Can 10 run on a Pentium P6100

[sticks]

Working on a win 7 system for someone with a Pentium P6100 processor and
am wondering if anyone has this working on a windows 10 system. Several
things with this laptop I'm trying to fix, but would eventually like to
upgrade it to windows 10 if it can run it.

Was just going to image it and go ahead and try doing the 10 upgrade,
but not having luck getting Macrium to finish an image. Doing a
thorough chkdsk now, and see if that find errors.

Anyone running windows 10 with a Pentium P6100?

[😉 Good Guy 😉]

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[Anon]

Post by sticks
Working on a win 7 system for someone with a Pentium P6100 processor
and am wondering if anyone has this working on a windows 10 system.
Several things with this laptop I'm trying to fix, but would
eventually like to upgrade it to windows 10 if it can run it.
Was just going to image it and go ahead and try doing the 10 upgrade,
but not having luck getting Macrium to finish an image. Doing a
thorough chkdsk now, and see if that find errors.
Anyone running windows 10 with a Pentium P6100?

<https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/windows-10-specifications#primaryR2>
Hope this helps.
--
https://www.temu.com/
https://b4ukraine.org/
https://www.eff.org/

You can easily run Windows 10. See this link:

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/50175/intel-pentium-processor-p6100-3m-cache-2-00-ghz.html

[Paul]

Working on a win 7 system for someone with a Pentium P6100 processor and am wondering if anyone has this working on a windows 10 system.  Several things with this laptop I'm trying to fix, but would eventually like to upgrade it to windows 10 if it can run it.
Was just going to image it and go ahead and try doing the 10 upgrade, but not having luck getting Macrium to finish an image.  Doing a thorough chkdsk now, and see if that find errors.
Anyone running windows 10 with a Pentium P6100?

You can do a ddrescue image of it.

On Linux (Linux boot DVD):

sudo apt install gddrescue # ddrescue will not be on the DVD, install to RAM.
# With a few exceptions, the networking needed will work.
# (In my example, I stored the output under /root, but you might
# use a large USB-hosted drive for this.)

sudo ddrescue -f -n /dev/sdb /root/sdb_rescue.img /root/rescue.log # A 1TB disk, makes a 1TB .img file
# The first pass may actually complete, error free.

# Examine the LOG file for details. A large log file means
# there are many CRC errors. CRC errors are permanent damaging errors,
# potentially knocking holes in transferred files. ("Gedit" is one of
# the text editors they might use on the DVD.)

gedit /root/rescue.log

# Now, the second pass reads the log, and concentrates only on the
# not-yet-captured sectors. This is a "we try harder" style of disk transfer.

sudo ddrescue -d -f -r3 /dev/sdb /root/sdb_rescue.img /root/rescue.log

After you've done enough second pass attempts, what remains in the rescue.log
is a list of sectors that will never be captured.

The 7ZIP program can read a .img file and traverse an NTFS partition.
You can pick individual files out of the ddrescue-mediated transferred .img
file, if you want to see what is in there.

When I rescued the data off a WDC Blue 250GB in my refurb, I had four CRC errors,
two of which hit and damaged files. The other two CRC errors were in white space.
I used nfi.exe to figure out which LBAs corresponded to which files.

That's an example of using free tools to rescue a balky disk.

disk ==> .img # These are some examples of things ddrescue can do
.img ==> disk # These two are backup and restore.

disk ==> disk # This is cloning, with ddrescue /dev/sdb /dev/sdc , disk to disk

Macrium can also do some of this. You can de-select smart transfer in the
preferences. But I could never be sure how tolerant it was of permanent errors.
The Macrium "dumb transfer" code is unlikely to just be a verbatim copy of FOSS gddrescue package.
When I had the chance, I really should have thoroughly tested Macrium, to
see if I could get it to capture the 250GB disk, but I had other things
on my mind at the time. Catching disk drives in just the right state of
dis-repair for testing, is difficult.

*******

If the HDD in the laptop is ailing, an SSD replacement has the speed
to make Windows 10 slightly more bearable. We are probably at the end
of the "low-price era" of SSDs. Samsung for example, has not made a lot
of money in the last six months. The NAND flash companies may have altered
production levels, in an attempt to bring the price of SSDs back up.

Samsung 870 EVO 1TB $60 (lower capacity drives might be cheaper still)

https://www.newegg.com/samsung-1tb-870-evo-series/p/N82E16820147793

It does not matter that the laptop SATA interface is only SATA I or SATA II.
The main gain with SSDs, is the zero seek time. Sure, sequential transfer
speed is nice, but when you're doing Windows Update, that pisses around
with "a million 2KB files", and that's when zero seek time, helps.

Windows guzzles CPU cycles, so CPU speed can matter too. what I discovered
in my latest purchase, is Windows does not really speed up all that much, when
infinite cores are available. A six core processor (6C 12T) is pretty well harvesting
what the design has to offer. An Epyc with a ton of cores, doesn't really go
all that much faster (no, I don't own one of those). CPU clock speed is king
on these OSes!!! This is why you ideally want 5GHz turbo. Not because you're a kiddy,
but because some of the algorithms Windows uses, just guzzle cycles. For pedestrian use,
like reading USENET, you don't need lots of cycles. It took me *two hours*
to upgrade W11 Insider a few days ago. Misery. And that's with "good" hardware.

I also tried to do Patch Tuesday, on an older hard drive, and that was
misery-incarnate as well. I won't be doing that a second time :-/

*******

Some laptops, the storage bay has no cooling. You check Google and
Google the model number, and see if users selected 5400 RPM hard drives
on purpose, to keep the drive temperature down. There are a few
SSDs which use a bit too much power. The Samsung example above, given
the era of hardware and the CPU speed, is unlikely to overheat.

Paul

[VanguardLH]

Post by sticks
Working on a win 7 system for someone with a Pentium P6100 processor
and am wondering if anyone has this working on a windows 10 system.
Several things with this laptop I'm trying to fix, but would
eventually like to upgrade it to windows 10 if it can run it.
Was just going to image it and go ahead and try doing the 10 upgrade,
but not having luck getting Macrium to finish an image. Doing a
thorough chkdsk now, and see if that find errors.
Anyone running windows 10 with a Pentium P6100?

Nope, don't have an old box with the P6100. That CPU was released back
in 2010. Benchmarks are very poor compared to later CPUs.

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/SpeedTest/756/IntelR-PentiumR-CPU--------P6100----200GHz

I'm surpised the user isn't already complaining about having a slow
system. With Win10, it won't be faster, and probably even slower. Also
likely with such an old CPU that the RAM is undersized. PCIe gen 2 came
out in 2007, and gen 3 in 2010, so unknown what the mobo supports. With
each gen, bandwidth doubled: gen 1 (c.2003) was 4 GB/s, gen 2 (c.2007)
was 8 GB/s, gen 3 (c.2010) was 16 GB/s, gen 4 (c.2017) was 32 GB/s, gen
5 (c.2019) was 64 GB/s, and gen 6 (c.2021) was 128 GB/s. The Pentium
P6100 only supports up to gen 2.

If the current hardware setup is tolerable to the user, keep it that
way. Win10 will be an even bigger disappointment on that old hardware.
Win10's installer does a hardware compatibility check. When hunting
around for users trying to upgrade to Win10, some reported the installer
complained the CPU is not compatible due to a lack of NX support, so
that user had an AMD CPU (Intel calls it the XD bit).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NX_bit

The compatibility check (since Win8) also looks for support of PAE
(Physical Address Extension) and SSE2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSE2

Looks like the P6100 supports PAE and SSE2, and NX. The Pentium 4
(c.2000 to 2008) had NX support, and the P6100 came out later (c.2010).
It is possible the user saying the upgrade complained his P6100 had no
NX support was because it was disabled in the BIOS. I think there was
some security software that had you disable some of the hardware-based
security features of the CPU, but seems that software would've been
unnecessary once the OS supported them via BIOS features. Is your
friend the type that tweaks BIOS settings?

https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Pentium_Dual-Core/Intel-Pentium%20Mobile%20P6100.html

That says the P6100 supports the NX bit.

