I recently fixed up a laptop. It’s specs were incredibly low-end to the point that I was surprised. it was a Lenovo G505 with a 1Ghz processor and only 1GB of RAM, running Windows 8.1.

The system was severely underpowered for all the preinstalled crap it came with, and was incredibly frustrating to deal with. This brings me to another mild rant- Anti-virus programs.

I’ve previously written about AV software and my views on them, however they do have their place. One huge issue is that they can corrupt the system beyond repair. In this case, the system had had Kaspersky Pure 3.0 installed. However, after uninstalling it, Windows Defender refused to activate, and in fact trying to run the service manually claimed the file was corrupted. I looked it up online but was unable to find a workable solution. I ended up performing a Windows Refresh, which took the system back to Windows 8 and returned all the preinstalled crapware. I removed as much of that as I could, removed McAffee and was able to re-activate Windows Defender, and then started Windows Update.

It took over 12 hours to run the updates, and the fun part is that they progress bar during download doesn’t work- it stayed at 0% for over 4 hours, despite viewing the windowsupdate.log showing that it was, in fact, downloading updates.

I was able to get the system into a fairly usable state again, though the limited hardware of the system certainly doesn’t help. I am amazed that my laptop from 2008 could actually be better than any modern laptop at all- but it apparently is.

It is incredibly frustrating when you look at the software landscape and see garbage like reimage and “optimizer” software which isn’t worth it’s weight in dog crap; They trick users into purchasing the software with incredible promises that they cannot possibly keep, then they try to assuage people’s issues by sending out their marketing cronies to lie on internet forums, as well as post fake reviews for their product.