It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. [Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, Book the First, Chapter I]
Yesterday ends the two weeks of trying to resolve operating system (O/S) issues on both my primary Linux installation and the only Window 10 installation I use. The above Dicken's opening line describes the time period perfectly.
The Ubuntu 20.04 installation started having video problems after a recent update. I dread kernel updates and anything changes that have the Nivdia in the description. Screen flicker, failure to load proprietary drivers and poor video quality I could not resolve. The screen flicker got so bad I couldn't look directly at the screen at times if I wanted to avoid puking.
The Windows 10 installation just took for every to load! When it did finish loading, the few applications I use were just brutal in terms of slow performance. It seem no amount of penance could move me from update purgatory. I confess the O/S is only used to support a few application, so it not constantly hooked up to the intravenous bag of updates Windows requires to function normally.
What are the chance of two primary O/S installation having issues? I won't bore you with all the details. The solution was a fresh installation of the O/S on two new hard drives. I have always kept my O/S installs separate. The O/S separation has made management so much easier. A drive bay that facilitates swapping drives makes switching O/S as easy as pushing a drive into the slot before a power on.
While the eight hour Ubuntu install had a few challenges to restore the look and feel of the Linux install, the Window 11 eight hours install was brutal, matching how emotion of when the installation failed. The Windows installation included a change from Windows 10 to Windows 11. Professional version only, I don't do that home shite!
The exercise started with the i7 intel Asus motherboard with 32 G or memory and Nvidia video card not being Windows 11 compatible. I speculate the Windows 10 was installed sometime in 2017. It wasn't the hardware but the BIOS in the hardware. An upgrade of the BIOS from a version that was prefixed with a decimal to a version that has no zero's resolved the issue.
Actually the trip to the hardware store to purchase hardware began the siege. The pimple face kid going through a catalogue of options was frustrating when all I wanted was two hard drives. I was forced to learn the new options and lingo to communicate my requirements.
From the start of my tribulations until resolution it was damn near two week. A trip to the city for hardware just before a major snow storm to blogging this post is the beginning and the ending of the journey.
I would beg to guess it took the knowledge accumulated over a twenty year career in system administration to stablize the two platforms. Fear is a great motivator. Fear that the two systems you depend on to accomplish any digital task are in jeopardy convinced me to spend some of my retirement money. I object to my spouse buying a new couch but hardware to restore my computers is a no-brainer purchase.
A two day late season snow storm gave me the time to hunker down and work the task to resolution. I'm happy with the outcome. Now to find the little tweaks that personalize the install will come over the next few days. I rarely make changes to default installs only because I can't ever remember the tweaks.
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