Hi folks, I'm back (devonwoody)

[devonwoody]

I have had a lovely time or was it hell.
Windows 10 plus a new PC.
One program still will not recognise me after 6 days of new passwords when it finds I am not on the same computer as registered? STEAM (train simulator)

Emails have played me up and still are, I have gone back to Mozilla Thunderbird and that is not the same format so it appears I have emigrated to a new planet?!

Trying to stay sane

 

[Bm101]

.
One program still will not recognise me after 6 days of new passwords when it finds I am not on the same computer as registered? STEAM (train simulator)

Steam allows you to play on multiple computers this suggests it is a password/log in error .
No expert but some issues might be:
1: Are you trying to sign in with your username not your account name if they are different? You can change your User name as often as you want, you can't change your account name.
2: Capitals/uppercase/lowercase on your password seems to be an issue for some reason DW. Take a look at this thread here. There are various workarounds that have worked for people here. https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/ ... 309/?ctp=2
3: remove the '@gmail.com' (whichever one you use) tail from your email address and try that as a log in.

You can save files and so on from your old PC but if you only have one or two games it's probably far easier to download them again when you get password issues sorted.

I think I might change the thread title to include PC Steam Login help or similar and hopefully some of the many knowledgable IT guys on here will see it and help.

Hope this helps. You are getting there, so take heart, I know it can be very frustrating! I gave up on windows 10 altogether it kept crashing my PC.
Regards
Chris

 

[devonwoody]

Thanks BM, there are some good tips there, they have exactly the same problem as me. Have another session on that tomorrow sound like a new account would be best I only have two purchased routes and the others were freebies.

 

[AES]

Hi Chris (Bm101). You wrote, QUOTE: I gave up on windows 10 altogether it kept crashing my PC. UNQUOTE:

May I ask what you've replaced it with please? I have Win 7 (which I went to grudgingly after MS stopped supporting XP - which IMO was the best of a poor bunch of Windows).

I know that MS will stop supporting Win 7 sometime late this year/next, and having seen (and heard!!!) my wife struggling with Win 10 across the other side of our home office, I've decided I'm definitely NOT going there. And Mac is out of the question on grounds of cost and compatibility with my existing applications (which include such "odd balls" as Matthias Wandel's Big Print program).

The local PC shop was talking to me recently about (don't quote me here I may be quite wrong about the name) an OS in the Unbuntu range which closely mimics/replicates Win XP. Do you or anyone else know anything about this please? Is it suitable for a PC klutz like me?

My only alternative thinking was to resurrect my old laptop (Win XP) and use that for ALL my offline stuff, using an upgraded MS 7 (I guess that would have to be Win 10?) on my present laptop purely for on line stuff like E-mails, posting here, etc.

Any thoughts/comments, Chris/anyone?

Devonwoody, welcome back and congrats on getting there in the end. But from the above, I just don't want all that hassle (and from my wife's experience) on-going hassle come every update too.

So sorry for the thread drift but I thought that while you've got all the PC buffs' attention on here I should jump in re my own future PC plans! Hope you don't mind.

 

[Bm101]

Thanks BM, there are some good tips there, they have exactly the same problem as me. Have another session on that tomorrow sound like a new account would be best I only have two purchased routes and the others were freebies.

If you can get past the password issue you wont have to re-purchase games DW. Just download the games again so you won't lose any money they will be in your steam client library. You might lose any progress/saved games. you may not. I'm not sure sorry.

 

[Bm101]

Hi mate, I'm afraid I won't be much use to you.
I built my pc for gaming 8 years ago when I had time and the will for that sort of thing. It was just before my lad was born and it was a moment of if I don't spend it now I never will. It was quite a high end spec pc built no frills but powerful for a specific purpose of processing power and has lasted well but I only know the real basics of some hardware related stuff like graphics cards (even that will be well out of date now). I use windows 7 too. I believe my issue with windows 10 is specific to the set up I have and the sli (twin) graphics cards I run and the motherboard possibly. I can't upate the drivers to my nvidia cards. It causes a total shutdown and blackscreens the pc.
I pay for Bitdefender and I don't take risks online. I trust these to keep me out of any trouble for as long as possible when support for 7 goes dark.
I'm sorry I can't help more my friend but my knowledge of your issues is tenuous to non existent. Certainly I wouldn't begin to offer advice. Hopefully someone will be along soon.
All the best.
Chris

 

[dynax]

Hi Chris (Bm101). You wrote, QUOTE: I gave up on windows 10 altogether it kept crashing my PC. UNQUOTE:

May I ask what you've replaced it with please? I have Win 7 (which I went to grudgingly after MS stopped supporting XP - which IMO was the best of a poor bunch of Windows).

