Strawberryland Forum

I settled on Windows Vista Home Basic. A tech reseller was selling full version OEM copies for around $12 shipped. No stock photos and the discs look genuine.
I lost the auction for the Home Premium disc. Got sniped at the last minute.

Vista Home Basic doesn't have fancy Aero Glass, but as I will use Vista only on occasion, it's no big deal. As long as it has Movie Maker 6.0, I'm good.

Also, if one plans on purchasing an older version of Adobe CS, make sure you can still activate it. I noticed that Mac versions of CS3 were selling for really cheap. I then found out why they may be priced so low. Adobe shut down the online activation servers for CS3. You used to be able to download offline installers of CS3 and product keys from Adobe's help site, but they since removed those downloads. It's another reason why online activation is no good in the long run.

Looks like I'll have to use FireAlpaca. I used it for a bit on Windows, and it doesn't look too bad for art creation. It just nags you to buy their full version software called OpenCanvas and that's it.

(04-26-2020, 03:03 PM)cpd2009 Wrote: [ -> ]I settled on Windows Vista Home Basic. A tech reseller was selling full version OEM copies for around $12 shipped. No stock photos and the discs look genuine.
I lost the auction for the Home Premium disc. Got sniped at the last minute.

Vista Home Basic doesn't have fancy Aero Glass, but as I will use Vista only on occasion, it's no big deal. As long as it has Movie Maker 6.0, I'm good.

Also, if one plans on purchasing an older version of Adobe CS, make sure you can still activate it. I noticed that Mac versions of CS3 were selling for really cheap. I then found out why they may be priced so low. Adobe shut down the online activation servers for CS3. You used to be able to download offline installers of CS3 and product keys from Adobe's help site, but they since removed those downloads. It's another reason why online activation is no good in the long run.

Looks like I'll have to use FireAlpaca. I used it for a bit on Windows, and it doesn't look too bad for art creation. It just nags you to buy their full version software called OpenCanvas and that's it.

Leaving everything to the cloud only breeds planned obsolescence as companies could just pull the plug on it whenever they want to or if the game/application is no longer financially sustainable.

Every now and then, I will come across this issue with Rusty, and only Rusty...

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/wind...8997a1c1c4

The problem is exactly as described in this MS help forum. It doesn't happen often, but when it does, it's a bit annoying. I can be just browsing the web or watching a video, and slowly, parts of Windows 10 stop responding, with the first usually being the taskbar or the app I was using. Most recently, it was the Windows Twitter app. I was able to close that and everything else, but I couldn't bring up the task manager. Ctrl-Alt-Del doesn't work either, and right clicking on the desktop freezes that too. In the end, I only have a moving mouse cursor, and I have to do a hard power off to get things going again. Reboot takes a while as well. When I restart, it boots into the recovery environment, and I have to restart the PC again to actually boot Windows.

According to the solution above, this could be an issue with Windows running on an SSD if it's using the generic AHCI drivers. This issue hasn't happened with Greta, my old laptop, but she is running the proper Intel AHCI drivers. I don't know if Rusty is using the AMD drivers. He has an AMD chipset and proper drivers should have been provided by Dell. I'll have to double check once I get Rusty back up again.

Though to tell you the truth, it's annoying problems like this that get me longing for a Mac, no matter how locked down they are. There are days that I feel that it may be worth it becoming an Apple sheep and having a system that just works rather than having to deal with random Windows 10 bugs or problems. macOS isn't perfect either, but I can't recall that OS ever having as severe problems like Windows 10.

So yeah... when Rusty's Windows 10 install isn't bugging out or freezing up at random, he can work rather great. It's the little quirks that are starting to get annoying unfortunately.

---

Well, some good news to report. Rusty is missing the AMD AHCI drivers, so I went to Dell's support pages and found the chipset package. I ran it, and the installer presented me with the option to install updated display drivers along with the chipset. I'm running that now, and I'll see if I get the proper AHCI software installed.

Okay. All of Rusty's AMD drivers are current. There's no AMD SATA/AHCI driver for Windows 10. You have to use the standard Windows 10 SATA/AHCI drivers.