I'd first try to resolve Macrium failing to save an image backup (not a
file/logical backup, but an /image/ backup of the OS partitions - there
could be more than 1 partition for the OS). If the Win10 upgrade
completes, but the system if super-slow or flaky, you'll need that image
to restore to escape back to Win7. You'll have an irate friend if you
destory the usability albeit slow with his Win7 setup.

Macrium has their peer-support web forums (https://forum.macrium.com/)
to ask for help. You'll find a more focused community there, but I
didn't check how viable are their forums (i.e., how active they are).
You'll need to provide more details on how you are backup up, if doing a
full backup, if doing an image versus logical backup, OS and hardware
specs, especially on the drives, and if tried Macrium on a quiescent OS
(you boot into the Macrium .dat image or from its bootable CD, so the OS
doesn't load that you are trying to image), or are trying to run Macrium
after booting the OS. The bootable image/CD for Macrium uses Windows PE
for its OS, so there is still an OS running, but not the one on the
partitions you are trying to image.

[Paul]

Post by VanguardLH

Post by sticks
Working on a win 7 system for someone with a Pentium P6100 processor
and am wondering if anyone has this working on a windows 10 system.
Several things with this laptop I'm trying to fix, but would
eventually like to upgrade it to windows 10 if it can run it.
Was just going to image it and go ahead and try doing the 10 upgrade,
but not having luck getting Macrium to finish an image. Doing a
thorough chkdsk now, and see if that find errors.
Anyone running windows 10 with a Pentium P6100?

Nope, don't have an old box with the P6100. That CPU was released back
in 2010. Benchmarks are very poor compared to later CPUs.
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/SpeedTest/756/IntelR-PentiumR-CPU--------P6100----200GHz
I'm surpised the user isn't already complaining about having a slow
system. With Win10, it won't be faster, and probably even slower. Also
likely with such an old CPU that the RAM is undersized. PCIe gen 2 came
out in 2007, and gen 3 in 2010, so unknown what the mobo supports. With
each gen, bandwidth doubled: gen 1 (c.2003) was 4 GB/s, gen 2 (c.2007)
was 8 GB/s, gen 3 (c.2010) was 16 GB/s, gen 4 (c.2017) was 32 GB/s, gen
5 (c.2019) was 64 GB/s, and gen 6 (c.2021) was 128 GB/s. The Pentium
P6100 only supports up to gen 2.
If the current hardware setup is tolerable to the user, keep it that
way. Win10 will be an even bigger disappointment on that old hardware.
Win10's installer does a hardware compatibility check. When hunting
around for users trying to upgrade to Win10, some reported the installer
complained the CPU is not compatible due to a lack of NX support, so
that user had an AMD CPU (Intel calls it the XD bit).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NX_bit
The compatibility check (since Win8) also looks for support of PAE
(Physical Address Extension) and SSE2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSE2
Looks like the P6100 supports PAE and SSE2, and NX. The Pentium 4
(c.2000 to 2008) had NX support, and the P6100 came out later (c.2010).
It is possible the user saying the upgrade complained his P6100 had no
NX support was because it was disabled in the BIOS. I think there was
some security software that had you disable some of the hardware-based
security features of the CPU, but seems that software would've been
unnecessary once the OS supported them via BIOS features. Is your
friend the type that tweaks BIOS settings?
https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Pentium_Dual-Core/Intel-Pentium%20Mobile%20P6100.html
That says the P6100 supports the NX bit.
I'd first try to resolve Macrium failing to save an image backup (not a
file/logical backup, but an /image/ backup of the OS partitions - there
could be more than 1 partition for the OS). If the Win10 upgrade
completes, but the system if super-slow or flaky, you'll need that image
to restore to escape back to Win7. You'll have an irate friend if you
destory the usability albeit slow with his Win7 setup.
Macrium has their peer-support web forums (https://forum.macrium.com/)
to ask for help. You'll find a more focused community there, but I
didn't check how viable are their forums (i.e., how active they are).
You'll need to provide more details on how you are backup up, if doing a
full backup, if doing an image versus logical backup, OS and hardware
specs, especially on the drives, and if tried Macrium on a quiescent OS
(you boot into the Macrium .dat image or from its bootable CD, so the OS
doesn't load that you are trying to image), or are trying to run Macrium
after booting the OS. The bootable image/CD for Macrium uses Windows PE
for its OS, so there is still an OS running, but not the one on the
partitions you are trying to image.

I get the P6100 is 832 on single threaded (passmarks) and my
old E8400 is 1192. The P6100 runs at 2GHz, the E8400 at 3GHz.
You can see, even though the P6100 has a low clock, it is
benefiting from a better memory path (memory sticks connected
direct to P6100, memory sticks are on X48 Northbridge on my
now-deceased E8400). I was running Win10 on the E8400 until the
motherboard blew. The P6100 runs DDR3 RAM, so it's a bit better
than the previous generation.

The cache on the processors, matters during 7ZIP compression,
and can be less of an issue, for normal tasks.

The P6100 is squarely in the "min-acceptable" range, rather than
"impossible for Win10" of my single core laptop. You could
live with it. Just walk away from the machine on Patch Tuesday
and go sort recycleables for garbage day.

Paul

[sticks]

Post by Paul
I get the P6100 is 832 on single threaded (passmarks) and my
old E8400 is 1192. The P6100 runs at 2GHz, the E8400 at 3GHz.
You can see, even though the P6100 has a low clock, it is
benefiting from a better memory path (memory sticks connected
direct to P6100, memory sticks are on X48 Northbridge on my
now-deceased E8400). I was running Win10 on the E8400 until the
motherboard blew. The P6100 runs DDR3 RAM, so it's a bit better
than the previous generation.
The cache on the processors, matters during 7ZIP compression,
and can be less of an issue, for normal tasks.
The P6100 is squarely in the "min-acceptable" range, rather than
"impossible for Win10" of my single core laptop. You could
live with it. Just walk away from the machine on Patch Tuesday
and go sort recycleables for garbage day.

Thanks Paul, appreciate your helpful knowledge. This system will mostly
be an email and casual browsing machine. There is a much newer desktop
system available to do the work. Gonna give it a shot now that it's stable.

[Graham J]

sticks wrote:

[snip]

Thanks Paul, appreciate your helpful knowledge.  This system will mostly
be an email and casual browsing machine.  There is a much newer desktop
system available to do the work.  Gonna give it a shot now that it's
stable.

It may well be worth upgrading the hard disk to an SSD. For about £50
it can improve an old machine so that it at least becomes useable.

[Paul]

Post by Graham J
[snip]

Thanks Paul, appreciate your helpful knowledge.  This system will mostly be an email and casual browsing machine.  There is a much newer desktop system available to do the work.  Gonna give it a shot now that it's stable.

It may well be worth upgrading the hard disk to an SSD.  For about £50 it can improve an old machine so that it at least becomes useable.

And if you want to salt a small one away for a rainy day,
now is the time to buy. The prices have dropped a fair
bit this year, certainly more price movement than in
previous years. We can use the opinion of a camel for that.

https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B08QBJ2YMG

Paul

[Nic]

Post by Paul

Post by Graham J
[snip]

Thanks Paul, appreciate your helpful knowledge.  This system will mostly be an email and casual browsing machine.  There is a much newer desktop system available to do the work.  Gonna give it a shot now that it's stable.

It may well be worth upgrading the hard disk to an SSD.  For about £50 it can improve an old machine so that it at least becomes useable.

And if you want to salt a small one away for a rainy day,
now is the time to buy. The prices have dropped a fair
bit this year, certainly more price movement than in
previous years. We can use the opinion of a camel for that.
https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B08QBJ2YMG

$59.99

Post by Paul
Paul

https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/sandisk-ultra-3d-sata-iii-ssd#SDSSDH3-1T00-G26


SanDisk Ultra 3D SSD 1 TB

$52.99 Actual Price $52.99

$47.99

[Paul]

Post by Nic

Post by Paul

Post by Graham J
[snip]

Thanks Paul, appreciate your helpful knowledge.  This system will mostly be an email and casual browsing machine.  There is a much newer desktop system available to do the work.  Gonna give it a shot now that it's stable.

