monophoto
Member
I leave my computer running continuously rather than restart it when I need to use it. Early this morning, our local power company did some maintenance switching which meant that we had a brief outage - long enough to have to remember how to reprogram the clock radio in the bedroom, and reset the clocks on the microwave and oven. And when I came into my office, my computer was powered down and had to be restarted. And of course, there was a Windows update waiting to be installed the next time the computer restarted.
The update/restart took an unusually long time, and at about 15% of the way, there was an onscreen message saying that it had encountered a problem and was undoing the changes that it had made. But then the counter restarted and it proceeded to completion. Everything seems to be normal except that nothing happens when I left-click the Windows start button at the left end of the task bar. I can right-click that button and get the alternate menu, but some of the options do not work. For example, if I right click on the Windows icon, and then try to choose 'Settings' from the menu, the Settings window pops up, but then closes after a few seconds.
I've poked around in Googleworld and found that this is a known issue with Windows 10, particularly those installations that were upgraded from an earlier version of Windows. My computer came with XP - I have the original XP discs, but because Microsoft forced the upgrade to Windows 10, I don't have Windows 10 discs.
The information I've found describes some pretty involved steps to recover the Settings menu, but then conclude with the 'if none of these steps work, reinstall the operating system' which is obviously not an option for me.
I can live with the computer with this flaw, at least for now. But what I'm wondering is whether some future Windows update will correct this problem?
(My computer is about 10 years old, and I know that the best solution would be to replace my computer. I've not had any serious problems with it up to this point. But other than this problem, it's working just fine and I still have more than enough memory for my needs, so I would prefer to not have to take that step yet.)
The update/restart took an unusually long time, and at about 15% of the way, there was an onscreen message saying that it had encountered a problem and was undoing the changes that it had made. But then the counter restarted and it proceeded to completion. Everything seems to be normal except that nothing happens when I left-click the Windows start button at the left end of the task bar. I can right-click that button and get the alternate menu, but some of the options do not work. For example, if I right click on the Windows icon, and then try to choose 'Settings' from the menu, the Settings window pops up, but then closes after a few seconds.
I've poked around in Googleworld and found that this is a known issue with Windows 10, particularly those installations that were upgraded from an earlier version of Windows. My computer came with XP - I have the original XP discs, but because Microsoft forced the upgrade to Windows 10, I don't have Windows 10 discs.
The information I've found describes some pretty involved steps to recover the Settings menu, but then conclude with the 'if none of these steps work, reinstall the operating system' which is obviously not an option for me.
I can live with the computer with this flaw, at least for now. But what I'm wondering is whether some future Windows update will correct this problem?
(My computer is about 10 years old, and I know that the best solution would be to replace my computer. I've not had any serious problems with it up to this point. But other than this problem, it's working just fine and I still have more than enough memory for my needs, so I would prefer to not have to take that step yet.)
