I'll image the Windows 7 installation I currently have and move that over to the new system.
Doing this naively is going to fail. Assuming this is a full retail version, because technically you're not allowed to do what you want on a OEM or SystemBuilder version. "Techncially". So I am assuming a full retail version of 7.
What you want is using sysprep to generalize your system before moving the disk/image:
sysprep.exe/generalize/shutdown
When it's done with that, image and/or move the disk. You *will* have to activate.
It's simple... We've hit a performance plateau quite a while ago. Not sure when I bought my Dell XPS 15 L502x. Something like 2010 and it was on sale for 50% of the price. Anyway, that is a Core i7 2630QM (or 2635QM, I need to check) and it came with 4GB RAM (later upgraded to 16GB). There is simply nothing I can throw at it that it can't do with cycles spare.
Five year old machine: totally fine...
So, PC sales are dependent on replacement sales... as most people do not need more performance.
I'd wager to say that the late Core2Duos in the XP days, would be enough performance for most tasks, but I'm sure I'll get the 640kByte is enough quote attributed to Billy
Look, I understand your perspective. Let me tell you a little story. In the time of our parents, it was not uncommon to start at an employer and work there for the full 40 years. You took care of them, they took care of you.
My father was like that. He started as a young man in 1973 in a large bank, and he did have a really nice career. Granted, I never saw him. He was always at work, always. He did it for us, I know that. He earned well, and could provide us with a good life and my mother stayed home for us.
Then something changed in the early nineties, I don't know what, but I suspect company culture, because my father worked hard. One day, end 1992, he came home and he told us he "had been let go". Basically, "on the spot", because due to his responsibilities he could do way too much damage. I was also superbly timed: a few months more, and he'd have worked there for 20 years instead of 19, which would have doubled his legal severance package.
My mother and my father were shocked. Both expected him to stay with the same company as had both my grandfathers. My father, was -by then- 45 years old. Try getting a job at that age. It took ages before he found anything again, and then it were basically consulting gigs that kept us afloat until he retired.
I was a teenager, when that all happened. It made a profound impact on me, never to trust your employer ever. I'm not going to give you all my time, I'm not going to continue to work for you if you refuse to give me raises. I will leave you.
I doubt, it's the employees that stopped being loyal... I believe that the employee-employer trust has been broken, and I doubt it was the employees doing the first step.
Interestingly, it seems that the AMD Geode LX on which this board is built, supports 686 except for one operation that isn't really in the 686 spec. It should thus work. That surprises me, but it's good news.
Stuff like the Soekris net5501-70 are still being sold *today*. That's a 586-class machine and it does what it must do just fine. Those have been made for low-power use from the beginning.
Exactly what I did. Main reason is that I didn't trust the rollback feature (you know the one you can click within 30 days) I did it for all Win7 machines I manage. I do know one or two machines from acquaintances that run Ubuntu, that have a 7 license. I should do those too, just pro-forma, but... Whatever, if they really want Windows back instead of Ubuntu, they can buy new machines. If I hadn't installed Linux, they should have bought new machines any way.
Here it's either a 30k€ for the full blown SA, or something like 12k€ for the SARL (which would be the Ltd). That's the capital you have to raise. You can spend it afterwards, but you need to have it for creation... That's without any lawyer and consulting fees.
I live in one of these tax havens... I pay taxes. Quite a lot of them. Less than in the neighbouring countries, but since it's so tiny here, living here is so very expensive that I sometimes think people in neighbouring countries have it better due to a lower cost of living.
Anyway, that's not what I came to say. While it is most certainly true that everybody could profit from these tax havens by "filing the paperwork", that is not entirely true. Many require you to create companies and I know as a fact, than in my country that's not cheap. Well, okay, it'll cost you about the price of a small family car. Is that much? Not really if you've got millions or billions. So, that is one barrier of entry.
Also keep in mind that many smaller businesses and private persons, need their income to actually live. So, that 100000$ income you have? You need it. No way you offshore it all, so you can save on taxes. Bigger companies and very rich individuals have the luxury of having a certain fluidity and can do with that "extra money", including making it disappear in shady tax schemes.
Finally, the above problems didn't exist, you have to look at the return of investment. If I'm setting up a complicated, perhaps even borderline illegal, tax scheme to avoid taxes of, let's say 500$ a year, am I investing my time wisely? We're talking 1.37$ saved a day... That's not even the overpriced latte at Starbucks. Drop the caffeine habit, and save more...
So, I'm not really all that sure it's a matter of "too lazy to do the paperwork".