It may well be worth upgrading the hard disk to an SSD.  For about £50 it can improve an old machine so that it at least becomes useable.

And if you want to salt a small one away for a rainy day,
now is the time to buy. The prices have dropped a fair
bit this year, certainly more price movement than in
previous years. We can use the opinion of a camel for that.
https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B08QBJ2YMG

$59.99

Post by Paul
    Paul

https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/sandisk-ultra-3d-sata-iii-ssd#SDSSDH3-1T00-G26
 SanDisk Ultra 3D SSD 1 TB
$52.99 Actual Price $52.99
$47.99

The neat thing about SSDs, is the price remains "linear" to a
lower level than the rotating hard drives. For some, you might
pay $20 to $25, but I would not promote items like that, if
their reliability is unknown (some of those have no reviews).
Whereas, It is usually difficult to make a rotating HDD
for less than $50 or so.

There are some Samsung items, which had technical problems
(a couple of their NVMe models). They were reallocating sectors
for no reason, and "wearing out" prematurely as a result. Something
which could be fixed by a firmware upgrade. But the firmware upgrade,
did not reverse the wear detection, and if it said 90% of cycles
were used, you did not get those back.

*******

Even their larger Samsung SATA models fell in price, which normally
would not happen. For a boot drive, they don't need to be this big.

https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B08QBL36GF

The biggest SATA SSDs are 8TB, but they are usually made
with QLC chips. And spending a lot of money on "toilet paper storage",
is a non-starter. You can see for this model, they were
"late getting the memo". There must be a huge pile of
unused QLC chips at the fab. The problem with tech like this,
is the cells get "mushy" and the symptoms are, if you
do a read-bench on a SATA one, the rate drops from 500MB/sec to 300MB/sec,
and that's the drive furiously doing error correction
with a three core ARM processor.

https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B089C3TZL9

There are certain things I will not tolerate in storage.
Say for example, I buy an NVMe with 7000MB/sec writes.
It runs for 10 minutes, and suddenly it is writing at 1500MB/sec.
(And this is not overheat -- there's a fan pointing at it.)
I don't buy storage devices like that. Everything I own here,
has consistent behavior. I have just one NVMe here, and it has
consistent behavior (it's an older model).

If your trash never drops below 1500, then sell it as 1500, and
I don't have a problem with that. You should only advertise,
a performance level the thing can sustain.

Paul

[J. P. Gilliver]

[]

Post by Nic

Post by Paul

Post by Graham J
It may well be worth upgrading the hard disk to an SSD.  For about
£50 it can improve an old machine so that it at least becomes useable.

And if you want to salt a small one away for a rainy day,
now is the time to buy. The prices have dropped a fair
bit this year, certainly more price movement than in
previous years. We can use the opinion of a camel for that.
https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B08QBJ2YMG

$59.99

Post by Paul
Paul

https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/sandisk-ultra-3d
-sata-iii-ssd#SDSSDH3-1T00-G26
SanDisk Ultra 3D SSD 1 TB
$52.99 Actual Price $52.99
$47.99

This "salt a small one away" - what would your reason be for doing that:
because you don't trust the bigger ones (because they're 3 or quad
cell), and think the small ones will disappear? (How would we know small
ones aren't made with 3 or 4 cell chips?)

[Paul]

because you don't trust the bigger ones (because they're 3 or quad cell),
and think the small ones will disappear? (How would we know small ones
aren't made with 3 or 4 cell chips?)

The price will go back up. The fab is reducing output of specific
chip types, for the purpose of protecting prices (by making product
harder to find).

Sure, it's speculation.

They stopped making DDR2 in March, as an example of reining in waste.
If the economy wasn't so bad, the DDR2 might have stuck around a bit longer.

The same thing has happened with DRAM before. Bottom drops out of market,
DRAM is dirt cheap. That's a good time to buy, if you had not bought already.
I generally only buy RAM though, when there is a demonstrated need.

If and when Windows 11 storage slows down (after an "Upgrade" coming soon),
I'm pretty sure at this point, that somebody will be buying a new SSD.
I've been watching the Insider version, and some aspects of storage
are still slow. I have no idea what kind of "optimization" this represents o.O

o.O are "kooky eyeballs" by the way.

I think there was already a demonstrated issue with DirectStorage.
Which is something that might eventually be used in a computer game.

Paul

[J. P. Gilliver]

Post by Paul

because you don't trust the bigger ones (because they're 3 or quad cell),
and think the small ones will disappear? (How would we know small ones
aren't made with 3 or 4 cell chips?)

The price will go back up. The fab is reducing output of specific
chip types, for the purpose of protecting prices (by making product
harder to find).
Sure, it's speculation.

Do you think "small one"s (1 TB is a "small one" these days!) will
disappear altogether?

(What's Window 7's size limit for SSD/HDs?)

If I do decide to do some salting, is there any way to tell which models
are using one- or two-bit cells (if that's the right terminology) and
which three- or four-? Is the one you cameled ("SAMSUNG 870 EVO SATA III
SSD 1TB 2.5” Internal Solid State Drive, Upgrade PC or Laptop Memory
and Storage for IT Pros, Creators, Everyday Users, MZ-77E1T0B/AM") OK?
Though it's £29.99 on Amazon UK, which is very tempting! But there's
also another one with the same part number other than QVO instead of
EVO, but that's £52.06 - is that better in some way, or does Q in the
part number mean it uses the 4-level chips that are to be avoided and it
just hasn't dropped in price?

Is there any _dis_advantage to "salting" for SSDs - do they deteriorate
if unpowered? (For that matter, do spinners?)

Post by Paul
They stopped making DDR2 in March, as an example of reining in waste.
If the economy wasn't so bad, the DDR2 might have stuck around a bit longer.
The same thing has happened with DRAM before. Bottom drops out of market,
DRAM is dirt cheap. That's a good time to buy, if you had not bought already.
I generally only buy RAM though, when there is a demonstrated need.

Ditto, on the basis that the form factor and interface I might
eventually need won't be the one I've speculated on - they seem to
change so often.

Post by Paul
If and when Windows 11 storage slows down (after an "Upgrade" coming soon),

Have you heard there's some "up"grade coming that'll hammer storage? (As
well as slowing it down, presumably it'll shorten the life too if SSD?)

Post by Paul
I'm pretty sure at this point, that somebody will be buying a new SSD.
I've been watching the Insider version, and some aspects of storage
are still slow. I have no idea what kind of "optimization" this represents o.O
o.O are "kooky eyeballs" by the way.
I think there was already a demonstrated issue with DirectStorage.
Which is something that might eventually be used in a computer game.
Paul

Never heard that term. I'm feeling old (-:

[Paul]

Do you think "small one"s (1 TB is a "small one" these days!) will disappear altogether?
(What's Window 7's size limit for SSD/HDs?)
If I do decide to do some salting, is there any way to tell which models are using one- or two-bit cells (if that's the right terminology) and which three- or four-? Is the one you cameled ("SAMSUNG 870 EVO SATA III SSD 1TB 2.5” Internal Solid State Drive, Upgrade PC or Laptop Memory and Storage for IT Pros, Creators, Everyday Users, MZ-77E1T0B/AM") OK? Though it's £29.99 on Amazon UK, which is very tempting! But there's also another one with the same part number other than QVO instead of EVO, but that's £52.06 - is that better in some way, or does Q in the part number mean it uses the 4-level chips that are to be avoided and it just hasn't dropped in price?

https://semiconductor.samsung.com/us/consumer-storage/internal-ssd/870evo/

[near bottom, in "spec" section]

STORAGE MEMORY

Samsung V-NAND 3bit MLC <=== a violation of the naming scheme

The naming scheme would normally be:

SLC = 1 bit per cell (2 voltage levels for logic 0..1
MLC = 2 bit per cell (4 voltage levels for logic 00..11)
TLC = 3 bit per cell (8 voltage levels for logic 000..111) \__ Can get mushy,
QLC = 4 bit per cell (16 voltage levels for logic 0000..1111) <=== sensitive to threshold shift / need error correction inside

At one time, the claim was, the Samsung VNAND first-generation, had
relaxed spacing internally (22nm), which improved the behavior of the flash.
A lot of time has passed since that first gen, and it would be natural
for the 3 bit VNAND to be more TLC-like by now, on smaller geometry.
There is no one to track the geometry for us, and tell us just how
much of a misnomer this is now. So what we might watch for, is
"write speed inconsistency" as a sign of shenanigans. If you bought a
V-NAND NVMe SSD, and it did not write at a constant 3500MB/sec, you might
suspect you've been suckered. 3500MB/sec is related to the speed of a
certain PCI Express standard wire rate. Each gen goes (roughly) 2x faster.

