Well I have just recovered from another major crackup with my laptop. I have really no idea how I did it. My system is a HP Tx2z Touchsmart with a Crucial SSD, 8 gb, Win 8 Pro 64, Win 7 HP 64, Ubuntu 12.10 64, multiboot all on separate partitions. This crackup makes it about 4 or 5 times since Oct 26 since I installed Win 8 pro. What happened this time was, I was using Windows 8 and everything was working good, nice 'n slick, I wasn't installing anything not doing anything radical or weird and decided I would restart into to go into another OS. I logoff, hit restart and wait for computer to reboot(I was taking a chance but I'll get into that later) I pick a different OS(Ubuntu 12.10, but doesn't matter get similar results for Win7 other times) and reboot begins. Reboot goes through grub and part way into Ubuntu then stops, Caplock light blinking. After waiting a minute or two I power the system down. Now I use the power button again, indicator lights come on, fan comes on, but black screen, no bios, no cursor, no nuthin. Power down, pull off battery leave things to cool off a while. Restart black screen again but after waiting a little there's printing on the screen. HP's menu comes up,and a "No Boot device"message. Running HP's HDD test got "No Hard Disk Detected". I shutdown and powered up again, this time things look normal, go into Win7 and everything works OK do sfc scan no problems, scan disk no problems. This is fairly routine now.
Other times if I tried to restart into Win 7 in similar circumstances I would have to do a system recovery from Win7 DVD. So far it works and it actually surprized me how well it works but I always lose something because it deletes the latest restore point, if Ubuntu's grub has a problem usually it's easier to get things back to normal.
To the best of my recollection this doesn't happen rebooting from Ubuntu, or Win 7, and never happened before I installed Win 8 Pro
When I use Win 8 now I never hibernate, sleep, or restart when I quit, always shutdown. Win 7 is default boot. Quickstart on Win 8 is disabled. If I see the blue screen Win 8 start menu on startup I quit and restart til I get text based menu to start OS. I have all updates, latest firmware on SSD, use MS antivirus, everything vanilla as possible. I've had all 3 versions of Win 8, (Dev preview, Consumer preview, Release preview) on this machine in dual or multiboot and never had any problems like this. This is hairiest most delicate version of Win 8 I've run so far. I can hardly wait for updates.
The HP Tx2z was a test platform for Win 8 while it was in development. Now HP says it won't provide Win 8 support for any system built prior to 2011. Which I guess means no bios updates or driver updates. Oh well, a lot of the Win 7 drivers work fine. N-trig provided a beta digitizer driver in Aug 2012 but nothing since. I used to go to Touchsmart Dev Zone web site to get the latest on this computer for tips about using Win 8, that's been shutdown since mid October 2012(nice timing). Of course this site had no official affiliation with HP. Googling "HP Tx2z Windows 8" doesn't get me near the number of hits it used to a few months ago. Puzzling that.
If I could, I think I would buy the Release Preview version of Win 8 from MS but that's a slim chance. I think maybe one of these times my machine is going crack up for good if I keep using this version of Windows 8. Windows 8 is starting to look more & more like shelfware to me, for this machine anyway, it's just too risky. I think I've just been lucky so far. Do a search on this website for "brick" and you'll find others with similar or worse problems than I have.
I like the concept of Win 8, but what I think I'm going to do is try to make my Win 7 more touch friendly, get some kind of shell to make it resemble Win 8, metro-ize it so to speak. Talk about going against the grain eh? Ubuntu is actually starting to look fairly good. It's pretty quick and after updates it boots into kernel panic only 1/10 the time instead of 1/3 time and it looks more similar to my Win 7 setup than Win 8 does. It also only takes up about 4 gig of space. But on the other hand the touch aspect is deficient, no scrolling, zooming etc touch is just to select progs and configuring it looks like steep learning curve.
IMHO probably the best way to get Win 8 is installed on a touchscreen computer that was designed to run it and I'm not sure if that would be worth it. Touchscreen is nice but it's really no big deal and it kinda gets boring after a while.
Other times if I tried to restart into Win 7 in similar circumstances I would have to do a system recovery from Win7 DVD. So far it works and it actually surprized me how well it works but I always lose something because it deletes the latest restore point, if Ubuntu's grub has a problem usually it's easier to get things back to normal.
To the best of my recollection this doesn't happen rebooting from Ubuntu, or Win 7, and never happened before I installed Win 8 Pro
When I use Win 8 now I never hibernate, sleep, or restart when I quit, always shutdown. Win 7 is default boot. Quickstart on Win 8 is disabled. If I see the blue screen Win 8 start menu on startup I quit and restart til I get text based menu to start OS. I have all updates, latest firmware on SSD, use MS antivirus, everything vanilla as possible. I've had all 3 versions of Win 8, (Dev preview, Consumer preview, Release preview) on this machine in dual or multiboot and never had any problems like this. This is hairiest most delicate version of Win 8 I've run so far. I can hardly wait for updates.
The HP Tx2z was a test platform for Win 8 while it was in development. Now HP says it won't provide Win 8 support for any system built prior to 2011. Which I guess means no bios updates or driver updates. Oh well, a lot of the Win 7 drivers work fine. N-trig provided a beta digitizer driver in Aug 2012 but nothing since. I used to go to Touchsmart Dev Zone web site to get the latest on this computer for tips about using Win 8, that's been shutdown since mid October 2012(nice timing). Of course this site had no official affiliation with HP. Googling "HP Tx2z Windows 8" doesn't get me near the number of hits it used to a few months ago. Puzzling that.
If I could, I think I would buy the Release Preview version of Win 8 from MS but that's a slim chance. I think maybe one of these times my machine is going crack up for good if I keep using this version of Windows 8. Windows 8 is starting to look more & more like shelfware to me, for this machine anyway, it's just too risky. I think I've just been lucky so far. Do a search on this website for "brick" and you'll find others with similar or worse problems than I have.
I like the concept of Win 8, but what I think I'm going to do is try to make my Win 7 more touch friendly, get some kind of shell to make it resemble Win 8, metro-ize it so to speak. Talk about going against the grain eh? Ubuntu is actually starting to look fairly good. It's pretty quick and after updates it boots into kernel panic only 1/10 the time instead of 1/3 time and it looks more similar to my Win 7 setup than Win 8 does. It also only takes up about 4 gig of space. But on the other hand the touch aspect is deficient, no scrolling, zooming etc touch is just to select progs and configuring it looks like steep learning curve.
IMHO probably the best way to get Win 8 is installed on a touchscreen computer that was designed to run it and I'm not sure if that would be worth it. Touchscreen is nice but it's really no big deal and it kinda gets boring after a while.
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My Computer
System One
-
- OS
- win 7, 8.1, Ubuntu
- Computer type
- PC/Desktop
- System Manufacturer/Model
- HP tx2z
- CPU
- AMD Turion x2 Ultra 2.4
- Motherboard
- Quanta
- Memory
- 8 GB
- Graphics Card(s)
- ATI Radeon 3200
- Hard Drives
- Crucial M4 256gb ssd