The previous AMD drivers were the originals from 2017, so perhaps the updated versions may improve system stability? I'll have to wait and see. I'm hoping it does obviously.

(04-27-2020, 08:12 AM)cpd2009 Wrote: [ -> ]Okay. All of Rusty's AMD drivers are current. There's no AMD SATA/AHCI driver for Windows 10. You have to use the standard Windows 10 SATA/AHCI drivers.

The previous AMD drivers were the originals from 2017, so perhaps the updated versions may improve system stability? I'll have to wait and see. I'm hoping it does obviously.

So it was previously running off the OEM-provided drivers before?

(04-27-2020, 08:36 AM)huckleberrypie Wrote: [ -> ]

(04-27-2020, 08:12 AM)cpd2009 Wrote: [ -> ]Okay. All of Rusty's AMD drivers are current. There's no AMD SATA/AHCI driver for Windows 10. You have to use the standard Windows 10 SATA/AHCI drivers.

The previous AMD drivers were the originals from 2017, so perhaps the updated versions may improve system stability? I'll have to wait and see. I'm hoping it does obviously.

So it was previously running off the OEM-provided drivers before?

Indeed. I was actually waiting a bit to see if any updated ones got released by Dell themselves, but looks like you have to update the AMD drivers on your own. In the recent past, PC manufacturers sometimes state in KB articles that one should only use drivers from their support/downloads site. Thus I am sometimes hesitant to use generic driver packs from AMD, Intel or Nvidia. I only updated since the chipset package I downloaded from Dell checked the AMD website for updated drivers, and given the circumstances, I went ahead and updated. I'll see if this fixes Rusty's occasional freezing and other random problems.

(04-27-2020, 09:04 AM)cpd2009 Wrote: [ -> ]

(04-27-2020, 08:36 AM)huckleberrypie Wrote: [ -> ]

(04-27-2020, 08:12 AM)cpd2009 Wrote: [ -> ]Okay. All of Rusty's AMD drivers are current. There's no AMD SATA/AHCI driver for Windows 10. You have to use the standard Windows 10 SATA/AHCI drivers.

The previous AMD drivers were the originals from 2017, so perhaps the updated versions may improve system stability? I'll have to wait and see. I'm hoping it does obviously.

So it was previously running off the OEM-provided drivers before?

Indeed. I was actually waiting a bit to see if any updated ones got released by Dell themselves, but looks like you have to update the AMD drivers on your own. In the recent past, PC manufacturers sometimes state in KB articles that one should only use drivers from their support/downloads site. Thus I am sometimes hesitant to use generic driver packs from AMD, Intel or Nvidia. I only updated since the chipset package I downloaded from Dell checked the AMD website for updated drivers, and given the circumstances, I went ahead and updated. I'll see if this fixes Rusty's occasional freezing and other random problems.

Which reminds me of when AMD had this policy of leaving OEMs to provide vendor-specific driver updates for laptops. It didn't sit well with people who had to wait eons for their laptop manufacturer to churn out an updated driver which could take ages to do so. Fortunately, AMD relented and unified both laptop and desktop drivers into one package.

I got one nice surprise after updating... an all new AMD control panel thing. It appears to combine both the standard graphics card settings with features that you'd find in Nvidia GeForce Experience, such as recording/streaming options, VR settings, game optimizations and so on. It looks much better than Nvidia's offering. It reminded me on how the standard Nvidia control panel continues to use Windows XP era icons in the UI, making the whole thing look dated and clunky.

(04-27-2020, 12:09 PM)cpd2009 Wrote: [ -> ]I got one nice surprise after updating... an all new AMD control panel thing. It appears to combine both the standard graphics card settings with features that you'd find in Nvidia GeForce Experience, such as recording/streaming options, VR settings, game optimizations and so on. It looks much better than Nvidia's offering. It reminded me on how the standard Nvidia control panel continues to use Windows XP era icons in the UI, making the whole thing look dated and clunky.

The UI has been like that for quite a while actually. They only revamped the interface recently along with a few other features.

We all remember Ashens videos of horrible iPhone knockoffs in the early 2010s. Well, I just randomly found another guy on YouTube who is reviewing such early iPhonies... in 2020. It's a currently ongoing series, and this is the first part.