I have one, for my wifes iMac, running on a Debian VM on my Xen host in the basement. You don't need to virtualize, you can do it on anything that runs Debian, like... let's say a Raspberry Pi. In all honesty, it's ages ago I set it up. I just Googled for solutions and you'll find many articles. I just picked one, I can't guarantee it will work.
I have one of those. I did upgrade to 10 from 7, without issues. The thing is, I only did that to secure the 10 license. Basically I imaged my 100GB 7 partition, upgraded, looked whether 10 said it was activated and put back the 7 image and applied to NoOSUpgrade patches. I actually never boot into 7, to be honest. 99% of the time, I'm just running Linux.
My sister and brother have the same laptop and I did the same for them. They do use Windows, but I understood they'd rather stay with 7.
Interesting to hear that 10 doesn't work well on that model. Given they're really excellent laptops (Quad Core 2nd Gen i7, halfway decent NVidia graphics and 16GB RAM, great 1080p screen) it would be sad to have to discontinue using them in 2020.
Send her a.reg file. I do such changes once, store the.reg file and reuse that file on any computer I get my hands on (where the behaviour is desired, of course)
While I am not 100% sure, most likely the license is embedded in your firmware. They started doing that with Windows 8.
You can find it out using Linux:
Now, it is true that there are pre-activated keys for OEMs disks like HP, Dell, etc.. At least for Windows 7 it was like that. They have so called SLP Keys (System Locked Pre-Installation Key) and they are not the same as the one printed on your Windows 7 machine. SLP keys only work on a certain range of machines, but also have the advantage as working like generic OEM DVDs. I've had this case where a Windows Vista machine (Vista Key sticker) from Dell and I used the a Windows 7 Dell OEM disk, and... it activated itself. Technically it didn't have the rights to do so and I was totally surprised it did. Use the same OEM disk on an Acer and it will install but not be activated, at which point you use the sticker on the machine. When I started to mess around with these things, I realized that in the Windows 7 era, all machines shipped with two keys: the SLP license and the (recovery) sticker license.
Given that from Windows 8 on the licenses are embedded in the firmware, this is over.
Personally, I think reinstalling from scratch is always the right option. With decrapifying you might miss something, and if you're routined, you have a reinstallation done rather quickly. If you stick with big brand machines, getting drivers is no Herculean task any more. Back in the day, oh, yes, I remember... Hard to find, need to use shady places, take drivers from different machines and try to see whether they work. Today, it's "go to manufacturer website", download what is *missing* and use what Windows gives you as default drivers for all the rest, with the notable exception of the graphics card.
It's not that I don't believe you and I'm the first to discourage the use of Windows... BUT, Microsoft has done one thing right since the release of Windows 10, namely allow the OS to be downloaded for free (gratis) from their site. Windows 10 Pro and Home can be downloaed as an ISO or with a tool to create a Bootable USB stick. From what I understand any valid Windows 10 key, will be accepted by these installation media.
As a matter of fact, this can be done with Win 8(.1) too these days, even though I only did once: The laptop I am typing this on. Came with OEM Win 8, but I didn't want to use it, so I installed Ubuntu without making a backup of anything. Now, in order to secure the 10 license, I did a dd of the disk, installed Win 8 from the installation media I got from Microsoft and then upgraded to 10. After that, I did a dd in order to restore it to the original configuration. This way, should I want to give it away or sell it in a few years, I can give the future owner what they might want: Windows 10.
To get back to my point: Windows now provides usable installation media. No need for restore media, or hoping you find a OEM disk that works with your machine and key... There is now an official way, and that is the only positive thing that Windows 10 brought us.
Your Envy can be reinstalled from scratch if you are inclined to do so. Get the ISO here. Now, my personal opinion is that you're better off with staying with Linux, but don't kid yourself. You *can* have a clean Windows installation these days.
The myth that gas engines don't last long is alive in Europe. I am often confronted with unbelief when I tell them how old my car is an how much kilometres it has, My mechanic told me they once got the job to do a rebuild of an Audi RS4 engine (obviously, that's gas) and it turned out that the wear of the engine was pretty much negligible at over 400000km.
Now, obviously, you're right about torque, I won't contest that.... First a disclaimer, I am European and I'm one of the crazy Europeans that bought an gas engine and like it. As a matter of fact, I own an Audi TT 1.8T bought new in 02/2000. That makes it nearly 16 years old and it has 326000km on the counter. The oil needs to be changed every year, or every 15000km. Mechanically, I have never had any problems with the car, and my mechanic of trust says it has plenty of years in it.
