Raoul's China Saloon (V5.0) Beta
The Bar Room => The Bar (ON-TOPIC) => Tech Talk, or If Yer So Damn Smart, What The Hell You Doin' Teachin' English? => Topic started by: AMonk on June 03, 2015, 11:21:44 PM
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Please give me some help/advice. Thanks. agagagagag
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Happened to my computer too. It's nagware Microsoft generously installed for you a while back. If you go into your list of installed updates (Start > Control Panel > Windows Update > Installed Updates) and look for an update called KB3035583, that's what's doing it.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/2906002/operating-systems/mystery-patch-kb-3035583-for-windows-7-and-8-revealed-it-s-a-windows-10-prompter-downloader.html
Uninstalling the update removes the notification. As for what happens if you do any of the actions offered by the notification, beats me. I deleted KB3035583 and will think about Windows 10 some other time.
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Getting it for free is a limited time offer. Grab it while you can.
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I'm experimenting some with Windows 10. I have just today installed build 10240 on ye olde laptop number 2. Obviously, this is pre-release so one can't expect it to look entirely wonderful - there aren't machine specific drivers yet, as far as I know - but, yeah, it looks like shit. If you've seen Office 2013, Windows 10 has that minimalist aesthetic, which I actually like, and I bet it'll look great once proper drivers for my particular graphics card get issued....
Meanwhile, first and strongest impression is there's a buttload of phone-style settings and nonsense to go through and turn off. Like all the ways a phone can spy on you that you normally turn off (right?), like location checking and the syncing of friggin everything. None of which is usual for a pc or a laptop, and it's odd to have to be as suspicious of a new os on a laptop as you would on a phone, but there it is, I guess.
Second impression (which actually came first but is more easily resolved) is, gah! Start menu, where are you?! The Start menu functionality is all there, but rearranged and "improved" by the addition of an Action Center - which one mostly wants to turn off because, once again, it's all phone crap and tablet nonsense. I suppose there's a moderately functional desktop operating system under there as well. I'll find out some other time.
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So I tried some old Win7 (32bit) drivers for my equally old graphics card and they worked. Win10 looks prettier now so I take back my initial impression. The intended Win10 user interface is flatter than Win7 and the icons more cartoonish, which is a change, but it might be that in the end, all that extra phone and tablet stuff notwithstanding, Win10 might - *might* - turn out okay.
I still keep finding things to turn off - like friggen Onedrive - but, plausibly, what I'll end up with, after all this relatively minor tweaking, is the functionality of Win7 with the flatter aesthetic of Win10. Possibly not what Microsoft was going for in a major OS update, but there it is.
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Use this to put the normal start menu back: http://www.classicshell.net/
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I'm hoping I don't have to resort to such hacks. So far I've just been setting up the computer, and with respect to that task Windows 10 is more annoying and inaccessible than Windows 7. On the surface it's easier. But underneath, stuff is hard to locate and control, mostly just because the start menu is crap. But I haven't actually used the machine much for anything yet, so we'll see. Once the tinkering is done, maybe everything'll be okay. I'm hoping too that normal use will show some improvement over Windows 7. Otherwise, why upgrade?
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So after experimenting for a while, playing around with decoration and a few apps - goddammit, they're programs! - meh, it's okay.
Aesthetics
I don't know if the final release will be as pared back as the pre-release version I have, but the aesthetic takes some getting used to. The curvy, frilly Aero frills of Windows 7 are gone. Open windows are meant to look more like sheets of paper than whatever 3d thing they were supposed to be on 7. It's... okay. I like it in Office. For the whole operating systems, it's... minimalist.
Utility
Stuff works. The 3rd party apps I like work. Office works. Internet Exploder continues to suck balls. I swear, I am reasonably proficient in internet things, but since about IE6, Internet Explorer is the only browser I just can't make work. I always get errors of some kind, even in Windows 10 with the IE that came with the OS. Luckily, Windows 10 comes with a pared back, actually functional browser called Microsoft Edge. It's better, and it's the default. Chrome and Firefox work too but they look odd in the new Win10 aesthetic environment. The tab bars look like crap.
