Posts made by mom2jel

Recent observations on another Win10 installation…
I gave my 86-yr old mom my HP Envy i5 desktop that came with Win8. When I first got it, I did a clean install of Win7 and that is what she is using (and won’t upgrade).
I decided last week that when it came time to sell that pc, that it should have Win10 with it. I switched the wires from the current hard drive to a freshly formatted hard drive and installed Win10, skipping the inputting of the product #.
Once it was installed I went to type in the Win8 product # and couldn’t find the sticker on the case (like Dell does) - found out that the original product key is stored in the UEFI (still referred to as the BIOS).

I tried several product key finders (including Magic Jelly Bean) and I liked ProduKey the best - got the Win8 (and Win10) keys and input the Win8. Win10 didn’t like it at first - so I let it sit a couple of days before I tackled it again.
Did updates, installed MS Office, etc, waited another day and when I was poking around trying to find out how to contact MS support - lo, and behold it was activated.
For what it’s worth, looks like the Win10 (free upgrade?) key is the same and tied to your MS account because when I used ProduKey on two other pc’s I have, the Win10 keys were the same - or maybe it’s “my” key assigned to my MS account (I’ll have to go check my son’s pc).

I have yet to have Cortana bother me

I’m actually used to Win10, it’s not so bad if you change a few things. I’ve updated several pc’s in the last month, these are the changes I do (in no particular order).
Hide Cortana: Right click on bottom taskbar, scroll up to Cortana and choose “Hidden”.
Click on the “Start” icon, then Settings (gear icon):
first up is Display, turn on Night Light (it’s like f.lux).
Click Notifications & Actions - and go through each item (personally, I have everything turned off). You can fiddle around with the rest of the settings here.
Next click “Home” while under Settings and then choose Personalization - then click “Start” on the left side - this will be where you make the biggest improvement!
On the bottom of the Start on/off settings, look for “Choose which folders appear on Start” - then turn on all of the ones you want (this gives the greatest Windows 7 look/feel).
Click “Home”, then choose Privacy and go through everything one by one.
The “app” boxes on the menu you can right-click and remove (and uninstall some of them). Menu items, right-click them to add your app shortcuts.
Here’s my Win10 desktop & menu here:

I was all excited for this (DS16 is a HUGE StarWars fan), then I realized it’s a BETA and is only good through 10/9

@orangespot Personally, I would go the ebay route, maybe etsy.
If it’s easy enough to set up website, do it - but it’s so hard to direct traffic there that I would just consider it a “making your business official looking” website.

I love the USPS Priority padded envelopes - can fit items in them that might not fit in the cardboard flat rate envelopes.
I list items from around the house. I have a stack of clothes that I need to list, I hate taking pictures and doing descriptions.

There’s been a couple of times I swear the buyer was trying to do something underhanded. I had a women file a claim because the insoles of a pair of athletic shoes weren’t glued down and she spent $6 on glue (WTF?). Guy bought a Xbox external hard drive, used it for a month and then decided it wrecked his xbox and filed a claim to return it. Overall buyers are decent, then every once in awhile you get a jerk.

WATCH4FALLCOLORS - 100 pts
not sure of expiration

I’m a Google girl
I have these on my desktop, Chromebox, Chromebook, and android phone.
Keep - can share notes (perfect for grocery list), can “tack” notes to the top, choose reminder dates.
Backup and Sync - Can sync items you choose (Drive, Desktop, Photo’s, etc)
Contacts - Will stay synced between pc and phone
Drive - On my pc, this would be “My Documents” folder. Inside of that I have folders for each of my boys that I share with them. You have no idea how many times this has saved us over the years! Copies of their driver’s license, copies of our auto insurance, vaccination records, medical records.
Music Manager - uploads “My Music” folder so that I have access anytime to my music (I have around 20,000 songs!) need to set to wifi only on phones so data doesn’t get used.
Families - especially nice for sharing movies, books, and apps across family members.

Other ones:
TeamViewer - perfect for working on my 86-yr old mom computer from home so that I don’t have to drive to her house to get her “cc:” field back in her Outlook, lol. Or my lazy butt to go turn off DS’s pc he left on in another part of the house. I can also work on college son’s pc when he requests help (rare, but still nice to have). Our high school distributes MacBook’s to all the students… except I’m mean and force my DS to use his Chromebook from home. For one class that needed to use a program, he used TeamViewer on his pc at home to run the program via his Chromebook at school.
CCleaner
Malwarebytes

This is a nice cookbook. I haven’t made anything yet, lol; but my son has Crohn’s Disease so I had requested this a while ago.

FREE Meow Mix Simple Servings Cat Food Sample

Thanks, I was needing a new one.

@chinarider said in Windows 10 - free?:

I assume what you’re seeing is right in line with what the guys discussed some months ago. It will activate but technically speaking you shouldn’t really have a Windows 10 license. Whether or not Microsoft ever does anything about it is another story. Although I’m somewhat surprised to hear that the machine with a clean install activated without any input on your part… That doesn’t make any sense to me. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding…

I just clarified over there, figured I’d do it here too.
I read an article from a tech guy saying the upgrade still seemed to work at the end of May(?). I think the first pc I worked on had the free upgrade already done but had automatically installed 32bit and I wanted 64bit. Then I found that Windows doesn’t like to do that and had to do a clean install.
When I did the install and entered the legitimate Win7 key it worked.

Second to last pc I upgraded I didn’t have the product key in front of me, so I figured I’d enter it later. A few days later I went in to register it and it was done already. Last pc I did was the homemade one, and again just figured I would enter the key later - and when I went to go input it, it was already activated.

I have product #'s from TechNet days, so I wasn’t trying to pull anything sleazy.

(I was on a roll in August/Sept of cleaning up various pc’s (college kids, etc); ended up selling four out of six of the pc’s I had sitting around. The last two I have interested buyers. I have one pc case and a box of computer parts (PSU’s, hard drives, DVD-drives, cables, etc) to sell and then I’ll have my “computer closet” cleaned out - yay!)

Thank you for the RSS feeds!
I like following the freebie thread via RSS on my uStart.org homepage

I’ve been going through several pc’s the past couple of months cleaning them up to sell, and it seems like Windows 10 is free to install.
I had two computers that I did a clean install of Win10, skipped the part where I entered the Product Key and the next day the computers would be activated and registered.
One was a homemade pc, had corrupted Vista on it’s hard drive so I reformatted it (externally on another pc) before the Win10 install.
I go through Win10 settings to get the “feel” of Win7, especially on the Start Menu - so I’m a Win10 convert.
So if you have an old pc sitting around, you might want to see if you can install Win10.
Windows Media Creation Tool (download, then install both versions to a flash drive is the best)