• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Windows pre-installs on generic PCs: do you trust them?

I was running W7 on a i3-6100 (Skylake) Z270 LGA 1151 board and when you put a i3-7100 (kabylake) into it the keyboard and mouse don't function on bootup during install (was using a different HD). Also, the built in GPU on the 7100 doesn't like W7 and won't load drivers. Little things like that make you use Windows 10.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
Was it a Windows 7 vintage machine? I seem to recall it got rapidly more difficult to install Windows 7 on anything much newer than Haswell-vintage machines, but I don't know firsthand. (I've always dreaded trying to install Windows from generic media on machines that are newer than the media; there were companies doing Windows 7 preloads for quite a while after 8/10 came out, but it wouldn't surprise me if getting it on there requires some kind of nightmarish exercise in slipstreaming drivers into the installer.)
Click to expand...
Windows 7 Home Premium, I was trying to install Windows 7 Pro.
 
I went the other direction, had a HP Windows 10 Tower with i7 &16GB RAM etc etc, MS decided it was an obsolete POS and said no Windows 11 for you. Go forth an empty your pockets of more cash. So I loaded Zorin 18.1 version of linux plus Crossfire and am now running linux plus my few Windows only programs all on linux. Runs super fast once again.
 
Days later and I’m resigning myself to thinking I’ll just keep Linux on this thing. Other than having somewhat underpowered graphics for playing PalWorld (my kid insisted I HAD to try it) this computer is so annoyingly competent at everything I kind of *have* to believe the Windows issues were some kind of corruption in the preload?
 
You're not getting a counterargument from me, I run my hardware on FreeBSD.

Issue I always had with MS, you are not allowed to get to the bottom of things. Even when it was somewhat possible, NT to 7 age, it was cryptic and without a connection to inner MSDN cabal you couldn't even resolve some error codes in meaningful way. You were always to believe, this thing works, and you shouldn't look into it.

The crown jewel of their "ways" was Boot Logging but what if the system won't boot in Safe Mode?
MCSEs I knew from back then carried the earliest live CD linuxes with them around, it was easier to mount and view a file than use whatever arcane procedure Microsoft prescribed...
 
If you decide to stay with Linux, but still have some Windows only programs, you might look into Wine and Bottles which are freeware. I decided to pay a few bucks and buy Crossover which was simpler for my aging brain to understand. I found that Crossover more or less automates the process you need to figure out on your own with Wine. OBTW, the owners of Crossover created Wine, I believe so I guess they have little desire to make Wine easier to understand. But the net result for me was that Windows only Sketchup 2017 now runs on my Zorin Linux HP tower.
 
tech58761 said:
I wanted a PC to do a slide show as part of a hobby display I'm doing at a meet next week (!), so when a friend bought a new PC last year, I talked him out of it, and he agreed provided the original HD gets pulled first.
This was a newer Dell, and I dropped a generic SSD into the unit and scared up install media so I could put Windows 7 (64 bit) on it - but it REFUSES to work.
It keeps griping about 32-bit something... I can't install drivers or anything!
And good night about trying to find the original install media - from what I read on Dell's site, you apparently were supposed to generate the flash drive installer from the ORIGINAL INSTALL.
I now have two doorstops and two coasters just taking up space. I ended up splurging on a fancy digital frame instead. I just HOPE the show hall has Wi-Fi!
</rant>
Click to expand...

I don't know if it has any connection to your difficulties, but I seem to recall that there was a time when some 64-bit hardware was shipping with 32-bit firmware.

Those systems need some kind of intermediate shim/bootloader/whatever in order to be able to execute a 64-bit EFI/UEFI executable... load and run a 64-bit OS.

@Zare My recollection from personal usage of Windows is that a lot of error messages (esp. BSOD) are somewhat generic in that they tell you that a particular problem occurred.

What they don't necessary tell you is "who" or what was responsible for causing the problem.