You can improve the mushy characteristic, by silently re-writing data at
rest inside the drive, without flashing the LED. That's a firmware level
trick, that can be made almost invisible (stop doing background writes,
when user issues a command).

You can see from this, the situation is rife with opportunities for abuse.

Is there any _dis_advantage to "salting" for SSDs - do they deteriorate if unpowered? (For that matter, do spinners?)

NAND flash, could actually last forever... if it could be annealed. The
temperature for annealing, is too hot for the plastic package to take that.

NAND flash is "stressed" each time it is written. It is a floating gate technology.

A drive at rest, is not being stressed. A drive which is "mushy" from sitting
on the shelf at the store, can be freshened up, by writing from end to end.
Before you benchmark it and panic at the speeds seen.

The charge on the gate could leak off, but a tunneling (quantum mechanical)
mechanism was used to put the charge there in the first place. It's just
possible the leaking would be quantum mechanically disallowed or discouraged
(high energy barrier). The standard boiler plate, is the recorded bit is
there for a minimum of ten years. And could last longer. The NOR flash chip
in some PCs, some have had bit-rot, which is a sign the charge may have
leaked off some of them. Not all of them. That might have been at the 20 year mark.

The magnetic domains on a hard drive, are likely to be a bit more "stable" than
the charge on a NAND flash gate. One reason this might be evident, is the
servo wedges (a fixed written pattern on the surface), those magnetic domains
are never written again once a drive leaves the factor, and we have drives that
are easily 20 years old and still work (servo pattern successfully located) just
like the day they were made.

The motor on the HDD contains two drops of oil. That is our "precious resource"
inside a drive. If that oil were to disappear, the drive spindle seizes. One
poster reported, a drive was sitting on the floor, on some kind of rubber feet,
and when it seized while running one day, the sudden change in rotation caused
it to "hop" a tiny bit. The FDB motor is sealed, and is the motor type that
uses two drops of oil, for extended periods of operational life. Older drives
used ball bearings, where bearing wear caused increasing NRRO and noise. I have
four 9GB ball bearing drives, you can't sit in the room with the damn things,
for noise, yet the data is still on them. They will eventually become unreadable,
because the heads won't be able to track the wobbling inside.

Ditto, on the basis that the form factor and interface I might eventually
need won't be the one I've speculated on - they seem to change so often.

DDR5, puts two channels on a single DIMM, and this is meant to distract us
from the level of innovation at the bit level. But since hardly any good
tech articles are written about this stuff, it's hard to say whether DDR5 is
an "honest" generation or not. And we should pay extra for deck chair movement.

And yes, they alter the number of contacts, the keying slot, and so on, so
that you can't put them into the wrong hole.

Post by Paul
If and when Windows 11 storage slows down (after an "Upgrade" coming soon),

Have you heard there's some "up"grade coming that'll hammer storage? (As well as slowing it down, presumably it'll shorten the life too if SSD?)

I'll only know, if they tell us. All I can say, is I install updates to the
W11 Insider, and the delete speed (rate files are removed after placement and
flush of the trash), still seems slow. We know that $BITMAP is not properly
maintained any more, the $MFTMIRR can be corrupt, and some of these things
are potentially done, to reduce wear on SSD drives. The "thing" that detects
these anomalies, is older copies of Macrium.

Post by Paul
DirectStorage.

The API might only be used for games. Intensive read. Could involve DMA into
video card. However, games have had compressed textures as a tech, for a lot
of years. The question would be, whether they will mess up operation
of anything else in the process.

https://www.pocket-lint.com/what-is-directstorage-and-is-your-pc-next-gen-ready/

Paul

[J. P. Gilliver]

Post by Paul

Do you think "small one"s (1 TB is a "small one" these days!) will disappear altogether?
(What's Window 7's size limit for SSD/HDs?)
If I do decide to do some salting, is there any way to tell which
models are using one- or two-bit cells (if that's the right
terminology) and which three- or four-? Is the one you cameled
("SAMSUNG 870 EVO SATA III SSD 1TB 2.5” Internal Solid State Drive,
Upgrade PC or Laptop Memory and Storage for IT Pros, Creators,
Everyday Users, MZ-77E1T0B/AM") OK? Though it's £29.99 on Amazon UK,
which is very tempting! But there's also another one with the same
part number other than QVO instead of EVO, but that's £52.06 - is
that better in some way, or does Q in the part number mean it uses the
4-level chips that are to be avoided and it just hasn't dropped in price?

https://semiconductor.samsung.com/us/consumer-storage/internal-ssd/870evo/
[near bottom, in "spec" section]
STORAGE MEMORY
Samsung V-NAND 3bit MLC <=== a violation of the naming scheme

Strange, I couldn't find "STORAGE MEMORY", "NAND", or even "LC" on that
page. However, I did find "Providing up to 2,400 TBW under a 5- year
limited warranty". When I tried changing e to q in the URL (so
https://semiconductor.samsung.com/us/consumer-storage/internal-ssd/870qvo/),
I _did_ find "The 870 QVO is Samsung’s latest 2nd gen. QLC SSD and the
largest of its kind that provides up to 8TB of storage." [the other one
only goes up to 4 TB], and "a limited warranty of 3 years" (though "Up
to 2,880 TBW"), so it suggests it's to be avoided - and Amazon UK's
pricing just hasn't caught up with itself.

Post by Paul
SLC = 1 bit per cell (2 voltage levels for logic 0..1
MLC = 2 bit per cell (4 voltage levels for logic 00..11)
TLC = 3 bit per cell (8 voltage levels for logic 000..111) \__
Can get mushy,
QLC = 4 bit per cell (16 voltage levels for logic 0000..1111)
<=== sensitive to threshold shift / need error correction inside
At one time, the claim was, the Samsung VNAND first-generation, had
relaxed spacing internally (22nm), which improved the behavior of the flash.
A lot of time has passed since that first gen, and it would be natural
for the 3 bit VNAND to be more TLC-like by now, on smaller geometry.
There is no one to track the geometry for us, and tell us just how
much of a misnomer this is now. So what we might watch for, is
"write speed inconsistency" as a sign of shenanigans. If you bought a
V-NAND NVMe SSD, and it did not write at a constant 3500MB/sec, you might
suspect you've been suckered. 3500MB/sec is related to the speed of a
certain PCI Express standard wire rate. Each gen goes (roughly) 2x faster.
You can improve the mushy characteristic, by silently re-writing data at
rest inside the drive, without flashing the LED. That's a firmware level
trick, that can be made almost invisible (stop doing background writes,
when user issues a command).
You can see from this, the situation is rife with opportunities for abuse.

Most definitely!

But basically, you just picked one at random to camelise for us, rather
than explicitly recommending it - right?

Post by Paul

Is there any _dis_advantage to "salting" for SSDs - do they
deteriorate if unpowered? (For that matter, do spinners?)

