Wrong forum, sorry.
Being the family IT geek I’ve just sorted my elderly uncle out with a new laptop, a reasonable spec samsung with windows 8.
I took it away for a few days to familiarise myself with it, set it up in a way that he’ll find easy to use and install a few essentials and didn’t encounter any problems so took it over to his to show him how to use it.
All was fine until I tried to install google earth and no matter what I tried it wouldn’t let me, giving me an error message saying file verification failed. So I then tried the google earth browser plugin and had the same problem. Then google chrome – the same. I’d already downloaded and installed firefox but tried re-downloading to see if the problem was just google software, again the install failed due to a corrupt file.
My next thought was that I’d installed a couple of windows updates since installing firefox and maybe these were the cause so tried a system restore but this didn’t work either.
I’ve also tried disabling smart screen and defender as some installs triggered smart screen protection.
I’ve tried wireless and wired internet.
So I’ve left it with him for now and will be going back in a couple of days to try again. Aside from a full factory restore I’m all out of ideas, googling the problem is bringing up very little and what I’ve found I’ve tried and it hasn’t worked.
The only other thing different is that I’m using his internet rather than mine but I cant see that being the problem.
Any thoughts on what I can try?
Any windows 8 users encountering similar problems?
Is windows 8 just a big pile of ****?