Advice on preparing a laptop for sale

[Jason]

And you mentioned the buyer isn't that skilled with computers so probably wouldn't know how to undelete files anyway.

[buster]

Actually Jason, Mike was mistaken. He, understandably, mistook his young age, say 14, and his almost complete inability to speak English (newly arrived from Asia), as a sign of unfamiliarity with computers. You would have enjoyed the next part Jason.

He opened a terminal, wrote a bit of code with lightning speed, and watched as all kinds of data appeared neatly on the screen. He chuckled and said, we think, " Most good. Buy with happiness." Or something like that. Then he half bowed with a smile on his face, and shook each of our  hands, went outside and got on an electric bike, and disappeared into the darkness. Just like a tv show!

And Mike had the gall to say, "I bet I could have got 25 bucks more."

You missed something quite interesting Jason.

[fox]

Harry, you really missed your calling! You should have been a writer, or at least an English teacher. 

Good seeing you at the MUG yesterday; do come again.

[buster]

Sorry Mike. I made you out to be a unpleasant, selfish person. Which you may be anyway.  But a neat thing like that happening at Tim Horton's needs some kind of ending to the story or it just ends with a thud. So Jason, what Mike actually said instead of what I wrote, was, "Nice kid."

So does that have any ring to it? Compared to making a bit of fun at the expense of Dr MIke?

[Jason]

Great story! And yes, the first version is the best

[buster]

" presently, it is installing a Windows 10 1803 update"

This is taken from earlier in the thread. On the old desktop computer I have resuscitated in the basement, and you read about, it is up to 1903. BUT... Checked my everyday laptop that resides comfortable near food and a fridge upstairs, it has updated to only 1803!

Odd, but not worth the effort to track down.

[buster]

Positive proof that Microsoft monitors EVERYTHING - I swear on my goddess Athena that after I posted that lack of an update, I went upstairs and checked, just out of interest, for updates on the laptop. We're talking 5, 10 minutes later. There it was: Preparing for cumulative update 1903.

Microsoft reads our forum threads! Scary!

[Jason]

I previously believed that these big updates (i.e. 1803, 1903) require you to go to the Update Assistant to apply them, at least initially. Even though we don't see much difference as users, it changes enough under the hood that you don't want to just push it out to everyone without any warning Was trying to find evidence of this because it was just a guess on my part having recently installed Windows 10 freshly on two machines, and I found this update from Microsoft dated July 16, 2019:

The Windows 10 May 2019 Update is available for any user who manually selects “Check for updates” via Windows Update on a device that does not have a safeguard hold for issues already detected. If you are not offered the update, please check below for any known issues that may affect your device.

It may be that it would have come to you in the coming weeks as well because Microsoft rolls out updates gradually instead of to everyone at once unless you check for updates manually as above. That's probably the more correct interpretation.

[fox]

Well it turns out that the May 19 update did not show up on my xps via Windows Update, but it did show up when I went to the MS download site for Windows 10. The Update Assistant from there gave me the option to update now, and I downloaded and installed that update (1903). I was on that site to download a copy of Windows 10 that I can put on a usb drive in case of emergency. (If and when I ever sell this laptop, I'll have to get it back to its original state, and as you know, I somehow blew that with the older xps I just sold!) Apparently, the Windows 10 license on my xps is digital, and can be detected by an installer or repair disk, so I don't need a license number.