NAND flash, could actually last forever... if it could be annealed. The
temperature for annealing, is too hot for the plastic package to take that.
NAND flash is "stressed" each time it is written. It is a floating gate technology.
A drive at rest, is not being stressed. A drive which is "mushy" from sitting
on the shelf at the store, can be freshened up, by writing from end to end.
Before you benchmark it and panic at the speeds seen.
The charge on the gate could leak off, but a tunneling (quantum mechanical)
mechanism was used to put the charge there in the first place. It's just
possible the leaking would be quantum mechanically disallowed or discouraged
(high energy barrier). The standard boiler plate, is the recorded bit is
there for a minimum of ten years. And could last longer. The NOR flash chip
in some PCs, some have had bit-rot, which is a sign the charge may have

I was (fairly idly) wondering about just general degradation, i. e.
would an _unused_ (new) drive deteriorate, if bought and then put away
as your "salt" implied. I wasn't thinking about data retention.

Post by Paul
leaked off some of them. Not all of them. That might have been at the 20 year mark.
The magnetic domains on a hard drive, are likely to be a bit more "stable" than
the charge on a NAND flash gate. One reason this might be evident, is the
servo wedges (a fixed written pattern on the surface), those magnetic domains
are never written again once a drive leaves the factor, and we have drives that
are easily 20 years old and still work (servo pattern successfully located) just
like the day they were made.
The motor on the HDD contains two drops of oil. That is our "precious resource"
inside a drive. If that oil were to disappear, the drive spindle seizes. One
poster reported, a drive was sitting on the floor, on some kind of rubber feet,
and when it seized while running one day, the sudden change in rotation caused
it to "hop" a tiny bit. The FDB motor is sealed, and is the motor type that
uses two drops of oil, for extended periods of operational life. Older drives
used ball bearings, where bearing wear caused increasing NRRO and noise. I have
four 9GB ball bearing drives, you can't sit in the room with the damn things,
for noise, yet the data is still on them. They will eventually become unreadable,
because the heads won't be able to track the wobbling inside.

Ditto, on the basis that the form factor and interface I might eventually
need won't be the one I've speculated on - they seem to change so often.

DDR5, puts two channels on a single DIMM, and this is meant to distract us
from the level of innovation at the bit level. But since hardly any good
tech articles are written about this stuff, it's hard to say whether DDR5 is
an "honest" generation or not. And we should pay extra for deck chair movement.
And yes, they alter the number of contacts, the keying slot, and so on, so
that you can't put them into the wrong hole.

Since I tend to use mostly laptops these days, it's fairly moot, as - I
think - most laptops are sold with the most RAM they can take anyway, or
at best can only be upgraded by a factor of 2, which by the time one
thinks of doing it isn't sufficient. I suppose one should buy some
against the probability of failure, but on the whole I don't think I've
ever had a RAM failure on a laptop before something else goes. (Actually
I don't think I've ever had a RAM failure on anything.)

Post by Paul

Post by Paul
If and when Windows 11 storage slows down (after an "Upgrade" coming soon),

Have you heard there's some "up"grade coming that'll hammer storage?
(As well as slowing it down, presumably it'll shorten the life too if
SSD?)

I'll only know, if they tell us. All I can say, is I install updates to the
W11 Insider, and the delete speed (rate files are removed after placement and

Ah, I assumed you meant you'd heard something.

Post by Paul
flush of the trash), still seems slow. We know that $BITMAP is not properly
maintained any more, the $MFTMIRR can be corrupt, and some of these things
are potentially done, to reduce wear on SSD drives. The "thing" that detects
these anomalies, is older copies of Macrium.

I'm still on 5 or 6.
[]
Basically, I'm in two minds about the SSD: 30 quid for a TB _is_
tempting, but not sure if I'd ever use it. (The 415G data partition on
this machine still has 321 GB free [21.7G free of 50G C: partition].
Spinner.)

[Paul]

Basically, I'm in two minds about the SSD: 30 quid for a TB _is_ tempting,
but not sure if I'd ever use it. (The 415G data partition on this machine
still has 321 GB free [21.7G free of 50G C: partition]. Spinner.)

If you're on Win7 and happy with how things are running,
then there's no reason to get excited.

I would think of a thing like this, as an option for
someone who has noticed both W10 and W11 are slowing
down, and they can foresee (using weather-resistant eyeball),
that an SSD is an inevitable development.

SATA SSDs are popular, simply because the handling on them is easier.
Me fitting my NVMe drive, with all the junk in my PC case now,
it would take me half the day to remove stuff so I could get
a screwdriver in there. NVMe might be better, but only for an
uncluttered computing device. Any time a desktop here ends up with
a huge hunk of cooler inside it, any thoughts of quick equipment
installs, go out the window.

I'm not "committed" to SSDs, in the sense that I don't
assign them the same metric as the mechanical ones. If
I'm going to be doing a lot of writes, then I'd prefer
the writes don't cost me anything. If the SSD drive has 600TBW, then
if I write out 4TB of backups to the thing, then that is a
percentage of its write life. The hard drive would be slower,
but with the exception of the wearout behavior of the lowest
tier of drives, the hard drives can take it. Even the HDD drives
I've retired here, they just won't die. They may be slow, but
they keep on rotating.

And the TBW on SSD, is how the price is determined. Like all marketing,
you pick some factor to abuse, and you run with it.

A regular drive might be 600TBW for the 1TB one and 1200TBW
for the 2TB one. All that is telling you, is that a flash cell
can take 600 writes. (Those are user writes and include compensation
for write amplification, which could be pattern dependent.)

One company, had a small SSD, with 12,000 TBW, and the price on
that is well over a thousand. And if you look at the materials
inside, no "gold bricks" are involved. It's still flash chips, but
they're Micron Enterprise Flash chips (6x write life). The price
likely includes a large dollop of profit. But the manufacturer
knows, that only a few fools will buy those, which is why you
can't locate that with the camel thing. Imagine your mom&pop
computer store, forking out $1000 and sitting that in the shop
window, and nobody buys. The distribution model for "lumpy goods"
is simply not smooth enough for such an item. It's the same problem
with 22TB hard drives -- way too expensive for a distribution chain,
which is why the distribution chain for hard drives is breaking
down, or is now entirely broken.

This is why WDC sells drives from its own web site. It's to prop up
the broken distribution system.

My computer store, has almost no hard drives in stock. Only the
1TB HDD for $70 each. I have a few of those. They used to carry
about a hundred units per store in the "tray", spread over a
wide range of capacities, but have given up on doing that. But the
chain owner is bat-shit crazy - and thinks that somehow, by running
a chain with zero stock, he will avoid bankruptcy. Not even their
"warehouse" has stock. Ordering online with that chain, does nothing
to correct the stocking situation now. You would expect if the owner
was sane, the warehouse would be choked with stock, the brick&mortar
stores would have nothing. That's the kind of model you would expect
(encourage online sales, to compete with online sales).

Paul

[sticks]

Post by VanguardLH

Post by sticks
Working on a win 7 system for someone with a Pentium P6100 processor
and am wondering if anyone has this working on a windows 10 system.
Several things with this laptop I'm trying to fix, but would
eventually like to upgrade it to windows 10 if it can run it.
Was just going to image it and go ahead and try doing the 10 upgrade,
but not having luck getting Macrium to finish an image. Doing a
thorough chkdsk now, and see if that find errors.
Anyone running windows 10 with a Pentium P6100?

Nope, don't have an old box with the P6100. That CPU was released back
in 2010. Benchmarks are very poor compared to later CPUs.
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/SpeedTest/756/IntelR-PentiumR-CPU--------P6100----200GHz
I'm surpised the user isn't already complaining about having a slow
system. With Win10, it won't be faster, and probably even slower. Also
likely with such an old CPU that the RAM is undersized. PCIe gen 2 came
out in 2007, and gen 3 in 2010, so unknown what the mobo supports. With
each gen, bandwidth doubled: gen 1 (c.2003) was 4 GB/s, gen 2 (c.2007)
was 8 GB/s, gen 3 (c.2010) was 16 GB/s, gen 4 (c.2017) was 32 GB/s, gen
5 (c.2019) was 64 GB/s, and gen 6 (c.2021) was 128 GB/s. The Pentium
P6100 only supports up to gen 2.

