Recently, I finally bought an iPad. I figured that a lot of my customers need assitance with one and while I’m often able to resolve their technical issues, I wouldn’t call myself a confident user and up until recently, didn’t even know how to switch between different apps without launching them again, how iCloud works, how to customize the interface, how to connect one to any other Apple device and so on.

I didn’t want to buy anything used and old so I settled on a 2017 32GB model, which should be plenty for my needs. Out of the box when setting it up, it already had an issue! I couldn’t even use my Apple ID. The iPad was complaining that my Apple ID or password are incorrect and I should “try another one”. I tried the same ID online and it worked. Decided to change the password and it didn’t help either. I could use the Apple ID and password to login anywhere but the iPad just wouldn’t accept it. After several attempts, I proceeded to set it up without one. When the system was ready, I went into settings and was finally able to enter my ID and password – and this time, it worked!

Recently, I’ve seen a few laptops that had touchpad stop working after they have been upgraded to Windows 10 1803.
I thought, well, no big deal, I’ll just download the drivers but it wasn’t that simple! The touchpad wouldn’t even show up in the Device Manager so even when I managed to install Synaptics drivers, it still didn’t work!

The three laptops in question were all cheap circa-2014 models that came with Celeron Bay Trail CPUs (like Celeron N2840) and originally had Windows 8 or 8.1. Even though they are slow, they actually work quite well with an SSD drive and a fresh install of Windows, making them perfect for kids or older folks. So, I had these models:
Acer ES1-512 with 15.6″ screen
Lenovo B5030, also 15.6″
and a little HP Stream with 11″

I’ve also seen other people reporting the same issue with newer laptops, such as those based on Pentium N3540 and similar CPUs.

In case of Acer, I was able to solve the issue by switching the touchpad mode from Advanced to Basic in the BIOS settings, however, you may need to update the BIOS before doing that. It worked but disabled the multitouch gestures – so, no two-finger scrolling, pinch-to-zoom, or anything else… probably ok for those who use a mouth anyway but I wasn’t satisfied with this fix.

Lenovo and HP didn’t have any BIOS settings to modify the touchpad behavior so I had to find a fix… The problem is actually well documented, all you have to do is search for “XXX touchpad doesn’t work after Windows 10 upgrade” but finding the actual solution is never easy. Most people suggested using the mouse, updating the drivers (duh), or enabling the touchpad with Fn + F4 (could vary) keys but I’ve already tried all these anyway. Many articles appear to recommend programs like “Driver Genius” or “Reimage” and suggest that these can solve almost any issues “FOR FREE” but after you download these (for free, of course), they will tell you that you need to pay for a “Pro” license and that isn’t free! Typical sign of crapware that promises but doesn’t deliver. Well, may be it does, but I’m not giving my money to these scammers to find out.

The solution was simple. I had to download “Intel Serial IO” drivers. In some cases, they would only be listed under Windows 8 or 8.1 drivers. You’ll need to install these in compatibility mode. After it’s done, restart and Windows will finally recognize that the laptop has a touchpad. In most cases, drivers will be installed automatically from Windows Update and that’s it. If the driver installed doesn’t support multitouch, just download a better one from the vendors websites or use tools like Snappy Driver Installer!

Recently, I saw a few computers with Windows Store and a few other Apps disappeared after some Windows Updates. Generally, the lack of “Store” would be a good thing – I don’t want any “modern apps” or games that Microsoft insists on installing on all computers, however… I use Sticky Notes and Calculator a lot and didn’t want to find a replacement for these. There are some other useful apps for home users too so I needed to find a way to fix it.

First, things that DIDN’T work.
1. WSReset.exe command resets the store cache. The problem is, it was trying to open the Store and because it was missing from the computer, would ask what program to open it with. Um, itself!

2. Microsoft has a troubleshooting utility that claims to fix all Store problems… not so fast. I downloaded it from here , it asked me to sign in to a Microsoft account, which I did. I had to reopen the tool and was presented with this dialog

Sure, let’s reset. It did something for a minute and failed to fix it with the same error message as from step 1.

