caretaker

I'm going to have a go at a friend's laptop that is bogged down in the Windows upgrade swamp. After seeing how quick mine all are he's eager. It sounds like even though he paid big money he got a spinning rust drive and hardly any ram. If I can import his stuff using the thumb drive I'll call it a bonus, but if it gets lost he won't freak out. He paid 3800 for his laptop, paid a shop 1100 to fix it once, and I think I can get it up and running better than ever for under $100.

BristolUK

But it appears to need a disc and lots of newer laptops don't have optical drives anymore.

BuckinghamshireBoy

There's a South Korean washing machine manufacturer (since diversified a bit) who make an external USB Blu-Ray/DVD reader/writer bit of kit which is really not that expensive and fills this and other needs. Well worth looking at.

Doubtless many others out there, I got mine in a sale, very happy with it.

caretaker

I bought one on Ali because my little Lenovo x200 and x201 don't have a disc drive in them, and it was only about $20 for a usb 3.0 one.

dakota44

How do I find whether my laptop has already been updated? I did an update 3 or weeks ago but never paid attention to what windows update it was.

chawkins99

Click Start and type Winver.

Latest version is 1803.

dakota44

thanks. I will do that now.

dakota44

Nope..mine is 1709. So I guess I will dodge that upgrade.

BristolUK

I knew there must be a quicker way than the one I did.

We have four running here...all still on 1709.

I've already taken an image, I'll do a separate copy of a couple of small files...but I'm just going to let it happen.

Danger is my middle name.

BuckinghamshireBoy

Gilbert "Danger" O'Sullivan. I like it.

BristolUK

Nobody else has noticed...or said anything.

BuckinghamshireBoy

It was nagging me for a couple of days before I figured it out (I refused to resort to Google)

BristolUK

I'm doing 1803 right now. 80 minutes so far...84% on third restart I think.

BuckinghamshireBoy

indeed.

OH's machine was upgraded last weekend, it went fine, took just over two hours.

BristolUK

All done. 90 minutes. Seems to be behaving.

Only thing I noticed is I tried to open a word doc - I use WPS not MS Office - and it said it was broken. I just had to use "open with" and select WPS writer and presumably next time it will default to Writer rather than Word.