How to update to Windows 11

You will need a good internet connection and a bank 8GB USB drive or larger. If you are upgrading a laptop, make sure it is plugged in and not running on battery only.

Download Windows 11 and select Create Windows 11 Installation Media

Plug your blank USB into your computer and then click on the Windows 11 installer and select create a USB installer. This will take a while, just follow the instruction, they are self-explanatory.

In the shop, we perform a full tuneup and a full backup prior to updating to Windows 11 but since you probably will not have the equipment for that you need to at least uninstall old programs you no longer use and optimize your hard drives, and backup your computer.

Now to perform your Windows 11 update, after creating your backup, reboot your computer and plug in your Windows 11 installer USB. Click on the setup.exe like the image below.

Now just follow the USB installer directions and your Windows 10 computer will be updated to Windows 11.

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If you register, it will be downloaded to your computer when it’s released. If and when you chose to install it is up to you. If you chose to install it, please read my notes below as upgrading can change your computer completely and you need to know what can happen.

If you have Windows 7 and are completely happy with how your system runs right now, there is no need to do a windows 10 upgrade and you can ignore this message. Which is recommended for business computers.

Technicians are already preparing for what can happen to your computer, before and after the windows 10 upgrade.

Possible Windows 10 Upgrade Issues

Here is a list of issues to be ready for.

• The upgrade, as with any software upgrade could not install correctly and leave your computer in a state of not functioning. Meaning, that you cannot log in, cannot boot to Windows, or view your monitor (graphic issues from drivers malfunctioning, etc.). As we do not know what can happen, we recommend you be prepared for the worse.
• The upgrade might install just fine but leave you with no programs or any of your current settings.
• The upgrade might install just fine and you might have all of your programs and settings, but your drivers for your printers, webcams, scanners, etc. might not work.
• The upgrade might install correctly and everything seems to work, but some of your critical business software might not work correctly.
• Before doing any upgrade, have all of your installation disks ready in case you need to reinstall programs.
• Be sure to have all of your online software subscriptions and passwords ready in case you need to reinstall them.

Tips from Techs

• Do not download and install the windows 10 upgrade on the very first day you have it available.
• We recommend waiting it out until the bugs are figured out.

If you own a business, you should have the following done on your computer prior to any upgrades:

• Full system image of your computer (this will allow a full restore to before the upgrade, including operating system, programs, setting,s and data). If the Windows 10 upgrade goes bad or you dislike it, you can go back in time.
• If you don’t opt for full system image, at least have a good backup of your current data before any upgrade. There is no promise that an upgrade will keep your data!

If you are a home user, we still recommend the full system image, but due to cost… many home users just want their data backed up. But considering how many home users have custom software for their music, videos, and games, it’s worth a full system image.

If you feel you need help, please contact us at A1 Computer Repair at (530) 903-8838. We can help you remotely set up a software program to do a full system image. You will need an external hard drive for this installation.

This article was reprinted with permission from Call That Girl Tech Support & Office 365 Consulting.

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It’s extremely frustrating, but there are things that can help. The first culprit that we usually see impeding start-up time is malware infection. These insidious bits of software do everything they can to take over processing priority, and you’ll especially notice the performance hit at start-up.

Another common culprit is simply too many (legitimate) programs stampeding to load at a start-up, unbeknownst to you. These are the programs that load in the system tray by default, and 90% of them–especially non-Microsoft processes–don’t really need to load at start-up, though they set themselves to do that. Finally, one of the more common culprits is low RAM.

Many computers ship with the bare minimum needed to run Windows (this keeps the price enticingly low at the store), but does not exactly make them perform well on a daily basis in practice. It is fairly inexpensive to upgrade the RAM in your system.

That said, if you REALLY want to speed things up, you can choose to switch out your hard drive for the newest variety, an SSD hard drive. These hard drives have no moving parts and are super-fast. We have these installed in almost all our computers at home.

On our big rig, this change alone changed the boot time from almost seven minutes to less than 30 seconds. They are smaller and somewhat more expensive than traditional drives, but if these trade-offs are worth it to you, the speed you will enjoy is quite nice.

