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Someone brought me an old laptop to "clean up" because she wants to give it to a 3-year old grandchild, to keep her away from her "good" laptop. It's old, it's slow, there was nothing I was asked to salvage, so I figured the quickest way to get there was to blow everything away and just let a clean install of Windows take over the entire disk after deleting it all.
The first attempt to install went just fine. Then I let Windows 7 get and install any and all updates it could find. This is what the system came with, and even though I realize it's out of support, yada-yada, I figured it would probably be the best thing to reinstall on it. Anything newer would be even slower, not to mention no guarantee that any proprietary driver might not be available or work with 8/8.1/10/whatever else. At some point some update failed, and it spent countless hours rolling everything back. Next time around I told it to only install a subset of them, and do it all in smaller chunks (that generally seems to work better in my experience since, at this point in time, Win7 tries to get and install hundreds of updates...which might be just too much for it to try to handle all at once).
At some point it decided to run System Repair (not System Restore) on every startup, even though it could never find/fix any problem. I figured I'd try a different hard drive - I have plenty of spares I don't mind giving away. Long story short, I'm back in the same situation; System Repair comes up on its own on every reboot and, if I can eventually reach the login screen, the subsequent reboot starts the whole thing all over again.
While I'm ready to say the first hard drive's just gone way past its useful life (the manufacturing date printed on it says 2007), I have a harder time saying the same about the second, and I know I last used it to test various Linux distributions in another laptop and never had a problem with it.
I'm not sure if some unrelated hardware problem could manifest itself in this way. But I'm running out of patience and not quite willing to try a third hard drive, if only for the sake of trying.
Again, it's just an old laptop to be given to a 3-year old, so honestly, I've probably spent way more time on this than anyone ought to. I think this is gonna be one of those rare times I just tell her to trash it.
I had no point and no question. Just a semi-rant, I guess...
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dandy72 wrote: she wants to give it to a 3-year old grandchild
3? Get them an Etch A Sketch instead, I doubt they'll know the difference 
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F-ES Sitecore wrote: I doubt they'll know the difference
My 3-year old grandson watches films and plays games on his tablet. He would definitely know the difference. His first question when he first brought it to our house: "Grandad, what's your wifi password?".
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Yeah...I think her expectation was that she might be able to set up some simple games on it to keep the kid occupied, but I have no idea what old game might still work on Win7, on a laptop that old.
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Everything that's equally old.
Wrong is evil and must be defeated. - Jeff Ello
Never stop dreaming - Freddie Kruger
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True. But I suspect she's not the type who would've hung onto an installer so she can set it up again 10 years down the road. I'd expect her (and that'd be me being an optimist for her to go that far) to google for something, download it, and try to install it. And her googling would NOT be returning anything that has the same age as her laptop.
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Neat Trick for young kids.
The passwords should be the phone numbers they should always know!
Starting at 2, my daughter got her first computer (an old spare), I removed the WIN, ALT and other KEYS that cause problems.
By 5 she was doing a little home key practice
By 5th Grade she could type over 60 WPM!
Another good idea we used:
Practicing Touch Typing for 2-3 minutes (increasing over time), was the PENANCE she had to pay to PLAY!
Everything she was given, had a condition attached to it, like study time, reading time, math time.
She did her "WORK" first, and then had access to games, walks and drives...
The little snot learned to complete EVERYTHING in the first 1hr of the day, all summer, so she could have the rest of her day. LOL...
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Kirk 10389821 wrote: The passwords should be the phone numbers they should always know!
I liked this idea!
If you are not criticized, you may not be doing much.
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dandy72 wrote: When do you cut your losses?
1992. That's when I moved across the country and I have had no such requests since.
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That'll cut down on the requests from friends and family, but after nearly 30 years, haven't you made new acquaintances who now know you're a "computer guy"?
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dandy72 wrote: I last used it to test various Linux distributions
So why not go with an easy to use Linux distro. I wouldn't have thought a 3-year old is going to mind.
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See one of my replies above. I think her expectation was that she'd be able to install some simple games to keep the kid busy, nothing more sophisticated than that. She won't figure out Linux. And I don't want to be a Linux support guy.
