How to get Windows 10 on a Toshiba Satellite A665 that won’t even boot

I went through some irritation to get Windows 10 installed on a discarded old laptop, so am putting it here for every one else.

Microsoft’s half-and-half troubleshooters

It’s another interface proofreading failure from Windows!

Introduced in, I think, Windows Vista and retained to date, troubleshooters are standardized appearance little programs that Windows runs to solve a few common issues, like networking and sound. The current list is at Windows Settings > Update & security > Troubleshoot.

Here a screenshots of two of them, with the same irritating mistake of not making the instruction text agree with the options presented:

Playing Audio [Windows Troubleshooter]. Select a device to troubleshoot / […]Select one of the listed devices or […] select I’m having problems with a different device. / Options: NVIDIA High Definition Audio is disabled, I don’t see my device listed

I do not have enough interest to install Vista or 7 in a virtual machine and see when the wording changed and which is the original. I first noticed this, with the same text problem, in the Devices and Printers troubleshooter on April 13, 2019. Aside for looking stupid, this can’t make accessibility sense. Anyone that uses a screen reader, let me know.

 

Update on the one tablet

I threw it out.

Microsoft can start touching me again

After I swore at Windows 10 for getting too close, now it seems to be maliciously complying. Some of this could lead to serious loss.

Microsoft screwup in Windows 10, v. 1803

SO!

I just installed Windows 10’s April 2018 update, version 1803.

Part of this update entails removing XPS reader software that was part of all previous versions of 10, and instructing us to find an app in the Store for it.

I download Microsoft’s “Reader” app and install it from the Store.

Opening an XPS file with the new app brings up an error message… that I have to use XPS reader (the one installed with Windows).

Agfh! Is Microsoft trying to annoy me?

Night Light and Windows defaults

Microsoft Windows 10 now (version 1703) has a feature where you can have the screen shift from “normal” (whatever that is) to warmer colors at night. Supposedly this keeps you from staying awake.

I just notice, however, that the default Windows background is a VERY BLUE image, which kind of defeats the purpose. Unless they (Microsoft) think that you never look at the background because you’re never on the desktop?

Too many Firefoxes

Many of us remember the famous Windows XP Service Pack 2, which really marked when Microsoft started to get serious about their client systems’ security. Prior to that there was little to guide the end user that I remember. XPSP2 brought the first version of the Security Center, which made it easy to set up the Windows Firewall and actually told them they they needed an antivirus to be safe. This was still prior to Microsoft’s providing one.

Anyway, Windows Firewall is still around and rarely seen after maybe the first week of an installation of Windows, since it is on by default and by then, all the other programs will have been installed and configured to go through the firewall.

Sometimes, however, things glitch:

Three entries for Firefox in Windows Firewall.

I have no idea what the cause of this is. Is it a problem?

An unwontedly ugly property sheet

We all know that parts of a system that are used the least are generally the worst. They get the least attention and have the lowest priority when triaging bugs. In some cases they are so rarely seen that they don’t even get bug reports written about them. Vide the now notorious Windows 3.x font addition dialog that lasted until Windows Vista.

Here is a less egregious example from Windows 10 (current version, 1511):

FTP Properties box with single tab “General”, including Type (Microsoft Word Document), Location (an ftp:// server), Size, and Modified. Permissions grid of Owner, Group, All Users vertically and Read, Write, Execute horizontally.

Note the background color problem under the permissions section of the dialog. I suspect that it has been there since Windows 98 or something. If it was removed, this would look fine. Maybe in the next version of Windows, the anniversary update, they will improve this?

I am not mentioning the UNIX style permissions because that is a function of the FTP server, rather than the Windows FTP client.

Hypermarking by a Microsoft coder

I’ve noticed something about industrial/intellectual property marking: the bigger or more established the company or undertaking, the more understated the marking. For example, Mozilla Firefox’s about box (The traditional place for dropping IP notices) just has a small type note that “Firefox and the Firefox logos are trademarks of the Mozilla Foundation”.

In contrast, small time operators usually go overboard with the ©®™ stuff. I have decided to call this “hypermarking”. The thought of the thesis above came from my observing an example of it in, of all places, Microsoft Windows.

Missing cancel option

In Windows 10, there is an option (well hidden) to require people to press Ctrl+Alt+Delete before they sign in to Windows. The technical reasons WikipediA explains here why this is a thing.

Anyway, in all previous versions of Windows, after giving it the three-fingered salute you could cancel out by clicking a back button, a cancel button, or hitting the Esc key.

Windows 10 for some reason eliminated these, so you can’t jump back to the lock screen, but have to either sign back in, or wait 120 seconds for the system to kick you back to the lock screen.

Does anyone know why this was done? Is there some security or usability benefit to this new behavior?