Considered Merit So Far
Well, that's hard to judge just yet. Trying to work with the internals is frustrating. I mean, it's Windows, and getting at settings has always been an ordeal, but in Win10 every pathway seems ad hoc, and some stuff seems unfindable. One will need to explore, leave breadcrumbs, make notes on all the arcana. That's my impression, anyway. Like Windows 7, but worse. Plus, lots of phone-and-tablet style functionality - news "apps", weather "apps", etc, which I suppose will be meaningful to someone, but wasted in a working pc. Nonetheless, it all seems to work at least as well as Win7 on this particular laptop. I'll keep it and see how it goes.
I suppose the fact I actually care to test this out means something. Windows 8 completely passed me by. I didn't even give that os a thought. I don't remember why. Just didn't care.
Anyone else have any experiences?
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Still sounds like 8.1 which I used for a bit. I used ClassicShell to turn that in to Win 7 though. I might end up doing the same when the 10 upgrade rolls in.
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I think maybe Microsoft is going for small screen compatibility with this new, severely minimalist aesthetic. I find that and all the phone-related crap in Windows 10 obscurely annoying. I use Windows with large monitors, dammit!
Well, anyway. There's two, maybe three different menu philosophies at work in Windows 10. Windows 7 has probably two: whatever the Start menu does, and then whatever complex explorer thing opens up afterward. Windows 10 has added in phone style "simplicity", with large arrows and simple-minded, barely informative option/explanation screens. Once you get used to it, and to the oddball idiosyncrasies of the back arrows, maybe it's okay. (Back arrows don't always take you back to the screen you came from - sometimes, often, particularly in settings stuff, they take you back to a the more general category of settings the particular one you navigated to comes from - it's disorienting.)
So there's that. And there's how opaque Update has become. There's no longer a Windows Update link in the Control Panel, for instance. If you want to find what's going on, you have to search "update" or something similar. And if you don't have the "Professional" or "Enterprise" edition of Windows 10, you might as well forget about searching, because you're not controlling those updates anyway. Having an operating system doing sometimes large scale downloading, and then altering itself, in the background is... worrisome.
Meanwhile, on more simple usability stuff: installing languages is easy. I forget how I did it, but installing a Chinese language IME was considerably easier than any other Windows I've encountered. I think I just searched "language", discovered an option to "Add a language" and selected Chinese. Boom, done. (Maybe. I think it actually downloaded something from Windows Update, but I'm not sure.)
Lastly, I'm really liking Microsoft Edge as a browser. It's super-minimal, intuitive, and nippy. Unfortunately at present there are no Extensions, so no Adblock and no script controls. Apparently they'll be available around "autumn" (presumably North American autumn).
So ultimately, will I upgrade my main computer now? Short answer: no. Long answer: most people upgrade only when they buy a new computer, so who's going to rush anyway, right?
Windows 10 is the future, probably. It's probably the last numbered Windows there will ever be. In the future it'll all just be "Windows", and you upgrade to whatever version is going whether you like it or not. Or so goes the theory. For that to truly work though, Microsoft has to somehow wind up supported by third-party app creators, people who invent such things as ClassicShell. Ordinary users would customise their Windows experience and boom, everybody happy. It hasn't happened yet though, and it isn't what traditionally happens when you have a Windows machine. So, we'll see. Not even Microsoft is expecting everyone to rush right in and make the change. That "free" upgrade they're offering Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 user is available as an option for one whole year. But maybe in the end it'll probably be worth doing eventually. I actually don't know what the benefits are.
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For the curious, the laptop I've been using for this test is a Lenovo SL400 Thinkpad. In other words, a seven year old device. It also has 2.00GHz Core 2 Duo CPU (old), an independent graphics processing unit (old), 2GB of RAM (old), and an SSD (new). So it's old, but to some degree, tricked-out. It has in any case a bit more grunt than the minimum system requirements (http://www.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/windows-10-specifications) suggest are needed. I think, on this machine, Windows 10 works pretty well. There are trade-offs, but in the long term they might not be that terrible. This is my tentative stamp of approval.