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Linux low hardware requirement is a lie. Have you ever tried to install a current distro to an old computer?
I was not able to install Linux Mint second newest to a 10 years old CPU/integrated GPU/RAM/Motherboard that ran Windows 10 before... I had to go back to the oldest supported Mint distro.
Don't forget: Linus said binary compatibility is for userland software, not for drivers!
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Peter Adam wrote: Linux low hardware requirement is a lie. Have you ever tried to install a current distro to an old computer?
Yep, most of the current, popular, distros assume you are installing on modern hardware - and won't do that well on an old PC. But there are still plenty of lightweight Linux distros, which will.
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Linux Mint, as a lightweight distro with the simplest window manager did not on my MB. I could make it work, if I would update a magnitude of things from the kernel till the C compiler through the libc, and who knows where the ball would have been stopped.
Face it, the os world assumes you are on the bleeding edge, and turns together with the bunch wherever the Good Guys lead them. May the const correctness be with you!
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"Someone" asked you to do this... I'm guessing it's not someone especially close to you or you'd have said "my partner" etc. You've spent hours on this now. Assuming your professional rate is ~ $100/hour you could have gone out and bought a brand new 7" tablet for the cost your "someone" is asking you to stump up. I think an approach (now long past the point of no return) would have been to spend one hour, if all was well then OK, otherwise hand it back with the offer of continuing to try but at (say) half your professional rate. That would be a very fair offer.
Personally, I would have declined at the outset, on principle, to provide a 3-year old with a laptop. It's likely to get broken / dropped / sicked on / thrown at the cat in less time than you've spent on it. A 3-year old should be playing with Lego, jumping in puddles, cutting up Dad's suit and scribbling on the wallpaper. When it needs a story it's parents should read to it or make one up. YMMV, IANACP etc (I am not a child psychologist - though I did get a distinction on a uni course on child development.  )
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Agree. 3 year olds (or less then 10 for that matter) should not be on computers/laptops/tablets more than is needed for education. I have seen kids so dependent on video satisfaction they are like little crack-addicts. I fear for their mental development. Someday they'll have to Google how to make toast.
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I haven’t seen $100/hr since Bush/Obama flooded us with H1-B’s
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Hi,
Before you scrap the machine try deleting this registry key and see if your problem goes away.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RebootPending
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It sure would be nice to try, if I could even reach a state where I could do anything with the registry. Right now I can't get that far.
I realize you can load and edit the registry from a command prompt (which I should be able to reach), but I'm past the point where I can be convinced to bother to try.
And I'm curious: what does a "reboot pending" flag have to do with running the system repair tool?
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I have had problems when installing Windows 7 last times too due to the high number of updates too. In my case it was due to a problem with the updater itself.
It got solved downloading the KB3138612 and installing it manually.
Clean install finish offline, get online, windows updater updates itself, install the local KB3138612, ask for updates, get a list of over 150, click ok, leave it over night...
Next day, only one update had failed. Try again, got through
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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I installed Win7 x64 (with SP1 slipstreamed in it) from a CD that had been created from an ISO file. I have that file in a folder, with two subfolders, one containing KB3138612, and the other KB3145739. According to the readme I had left in the folder, the two patches help to avoid extra-long patch update times. So I installed the OS (including SP1), then the KB file you're referring to, then the other, then I let it go online and download/install everything. Pretty close to what you're describing.
At this point, the laptop is stuck in a System Repair (no error found) / Reboot loop.
As others have said, I've already spent way more time on this than any of it is worth.
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I've seen several laptop hard drives do a slow fail. Years ago, my oldest daughter's laptop would sometimes not boot. I suspected marginal drive sectors were causing the problem, but getting around that was problematic. I finally ran Seagate's SeaTools and it solved the problem for a few months (long enough to save her pictures which, to my knowledge, she has yet to get from my Google drive.)
One clue that SeaTools was working is that about two hours in, it spent several hours analyzing a few dozen sectors. I concluded that the problem is over aggresive firmware which "refuses" to retire marginal sectors. SSDs are simply mandatory on laptops.
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Throw a Linux on it; say Ubuntu or a variant. Lubuntu is said to be fast.
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