I know that MS will stop supporting Win 7 sometime late this year/next, and having seen (and heard!!!) my wife struggling with Win 10 across the other side of our home office, I've decided I'm definitely NOT going there. And Mac is out of the question on grounds of cost and compatibility with my existing applications (which include such "odd balls" as Matthias Wandel's Big Print program).

The local PC shop was talking to me recently about (don't quote me here I may be quite wrong about the name) an OS in the Unbuntu range which closely mimics/replicates Win XP. Do you or anyone else know anything about this please? Is it suitable for a PC klutz like me?

My only alternative thinking was to resurrect my old laptop (Win XP) and use that for ALL my offline stuff, using an upgraded MS 7 (I guess that would have to be Win 10?) on my present laptop purely for on line stuff like E-mails, posting here, etc.

Any thoughts/comments, Chris/anyone?

Devonwoody, welcome back and congrats on getting there in the end. But from the above, I just don't want all that hassle (and from my wife's experience) on-going hassle come every update too.

So sorry for the thread drift but I thought that while you've got all the PC buffs' attention on here I should jump in re my own future PC plans! Hope you don't mind.

Hi AES, Ubuntu is a Linux based operating system, it nothing like XP, it will NOT support any windows based software, i replaced my Win Vista on a laptop with ubuntu, it is quite a steep learning curve using it, the best thing is either download and create an image disk, or pick up a linux mag at the newsagents as that will have a copy of some form of linux operating system, but not necessarily ubuntu, it could be mint or some other variant, but essentially they are free, have a look at some of the linux forums or google ubuntu for more info, the current version for ubuntu is 18.xx, and has had a facelift from previous versions, hth.

 

[Eric The Viking]

I agree it is different, but Ubuntu, or at least Wine (WINdows Emulator) does allow you to run some Windows programs. For example, I run a couple of different versions of SketchUp Make, mostly without problems.

There are versions of Ubuntu that look very much like old-style Windows. Xubuntu (which I now use on four different machines) is one such. If you want to experiment you can download it and run it from a DVD, without altering your Windows computer at all (bit slow that way though). Remove DVD, restart computer: back to Windows 10 (or whatever).

You can also have a "dual boot" setup, letting you choose between Ubuntu or Windows when you start the machine.

To be honest, John (DW), you might find it a bit difficult, and you might find some of your programs still won't behave well. It all depends how well they were written in the first place.

This below is a link to the latest xubuntu DVD image (hosted by the University of Kent). It's both an installer or a trial version. To just try it, burn a DVD using the .ISO image, boot the computer from that, and follow the instructions to just try it and NOT install it.

It's a fairly large download though: 1.3 GBytes

http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/cdim ... -amd64.iso

 

[AES]

Sorry if I created a "bum steer" in my thread drift post above folks. I did say that I wasn't sure of the name when I wrote Unbuntu - the name I was actually told by the local PC people was Linux. They said there's a version of Linux which runs just like (and looks just like) Win XP. That would be interesting for me - I think!

P.S. Why do so many software programs have such weird and wonderful names (rhetorical Q) ;-)

 

[Duncan A]

......... I believe my issue with windows 10 is specific to the set up I have and the sli (twin) graphics cards I run and the motherboard possibly. I can't upate the drivers to my nvidia cards. It causes a total shutdown and blackscreens the pc........
Chris

Not sure if it applies to your problem but Intel do state that some processors are not compatible with Win 10 although Microsoft claim that they are. One such processor is the 2nd gen i7 with an inbuilt graphics processor (low power), working alongside a separate (high power)graphics card. We had a problem on a laptop and got around it by editing the Registry to stop the laptop trying to auto-switch to the Intel GPU when it wanted to save power.
If you want to give it a try, run RegEdit, do a search for ENABLEULPS (my caps, not case-sensitive) and set it to 0 if it is not already so. This will mean that the computer runs with a separate graphics card - always supposing that your computer has this setting in the first place.
Of course, it may be that you have a variation of this problem between the two graphics cards where one does not hand back control to the other when required to do so. In which case, I haven't got a clue how you'd deal with it!
Sorry to DW for hijacking the thread
Duncan