Sometimes the software/hardware responsible is obvious from the sequence of preceding events, but more often than not you are left to trawl google for examples where other people had similar situations and might have found a solution.
 
Last edited:
Istarian said:
I don't know if it has any connection to your difficulties, but I seem to recall that there was a time when some 64-bit hardware was shipping with 32-bit firmware.

Those systems need some kind of intermediate shim/bootloader/whatever in order to be able to execute a 64-bit EFI/UEFI executable...
Click to expand...
Or install 32-bit Windows.
 
DeltaDon said:
If you decide to stay with Linux, but still have some Windows only programs, you might look into Wine and Bottles which are freeware.
Click to expand...

Heh. Ironically enough I actually used Wine in a 32 bit Linux VM on my Windows 10 box to run WinCUPL because that software turned out to be impossible to get running reliably natively. (It actually predates XP, you have to install some legacy junk to run it on *that*.)

The reason I had Windows 10 at all in the first place was because A: I ended up with some machines that could be upgraded to it for free and was curious, B: I thought there was a *chance* I might want to experiment with some Windows-only software like the Adobe creative suite (I have *completely* scratched any thought of that off my list, they're far too evil *and* it's become obvious there's no way I'm going to ever have enough free time to justify the subscription costs), and C: I was getting into electronics design and microcontrollers, and a lot of the dev tools from the manufacturers are Windows-forward. With A and B not on the list anymore all that's really left is C, and, I dunno, that came with the downside of making life really skitzo in other areas. (I ended up with this total mishmash of native Windows, Cygwin, and Linux commandline envionments that I'd run stuff in, often compiling and installing duplicates of the same tool in multiple places, and I *really* dislike how shells and pathing work in Windows...) So, yeah, maybe this thing being borked under Windows 11 is actually a good wakeup call.
 
By now, on reasonably powerful machines, Windows 9x runs well on DOSBox-X or 86Box. Some games just won't run on anything else due to bad programming, so they will just fail in any other environment. Steam has been shipping with Proton commercially for long enough to prove that Windows is no longer necessary for modern gaming, either.

A lot of Windows vendor tools run well in Wine or DOSBox, or have a Linux version. Funnily enough, binary compatibility on Linux is bad enough that sometimes, running the Windows version through emulation is easier than trying to get the Linux version working. On the other hand, Docker has joined the chat years ago, too...
 
Istarian said:
I don't know if it has any connection to your difficulties, but I seem to recall that there was a time when some 64-bit hardware was shipping with 32-bit firmware.
Click to expand...
Hmmm. That could be it then, I guess. Anyhow, I'm out of time to investigate that angle as I'm hitting the road as soon as I get everything picked, packed, and loaded.
The frame will have to do (not happy with only 9" when that PC would have given me a full 19" screen. Oh well.)
 
@Svenska I find that somewhat hard to believe...

Apple does tend to go it's own way a lot, but if they couldn'tjust go straight to 64-bit UEFI compliant firmware I don't buy that everybody else could and did.

Some search results mentioned the Acer Switch 10E (a hybrid/convertible laptop, tablet). So anythinh that uses an Intel Atom Z series processor (formerly Bay Trail) may have that exact issue...

Perhaps this is connected to hardware which has a 64-bit processor, but wasn't shipped with a 64-bit OS?
 
Last edited:
Istarian said:
Apple does tend to go it's own way a lot, but if they couldn'tjust go straight to 64-bit UEFI compliant firmware I don't buy that everybody else could and did.
Click to expand...
The PC world never needed a 32-bit UEFI. They had a universally supported and tested BIOS to fall back to. Windows 7 did not support 32-bit UEFI and turned out to live an extraordinarily long life. Vendors would have been stupid to ship something it could not run on. Additionally, 32-bit platforms were seen as legacy platforms to be phased out; why invest in a completely new firmware ecosystem for no good reason?