So if your computer is slower than molasses on a cold day, We can fix this! Just let us know.

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The company is lowering the price of its most expensive smaller business offering — from $15 per seat per month to $12.50 — and raising the employee cap in some cases to 300 from 25. Microsoft has preserved a $5 per seat per month Office 365 option that includes its cloud products,  but not desktop versions of Office proper.

The moves are customer-friendly because we are in a period of intense competition. Microsoft wants to bring people in from the cold of their past multi-year software buying cycles, while also shepherding smaller companies and businesses into its fold by selling them Office as a service at moderate price points.

Google, Apple, Dropbox, and Box want that same action. Far more than a trillion dollars in market cap is fighting for the right to store your files and help you edit them. Those firms would very much prefer if Office 365 were a flop.

Here are the new plans, via Microsoft:

Office 365 Business – The full Office applications – Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Publisher, with 1TB of OneDrive for Business cloud storage to access, edit and share your documents across your Windows PC, Mac, iPad, Windows tablet and smartphone.

Office 365 Business Essentials – The core cloud services for running your business – business-class email and calendaring, Office Online, online meetings, IM, video conferencing, cloud storage and file sharing, and much more.

Office 365 Business Premium – Get everything from both the Office 365 Business and Business Essentials plans.

The new options will go live on October 1.

Office 365 is becoming Microsoft’s Amazon Prime: A solution you pay for yearly that contains a kitchen-sink-like quantity of this and that. Microsoft, like Amazon, isn’t afraid of mixing in a slurry of services. If only Office 365 were as aptly named as Prime

via New Microsoft Office 365 Plans For Small Businesses.

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This covers all versions of Windows 7, Mary Jo Foley points out.

The end of support generally means no more updated features or performance improvements, unless you are covered by extra “extended support.”

UPDATED: Microsoft has promised to provide security patches even after it ends mainstream support, through 2020. What is ending is design changes, warranty claims, and no-charge incident support.

This move will mostly affect consumers. Businesses that pay for extended support for Windows 7, as most of them do, will get all updates for another five years, until January 14, 2020.

That’s important because many businesses are right now in the process of upgrading their old Windows XP PCs, but they’re moving to Windows 7, not Windows 8.

There’s some speculation that, given the popularity of Windows 7, Microsoft might change its mind as the date nears and continue to support it a bit longer as it did for Windows XP. All told, Microsoft supported XP for about 13 years.

That kind of extension doesn’t seem likely at this point. Remember, Windows 8 basically includes a full version of Windows 7, called Desktop mode. With Windows 8.1, it’s possible to run a Windows 8 machine in Desktop mode and almost avoid the new-and-confusing Windows 8 part of the OS.

And Microsoft really needs to nudge consumers into buying Windows 8 machines. More Windows 8 machines mean more developers will want to write software for Windows 8, which will make more people want to buy it.

By the way, Microsoft also set the end-of-life of mainstream support for Windows 8 (including the latest version, Windows 8.1), for January 9, 2018.

This is another hint that Microsoft should have its next version of Windows ready in 2015, code-named “Threshold” (sometimes referred to as Windows 9).

If Microsoft plays its cards right, Windows 9 will be to the unloved Windows 8 what Windows 7 was to Vista, which InfoWorld ranked No. 2 on its list of the 25 biggest tech flops (also PCWorld’s “Biggest Tech Disappointment” of 2007.)

Here’s the chart from Microsoft’s Lifecycle Support page.

The post End Of Free Windows 7 Support Coming Soon appeared first on A1 Computer Repair.

There’s no shortage of competition in this area, of course, but Live Creator has one or two useful touches that you might appreciate.

This starts with the download itself. There’s no bulky ISO here, just a single 8.8MB executable that is ready to run whenever you like.

The program opens with a simple wizard, asking if you’d like to create a bootable CD or USB key. Conveniently, there’s also an option to use a previously downloaded ISO image. (We wondered if this could work with any ISO, as a general way to create bootable USB’s, but sadly not. It’s strictly ESET-only.)

