- Joined
- May 6, 2015
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A friend bought a new Dell with W10. Build date 31.12.2015. Powered it up and it sat and flickered its activity light for some time with no display. I suspect that all Dell had done to 'install" w10 was to load the packed image, no more. Anyway. Plugged in a network cable and rebooted and it came up in the original build 10240. We were annoyed to say the least, it should have been at least up to 10586 as it then took another hour to get uptodate as it downloaded a large cumulative update and some small updates before it started on 10586 and the two or three updates since.
The PC came with McAfee and gave an option to NOT install it. We selected that and found when we tried to start Defender that it was installed anyway. We told McAfee to uninstall itself which it appeared to do without having to download and special software to do it.
My friend had bought Office 365 with the PC and for that he needed a Microsoft account. The format is to use ones email account, it has to be a valid account as MS send a validation message. He has been with the same ISP for nearly 20 years, Bell Canada, whose service was/is called Sympatico and the email address is (e-mail address removed).
Well MS came up with an error saying that sympatico.ca was a 'reserved' address and could not be used. Just that, not even an error number to Google.
We quickly generated a new gmail account for him and used that and all was well.
Later I researched this and it seems that Bell Canada turned over their email processing to MS, allowing users to keep the sympatico ID but really it does not exist any more. Totally weird.
Another thing. We went the the 'store' to download the HP remote printing APP. Already there appeared to be 27 things waiting to be updated and/or downloaded. No progress messages just the rotating wheel. That was annoying as well.
So Yes a new machine from a major manufacturer can be a pain to bring up but it is much better than the days immediately after 29 July and it did come alive with no whimpering about bad drivers etc.
The PC came with McAfee and gave an option to NOT install it. We selected that and found when we tried to start Defender that it was installed anyway. We told McAfee to uninstall itself which it appeared to do without having to download and special software to do it.
My friend had bought Office 365 with the PC and for that he needed a Microsoft account. The format is to use ones email account, it has to be a valid account as MS send a validation message. He has been with the same ISP for nearly 20 years, Bell Canada, whose service was/is called Sympatico and the email address is (e-mail address removed).
Well MS came up with an error saying that sympatico.ca was a 'reserved' address and could not be used. Just that, not even an error number to Google.
We quickly generated a new gmail account for him and used that and all was well.
Later I researched this and it seems that Bell Canada turned over their email processing to MS, allowing users to keep the sympatico ID but really it does not exist any more. Totally weird.
Another thing. We went the the 'store' to download the HP remote printing APP. Already there appeared to be 27 things waiting to be updated and/or downloaded. No progress messages just the rotating wheel. That was annoying as well.
So Yes a new machine from a major manufacturer can be a pain to bring up but it is much better than the days immediately after 29 July and it did come alive with no whimpering about bad drivers etc.