 

[Bm101]

Another apology to DW. :roll: Sorry DW!
Thanks Duncan. That's really interesting!
i7 2600 @ 3.40Ghz. As I say it's 8+ year old now. Two 580's for cards.
Thought it was a lost cause.
Will have a look into that now. Many thanks for posting, much appreciated. Could be a real game changer for me. =D

Regards
Chris

 

[Eric The Viking]

@AES: I think Xubuntu looks a lot like XP. Link above.

Burn a DVD from the image to make it bootable. Don't copy the download to a DVD as that won't work. Then you can try it, or set up dual boot (keeping whatever you already have), or whatever you wish.

BORING BACKGROUND STUFF:

UNIX - the original concept from the 1960s/70s. Multi-user, networked (sometimes), started in academia and spread to wide acceptance in engineering and limited commercial applications.

DOS - derived from UNIX (in large part), but no networking nor multi-user capabilities. Runs on a PC. Single-user, no networking as shipped, many limitations but hugely popular for business and home use.

Windows - originally just a graphical display system (a "desktop"), running on top of DOS. Now the name for the underlying operating system too. Microsoft proprietary. Mainstream operating system.

Linux - UNIX for PCs, originally written by Linus Torvalds (hence Lin-UX). Put in the public domain by Torvalds, is open source and free to anyone to use. Has a number of "flavours"...

Ubuntu - a very popular flavour of Linux. On its own doesn't look much like Windows, but desktops like the one shipping with Xubuntu fix that pretty well.

Xubuntu - a variant of Ubuntu that is deliberately intended to look like Windows and behave in a similar way (NB: not identically!).

Wine - a windows emulator that tricks software into thinking it's running on Windows when it's actually running on Linux. Free, popular with the gaming community, sometimes awkward and flaky.

You can also run real Windows as a "virtual machine" on top of Linux. This gives 100% compatibility with Windows software (or should), but is a bit cumbersome and needs a lot of memory. Both Wine and a virtual machine allow data, network connections, printers, etc., to be shared between the Windows environment and native Linux.

Too much info, probably

E.

 

[Sideways]

I've always been a mac fan and endured windows because of work. Installed win10 on a lenovo a couple of years ago and after some adjusting to it, don't find it too bad. My hate however is the way windows like ios won't let you refuse updates. As the majority of grief with computers is due to problems with poorly tested updates, for a quiet life, you need to get it working cleanly and then reject any changes for as long as possible.
My hint is to learn about "policies". This is part of windows that allows network administrators to limit what a user can do with a company pc. It turns out that by creating a "policy" you can force windows 10 to ask before it downloads and installs updates. You can't stop it asking, which it does almost every day, but you just "view" and then close the window. I've successfully ignored the daily updates for over a year and my machine continues to run just fine.

 

[devonwoody]

Looked in this evening for. A break from TV.
Happy to see that many are interested in the thread and found interest on all comments.

BTW I feel I can cope with w10 and pleased to report that the new pc performs faster than I can think with ssd drive and nvida 1060 video card.

 

[AES]

Again apologies to Devonwoody for hijacking this thread.

Thanks to all for the helpful info. Duncan A, thanks, my wife certainly does have problems with just about every Win 10 update and as you say, can't stop them. I'm not sure that either of us would know enough to be able to "downgrade" the auto updating to "ask 1st" but even if we could perform that trick, how would she know what updates to accept/what to reject (I understand that there are some updates that are definitely needed - security gaps and all that, she does our on-line banking with that thing)? No, we just want a PC that you start up and then it just runs "as originally intended", NOT having to spend hours of frustration trying to get to a system that jus works. Too much to hope for I think!

