Can now accept credit card payments

I have finally made the move of PC-fix-IT being a cash or cheque business into a 21st century electronic payments one. Instead of signing up for a contract with an electronic payment company including consultation and other setup costs, I'm testing the water by using the pay-as-you-go Paypal Here card reader paired to my mobile phone.

The card reader arrived today so all I need now is a customer who is willing to be a guinea pig.

Mid-life upgrade

There was a time when increasing the RAM of a Windows XP computer from 512Mb to 1Gb gave a real noticeable performance improvement. Similarly adding an extra 1GB to a sluggish Windows Vista PC resulted in a performance boost. Now, adding extra memory to a Windows 7 system which is already has 2, 3 or 4Gb doesn't generally give a truly amazing responsive improvement.

I'm finding that adding an SSD gives the desired mid-life upgrade the WOW factor. Prices have continued to drop with 120Gb SSDs costing well under £40 plus 250Gb capacity for under £70. Performance and reliability of these devices have improved with newer motherboards having SATA3 (6Gb/s) ports as well. The majority of my customers do not have huge photo collections or music or film libraries and the PCs are used for email, Facebook, web surfing and document creation. Hence substituting the old HDD with a low capacity SSD is not an issue. And cloning the HDD does not take long. For a desktop system leave the HDD in place as a backup device is also a good practice.

The reboot of the upgraded system is a perfect way to show off the overall performance increase and give you a happy and satisfied customer.

Pentium G3258 and Windows 10

I've just built a basic gaming system with one of my favourite CPUs the Intel Pentium G3258.  I'd already loaded Windows 7 on it but wanted to upgrade to Windows 10. Every time and every which way I tried it failed to install giving the error 0xC1900191-0x20017 The installation failed in the SAFE_OS phase with an error during the BOOT operation.

Further investigation revealed it was something to do with Windows Update KB3064209 and file C:\Windows\system32\mcupdate_genuineintel.dll. However all the fixes suggested didn't work. Then on www.reddit.com (a site I don't normally use for technical support) there was a post about the Intel Pentium G3258 CPU in particular having this problem. It was suggested to disable one core of the processor in the UEFI BIOS, then do the install and then delete or rename the mcupdate_genuineintel.dll file. This did work and the system is fine running Windows 10 as you can see. I trust that Microsoft will patch this strange bug in the not too distant future.

Learning Windows 10

With the release of Microsoft's latest operating system Windows 10, I've been very busy advising and helping people upgrade their existing systems and ordering new ones.

Even though I have had three systems in the workshop running the technical preview version for the last nine months, I'm still learning the problems of installing, running and using this new version.  Also helping people with the new apps and procedures.  I've only had to un-install it twice as most people are happy with it after the initial learning curve and UI differences.  A couple of old printers are no longer supported any more with drivers.

There are times now that when I use Windows 7 and try to do something that is only available in Windows 10.  Cortana seems a little reluctant to appear automatically here in the UK.

Anyway, I've certainly had more business in what is usually a quiet holiday month.

Back to Wolfenstein

For the last couple of months, I haven't been playing a regular game.  I've gone back to a few of the old ones but it is not the same excitement of discovering and achieving something new.  There was an offer recently for less than £4 so I thought that I'd give it a try.  Great fun!  Just like going back in time killing lots of weird Nazis with a variety of different weapons.


The graphics are good even though you travel a scripted path along corridors, halls and tunnels.  The gore is impressive and the tension is just as it was.  Well worth it.

Great new Windows 10 video

 

I just found this great Windows 10 video on the Microsoft website. Windows 10 is for people who do unexpected things.

Living with a cheap laptop

Almost one year ago I bought a brand new DELL Inspiron 15 laptop for just £166. You can see my original review here. So it was time to give an update especially after my recent disappointing review of the DELL Latitude E3550 laptop. What can you expect for just a quarter of the price?

Quite a lot actually. If you just want a basic, laptop for email, web-surfing, photo editing and 2D gaming it does really well. Boots up quickly, connects to the Internet and provided you don't expect it to do more than one thing at time it remains responsive. Battery life is excellent too. It did come with Windows 8.1 but with the prospect of Windows 10 coming out next month and a free upgrade that will help a lot. As the warranty will be out, I'll upgrade it with a cheap 128Gb SSD as well.

I love this laptop and it does brilliantly for the price. DELL must have sold containers of them over the last Christmas holiday period! However shortly after that Microsoft withdrew its free Windows offer in Europe for this class of system and then they quickly disappeared. However if you look for the equivalent Lenovo which includes a DVD writer as well you can still find them for £169.