Highway only mileage is 7l/100km or 33mpg (used Google to convert: US gallon). Sure, this is much higher than my wifes Mini Diesel (07/2006, new. 1.4liter), which does 5l/100km (47mpg).
I'm really not sure if you can simply say "gas powered engines can't possibly be long lived"... I'm sure that you'll just yell "anecdote", but my car does exists and I'll drive it home tonight as I have done for the last 16 years.
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Doing this naively is going to fail. Assuming this is a full retail version, because technically you're not allowed to do what you want on a OEM or SystemBuilder version. "Techncially". So I am assuming a full retail version of 7.
What you want is using sysprep to generalize your system before moving the disk/image:
sysprep.exe /generalize /shutdown
When it's done with that, image and/or move the disk. You *will* have to activate.
Good luck
It's simple... We've hit a performance plateau quite a while ago. Not sure when I bought my Dell XPS 15 L502x. Something like 2010 and it was on sale for 50% of the price. Anyway, that is a Core i7 2630QM (or 2635QM, I need to check) and it came with 4GB RAM (later upgraded to 16GB). There is simply nothing I can throw at it that it can't do with cycles spare.
Five year old machine: totally fine...
So, PC sales are dependent on replacement sales... as most people do not need more performance.
I'd wager to say that the late Core2Duos in the XP days, would be enough performance for most tasks, but I'm sure I'll get the 640kByte is enough quote attributed to Billy
My father was like that. He started as a young man in 1973 in a large bank, and he did have a really nice career. Granted, I never saw him. He was always at work, always. He did it for us, I know that. He earned well, and could provide us with a good life and my mother stayed home for us.
Then something changed in the early nineties, I don't know what, but I suspect company culture, because my father worked hard. One day, end 1992, he came home and he told us he "had been let go". Basically, "on the spot", because due to his responsibilities he could do way too much damage. I was also superbly timed: a few months more, and he'd have worked there for 20 years instead of 19, which would have doubled his legal severance package.
My mother and my father were shocked. Both expected him to stay with the same company as had both my grandfathers. My father, was -by then- 45 years old. Try getting a job at that age. It took ages before he found anything again, and then it were basically consulting gigs that kept us afloat until he retired.
I was a teenager, when that all happened. It made a profound impact on me, never to trust your employer ever. I'm not going to give you all my time, I'm not going to continue to work for you if you refuse to give me raises. I will leave you.
I doubt, it's the employees that stopped being loyal... I believe that the employee-employer trust has been broken, and I doubt it was the employees doing the first step.
Collateral.
That would actually be useful to thin out bad drivers, wouldn't it?
Interestingly, it seems that the AMD Geode LX on which this board is built, supports 686 except for one operation that isn't really in the 686 spec. It should thus work. That surprises me, but it's good news.
Stuff like the Soekris net5501-70 are still being sold *today*. That's a 586-class machine and it does what it must do just fine. Those have been made for low-power use from the beginning.
Get the job done at no cost. Gimp is fine, I manage to do anything I need to do.
Maybe. However to get something done quickly and cheaply, I'd take the janitor over Prof. Hawking any day.
Exactly what I did. Main reason is that I didn't trust the rollback feature (you know the one you can click within 30 days) I did it for all Win7 machines I manage. I do know one or two machines from acquaintances that run Ubuntu, that have a 7 license. I should do those too, just pro-forma, but... Whatever, if they really want Windows back instead of Ubuntu, they can buy new machines. If I hadn't installed Linux, they should have bought new machines any way.
Just in case you don't know. Recapitulation theory ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny") has been largely discredited.
$700/year is a significant expense to normal people. You need at least to save $700 in taxes, in order to make that work for you.
Here it's either a 30k€ for the full blown SA, or something like 12k€ for the SARL (which would be the Ltd). That's the capital you have to raise. You can spend it afterwards, but you need to have it for creation... That's without any lawyer and consulting fees.
Anyway, that's not what I came to say. While it is most certainly true that everybody could profit from these tax havens by "filing the paperwork", that is not entirely true. Many require you to create companies and I know as a fact, than in my country that's not cheap. Well, okay, it'll cost you about the price of a small family car. Is that much? Not really if you've got millions or billions. So, that is one barrier of entry.
Also keep in mind that many smaller businesses and private persons, need their income to actually live. So, that 100000$ income you have? You need it. No way you offshore it all, so you can save on taxes. Bigger companies and very rich individuals have the luxury of having a certain fluidity and can do with that "extra money", including making it disappear in shady tax schemes.