Yes, it has 4GB and can go up to 8GB. Enough for moving forward, for
now. It's not as slow acting as I would have thought.

Post by VanguardLH
If the current hardware setup is tolerable to the user, keep it that
way. Win10 will be an even bigger disappointment on that old hardware.
Win10's installer does a hardware compatibility check.

Of the several systems I've done this to, I've not found this to be a
problem, and the benefits of updating are worth the risks of trying.
Chrome for example, which I don't use but the owner does, can't be
updated in Win 7.

Post by VanguardLH
When hunting
around for users trying to upgrade to Win10, some reported the installer
complained the CPU is not compatible due to a lack of NX support, so
that user had an AMD CPU (Intel calls it the XD bit).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NX_bit
The compatibility check (since Win8) also looks for support of PAE
(Physical Address Extension) and SSE2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSE2
Looks like the P6100 supports PAE and SSE2, and NX. The Pentium 4
(c.2000 to 2008) had NX support, and the P6100 came out later (c.2010).
It is possible the user saying the upgrade complained his P6100 had no
NX support was because it was disabled in the BIOS. I think there was
some security software that had you disable some of the hardware-based
security features of the CPU, but seems that software would've been
unnecessary once the OS supported them via BIOS features. Is your
friend the type that tweaks BIOS settings?
https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Pentium_Dual-Core/Intel-Pentium%20Mobile%20P6100.html
That says the P6100 supports the NX bit.

Originally, I saw this type of conflicting stuff in my researching on
the CPU. One page had a Microsoft MVP say it was meaningless and that
if the cpu speed was over 1 Ghz it should work. That's why I initially
asked if anyone was presently using this CPU with Win 10.

I would not do some windows updates and failed at the macrium image.
That's where your and Paul's typical excellent advise helped push me to
where I'm at now.

First I decided I needed to sort out why it wouldn't update properly and
a hint was the macrium failure. I did a chkdsk first, with only the /f
option and it came back OK. Still getting errors on updates I figured
there must be disk problems and did another chkdsk with /f /r options.
This found 4 or 5 bad sectors and repaired them. I repeated this test
and it found one additional slight problem and fixed it. The disk was
reported as "clean." Two of the sector areas looked like they might be
system files so I did a SFC test and it reported all good.

The windows updates were still having difficulty on some, and the error
code 80092004 pointed me to the fix of installing KB 4474419 and
KB4490628. This allowed the system to process SHA-2 signatures. After
this was done, the updates came in and installed perfectly.

I have a feeling I know what happened to get this box in this shape, and
it has to do with a dead battery. Windows reports it as no battery
found. It's completely dead. I think it was probably trying to do an
update and with the shutting down/restart processes happening the owner
pulled the plug and this started the initial disk error problem. This
compounded the problem every time he tried to use it until it was all
too confusing to him. In the end, it's back to working now and I'll
have to explain the little things to him on how this works safely.

Post by VanguardLH
I'd first try to resolve Macrium failing to save an image backup (not a
file/logical backup, but an /image/ backup of the OS partitions - there
could be more than 1 partition for the OS). If the Win10 upgrade
completes, but the system if super-slow or flaky, you'll need that image
to restore to escape back to Win7. You'll have an irate friend if you
destory the usability albeit slow with his Win7 setup.

This morning it successfully created the image of the disk and I made a
rescue boot disk on it. I tested it and it does boot on it properly, so
I'm going to try the win 10 this morning and see how it works. I now
now I can always put it back to a good working Win 7 laptop, like it is now.

Thanks for the help!

[VanguardLH]

Post by sticks
This morning it successfully created the image of the disk and I made a
rescue boot disk on it. I tested it and it does boot on it properly, so
I'm going to try the win 10 this morning and see how it works. I now
now I can always put it back to a good working Win 7 laptop, like it is now.

Do you really want to do an upgrade instead of a fresh install? After
making the repairs in the Win7 setup, and after saving an image backup
of the OS partition(s), why not remove that drive to save it instead of
rely solely on an image backup, and replace with a new drive then
install Windows 10 afresh?

Windows 10 will run as an indefinite trial. That is, there is no
expiration of the trial. You can get Win10 for free, but it runs as a
trial. That means there is a watermark on the desktop background (there
are workarounds to eliminate the watermark), some personalization
features are missing (your friend may not need them), and some admin
functions are missing (your friend may not have used them, so he won't
miss them). The new Win10 setup would be the cost of the new drive. If
the old one was a spinner (which appears so since you were running
chkdsk on it), get an SSD. The much faster drive will help compensate
for the old CPU. The data bus won't get any faster, but drive access
will speed up a lot.

If your friend decides later that he just can't stand any feature or
function losses of using the non-expiring Windows 10 trial, he can buy
just the product key for about $40 on eBay. He'd have a clean start
with Win10, and later decide to get a key if he wants to unlock features
and functions that he deems are critical to his use of Windows. The
Win10 image is free from Microsoft. Do a clean install on a new and
much faster drive. However, PCIe 2.0 is the limiting factor on the old
hardware, and it'll be connected using SATA on the mobo instead of an
NVMe slot. Looks like your friend is over due for some hardware
upgrades. Like buying a home, that is not where the expenses stop.

Long URL: https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100011693%20600545605%20600038506%20600038510%20600038519%208000%2050001077%2050001306%2050001455%2050001471&Order=1
Short URL: https://tinyurl.com/newegg4TBSSDs

Those are 4TB SSDs from the better brands. Don't just go by price.
Looks up the specs on candidates to check what is their read and write
speeds, especially write speed. I selected Newegg as the seller. Add
in 3rd-party sellers using Newegg as a frontend shop, but only if you
trust any of them. Windows will boot faster. As for how much speedup
is noticed with other apps, depends on what the app does. Video games
will load faster although many have been tweaked to memory cache objects
and textures into memory to overcome spinner drives. Speed will be
faster, but not overall as much as you expect. So, have your friend
decide if they can afford the faster SSD drive, and start with a fresh
install of the OS instead of muddling an upgrade with old updates,
tweaks, registry changes, and all the dross that gets pulled into an
upgraded OS from the old one.

Of course, with a fresh install of the OS, your friend will have to
reinstall all his old programs - well, those that still support
installing and running on Windows 10. So, make sure he/she has all the
installation media for his old programs, or can retrieve them via online
downloads. My aunt lost some very ancient graphics programs, like
making greeting cards, when she moved to Windows 10, but she found free
alternatives for newer replacements. As for the data, well, that can be
restored from your image backup.

[Nic]

Post by VanguardLH

Post by sticks
This morning it successfully created the image of the disk and I made a
rescue boot disk on it. I tested it and it does boot on it properly, so
I'm going to try the win 10 this morning and see how it works. I now
now I can always put it back to a good working Win 7 laptop, like it is now.