Didn’t allow me to submit feedback though 🙂

3. Next I tried Windows All-in-one-Repair from tweaking.com. They make an awesome free app that allows to fix many Windows issues in a semi-automated way. Didn’t work either and the message I saw was “This repair is currently disabled for this version of Windows due to the constant changes to the app store”…

4. Next I tried Powershell. It’s very useful to script things and sometimes is the only way to get something done in Windows. There are plenty of tutorials on the Internet but most commands are pretty simple and can be just copy-pasted with little modifications.
open the command prompt as admin, type powershell.exe and then the commands below
Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted
Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register
“$($_.InstallLocation)AppXManifest.xml”}

Did something for a few minutes but the Store still didn’t work.

5. Tried “SFC /scannow” and it said no corruption was found
6. Same with DISM and the variety of switches (ScanHealth, CheckHealth, RestoreHealth) – all clean!

This is what finally worked.
I noticed that the powershell commands from the step #4 used files AppXManifest.xml. I searched for the files and found a hidden folder C:Program FilesWindows Apps. I didn’t have access to it so had to change the owner to the logged in user account and add the required permissions. Don’t forget to change it back to the TrustedInstaller afterwards!

I copied the missing Store app folder from a known good computer. It appears that the folder contents depend on the edition of Windows, so if you are trying to fix Windows 10 Pro, make sure you copy the folder from the identical Windows 10 Pro setup. Mine looked like Microsoft.WindowsStore_11706.1002.9.0_x64__8wekyb3d8bbwe, yours could be different. Now, some PowerShell magic.

After this, you’ll need to make sure the proper permissions are set. A common cause of many problems is not having Full Control permissions for “ALL APPLICATION PACKAGES”. As soon as I did that, I was able to open the Store and install the only apps I use – Sticky Notes and Calculator. I really wish Microsoft had kept them as regular apps but they clearly didn’t listen to my feedback!

A few weeks ago, it was revealed that pretty much all modern CPUs designed after 1995 suffer from a major design defect that can be used to create critical vulnerabilities. An existence of a vulnerability doesn’t mean there is a way to exploit it for malicious purposes, however, I wouldn’t be surprised if something is invented soon… the cyber criminals won’t miss their chance to create malware that could potentially attack most computers.

Since then, there have been some measures to mitigate the vulnerability. Microsoft released new updates for Windows but it’s not enough. The system manufacturers must provide updates for their systems (BIOS and firmware) and most probably won’t bother… especially for systems older than 3 years.

Apple also released updates for their most recent Macs, iPads, and iPhones but devices made more than a few years ago won’t be compatible with the updates. If your Mac can’t run OS X Sierra or High Sierra… well, might be time to upgrade.

The updates patching vulnerabilities will slow down most computers. The impact won’t be much but it’s noticeable for those who still use old hardware. General CPU and gaming performance isn’t affected much, but the storage performance is. If you have a fast SSD, it will become up to 30% slower – which isn’t really that big of a deal for most people. It’s worse if you have a spinning hard drive… especially if it’s a cheap laptop that has a 5400rpm drive. In this case it would be best to upgrade to a Solid State Drive (SSD). Not only it will prevent your system from slowing down too much, it will make it perform better than when your laptop was new!

Do you want to check if your system is already protected from Spectre and Meltdown? Gibson Research Corporation has released a tool that works on all versions of Windows and can test your computer. You can download it from their website. I installed it on my computer and found that it has already been patched against Meltdown

Protection from Meltdown doesn’t require any processor or motherboard firmware updates so no surprises here.

However, my system was vulnerable to Spectre! I have an HP EliteDesk business grade PC and these systems are usually supported for a long time after being released so I went to HP website and found there was an update for my system. I downloaded it, and it took about 5 minutes to install. I ran InSpectre program again and was told my system is fully protected.

Now, the performance impact… I used UserBenchmark free tool to measure performance of my computer before and after update.

The CPU performance was not affected at all. Graphics card (integrated Intel) and RAM became a bit faster by about 5% – not what I expected! SSD suffered but I can live with that.

Metrics Before After
Seq performance 309 MBps 277 MBps
4k performance 34 MBps 28 MBps
Deep queue 4k 151 MBps 92 MBps

I was really surprised to see such a big drop in deep queue performance but it only matters when the computer is running many programs reading and writing to storage at the same time.

