Windows

Melita tried installing the Spectre Meltdown patches and now she's having issues with Windows. Leo says that the problem may be due to the antivirus companies not updating so that she can install it. Microsoft has to update Windows Defender with a patch to her registry that says it's ready. She tried doing a system recovery to reinstall Windows and now she can't do anything. Leo suspects that Melita may be having issues with her hard drive. Or her optical CD install discs have gone bad. It could also be a larger motherboard failure, like a dead motherboard battery.

Roger has a similar Acer Cloudbook that can't be updated. Can he turn it into a Chromebook? Leo says it's possible. There are online open source Chromebook installs out there. Another option is to use Windows Media Tool to create a USB key to create an install of Windows 10. Then he could try installing that.

Jim has a Windows 7 computer and about two months ago it started messing up his mouse, which freezes up anywhere from a few seconds up to 5 minutes. It usually happens after checking his email and then going online for a while. Then he exits out and the mouse freezes and he has to reboot. Leo says that there's probably something running in the background that's slowing down his computer and causing processes to back up. Leo suggests trying another browser, like Google Chrome.

Steve has a NuVision Windows tablet and when he turned it on, it wanted to update, but it can't because there isn't enough space on the drive. How can he update it? Leo says that the biggest problem these tablets have is that there's no space to update it, and it's not possible to connect a thumb drive to do it. He did put a 64GB microSD card into the slot, but that didn't work either. Leo says that's because it probably has to update to the internal memory. Steve can try downloading an updated version of Windows 10 Creators Edition using the Media Creation tool. It could work.

Eric wants to know if he can play an old Windows game on his new Mac. Leo says he might able to. He can try using WINE. The other way is to run Windows virtually through VirtualBox (free), or VMware. Then he can run Windows virtually, and install the game in the Windows environment.

Stan is trying to update his computer, but he can't download the files (there's an exclamation point). So he turned it off and turned it back on and it updated anyway. Leo says that it's likely his computer was made compatible by Microsoft and when he turned it back on, it did the update because it was ready to. Windows also has a troubleshooter that could help.

Matthew gave his mother in law a Dell computer Inspiron 17R 571 running Windows 10, but it's taking 5 minutes to boot up. Leo suspects that the spinning hard drive may be starting to fail, with difficult to read sectors. It could also be software that's hanging up the bootup process. Matthew should try using the boot log to see what may be causing the issue. He can get to this by holding the Shift key while its booting, and he can choose to create a boot log on the root level of the drive named bootlog.txt.

Steve has an old Gateway computer and wants to know if he can update to the latest Windows 10 Fall Creators update. It won't install, failing at 84%. It can restore the previous version, but he doesn't know why he can't update. Leo says that it should since Microsoft has opened it up to all computers now. But if he hasn't applied all the previous hotfixes, it may fail.