ESET SysRescue Live Creator then downloads its bootable image (a 324MB ISO), and prepares your CD or USB immediately afterward. In another thoughtful touch, you’re given an option to create another CD/ USB or save the ISO for reuse later.

Booting ESET’s rescue environment reveals more welcome extras in tools to check your RAM and system drive for defects. Hardware issues can cause odd malware-like problems, so it’s worth trying these if you can’t find anything else.

The ESET SysRescue tool is the real star here, of course, and it has more options than some similar tools. You’re able to download the latest virus signatures and check your system with various scan types. The core antivirus engine gets mixed results with the independent labs — AVTEST’s April results found it had an above-average 100 percent detection rate for known threats, a below-par 93 percent for zero-day attacks — but there’s more than enough power here to be useful.

When it’s all done, you can keep the USB key around for reuse later. But if you need it for something else, ESET SysRescue Live Creator is also able to wipe the drive in seconds. Just connect the drive, start the program again and click “Erase existing SysRescue USB”: another useful feature that you won’t always find elsewhere.

Article Originally from: http://betanews.com

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I am just about to upgrade from XP Home to Windows 7 Professional and have been thinking about ways of making and keeping the system faster. Putting the operating system on an SSD would be one thing, but how about also having a separate drive for all non-OS installed programs, downloads, and files? Would you recommend this or, indeed, one for programs and related files, and one for other data, such as photographs, audio files, text documents, etc. If so, how should I go about it? Alan

When you’re moving to a new PC, or even installing a new operating system, it’s important to think about where you are going to store data. This won’t necessarily make your PC run any faster. However, it will make it easier for you to keep track of irreplaceable data, and make backup copies.

One of the problems with the DOS-based versions of Windows (95, 98, 98SE, Me) and, to a lesser extent, Windows XP was a tendency to slow down over time, under the weight of accumulated cruft. I used to do a clean re-installation every 18-24 months. The good news is that Windows 7 doesn’t suffer from this problem, or at least, not to a significant extent. I’m running Windows 7 on a laptop and Windows 7 Pro on a desktop, and have not yet needed to reinstall either operating system. (Windows 7 has a Resource Monitor and a Performance Monitor so you can track how it’s doing.)

This also means there’s not such a big advantage to having your hard drive divided into two partitions, or having two separate drives. In the old days, it was useful to have the operating system and programs on drive C: and all your data on D: because if you wanted to reinstall the OS, you could reformat C: without worrying about losing data. That’s still the case, of course, but it’s not as important if you don’t expect to have to reinstall the OS.

Another advantage of having two drives was that it made backups simpler. Basically, almost everything on C: could be replaced either by reloading programs from disc or by downloading new versions from the net. Almost everything on D: couldn’t easily be replaced, such as personal documents and photos, and music files ripped from audio CDs.

I say “almost everything on C:” because Microsoft and various software houses don’t make it easy. Microsoft stores things on the C: drive under different user account names (C:\users\jack etc), while some programs like to store data in their own directories. This makes sense because the vast majority of PC users don’t pay any attention to where and how things are stored, so developers try to organize their data for them. But it means that if you do care, then you have to change each program’s default settings to point to the folders you want it to use.

Note that there are privacy implications to moving data. People who have limited or guest accounts on Windows – including children – only have access to their own programs and data on C:, and to common programs. But they can probably access anything on the D: drive unless you block them.

Partitions, drives and folders

From a software point of view, it doesn’t usually matter if you have (a) two separate hard drives, (b) one large hard drive split into two or more partitions, or (c) a separate folder that you use in the same way as a hard drive. From a hardware point of view, having two separate drives provides more resilience: it’s unlikely that both the C: and D: drives will fail at the same time. But remember, having one drive with two partitions – also called C: and D: and working as separate drives — doesn’t provide the same resilience. If the physical hard drive fails, then both drives fail. You can copy files from C: to a partition called D: but you still don’t have a backup. You only have a backup if you copy the files to one or more external hard drives, and/or an online cloud-based service such as CrashPlan, Backblaze, Carbonite, or Mozy.

