For anyone going through the Windows 10 saga, here is something I just learned;
My 10 yr old Dell Studio desktop is listed by Dell as non compatible but I’ve been running Windows 10 for almost a month (since Microsoft foisted it on us) and things usually work very well, until they don’t. I’m seeing Blue screens like the '90s, but with new messages, always something like Services_Extension_Failure and re-booting is sometimes difficult.
Huge crash last night and this morning it would only ‘beep’ warning signals at me, it wouldn’t boot at all.
If you can open the door to the DVD and get the Windows 7 .exe in the tray, the next boot will use that to get past the ‘beeps’ phase of boot up, and away you go again. Good trick.
I’m typing this on the machine now. A few days ago, while looking through things in safe mode, I discovered a box showing the Windows swap file to be 8918 MB (or something close to that) with a typed in recommended size beside the window saying 1919 MB was recommended, so I changed that and things seemed to work better for a day or two, then the crashes started again. A crash is always preceded by a memory action. When SketchUp saves automatically for example. I went to MS’s Win 10 site and tried a few of their memory fixes, they seemed to do good things but we’re still crashing. A few years back when I started using SketchUp on this machine I had to upgrade the HDD, the Video card (to an AMD Radeon 433 mb) and as a consequence of the new vid card, a bigger power box, from 150 watts or so to 350 watts as I remember. So when Dell says it’s not compatible, maybe they don’t know.
When you automatically upgrade drivers for video cards under Windows 10, it upgrades the card it thinks is there, the one that came with it, which is in the land fill. That’s today’s tip: I had to dig out what card I had put in there, and then get the new Win10 driver for that.
3d Connexion also has new drivers for Space Navigator, dated Aug this year and again in September 15 I think it was, so get that too if you’re into the space mouse.
I’m trying to draft a free standing coat rack for a week now, it keeps evaporating, we’ll see how far I get today.
I have a back up 'puter, a HD laptop workstation running Windows 7 and with mostly the same stuff on it. I can email and jump drive files back and forth and I have a mediocre wi fi connection to the laptop, and a Cat 5 cable Internet connection for the desktop machine. When Windows 10 is running, it all works very nicely. And it’s all cheap stuff, the Dell is ten years old, the laptop from Craigslist is 8 years old. Look for the quad (four) processors and as always since Windows 3, more RAM. (Random Access Memory) I wish I knew more about what I was doing technically though. If I’d studied computer science, I wouldn’t know what to draw in SketchUp so what is one to do?