Thanks to EtV for the info. it's not to much info at all (thanks) and I MAY try that (someday)! but as said above, I "simply" want a system that works, and that will continue to do so, WITHOUT fiddling around every other day. What the local PC wallah said about Linux sounded good, but from what you're saying, it does sound like quite a hassle to get everything that was written for Win XP working again, AND not only is there a cost associated with getting an updated program/s for all the bits of software I have (WHY should I spend more money for "nothing"?) but even if free, I'll still have all the hassle of learning a new way of doing something that today I can do perfectly well without thought. Just one example, look at how MS have consistently "improved" Word!!!!!!!!! I can PROVE to you that it now takes many more key strokes and mouse clicks to (for example) build a data table in Word than it did 3 versions ago - AND the end result is no better.

No, by the sound of things, for me it sounds like resurrecting my old XP laptop (which ran all the programs I needed perfectly well) and then simply updating this present laptop from Win 7 when MS support stops to something (Win 10 I guess) but then use it ONLY for on-line stuff is the answer for me.

"Slowly but surely" I'm getting pretty fed up with the whole "PC world", AND with being treated like a "milch kuh" dinosaur by virtually ALL software vendors (especially but by no means limited to MS) just because I'm happy with what I've already got, AND know how to use it to achieve the results I need.

Sorry devonwoody, this has turned into a rant (as well as a thread drift) which was NOT my intention.

 

[Robbo3]

DW: what problems are you having with your email?
If you want to PM me your email address I'll see if I can help. I use the portable version of Thunderbird.

AES: There was an old version called Linux XP but it's been discontinued.
There are over 500 versions of Linux which tends to make choosing one harder rather than easier.
Most are good at finding the drivers for your motherboard but there are some anomalies.
Linux Mint (about 4 versions) has a good reputation for finding the drivers & for ease of use. Another is Zorin OS.
If you don't know how to burn a bootable CD/DVD I can walk you through it or I could do it & post the disk to you.
You place the disk in the drive, boot from it & the operating system loads & runs from the disk. You then get the option to install Linux to your hard drive or carry on using it from the disk.
Don't install it unless you have backed up everything you need to keep as it will probably wipe your hard drive.

 

[dynax]

Apologies to DW again, but thanks to Eric i downloaded xubuntu took just over an hour, i then burnt it onto a usb stick, and tried it, it is much better than the current gnome version of ubuntu i am currently using, for me at least, my machine is over 10 years old, so far as to say, i will do a full install later today, just need to back up my files to an external drive, i'm not going to do a dual boot, i will do a clean install, just to reduce the risk of conflicts having 2 versions of ubuntu, but from first impressions it looks and feels very much like previous versions of windows albeit superficially, will let you know how i get on later, many thanks to Eric for the link, cheers, Mike.

 

[AES]

Thanks Robbo 3, I really do appreciate the offer of help.

You're quite right, I don't know how to burn a bootable CD/DVD (at present I'm having trouble burning a copy of a legitimately bought CD of our last Choir Concert!!!!), so I do appreciate your offer of thanks, really. But at present my laptop/Win 7 combination is working ALMOST as well as it did when new(!!!), AND AFAIK, MS are still supporting Win 7, so I'm safe going on line, like this.

So thanks for the offer, but I shall leave it as is for a while at least. As said when I originally hijacked DW's thread, I'm just thinking about the future and have no need to do anything just yet. But I have bookmarked this thread and may well come back to take up your offer. Thanks again.

 

[thetyreman]

instead of using microsoft office I'd recommend Libre Office to replace it, also it's free and open source, haven't used microsoft office for almost a decade now, and could never go back.

 

[AES]

I'm sure you're right thetyreman. I've heard that before.

Yeah, and I KNOW I'm a Luddite of the 1st (last?) order. BUT will it work on ALL my existing .doc files, AND will it work EXACTLY the same way as my MS Word does now?

I very much doubt it (quite wrongly no doubt ;-) ) so I just don't want to try something new with all the POTENTIAL frustration of learning something new, especially since if there's one thing I can "drive"* correctly and competently, it's MS Word. It is definitely NOT my favourite program W (I first learnt word processing with Word Perfect, which I thought was MUCH better) but when I joined Swissair in 1991 I think it was, Word was what you were given (and an IT Dept that wouldn't allow anything else)!

"better the devil you know ... " and all that!

Thanks all the same but I just don't want what is for me most likely to be all the hassle of learning a new program. I can (IMO) spend my time more profitably.