So, what if you have an older system that won’t get the updates? Time to upgrade it. Or take the risks – the choice is yours.

I recently got a few older Macbooks from customers who upgraded to newer computers and wanted to make them as fast as possible for those who don’t mind using older computers. The laptops I got are white Macbooks from 2007-2009 era, with very modest specifications, like Core 2 Duo CPU, 2 GB of RAM, and mechanical drives. All had bad batteries but that’s not surprising considering their age!

I found batteries online (not original but will last for couple years), got new chargers, and realized that finding RAM for these is almost impossible in New Zealand! Macbooks are very picky when it comes to RAM and I had to order it from overseas. Some people managed to get 6GB of RAM in these old laptops but it was too expensive so I settled on getting 2 sticks of 2GB each. That will make 4GB total, so plenty for older OS X. The RAM must be DDR2, 667Mhz, PC2-5300. I tried faster sticks but they didn’t work.

These laptops only support OS X Lion, which was first released in 2011 and got its last update in October 2012, more than 5 years ago! Compare it with Windows 7, that was released in 2009 and will still be supported until 2020… Getting the installer for Lion was another challenge… Long time ago, Apple used to charge for its Operating System upgrades and such is the case with Lion. It was $29.99 in the Mac store but I wasn’t the original owner so I couldn’t buy it. Luckily, I had one from a long time ago on my server (can’t recall where I got it from but probably torrents) and I used my Macbook Air to make a USB drive with Lion.

Yet another challenge… I inserted a 16GB stick, launched Disk Utility, erased the USB drive (not the partition below), and tried to restore the installer from the image. I kept getting the same error message, something like “Failed to restore, resource is busy”. You don’t expect things like this from Apple, do you? Neither did I. Turns out that I had to eject the USB drive volume (but not the drive itself, or else it wouldn’t be visible) and then the restore proceeded without a hitch. With a relatively fast USB 3.0 drive, it took just 4 minutes.

I replaced the original hard drive with a 120GB SSD, and powered on the 1st Mac while holding the Option key. My installer showed up right away and after a minute or so, I was greeted with the Lion welcome screen. I first erased the SSD with the disk utility (otherwise installer wouldn’t work), and started the installation. The 1st phase took just 5 minutes and I thought that was it – what a surprise. No, the Macbook restarted and continued with the install. Said it would take 20 minutes but actually took less than 5. After yet another restart, it was almost ready. OS X asked me to connect to a network, choose user account name and a few more things and it was ready.

I immediately checked for updates, and it found the combo update (10.7.5). It’s actually available as a download from Apple here. The whole update is just 2GB and took about 15 minutes to install. I dread having to install Windows 7 from scratch and then waiting couple days for the updates to finish, so I was glad it went fast and painlessly.

Being the old version, I found Safari painful to use and replaced it with Firefox. The last version to support OS X Lion is ESR 48, so that’s what I downloaded from here. I didn’t try Google Chrome as it stopped supporting Lion a very long time ago, unlike Firefox, that was updated some time in 2016… Firefox updated to 48.0.2 and then complained that the most recent version isn’t compatible with my system. Oh well.

I also installed LibreOffice for Mac and it’s a free alternative to Microsoft Office. The latest supported version is 4.3.7.2, can be downloaded from here. It opened several files created by Microsoft Office 2016 and saved in docx and xslx formats, so, probably, will be good enough for many users.

I tried browsing, watching Youtube videos, opening programs – and it feels pretty smooth, even despite having just 2GB of RAM (I’m still waiting for 4!). Youtube played trailers in 1080p without any noticeable lags, buffering and skipping frames. Actually, somebody did a detailed video on whether Lion is still usable in 2017. TLDR – yes, it is.

Was it really worth the trouble, considering these computers age and prices? I honestly don’t know. However, fewer laptops in the landfill is always better for the environment and having something old but still useful is definitely good for not-so-demanding budget users.

Still, if you have an older Macbook and deciding whether it’s worth fixing – the answer is both yes and no. If it has a broken screen, failed motherboard, or wouldn’t turn on – it’s time to move on. If it works ok but just a bit slow, or doesn’t hold the battery charge, extra RAM and SSD make a huge difference.

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