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 It has been 15 days since my last post but my last post was about our cat Oliver and our best buddy who we said goodbye to.  Some may think it strange but we have his ashes back home now in a cat urn.  It's only his ashes but to Julie and me, Oliver is back home now. 

It's now time to round the corner and get back to ham radio blogging. In my last radio post, I had just finished rebuilding my PC  and it's working great. What I mean by great is, it's fast, startup happens almost right away and all the radio programs work great. The other big event computer-wise was I finally upgraded from Win7 to Win10. In the past, I have posted about my going back and forth regarding upgrading to Win10. My first upgrade was a free upgrade that Microsoft offered if you were operating Win7. I did that (installed Win10 over top of Win7) and it was a disaster I was having sound device issues, some of my radio programs intermittently were giving me issues and some of my Windows startups had error messages and failed to start. I was told some or if not all my issues were related to me installing Win10 overtop of Win7 but at that point in time, I was not willing to wipe my drive clean and install Win10 and all my programs.

After my complete PC upgrade, I purchased Win10 and did a clean install on my new solid-state hard drive. I am happy to say that I have had no issues.  I did some research regarding Windows 10 and how on its own it installs updates at startup. I had seen many a post on radio sites how one day Win10 OS was without issue and the next startup there was issues.  Many times it was due to the fact that an update was the issue that created a problem! I was reading that a very recent Windows update if you had a solid-state hard drive and ran Windows defrag program it would not defrag your drive but erase the drive! As a side note, one should not defrag a solid-state drive in the first place. But there were many upset Windows users who had solid-state hard drives that were wiped clean!

Back to Windows 10 updating issue, I solved that by downloading a program that turns off Windows automatic update.  You can also turn Windows update off for 7 days at a time from within the Windows update program itself but you have to remember to reset it after 7 days or you will be updated. There are a few free programs out there that will stop Windows from updating The one I use is called Windows update blocker but there are others.... WUB, Windows update manager or WuMgr and Winupdatestop. The Windows update blocker program I use works great. 

I do believe it is important to update Windows as it is very important and keeps Windows running smooth and secure. Now you ask I feel windows updates are important but I have an update blocker installed on my PC? Let me explain the method to my madness, each month on the second Tuesday Microsoft sends out their update to our PC's. These updates at first do have issues and over the course of a few weeks Microsoft learns of them and sends out fixes.  I don't want to be a guinea pig for Microsofts updates and the best way for me to deal with this is to update after most if not all issues have been dealt with. I don't have a Microsoft crystal ball to know when to update but I do belong to a group that provides its members with a safe time to allow your OS to update. 

I have mentioned this group in a past post, the group is called Ask Woody and for a donation, it provides valuable information, posts and user groups for Windows users.  The group informs its users of safe update times to update as well as they will sectionalize the updates informing users of a certain update at this time should be avoided.  I do know about Mac and Linux OS's but I have tried both and for the radio programs I want run these OS's just don't cut it for me. 

Well, it's time for me to say 73 and thanks for stopping by the blog.....see you soon with a new post. 

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