hcg


Windows 10 Technical Preview

Windows 10 Product Family

Needed a machine to test Windows 10, the Debian Jessie laptop agreed to let Windows on the hard drive, as long as it behaved. So I downloaded the iso, and made a bootable USB stick with the aid of Rufus, nice little program.

The install went fine, was asked some questions that I answered yes to, which I later regretted. Since this operating system will run on everything from a phone to a desktop, you can imagine the background processes communicating with MotherSoft.

For the last few days, the laptop has been displaying the task manager, my peripheral vision keeping an eye on the running processes as I get work done on main desktop. What I found was that quite a few services have a mind of their own, with no settings to turn them off. The biggest culprit was Photos Background Task Host, no matter what I tried in settings, this service would continue to hog up the machine’s CPU whenever the laptop was idle.

The solution, which came by way of sifting through different online support forums, was to rename the offending file in C:\Windows\System32. The file in question was named backgroundTaskHost.exe, I changed the extension to .bak. In order to do this, you need to change the owner of the file from TrustedInstaller to your user or group.

Every machine in our house is entitled to a free Windows 10 upgrade, so I need to get acquainted with this new operating system, find out it’s idiosyncrasies. Last thing I want is a house full of computers, uploading gigabytes of data to the cloud, on their own, and saturating my meager upload speeds.

This test laptop will be the first one in the house to get Windows 10 when it’s released on July 29th, when and if I feel comfortable with the stable build, I’ll upgrade one machine at a time.

Baby steps.

Oh, and do I like Windows 10? I don’t know, the jury is still out on this one.

Where is my love life?
Where can it be?
There must be something wrong with the machinery