A week before my daughter’s school started, we were facing an issue where the laptop would switch off in the middle of a session. So, I decided to get it fixed before the school begins.
I was not sure about road restrictions heading towards the laptop repair center. Hence, I picked a laptop repair center nearby. He replaced some parts and the laptop worked for a grand total of one day. Then, as I shared earlier, the laptop died right in the middle of a school session.
I decided to go to my original repair center to fix the issue this time. Once fixed, the laptop ran for a couple of days. Then, the laptop died again over the weekend.
In the midst of all this, I had upgraded from Windows Home to Windows Pro, when the option appeared in the Updates page of the control panel. This is that throwaway line that you read in the novel and you skip past thinking it is insignificant but which turns into a world ending event later on in the novel.
The laptop repair center informed me that my laptop’s Intel Core i5 processor is not available and needs to be replaced with an Intel Core i7. He assured an extension of life of at least 2 years for almost a quarter of the cost of the new one. I took that offer.
When I got back home, the laptop worked well but got a “Windows not activated” message. Trying to fix it myself did not yield any results. So, I took it back to the laptop repair center. The center rep reprimanded me for upgrading the version and said that I now had a pirated version of Windows and he would have to crack the version. He informed me that I would never be able to update Windows ever again.
He returned the laptop to me to enable me to store the data before he cracked Windows.
Once I returned home, I considered searching a bit more to try and save the situation. This is when I found the article that saved me and enabled me to go back to my Windows Home edition with a new install.
When you upgrade from Windows Home to Windows Pro, you get a 10-day window to go back to Windows Home. If you miss this window, you need to do a fresh install of Windows. Windows now comes as an ISO image which you can boot from a pen drive. Also, BIOS has been replaced by something called UEFI.
All of the technical details are linked to in the article. The answer to look at is one by Andre Da Costa.
Parallel Spirals 