Do you really want to do an upgrade instead of a fresh install? After
making the repairs in the Win7 setup, and after saving an image backup
of the OS partition(s), why not remove that drive to save it instead of
rely solely on an image backup, and replace with a new drive then
install Windows 10 afresh?
Windows 10 will run as an indefinite trial. That is, there is no
expiration of the trial. You can get Win10 for free, but it runs as a
trial. That means there is a watermark on the desktop background (there
are workarounds to eliminate the watermark), some personalization
features are missing (your friend may not need them), and some admin
functions are missing (your friend may not have used them, so he won't
miss them). The new Win10 setup would be the cost of the new drive. If
the old one was a spinner (which appears so since you were running
chkdsk on it), get an SSD. The much faster drive will help compensate
for the old CPU. The data bus won't get any faster, but drive access
will speed up a lot.
If your friend decides later that he just can't stand any feature or
function losses of using the non-expiring Windows 10 trial, he can buy
just the product key for about $40 on eBay. He'd have a clean start
with Win10, and later decide to get a key if he wants to unlock features
and functions that he deems are critical to his use of Windows. The
Win10 image is free from Microsoft. Do a clean install on a new and
much faster drive. However, PCIe 2.0 is the limiting factor on the old
hardware, and it'll be connected using SATA on the mobo instead of an
NVMe slot. Looks like your friend is over due for some hardware
upgrades. Like buying a home, that is not where the expenses stop.
Long URL: https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?N=100011693%20600545605%20600038506%20600038510%20600038519%208000%2050001077%2050001306%2050001455%2050001471&Order=1
Short URL: https://tinyurl.com/newegg4TBSSDs
Those are 4TB SSDs from the better brands. Don't just go by price.
Looks up the specs on candidates to check what is their read and write
speeds, especially write speed. I selected Newegg as the seller. Add
in 3rd-party sellers using Newegg as a frontend shop, but only if you
trust any of them. Windows will boot faster. As for how much speedup
is noticed with other apps, depends on what the app does. Video games
will load faster although many have been tweaked to memory cache objects
and textures into memory to overcome spinner drives. Speed will be
faster, but not overall as much as you expect. So, have your friend
decide if they can afford the faster SSD drive, and start with a fresh
install of the OS instead of muddling an upgrade with old updates,
tweaks, registry changes, and all the dross that gets pulled into an
upgraded OS from the old one.
Of course, with a fresh install of the OS, your friend will have to
reinstall all his old programs - well, those that still support
installing and running on Windows 10. So, make sure he/she has all the
installation media for his old programs, or can retrieve them via online
downloads. My aunt lost some very ancient graphics programs, like
making greeting cards, when she moved to Windows 10, but she found free
alternatives for newer replacements. As for the data, well, that can be
restored from your image backup.

I bought a used Dell laptop from ebay w/w7Pro, but it came with a
minimum of windows components, I am trying to install pysol fanclub and
keep getting an error, something about api ...missing. Have you any
suggestions?

[VanguardLH]

Post by Nic
I bought a used Dell laptop from ebay w/w7Pro, but it came with a
minimum of windows components, I am trying to install pysol fanclub and
keep getting an error, something about api ...missing. Have you any
suggestions?

Might be an old program that wants an old version of the C Runtime
library. After installing Windows, and because I kept the downloads of
the VC++ runtime installers, that's one of my first actions after
getting the OS installed.

The ones I've kept that I install (and have had to reinstall because
some program or its installer fucked up the current runtimes) are:

VC++ Redistributables 2005 SP1
VC++ Redistributables 2008
VC++ Redistributables 2010 SP1
VC++ Redistributables 2013
VC++ Redistributables 2015-2017-2019
VC++ Redistributables 2022

If a really R-E-A-L-L-Y old Visual Basic program complains runtimes are
missing, well, it's been a couple decades since I ran into that, and I
never bothered keeping the downloaded installers for old VB runtimes.

That's the only suggestion I can give on the vague "API missing" error.
You might try installing or running the app again to record exactly what
it says.

Never heard of Pysol Fanclub. From an online search, it has a web site
at http://www.pysol.org/. It says dev on that program ended 2004.
Could be the old program is running afoul of security measures in a
newer OS. A Github site opened to continue the project at
https://pysolfc.sourceforge.io/. There is a link to "Forum" that you
might want to check out to ask a community more focused on that app.

Note: Normally I ignore-flag your posts, and use a default view of Hide
Ignored Messages. I only happen to see your post because occasionally I
switch the All Messages view. Because I flag instead of delete, I can
still see undesirable posts. When you need help, you're civil. Not
otherwise, so I ignore-flag your posts.

Note: Because your inquiry is severely different than the topic of this
discussion, I have changed the Subject header to reflect any further
subthreads are unrelated to the original topic. Start your own thread
on your different issue. Don't hijack.

[Paul]

Post by Nic
I bought a used Dell laptop from ebay w/w7Pro, but it came with
a minimum of windows components, I am trying to install pysol fanclub
and keep getting an error, something about api ...missing. Have you
any suggestions?

"Running program is not possible, missing api-ms-win-core-path-l1-1-0.dll. #261 "

https://github.com/shlomif/PySolFC/issues/261

Issue #1 api-ms-win-core-path-l1-1-0.dll <=== missing re-map DLL

Issue #2 "The installer uses Python 3.9, which is not compatible with Windows 7"

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/fix-missing-api-ms-win-crt-runtime-l1-1-0dll-dll-in-windows/

"Go to the Microsoft Visual C++ 2015 Redistributable page from Microsoft and click on the Download button."

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=52685

"Supported Operating Systems

Windows 7 Service Pack 1
Windows 8
Windows 8.1
Windows Server 2012 (plus others I've removed from list)
Windows Vista Service Pack 2
Windows XP Service Pack 3"

Available as 32bit and 64bit -- install both to cover off both types of situations

But that's not going to fix the Python issues, whatever they are.

*******

I've tried to help people with those API-* issues.

First of all, those are not ordinary DLLs. The files are tiny, which is
a "hint" to you, that no executable code is inside. These are mapper DLLs,
that map a request for a certain DLL in VS, to a specific and different
DLL in each OS you might run on. Microsoft applied for a patent for this
technology.

There are two cases. You ask me to find you a DLL, I find one, you're
happy, case is closed.

But the vast majority of times, an entire set of API-* DLLs is missing,
and eventually... a phantom file that does not exist on the face
of the earth - the software is calling for that. The adventure ends,
and is unresolvable by hacker means.

*******

Some programs will call DirectX code for some reason,
and the DirectX code has a call to check "kernel version".
If it smells some older OSes, the program stops on a dime.

These issues can be fixed with a Hex Editor, by replacing
certain branch instructions with a NOP. But good luck patching
the whole world that way. Only specific programs, occasionally
get detailed patch instructions like that.

I got a demo game once, which runs on WinXP, but a kernel check
forbade Win2K. After altering two locations in the executable,
it played in Win2K (because I'd neutered the kernel check), and
I played the entire level, and there were no issues whatsoever.
The kernel check ? A waste of time. And totally unnecessary, as expected.

But Python is a huge surface, and this is merely an example of
what awaits. I don't know what sin Python 3.9 has committed.

In the github thread, the recommendation is to use an older version.
And they name a version that might work.

Archive.org has captured github, but that doesn't mean you can
"suck" the materials needed, out of archive.org . Some github
pages, they *do* have all versions archived and this is in
the form of "version announcements" with a paragraph of text
for each. Getting an older version from a properly prepared github
page is easy. For the github developers who are clueless, you'll have
a hard time finding such things. These paragraphs may be lower down
on the README.md page.

https://web.archive.org/web/20171005230620/https://github.com/shlomif/PySolFC/

Paul

[Nic]

Post by Nic
I bought a used Dell laptop from ebay w/w7Pro, but it came with
a minimum of windows components, I am trying to install pysol fanclub
and keep getting an error, something about api ...missing. Have you
any suggestions?