/posted from Windows 10
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In a blow to everything everywhere, Halo Combat Evolved does not work on my Windows 10. Now I'm not a big gamer, I don't do puzzle games or get caught up in fantasy storylines, but I do like my shooters. Halo Combat Evolved - aka Halo 1, ye olden shooter game from 2001 - has so much single player replay value that I keep it around for blowing up aliens from time to time, and it runs fine on Windows 7. It ran fine on this same test PC with Windows 7 too. On Windows 10, it's a big bag of nope. It shows the splash screen and then minimizes to the taskbar, there to burn up 50% of my cpu resources doing, seemingly, nothing. Assorted compatibility tweaks - normally thoroughly unnecessary - do nothing either.
Half Life 2 does work. But Halo, man. I don't know if I can do with my Halo.
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Try this: https://www.virtualbox.org/
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Turns out to be a driver issue.
When initially run, Halo minimized to the taskbar. Then, watching cpu usage in Task Manager, every time I tried to maximize (which would result in Halo going full black screen then minimizing again), I saw some Nvidia user experience program trying to do something. So on a whim, I disabled the discrete graphics. On just integrated graphics, Halo did run (unplayably slowly). Thus, graphics card driver issue. After that, on another whim, when I re-enabled discrete graphics, lo and behold, Halo runs now.
The magical world of computer maintenance.
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Turns out to be a driver issue.
After that, on another whim, when I re-enabled discrete graphics, lo and behold, Halo runs now.
The magical world of computer maintenance Windows. bibibibibi bibibibibi mmmmmmmmmm llllllllll
There fixed that for you. Get a Mac. Spend less time futzing with stuff and more time being productive. Though, I've come to believe you're a futzer-at-heart
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Ahem. The term of art is "tinkerer" - has no hacking skillzors, but likes to google product info anyway. For instance, I just discovered you can get Macs in black.
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One thing about Windows 10 (and I guess this was true of Windows 8 too), is rather than being an operating system you add things to, there's shit you have to remove. Well, you don't have to. But if you wish to retain control over what gets communicated from your PC, then there's a lot to be suspicious of. For starters, every version of Windows 10 except Enterprise will send information about your computer and your computer use back to Microsoft *and their partners*.
Furthermore, Microsoft provides a lot of apparently simple apps as default and who the hell knows what they do once they're finished displaying your pictures, movies, documents, etc. How closely are they tied to this "telemetry" Microsoft collects, and why are they so simple to use you can't change any settings? Replacing them with genuinely useful programs is easy(ish). Removing them is difficult. You have to screw around with Powershell.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is not new. Google and Apple do this too. Further than that though, large scale exploitation of unowned resources is not in the least new. Oil, coal, gas, fisheries, forests, the goddamned air you used to breath... and now "telemetry". As with all unowned resources, a generation too late we're going to discover that, well shit, all that crap the companies collected and exploited for profit, we did own it, no matter how often they said it was just stuff they found.
I think probably Windows 10 can be made mostly safe to use. I'm annoyed at all the crap I have to learn first. What set me off this time was discovering that Microsoft has finally done it, they've included directories on your computer that you can't access without complicated shenanigans akin to the gaining of "root access" in Android. (\Program Files\WindowsApps) The difference with Android is huge numbers of people do it. In Windows, it's a throw your hands in the air kind of deal and you have to ask is it all worth it.
And it is all worth it? It might not be. I haven't worked out what benefits Windows 10 offers yet.
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I'm gonna give it a miss until we get to 10.1
Much like windows 8, Microsoft will bow to pressure and remove some of the useless and invasive crap IMHO.
Problem is and will continue to be that no matter what they do, a lot of the world is still running on XP like ATMs, POS machines etc... yes, you money is hidden behind an XP interface. aoaoaoaoao aoaoaoaoao
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Nolefan and Calach --> What about Apple? Is it better or the same thing with a different name? mmmmmmmmmm
If I was to buy a new computer, which would offer the best system?
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Of Windows 10, I would say it is presently a system in transition. Functionally, it is presently no worse than Windows 7. That is likely to improve with software updates. But be that as it may, Windows itself has changed. Or is trying to. In fact, Windows 10 is a mutant of sorts. The basic, independent operating system meant to make one machine work for you like it always did is still (mostly) present in Windows 10. But, seems to me, influenced heavily by the story of phones, Microsoft is also offering simplified default apps (so that more complex, more capable apps can be held back and offered for money in the App Store), and making internal operation of the os invisible while hoping consumers will move more of their content into "the cloud" (which by default Microsoft would prefer be the OneDrive cloud, offering perhaps sign-in services like Office360). I am suspicious of these changes. They put a lot of control into Microsoft's hands. Which isn't really an issue if you're not as paranoid as me. But it is still true that Windows 10 is two kinds of system squished together. I don't know how it rates compared to OS X.
