided to avoid all those former annoyances and at the same time streamline the laptop to be as fast as possible so you can get to work asap. As I didn't have a laptop personally, I budgeted $800 CDN. I preferred to get a Lenovo Thinkpad as I love how robust they're designed, but was about $300 out of my budget. Other specs I wanted: i5, discreet graphics, 4GB+ RAM, 17" Screen, NumberPad, etc. So I purchased an Acer Aspire E5-773G-525G. Then a Samsung 500 Series 500GB SSD. Initially I decided to keep the WD drive to make sure everything worked. It did.
Out of the box, it came with Windows 10. No problem I hoped as I have it on my gaming PC at home and quite like it. As I work for a manufacturer of control systems in elevators, conveyors, oil & gas controllers, etc. it was important that their software be compatible with my system more than any other feature. They conveyed interest in having someone test Windows 10 with the latest versions of their software. So I put on the latest drivers for the interface hardware and latest software. First controller worked no problem, 2nd, 3rd, 4, 5, 6, etc for several weeks.
...then a major update to Windows 10 drops. You know the ones, you know the ones, it tells you there's a major update and will take several minutes to install. After the install everything "seems" to be working fine. Except for updating firmware, now fails mid upgrade. The system goes unresponsive, then after a minute or more, a watchdog timer (WTC) event and bluescreen. According to microsoft, its a faulty AHCI from Intel and they provide instructions on how to replace it with the standard one. Did that, same problem. Of course every time it fails during a firmware update, you get to give the customer another $5000 control board from your own pocket, so this limited my retries. So I used the Acer recovery, rebooted it to the factory image, and it worked again... until the next major update downloaded.
This brings me to my gripe with Windows 10. There's no update interface to block updates you don't want. Microsoft is treating all users the same, regardless of technical ability, and deploying updates that are getting field tested on us. The only option, which isn't really an option, is to disable the Windows Update service. I'd prefer a Windows 7 style of "Notify me of updates, then let me choose to download them."
Here, 2 months later I found the key. You may have guessed it, Windows 7. It wasn't an easy install. Acer in their wisdom designed the hard drive and RAM never to be replaced, so the entire top has to be removed carefully so not to pull out the keyboard and touchpad cords. Put in the SSD, had to google how to change the bios to boot from a non-windows 10 partition, sheesh. Then figured out the Skylake platform doesn't support the Windows 7 USB stick natively. So burned the image to a DVD. Once 7 was up, then finding drivers for each unknown device in the device manager took a while. Acer doesn't support W7 anymore, so they're no help. Thankfully Asus got the USB working, even though Acer says it's impossible. Finally got all my apps and drivers installed. Took an image of the system. Everything just works, and no updates are getting forced on me.
Continue reading...
One of my pet peeves was the infernal IT security policies that were blanket designed to work equally for the president to the field service people like myself. This of course was a frustration in of itself because suddenly they'd force you to restart without more than a 30 second warning. From a service perspective I had sometimes been waiting for system updates to install while a client is trying to get his elevator going so people can get off, or get a conveyor working in a plant. Another annoyance was bitlocker which would always say my password was invalid and force a boot from the USB Key. Bitdefender was always blocking every install, even just updates to system apps.
So starting fresh, I decided to avoid all those former annoyances and at the same time streamline the laptop to be as fast as possible so you can get to work asap. As I didn't have a laptop personally, I budgeted $800 CDN. I preferred to get a Lenovo Thinkpad as I love how robust they're designed, but was about $300 out of my budget. Other specs I wanted: i5, discreet graphics, 4GB+ RAM, 17" Screen, NumberPad, etc. So I purchased an Acer Aspire E5-773G-525G. Then a Samsung 500 Series 500GB SSD. Initially I decided to keep the WD drive to make sure everything worked. It did.
Out of the box, it came with Windows 10. No problem I hoped as I have it on my gaming PC at home and quite like it. As I work for a manufacturer of control systems in elevators, conveyors, oil & gas controllers, etc. it was important that their software be compatible with my system more than any other feature. They conveyed interest in having someone test Windows 10 with the latest versions of their software. So I put on the latest drivers for the interface hardware and latest software. First controller worked no problem, 2nd, 3rd, 4, 5, 6, etc for several weeks.
...then a major update to Windows 10 drops. You know the ones, you know the ones, it tells you there's a major update and will take several minutes to install. After the install everything "seems" to be working fine. Except for updating firmware, now fails mid upgrade. The system goes unresponsive, then after a minute or more, a watchdog timer (WTC) event and bluescreen. According to microsoft, its a faulty AHCI from Intel and they provide instructions on how to replace it with the standard one. Did that, same problem. Of course every time it fails during a firmware update, you get to give the customer another $5000 control board from your own pocket, so this limited my retries. So I used the Acer recovery, rebooted it to the factory image, and it worked again... until the next major update downloaded.
This brings me to my gripe with Windows 10. There's no update interface to block updates you don't want. Microsoft is treating all users the same, regardless of technical ability, and deploying updates that are getting field tested on us. The only option, which isn't really an option, is to disable the Windows Update service. I'd prefer a Windows 7 style of "Notify me of updates, then let me choose to download them."
Here, 2 months later I found the key. You may have guessed it, Windows 7. It wasn't an easy install. Acer in their wisdom designed the hard drive and RAM never to be replaced, so the entire top has to be removed carefully so not to pull out the keyboard and touchpad cords. Put in the SSD, had to google how to change the bios to boot from a non-windows 10 partition, sheesh. Then figured out the Skylake platform doesn't support the Windows 7 USB stick natively. So burned the image to a DVD. Once 7 was up, then finding drivers for each unknown device in the device manager took a while. Acer doesn't support W7 anymore, so they're no help. Thankfully Asus got the USB working, even though Acer says it's impossible. Finally got all my apps and drivers installed. Took an image of the system. Everything just works, and no updates are getting forced on me.
Continue reading...