"Running program is not possible, missing api-ms-win-core-path-l1-1-0.dll. #261"
https://github.com/shlomif/PySolFC/issues/261
Issue #1 api-ms-win-core-path-l1-1-0.dll <=== missing re-map DLL
Issue #2 "The installer uses Python 3.9, which is not compatible with Windows 7"
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/fix-missing-api-ms-win-crt-runtime-l1-1-0dll-dll-in-windows/
"Go to the Microsoft Visual C++ 2015 Redistributable page from Microsoft and click on the Download button."
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=52685
"Supported Operating Systems
Windows 7 Service Pack 1
Windows 8
Windows 8.1
Windows Server 2012 (plus others I've removed from list)
Windows Vista Service Pack 2
Windows XP Service Pack 3"
Available as 32bit and 64bit -- install both to cover off both types of situations
But that's not going to fix the Python issues, whatever they are.
*******
I've tried to help people with those API-* issues.
First of all, those are not ordinary DLLs. The files are tiny, which is
a "hint" to you, that no executable code is inside. These are mapper DLLs,
that map a request for a certain DLL in VS, to a specific and different
DLL in each OS you might run on. Microsoft applied for a patent for this
technology.
There are two cases. You ask me to find you a DLL, I find one, you're
happy, case is closed.
But the vast majority of times, an entire set of API-* DLLs is missing,
and eventually... a phantom file that does not exist on the face
of the earth - the software is calling for that. The adventure ends,
and is unresolvable by hacker means.
*******
Some programs will call DirectX code for some reason,
and the DirectX code has a call to check "kernel version".
If it smells some older OSes, the program stops on a dime.
These issues can be fixed with a Hex Editor, by replacing
certain branch instructions with a NOP. But good luck patching
the whole world that way. Only specific programs, occasionally
get detailed patch instructions like that.
I got a demo game once, which runs on WinXP, but a kernel check
forbade Win2K. After altering two locations in the executable,
it played in Win2K (because I'd neutered the kernel check), and
I played the entire level, and there were no issues whatsoever.
The kernel check ? A waste of time. And totally unnecessary, as expected.
But Python is a huge surface, and this is merely an example of
what awaits. I don't know what sin Python 3.9 has committed.
In the github thread, the recommendation is to use an older version.
And they name a version that might work.
Archive.org has captured github, but that doesn't mean you can
"suck" the materials needed, out of archive.org . Some github
pages, they *do* have all versions archived and this is in
the form of "version announcements" with a paragraph of text
for each. Getting an older version from a properly prepared github
page is easy. For the github developers who are clueless, you'll have
a hard time finding such things. These paragraphs may be lower down
on the README.md page.
https://web.archive.org/web/20171005230620/https://github.com/shlomif/PySolFC/
Paul

Thank you Paul

[sticks]

Post by VanguardLH

Post by sticks
This morning it successfully created the image of the disk and I made a
rescue boot disk on it. I tested it and it does boot on it properly, so
I'm going to try the win 10 this morning and see how it works. I now
now I can always put it back to a good working Win 7 laptop, like it is now.

Do you really want to do an upgrade instead of a fresh install? After
making the repairs in the Win7 setup, and after saving an image backup
of the OS partition(s), why not remove that drive to save it instead of
rely solely on an image backup, and replace with a new drive then
install Windows 10 afresh?

I have let this drag on a couple days before responding, but I have read
and saved all the posts from you (Vanguard), Paul, and Graham and they
have been very helpful to me.

While I agree a fresh install would always be nice, one of the problems
with upgrading other people's systems is that they rarely store user
files with any kind of a system that makes it easy to simply reinstall
programs and get all their stuff back. In this case, it was simply not
worth it for me to search through the whole computer and every program
on it to make sure everything got saved.

The first attempts at installing the windows 10 upgrade would not work
with error code0x80072F8F - 0x20000 popping up. This pointed toward
needing TLS 1.2. Internet properties showed it as available and
checked. I looked several times and it was in there, though the windows
10 install said it wasn't. Eventually I found the registry hack
addressing this issue and that fixed it. From there installation went
fine, and the system upgraded and seemed to operate smoothly. Chrome
got upgraded immediately.

In the end, and this is the first one I've had this with, it just didn't
seem right for this laptop. The disk activity light was ALWAYS on. It
just didn't react to things as fast as it did under windows 7. I
actually bought this machine and gave it to the owner as a gift years
ago, so I made the executive decision to leave it as a Windows 7 system
and just explain a few things about security to him and how to treat a
machine with a dead battery safely. If a new one is ever desired, he
can always purchase one. As far as putting in an SSD, or upgrading
older memory from 4-8, it's just not worth it to me for this. So, I'm
gonna put the macrium image of windows 7 back on, make sure it works
again, and give it back. I'm sure the owner will have no idea how much
effort it takes to have gotten it working again, and that it probably
would not have been worth it if you had to pay someone to do that.

Thanks for every suggestion in this thread! Great advice from good people!

[Frank Slootweg]

sticks <***@charter.net> wrote:
[...]

Post by sticks
While I agree a fresh install would always be nice, one of the problems
with upgrading other people's systems is that they rarely store user
files with any kind of a system that makes it easy to simply reinstall
programs and get all their stuff back. In this case, it was simply not
worth it for me to search through the whole computer and every program
on it to make sure everything got saved.

It's not only about user files, but also - and most often, mostly -
about program *settings* (configuration, etc.).

Many/most programs need some kind of (re-)configuration and most
people do not take notes of what they've configured/changed. And even
*with* notes, it's a royal pain to have to re-configure everything
again.

I've had to do this several times (2000->XP->Vista->8[.1]->11),
because the new OS came on the built-in disk of the new system (all
laptops), so it was not possible/feasible to do an in-place upgrade.

Only once, I could do an in-place upgrade (8.1->10) on my wife's
machine and that was much, much less work.

So I fully agree with you that doing a fresh install on other people's
systems is nearly always a bad idea.

[...]

[DanS]

Post by VanguardLH

Post by sticks
This morning it successfully created the image of the disk
and I made a rescue boot disk on it. I tested it and it
does boot on it properly, so I'm going to try the win 10
this morning and see how it works. I now now I can always
put it back to a good working Win 7 laptop, like it is
now.

Do you really want to do an upgrade instead of a fresh
install? After making the repairs in the Win7 setup, and
after saving an image backup of the OS partition(s), why
not remove that drive to save it instead of rely solely on
an image backup, and replace with a new drive then install
Windows 10 afresh?
Windows 10 will run as an indefinite trial. That is, there
is no expiration of the trial. You can get Win10 for free,
but it runs as a trial.

...or you can **still** get the free Windows10 upgrade to the same OS level (Home,
Pro) using your valid Win7 key.

As of Aug 2023, this is still a working upgrade path.

I've done clean installs with it for personal use, and most recently, a couple in-place
upgrades on work machines.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/heres-how-you-can-still-get-a-free-windows-10-
upgrade/

[VanguardLH]

Post by DanS

Post by VanguardLH

Post by sticks
This morning it successfully created the image of the disk
and I made a rescue boot disk on it. I tested it and it
does boot on it properly, so I'm going to try the win 10
this morning and see how it works. I now now I can always
put it back to a good working Win 7 laptop, like it is
now.

Do you really want to do an upgrade instead of a fresh
install? After making the repairs in the Win7 setup, and
after saving an image backup of the OS partition(s), why
not remove that drive to save it instead of rely solely on
an image backup, and replace with a new drive then install
Windows 10 afresh?
Windows 10 will run as an indefinite trial. That is, there
is no expiration of the trial. You can get Win10 for free,
but it runs as a trial.

...or you can **still** get the free Windows10 upgrade to the same OS level (Home,
Pro) using your valid Win7 key.
As of Aug 2023, this is still a working upgrade path.
I've done clean installs with it for personal use, and most recently, a couple in-place
upgrades on work machines.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/heres-how-you-can-still-get-a-free-windows-10-
upgrade/

Yep, do the fresh install to get the trial version. Then decide later
to add the license key either to upgrade (but with a fresh install
already performed), or go buy just a license key ($40 at eBay) to
"upgrade" from the trial version to whatever key you buy.

[DanS]

VanguardLH <***@nguard.LH> wrote in news:orjtza6izfv3$***@v.nguard.lh:

<SNIP>

Post by VanguardLH

Post by DanS
...or you can **still** get the free Windows10 upgrade to
the same OS level (Home, Pro) using your valid Win7 key.
As of Aug 2023, this is still a working upgrade path.
I've done clean installs with it for personal use, and
most recently, a couple in-place upgrades on work
machines.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/heres-how-you-can-still-get-a
-free-windows-10- upgrade/

Yep, do the fresh install to get the trial version. Then
decide later to add the license key either to upgrade (but
with a fresh install already performed), or go buy just a
license key ($40 at eBay) to "upgrade" from the trial
version to whatever key you buy.

I did (4) clean installs after purchasing Win7Pro keys for @ $15-$20, over two years.
The keys were entered during the install process. These were new build PCs.

At work, did an in-place upgrade on (5) Win7 machines, with the last one being just this
past May.