Early last week, I came into possession of a Dell Precision 7510 laptop. A pure beauty that came all installed with a perfectly fine installation of Windows 7... and a Windows 10 installation DVD. Even though the laptop does not have a DVD drive, so the DVD was entirely useless, it picked my curiosity. And you know what they say about curiosity and the cat.
I am still alive, even though over the last few days I have cried, laughed, and done both at the same time. I spent one day trying out Windows 10, 2 days trying to get it to do what I wanted it to do, and 5 days trying to get rid of it, without success. As it is, it still lords over my laptop. It is a self-healing virus. Even the factory reset is not working out of the box.
My options should have been, from easiest to hardest
1) Tell Windows 10 I hate it and ask it to give me my Windows 7 back
2) Do a factory reset of my laptop from Windows 10
3) Wipe out the disk and do a fresh install of Windows 7
4) Hack a factory reset
Everything failed.
1) failed because (I think), when I upgraded to Windows 10 and it asked me to pick between keeping some of my stuff and do a clean install, I did a clean install. I did not have any files at that point as my laptop was brand new and I know from experience that if possible, clean installs are better. They are... clean and less likely to cause trouble. So the option to switch back to Windows 7 did not appear on the menu
2) failed because Windows 10 destroys the ability to do Dell factory resets. So no option on the menu to do that either.
3) failed because of a more involved reason. My laptop, as I mentioned, comes without a DVD drive. While annoying, I thought that it would be a small problem. After all, most installs these day can be done off USB. Most, except Windows 7 on the latest hardware. My laptop, being state of the art, has USB 3.0 ports. Windows 7 installation thumbdrives can't run on USB 3.0. For a while, laptops came with the ability to momentarily disable USB 3.0 and run USB 2.0 instead. No longer. Not mine. So can't do a fresh install of Windows 7. One thing I haven't tried but suspect will also fail for the same reason is to use an external DVD drive. But the external DVD drive plugs into... a USB port. So that's why I don't think this will work.
[Update - indeed, no luck with external DVD drive. But I solved the issue. See this post.]
Another consequence of the USB 3.0 is the inability of the Windows 7 installation to find a solid state hard drive (which I have for the OS). From what I read, solid state hard drives are treated as external drives plugged into USB. So if the installation can't read the USB ports, it won't find the solid state drive.
The era has come where the hardware has moved beyond what is supported by Windows 7. So I think I was right in thinking that upgrading to Windows 10 would allow my laptop to run better.
The problem is, Windows 10 has gone way down the path of thinking that the user is a complete idiot. I do not envision myself fighting my OS every day. It's not good for my health and my sanity. I also suspect that Windows 10 is a half backed product. I was never able to get the secure wireless connection to my university network to work correctly (it required a re-install every time I woke my computer up). I had many other issues too numerous to count or recall, and considering that Windows 10 does what it wants and not what the user needs, it is hard to tell if I was dealing with bugs or intentional spitefulness on the part of the OS.
4) failed as well, even though I can proudly say that I put up a valiant fight (and learned a lot).
Now I am left with sending my laptop back to Dell. I have no idea how they got Windows 7 on it in the first place. But I want them to do that again. Another fight to look forward to.
[Update - I talked to Dell and they are sending me a USB installation stick for Windows 7. They assure me it will work, as they are pre-loading it for the necessary drivers to run on USB 3.0. We shall see.]
[Update - Well, they did not pre-load the proper drivers. So they are sending another one. A Dell recovery disk can't be patched for USB 3.0 after the fact.]
[Update - In the end, they had to send me a new solid state hard drive with a pre-loaded Windows 7 installation ready to run from bare metal.]
As for my next laptop, it may very well be a Mac, if Mac OS has not gone down the path of thinking the user is a complete idiot as well. Considering how many of my Astronomer friends use Macs and look happy, I am hopeful. Or I could wing it on Linux alone. Linux distros came a long way over the last 10 years. Lord knows what they can achieve over the next 5 years.
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