Windows 11
Gracious Rebel
Shipmate
in Purgatory
I've had my head in the sand with the impending deadline in less than a month or so for end of support for windows 10. My PC says it can support it, but when I've trid to upgrade it fails with an error message to say something like there might not be enough memory available to apply the update. I can't remember exactly message. And don't really know how to get the message to come back.
I know we have some confident techie types here so I was hoping someone could advise me, (if that's allowed?)
I know we have some confident techie types here so I was hoping someone could advise me, (if that's allowed?)
Comments
Sometimes it works on a repeated try, but I think you have already tried multiple times.
I've always bought something or paid for them to do something so as not to treat them as a free IT advice service.
This. Very few errors are unique, and most have fairly simple solutions.
(and, to let you into a secret, those of us considered 'good with computers' are just Googling stuff anyway; we just have enough knowledge to reassure ourselves that the proposed solution is at least harmless)
Make of that what you will!
My work laptop (2019 Dell latitude) now has Windows 11. When you log in it says something like 'security zone: Windows Defender. I've never noticed any anti virus running eg McAfee.
I need to buy myself a laptop for home use and I'm thinking of getting the same ie a brand new Dell Latitude, (mundane reasons eg I'm used to it incl keyboard and always been totally reliable) not the highest spec cos I don't do gaming or need anything super fast etc. It will come with Windows 11 and I want Microsoft Word so I guess I'll buy Microsoft 365 subscription.
Do I need to buy anti virus eg McAfee as well??
No. Defender is perfectly adequate.
Agreed. I don't think I've used separate anti-virus since at least the release of Windows 10, possibly earlier.
Thank you!
I think that's the problem then. There's only 6.66GB free out of 237GB.
Even if you can shift some files to a pen drive or an external hard drive chances are you can free up enough space and it will probably not need all the space once it's finished installing so you can put them back.
Defrag doesn't really free space, it just consolidates free space into larger blocks. I'd check things like Downloads (right click and select properties to see how much space is being used by a folder), Documents and even Desktop if you have a tendency to store things there, and then drill down once you spot folders using up an unexpected amount of space.
One Drive and Google Drive can both store local copies of files you save to them, depending on how they're configured.
My usual go-to is to search for *.* and then sort by size and scrutinise the largest files, but that's because I've usually got some ISO (disk image) files sitting around.
The file manager application has a menu item "Clean up". It will show you how much disc space you can recover, which may be sufficient to allow the W11 upgrade.
There's a program (free) called WinDirStat which will do exactly that.
Make sure you download it from the original page - not some dodgy download site - I would get the .msi from https://windirstat.net/download.html and install that. You almost certainly want the Intel 64 bit version.
Secondly, when you run it, right click and run as Administrator. This is necessary for the program to see everything.
Because you haven't had any security updates since Jan 2023. Which in turn means that any booby-trapped website using an exploit discovered since then could do anything from nicking your personal data to using your computer to do whatever a bad actor the other side of the world wants it to do.
Remember WannaCry in 2017? That was how that got into the NHS network.
Put another way: no need to upgrade so long as you stay off the internet.
I did a quick search on that string and saw something about corrupted files, but its way past midnight now, and I'm gonna leave it for now....
This was mildly interesting. Suggested you’d need a min of 25gb of you were not doing fancy workarounds.
We were relatively late to PCs so our first had an 850MB hard drive. We soon got tired of having to uninstall a game every time we wanted to install a new one so my dad ordered a 4.3GB drive, and we were well chuffed to be told that they were out of stock and be given a free upgrade to 6.1GB.
My Gigabyte Motherboard is failing and uses DDR2 memory. A relation gave me a discarded HP Pavilion which uses DDR3 (ok, still old) RAM, but an SSD makes it run much faster, but it still can't run Windows 11.
Great!
Probably your IT department used MECM to run a task sequence to do the update - that's how we did north of 3000 over a few weeks. That will include a Rollback section for if it failed, so you see that section on screen as it decides whether the upgrade was successful.
I've never found those steps remedy anything.
Personally I'd go to the MS download site and create install media on a USB stick, then run the windows setup from within your existing OS - just make sure you pick the option to keep your files and settings.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/create-installation-media-for-windows-99a58364-8c02-206f-aa6f-40c3b507420d
I wouldn't. I'd either use Google docs (or similar) online or LibreOffice (free). Word as a standalone may not save you any money over the whole suite anyway.
Thanks, Karl
I think google docs is ok if you require only simple formatting, and it's easy to share with others. If you need close comparability with Word, I would use LibreOffice Writer.