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from the Have-you-tried-turning-it-off-and-restarting... dept.
Windows 7 will not go gentle into that good night: Ageing OS refuses to shut down:
It's not only end of support that Windows 7 diehards have to contend with. Late last week a new problem emerged – systems that refuse to shut down.
Complaints have been widespread on Reddit, Microsoft's official Answers forum and on on SevenForums. Some users also reported other issues, such as not being able to view their documents folder in Explorer.
Fortunately the problem seems to be fixable in most cases. The favourite solution is to tweak the UAC (User Account Control) settings with the Group Policy setting "Run all administrators in Admin Approval Mode" or the equivalent registry setting. Then run gpupdate/force, and everything goes back to normal.
There are other workarounds, such as using shutdown from the command prompt, or logging off and then shutting down.
This does not explain the reason for the problem, which appeared mysteriously on or around 7 February. There may be a clue in two other popular fixes.
Have any Soylentils run into this problem? How did you get around it?
(Score: 5, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday February 12 2020, @06:22PM (3 children)
Yes, there is a particular reason. It's called "Obstinate Old Woman Hard Headedness".
Her first exposure to computers involved DOS 3.2, Windows V1, V2, and V3.11, then Win9x. We moved on to XP, then when XP support was ending, I managed to get her onto Ubuntu. Things went along nicely, until Ubuntu started to force Unity on users. She played along, looking at various distros, then ordered a new computer for herself with a Win7 install disk. She just wasn't going to learn and relearn stuff on different distros.
Today, I think there's a small chance of getting her back on Ubuntu, with the Mate desktop environment. Like, maybe if her desktop dies a hard death, and she's desparate to play her silly games. Farmville and the like. Short of beating her up, and holding her grandchildren hostage, it's only a small chance. If Microsoft succeeds in pushing Win10 on her computer, she will probably bitch, moan, and curse, then finally accept Win10.
Oh - forget the grandchildren as hostage thing. They'll just eat all of my ice cream, cookies, potato chips, candy. No way do I win that scenario.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 12 2020, @07:27PM
Fascinating! An in depth look into Runaway's domestic life! Just fascinating.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 12 2020, @11:19PM (1 child)
Problem found.
You should have gotten her onto something that was not going to update itself and change its look and feel at the whims of someone else.
My system runs fvwm2, and my desktop has looked the same now through multiple Slackware upgrades for somewhere going on 20-25 about years. The monitors have gotten larger, the machines faster, and the drives bigger, but none of my controls decided to move themselves from the window title bar to the top left corner of the screen because someone else wanted them moved there.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Thursday February 13 2020, @02:11AM
I don't know how familiar you are with Ubuntu. At the point in time that I showed it to her, and she accepted it as her desktop, Ubuntu was still pretty new. It was just another Linux distro, offering all the same features as any other distro. The only differences between Debian and Ubuntu, was that Ubuntu solved some of Debian's installation headaches. You had all the same desktop environments, all the same software, everything was same-same, just a little easier.
Unity and Gnome3 happened about the same time. The choices were to switch over to an LTE version of Ubuntu, upgrade to Unity, change distros, or go back to Windows.
So, yes, in retrospect, Ubuntu was a mistake. But there were no real warning signs when we installed her Ubuntu OS.