Not Our Fault . . .
The power went off all on its own.
First up this morning, right after coffee and cereal, I got back on getting Win7 installed on our granddaughter’s HP laptop after I replaced her dead hard drive.
Once I got the HD replaced, it only took about 15 minutes to have Win7 installed and running, using this Win7 USB Installer.
I bought it on Amazon last December for just this kind of situation. It covers all the many different versions of Win7, including 32 bit and 64 bit. Note that it is not a FREE copy of Win7, since you must have a Product Key to make it work. So it’s perfect for this when you’re just replacing the OS.
Unfortunately it’s not available on Amazon right now since the seller is moving his business from FL to CA, so if you want one, keep checking back.
But as smooth as the OS installation went, it quickly ground to a halt after that.
In the past with other manufacturers, I can go online to their website, enter the product number, or the serial number, and it will tell me exactly what drivers I need to download and install. Or they may offer an option to scan your computer and tell you what you need.
But apparently HP doesn’t do it this way. When I followed their instructions and entered the Product Number, I got a list of 48 possible drivers, without a clue as to which ones I actualy needed.
But the first thing I wanted to do was to get the laptop online, so after futzing through three different drivers, I finally found the one that got me there.
But about this time it all came to a halt. A little after 3:30 the park shore power went off. So was this deja vu all over again after last week’s power problems at Colorado River?
Well, no. The power was off all over the park. But it did come back on in about 10 minutes, so no real problem . . .then.
Back on the driver hunt, I found that, unlike other manufacturers, HP doesn’t seem to have any way to discern the correct drivers for a particular HP computer. This was reinforced the fact that that there are a couple of utilities that you can download and they’ll tell you what drivers you need and then download and install them for you. But . . .
after they scan your computer and tell you they have identified the specific drivers you need, they then want anywhere from $30 to $40 to actually download and install them.
So cheap as I am, I started slogging thru the list, trying each one until after about 2 hours I had them all done,with no errors showing in Device Manager.
But I wasn’t done yet. Now I had to get Win10 installed. And surprisingly it went very smoothly. I used a bootable USB stick that I had created from a download from the Microsoft website, and had no problems
Just as I started this, the park power went off . . . again. And this time it was off for over an hour. But since the laptop had a full charge, i just let it keep going.
And about 45 minutes later, Win10 was up and running. So after installing AVG Free virus protection, and LibreOffice, I was done.
Tomorrow Jan and I will head for the Clear Lake area, to return the laptop to Miss Piper. But along the way we’ve got scheduled two clients, lunch with our son Chris, haircuts for both Jan and I, a car wash, and a stop at the dry cleaners.
And probably a couple of other things I’ve forgotten.
Thought for the Day:
“Gun control by definition affects only honest people. When a politician tells you he wants to forbid you from owning a firearm or force you to get a license, he is telling you he doesn’t trust you. That’s an insult. … Gun control is not about guns or crime. It is about an elite that fears and despises the common people.” – Syndicated columnist Charley Reese (1937-2013)
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