Poll

My computer wants me to udate to Windows 10.  What is YOUR thought on this?

Go ahead and let it.  It's DaBomb!
1 (50%)
Delete the option.  TOXIC!  Danger, Will Robinson!
0 (0%)
Wait a while (like 6 months) before upgrading. Can't be too hasty with new stuff!
1 (50%)

Total Members Voted: 2

Voting closed: June 18, 2015, 11:21:44 PM

Windows 10

  • 23 replies
  • 11453 views
*

AMonk

  • *****
  • 7819
Windows 10
« on: June 03, 2015, 11:21:44 PM »
Please give me some help/advice.  Thanks. agagagagag
Moderation....in most things...

Re: Windows 10
« Reply #1 on: June 04, 2015, 12:52:57 AM »
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.
when ur a roamin', do as the settled do o_0

*

BrandeX

  • *
  • 1080
Re: Windows 10
« Reply #2 on: June 04, 2015, 01:14:33 AM »
Getting it for free is a limited time offer. Grab it while you can.

Re: Windows 10
« Reply #3 on: July 28, 2015, 09:54:50 PM »
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.
when ur a roamin', do as the settled do o_0

Re: Windows 10
« Reply #4 on: July 29, 2015, 12:21:50 AM »
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.
when ur a roamin', do as the settled do o_0

*

BrandeX

  • *
  • 1080
Re: Windows 10
« Reply #5 on: July 29, 2015, 06:07:24 PM »
Use this to put the normal start menu back: http://www.classicshell.net/

Re: Windows 10
« Reply #6 on: July 29, 2015, 06:44:29 PM »
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?
when ur a roamin', do as the settled do o_0

Re: Windows 10
« Reply #7 on: July 29, 2015, 09:58:07 PM »
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?
when ur a roamin', do as the settled do o_0

*

BrandeX

  • *
  • 1080
Re: Windows 10
« Reply #8 on: July 30, 2015, 12:32:09 AM »
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.

Re: Windows 10
« Reply #9 on: July 30, 2015, 07:35:49 PM »
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.
when ur a roamin', do as the settled do o_0

Re: Windows 10
« Reply #10 on: July 30, 2015, 11:51:38 PM »
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 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
when ur a roamin', do as the settled do o_0

Re: Windows 10
« Reply #11 on: August 04, 2015, 09:14:22 PM »
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.
when ur a roamin', do as the settled do o_0

*

BrandeX

  • *
  • 1080
Re: Windows 10
« Reply #12 on: August 04, 2015, 10:17:22 PM »

Re: Windows 10
« Reply #13 on: August 04, 2015, 11:05:29 PM »
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.
when ur a roamin', do as the settled do o_0

*

old34

  • *
  • 2509
Re: Windows 10
« Reply #14 on: August 05, 2015, 03:54:47 AM »
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

Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad. - B. O'Driscoll.
TIC is knowing that, in China, your fruit salad WILL come with cherry tomatoes AND all slathered in mayo. - old34.