Windows 10 is not bad. It just seems to require more thinking about consequences than other Windows have seemed to in the past. It's making me angry, because I actually would like to try the newy newish newness of it for real, but I want to know what I'm losing in the bargain and I'm not sure.
Probably Apple does this stuff better. Seems to me synchronising every device and connecting all the things has been the Apple province for a while. Every Apple person seems to talk about their toys in that way anyway.
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Nolefan and Calach --> What about Apple? Is it better or the same thing with a different name? mmmmmmmmmm
If I was to buy a new computer, which would offer the best system?
I'm an IT guy by trade... I recommend the best solution to every user based on their need, may it be windows, linux or mac. for my own personal purposes, I've used macs since 1992. that should mean something.
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Anyone using Win10 yet?
I've had it for a while on the number two laptop, mostly just to see how awful it is. I've got Win7 on the main laptop and don't think I'll be changing soon. Win10 even looks shady. It's chunky and has no sheen. The browser, Edge, lacks extensions, and does an odd thing where it never remembers where it opened last. I often have to move it back into place. Plus, the sheer number and variety of things you have to turn off before the OS will stop calling home is unpleasant. I sincerely doubt I found them all. So how many apps want to check in with servers? What telemetry is collected? How many chunks of your actual data are sent off for inspection? What are all the settings you have to watch? I'll never know. (http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/windows-10-doesnt-offer-much-privacy-by-default-heres-how-to-fix-it/)
I reinstalled the whole thing yesterday, Windows 10 Enterprise this time, mostly just to see if I could, and to see if there really is an Win10 that doesn't track. That last little tricky bit where you have to use the group policy editor.... and I still don't know if everything's turned off.
Also, when the new installation starts up, instead of the "Windows is starting..." message, you get this:
Hi
We're happy you're here
Lots of great features to get excited about
Getting everything ready for you
Let's start
We're happy you are here?! It's my computer in my apartment.
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Two modestly tweaky tools for making Windows 10 less hateful...
Disassembler0's Win 10 Intial Setup Script (https://github.com/Disassembler0/Win10-Initial-Setup-Script) - for when you first run Windows 10 and want to do most of your settings tweaks and bloatware removal in one hit. It won't break anything, but it definitely changes things (for the better, imo). read up on what it changes before you run it.
and
Open Shell (a continuation of ClassicShell) (https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu) - a start menu replacement that allows among other things the replacement of that weird touch screen-centric Win10 start menu with a very much more familiar Win7 Start menu.
In coming days I'll definitely use the Initial Script, but I might see if I can get used to the Win10 Start thing before getting too nostalgic for Win7.
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This I didn't know, Windows 7 end-of-life is one year and two weeks away - January 14, 2020... Technically, development support for Windows 7 has been over for some time. The upcoming EoL is for security support.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsforbusiness/end-of-windows-7-support
So... Windows 10. You can still get it for free if you want to do an in-place upgrade.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/heres-how-you-can-still-get-a-free-windows-10-upgrade/
Meanwhile...
now being the proud owner of a skylake processor driven laptop, I basically have to use windows 10. (As I understand it, Windows 7 can be installed on skylake processor machines, but driver support technically doesn't exist, meaning it's just you and Google if you want to find drivers for your hardware...)
The easiest way to chop out all the windows 10 crap and leave behind the essential stand alone os is to get the LTSB version, now currently being called "LTSC" if you get the one based on windows 10 version 1809, but that requires an enterprise volume license....
Second easiest way is to get Pro or Enterprise and run some powershell script such as Disassembler0's. They tend to disable OneDrive, uninstall Cortana, cut out the ads on the Start menu, remove weird stuff like the Candy Crush and XBox hooks, and so on. After a while you can more or less have a Windows 7 look-a-like that's Windows 10 underneath, and it's mostly okay except when you try to change any settings (and you get the stupid Settings app instead of Control Panel) or you use the Start menu at all...
I'm wondering what my mother will like.