My current desktop PC has one large (1TB) hard drive. Instead of partitioning it, I created a folder called MAIN, which I use almost exactly like the D: partition pre-installed on my laptop’s hard drive. (I have no idea why I picked that name, but the caps make it stand out.) I put all my irreplaceable data in that folder. Obviously, it has a large number of subfolders such as Audio files (for interviews, etc), Documents, Movies, Music, Photographs, Work, etc. Each folder has numerous sub-folders, to make things easier to find. For example, my Work folder contains a Guardian folder, which has folders for Ask Jack, Netbytes, Obituaries, Technophile, and so on.

The main point of MAIN is that I can quickly make a backup of this one 132MB folder, or use FreeFileSync to update the current backup on an external hard drive. It’s manageable, so I’m more likely to do it. But what you do will depend on how much data you have, and how often it changes. If you have a large collection of music or video files, you might want to have these in separate folders, outside MAIN (or whatever). This is a particularly good idea if you share these media folders over your home network.

I said “it doesn’t usually matter if you have two separate hard drives”, but sometimes it does. For example, as you suggest, you can put the operating system on an SSD (solid-state drive) and large data files on a traditional hard drive, to take advantage of the SSD’s extra speed. However, this is only because SSDs are so expensive. If you could afford a 500GB or 1TB SSD, then you could use that for everything.

Another case is when applications use such large data files that disk throughput makes a difference to performance. For example, professional photo and video editing programs such as those in Adobe Creative Suite have their own “scratch files” (temporary disk storage areas) where they store vast amounts of transitory data. Operating systems also have scratch files or “page files” such as pagefile.sys in Windows. In this case, you can get better performance if the two scratch files are on different physical hard drives because that provides up to twice as much throughput to disk.

When rendering high-definition video, you may want to use one hard drive for reading operations and caching but use a separate (preferably clean) hard drive for writing the rendered file.

Original Article: How should I organize my hard drives and data when upgrading Windows? | Technology | theguardian.com.

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It means you should take action. After April 8, 2014, there will be no new security updates, non-security hotfixes, free or paid assisted support options or online technical content updates.

Running Windows XP SP3 and Office 2003 in your environment after their end of support date may expose your company to potential risks, such as:

• Security & Compliance Risks: Unsupported and unpatched environments are vulnerable to security risks. This may result in an officially recognized control failure by an internal or external audit body, leading to suspension of certifications, and/or public notification of the organization’s inability to maintain its systems and customer information.
• Lack of Independent Software Vendor (ISV) & Hardware Manufacturers support: A recent industry report from Gartner Research suggests “many independent software vendors (ISVs) are unlikely to support new versions of applications on Windows XP in 2011; in 2012, it will become common.” And it may stifle access to hardware innovation: Gartner Research further notes that in 2012, most PC hardware manufacturers will stop supporting Windows XP on the majority of their new PC models.

Get current with Windows and Office. This option has upside well beyond keeping you supported. It offers more flexibility to empower employees to be more productive while increasing operational efficiency through improved PC security and management. It also enables your organization to take advantage of the latest technology trends such as virtualization and the cloud.

Enterprise Customers: Microsoft offers large organizations in-depth technical resources, tools, and expert guidance to ease the deployment and management of Windows, Office and Internet Explorer products and technologies. To learn more about migration and deployment programs, please contact your Microsoft sales representative or Certified Microsoft Partner. Learn how to pilot and deploy a modern desktop yourself, download the free Microsoft Deployment Toolkit and begin your deployment today.

Small to Medium Business: There are many options for small and medium businesses considering moving to a modern PC with the latest productivity and collaboration tools. Small to mid-size organizations should locate a Microsoft Certified Partner to understand the best options to meet their business needs. If your current PC meets the system requirements for Windows 7 or Windows 8.1, you can buy Windows 7 Professional or Windows 8.1 Pro from a local retailer or Microsoft Certified Partner. If your PC does not meet system requirements, consider purchasing a new business PC with Windows 8.1 Pro.

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