Apple is not a PC vendor, never used a traditional BIOS, and had full control over MacOS. They also hate the idea of being PC compatible. So they shipped a 32-bit UEFI even on 64-bit hardware. Linux supported that combination for Apple hardware specifically, which is how I know about it.

The situation was different for 64-bit. UEFI was widely embraced by the industry and brought actual advantages. Microsoft started mandating it for Windows.

The situation was also different for embedded platforms. On ARM, UEFI supports ACPI (needed for Windows) and a standardized Secure Boot environment (needed for Android). Compatibility with other operating systems was never relevant, so it was adopted as vendors saw fit. Today, you have both UEFI and non-UEFI firmwares. Android can work with either, but slowly pushes towards UEFI.
 
Istarian said:
Some search results mentioned the Acer Switch 10E (a hybrid/convertible laptop, tablet). So anythinh that uses an Intel Atom Z series processor (formerly Bay Trail) may have that exact issue...
Click to expand...

So… I had a Dell Venue 8 tablet powered by a Z2580. I do believe that *technically*, yes, these used a 32 bit UEFI firmware, but they were *not* “PCs” by any stretch of the imagination. Looks like that ACER is pretty much the same hardware in a hybrid laptop case that came with Windows 8 instead of the whack Intel version of Android the Venue came with. These things used UEFI specifically to implement Secure Boot to lock them into signed OS releases and they’re essentially doorstops today, there was no mainstream support for this as an open platform.

… and before anyone tells me how foolish I was for buying that Venue 8, I didn’t, they were doing a thing where you could get one for free with a computer purchase. :P
 
ClassicHasClass said:
And worth every penny, it sounds like.
Click to expand...

Meh, it was a perfectly "adequate" dingus for reading web pages and watching Youtube, so for zero bucks, why not? (The computer I bought that it came with was a Xmas gift for a family member, so it was kind of an additional stocking stuffer.) The main issue with it, which I was fully predicting, was Dell rapidly lost interest in trying to compete in the tablet market (just like almost everybody else who tried did*) so it never got any software updates and otherwise started feeling crufty and untrustworthy after a year or so. Although I would be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed that once it was clear its useful life as a fondleslab was over it turned out to be basically impossible to hack anything interesting on it. (They sold a Windows 8 version, the "Venue 8 Pro", with slightly different hardware that apparently *did* get Linux crammed onto it eventually, if only barely so.)

Android on Atom/x86 was a weird sideline a bunch of companies got suckered into around that time. For instance, Cisco (yeah, the networking company) had several products, including a goofy tablet-that-docked-into-your-desk-phone dingus, and a video conference machine/computer monitor combo. I would guess they were all using roughly the same guts and may well have also had that weird embedded 32 bit EFI.

(* I mean, they were giving them away as promo items, that's the kind of writing on the wall that's hard to miss.)
 
I always just burn a new USB of the latest Windows install media whenever I need to put together a machine. It's not that I don't trust the preinstalled version per se, so much as it is that I would just rather do it myself and start off with a fresh install that I can tweak the way I want it with local GPOs and the like. I do, however, distrust certain vendors of prebuilt machines entirely, like MSI and Lenovo, as they've been known to grossly misuse the ACPI table entries intended to allow Windows to automatically locate and install critical device drivers.

Eudimorphodon said:
Android on Atom/x86 was a weird sideline a bunch of companies got suckered into around that time. For instance, Cisco (yeah, the networking company) had several products, including a goofy tablet-that-docked-into-your-desk-phone dingus, and a video conference machine/computer monitor combo. I would guess they were all using roughly the same guts and may well have also had that weird embedded 32 bit EFI.
Click to expand...

God, I remember those things. Maybe ten or so years ago I was working at a Cisco VAR/MSP that was trying to use that line to build a managed services telehealth type offering around reselling Webex. I think maybe a dozen or so clients signed up and only one of them stuck around for more than a couple years.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top