Finally, the above problems didn't exist, you have to look at the return of investment. If I'm setting up a complicated, perhaps even borderline illegal, tax scheme to avoid taxes of, let's say 500$ a year, am I investing my time wisely? We're talking 1.37$ saved a day... That's not even the overpriced latte at Starbucks. Drop the caffeine habit, and save more...
So, I'm not really all that sure it's a matter of "too lazy to do the paperwork".
I have one, for my wifes iMac, running on a Debian VM on my Xen host in the basement. You don't need to virtualize, you can do it on anything that runs Debian, like... let's say a Raspberry Pi. In all honesty, it's ages ago I set it up. I just Googled for solutions and you'll find many articles. I just picked one, I can't guarantee it will work.
Vista is still in extended support until April 2017. source
My sister and brother have the same laptop and I did the same for them. They do use Windows, but I understood they'd rather stay with 7.
Interesting to hear that 10 doesn't work well on that model. Given they're really excellent laptops (Quad Core 2nd Gen i7, halfway decent NVidia graphics and 16GB RAM, great 1080p screen) it would be sad to have to discontinue using them in 2020.
Send her a .reg file. I do such changes once, store the .reg file and reuse that file on any computer I get my hands on (where the behaviour is desired, of course)
Funny you say this. I've known quite few PA and they are useful. Cortana is pretty much totally useless from what I've seen.
You can find it out using Linux:
sudo hexdump -s 56 -e '"MSDM key: " /29 "%s\n"' /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM
(Source)
Now, it is true that there are pre-activated keys for OEMs disks like HP, Dell, etc.. At least for Windows 7 it was like that. They have so called SLP Keys (System Locked Pre-Installation Key) and they are not the same as the one printed on your Windows 7 machine. SLP keys only work on a certain range of machines, but also have the advantage as working like generic OEM DVDs. I've had this case where a Windows Vista machine (Vista Key sticker) from Dell and I used the a Windows 7 Dell OEM disk, and ... it activated itself. Technically it didn't have the rights to do so and I was totally surprised it did. Use the same OEM disk on an Acer and it will install but not be activated, at which point you use the sticker on the machine. When I started to mess around with these things, I realized that in the Windows 7 era, all machines shipped with two keys: the SLP license and the (recovery) sticker license.
Given that from Windows 8 on the licenses are embedded in the firmware, this is over.
Personally, I think reinstalling from scratch is always the right option. With decrapifying you might miss something, and if you're routined, you have a reinstallation done rather quickly. If you stick with big brand machines, getting drivers is no Herculean task any more. Back in the day, oh, yes, I remember... Hard to find, need to use shady places, take drivers from different machines and try to see whether they work. Today, it's "go to manufacturer website", download what is *missing* and use what Windows gives you as default drivers for all the rest, with the notable exception of the graphics card.
As a matter of fact, this can be done with Win 8(.1) too these days, even though I only did once: The laptop I am typing this on. Came with OEM Win 8, but I didn't want to use it, so I installed Ubuntu without making a backup of anything. Now, in order to secure the 10 license, I did a dd of the disk, installed Win 8 from the installation media I got from Microsoft and then upgraded to 10. After that, I did a dd in order to restore it to the original configuration. This way, should I want to give it away or sell it in a few years, I can give the future owner what they might want: Windows 10.
To get back to my point: Windows now provides usable installation media. No need for restore media, or hoping you find a OEM disk that works with your machine and key... There is now an official way, and that is the only positive thing that Windows 10 brought us.
Your Envy can be reinstalled from scratch if you are inclined to do so. Get the ISO here. Now, my personal opinion is that you're better off with staying with Linux, but don't kid yourself. You *can* have a clean Windows installation these days.
Yes, I didn't say anything else. Hence staring my phrase with "but".
.... but it doesn't run on the (true) Administrator account (when you activate it).
The myth that gas engines don't last long is alive in Europe. I am often confronted with unbelief when I tell them how old my car is an how much kilometres it has, My mechanic told me they once got the job to do a rebuild of an Audi RS4 engine (obviously, that's gas) and it turned out that the wear of the engine was pretty much negligible at over 400000km.
Highway only mileage is 7l/100km or 33mpg (used Google to convert: US gallon). Sure, this is much higher than my wifes Mini Diesel (07/2006, new. 1.4liter), which does 5l/100km (47mpg).
I'm really not sure if you can simply say "gas powered engines can't possibly be long lived"... I'm sure that you'll just yell "anecdote", but my car does exists and I'll drive it home tonight as I have done for the last 16 years.