Wow, what an ordeal. Within minutes of publishing last night’s post I tried another method to get Windows 7 to install on my new machine. It worked to my surprise but by the time the installation finished, it was late so I had to stop there. I was pleased because I didn’t think it would require much more work to get things to a final and working state. Boy, I was wrong there.
After getting home from work this evening, I started the computer and then had to install some drivers so I could get Internet access through the new network card. Unfortunately, I chose an “express” install method that also installed a whole bunch of other drivers that made Windows 7 very unstable. It basically ruined the installation and Windows wouldn’t even boot up again. I had to re-install Windows 7 again, which was tedious and time-consuming. Once I got a fresh install, I made sure just to install the network driver and nothing else. At this point I was able to begin the downloading of Windows 10. The whole thing was pretty much on auto-pilot for this portion of the ordeal. Once Windows 10 was downloaded, it installed itself and I thought I was in the clear. I was wrong.
I noticed something was wrong when Windows 10 rebooted itself for the first time after it installed. It would freeze and become unresponsive for about 30 seconds and then I’d have about five seconds to do something (open a window, click on a link) before it’d freeze again. It was like using a computer in slow motion. I eventually got the task manager open and it showed me that my Windows drive was at 100% utilization nearly all the time. This was causing the system to freeze. I looked up the problem on my laptop and luckily I discovered the solution was to update another set of drivers. It took about ten minutes to open up file explorer and double-click the driver installation program but it worked.
I have a stable Windows 10 installation now and it only took a grand total of about five hours (one hour last night and four tonight). Now I get to install all the programs I had on my old computer. It’s getting late now so that will have to wait for tomorrow. I am, however, very thankful I was able to get to this point.