Windows 8 resumed

A further report on the business first reported on at reference 1.

Successfully remove a Norton license from a PC which no longer needs it, thus freeing it up for present purposes.

The PC in question did not have a wireless adapter, so I moved it next to the BT router and plugged it in using a spare yellow cable handily provided by BT. Certain amount of confusion caused by my having knocked out the router power plug from its socket in the course of plugging the PC in next door.

Blue lights return to the router and some evidence of Internet activity appears on the PC, with the Windows 8 tiles appearing to have been activated. We have, for example, some weather. But Internet Explorer fails to fire up. So no way to install either Chrome or Norton. And how are BT going to get to look at the thing over their Citrix link?

Phone up BT, at which point the PC announces that it would like to do some updates. So we close the call while it does them. A batch of 37 updates followed by a second batch of 26 updates, all of which takes an hour or more and several restarts. Clearly the Internet is available to the PC for those sorts of purposes; there is hope.

Phone up BT again, the operator talks me through jiggling around with Internet Explorer and we eventually get it going. She is now able to take over the screen in the usual way and her first move is to install Chrome, saying it is always handy to have two in case one goes awol, which they do from time to time.

After some investigation she pronounces the screen drivers (by then installed?) to be ancient but the best available. In any event, the screen problems seem to have more or less disappeared.

The waking & sleeping problems have disappeared.

So, after two or three hours, all done. An entirely satisfactory bit of support from the BT Help Desk. Well worth the monthly subscription I pay for it.

I might say in passing that I have also learned that Norton is surplus to requirements in the Windows 8 world, with Windows 8 coming with its own on-board virus protection. Norton, in any case, rather old-hat and has slipped well down the rankings of such things. So all the fussing around with Norton turned out to be unnecessary and I shall not install the spare license on this PC and I shall ponder about taking it off the other two before renewal comes around next year.

Presumably all rather bad news for the Norton Corporation, very much, I think, a one product company.

Now off to Maplin's to see if I can get a cheap wifi adapter to plug into the back of the PC. Being offline no longer seems like such a good thing, whatever the man from the DT might have said.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/windows-8-offline.html.