W10 so far

I got Windows 10 running on multiple rigs throughout my wide-spread weekly geographical locations. I like it, it is snappy, very clean, very light and easy to work with, chocked full of useful tools some deeply hidden, and consistent. Those are just my top (positive) reasons for the new OS. I really like having the close-to-exact experience across all these rigs. This way, when problems arise (and someone needs my remote assistance) I can easily dial-into their computer and help them out. This makes my job sooooo much easier. It’s clean, light fast and it works (most of the time it works).

So, let me talk about the other times when it doesn’t work. I have run across 2 circumstances where this OS became unstable big time. Let me explain the problems and how I resolved them. First, my personal rig. Long-story-short I would be working along just fine for 20 or so minutes, then suddenly the entire machine would completely freeze (sometimes the speakers making loud, drawn-out tone). This drove me up the wall for weeks, and after investigating the event viewer,reconfiguring all the ram and HDD’s in all configurations feasible, and installing a beefier PSU, it turned out to be the damn USB microphone. I kid you not, people of the interwebs, the mic. So, now I just sit here with it switched off and have no problems at all (knock on wood). Now for the other time, my roommate’s computer. About 2 weeks ago (I guess), his would periodically not load webpages and BSOD on him randomly with different excuses/causes. Ranging from ”Memory Managment”, “Drive Failure” and the confusing “System PTE Misuse”. So,
I tried everything to his that I did to mine, to no avail. Here’s what I did. Updated to latest version of BIOS, reset BIOS to “Failsafe Settings”, formatted OS SSD, clean-installed W10Home to SSD (successfully). EXACT SAME ERROR MESSAGES on following boot! Long-story-short on this one, it turned-out to be a bad stick of RAM. To be honest, that was one of the first things I mentioned to him when he reported to me about his computer acting up. So, he is happy and I am happy.

Moral of the story: Unplug your microphone and test all your RAM.

Please don’t let these 2 experiences discourage you from Windows 10