Windows 10 updates?

[Namir]

Has anyone on this web site updated from Windows 7, 8, 8.1 to Windows 10? Did the update go smooth?

Namir

[Massimo Gnerucci]

(07-30-2015 06:04 PM)Namir Wrote:  Has anyone on this web site updated from Windows 7, 8, 8.1 to Windows 10? Did the update go smooth?

Namir

I did a 8.1 -> 10 upgrade yesterday.
All went smooth but my firewall/antimalware and System imaging software do not have an updated version (yet) so the first was uninstalled during the upgrade and the second shows as unregistered...

[BobVA]

Three machines went well. Two were OEM Windows 8.1/64 bit and one was an upgrade edition of Win 7/32 bit. All three were via the "GWX" in-place upgrade process.

Although the upgrades went without a hitch, but I did have some difficulty activating Windows 10 on the two OEM 8.1 upgrades, due to timeouts from the Microsoft activation servers, but eventually got that sorted out.

I'm holding off on upgrading my main Win7 box - need to do a drive backup first.

Regards,
Bob

[Bill (Smithville NJ)]

I just finished updating my wife's old laptop today. Took about an hour and went fine.

It's an old Dell laptop, dual core AMD, 2 GB memory. A bit out of date now since it originally came with XP on it. This past weekend, I put a 120gb SSD drive in it and installed a fresh copy of Windows 7. Then forced the update to Windows 10. So the system really had nothing but a base Win 7 on it.

One nice thing I see after the upgrade to Win 10 is that when I Hibernate the system, the hibernate file is only the size of the actual memory used (about 900 Meg) - not the entire 2 GB. Takes about 5 seconds to Hibernate and about 10 seconds to start up from hibernation. Part of the speed is, I'm sure, from the SSD, but having a lot smaller hibernation file really helps also.

I plan on waiting awhile before trying to upgrade my production desktop computer. I will probably install a new hard drive, install fresh copy of Windows 7, and then do a upgrade to Windows 10. That way I can always boot back to my existing system, if something goes wrong. Plus gives me a chance to reinstall only those programs I really use and can have a cleaner system.

Bill
Smithville, NJ

[rprosperi]

(07-30-2015 11:19 PM)Bill (Smithville NJ) Wrote:  ...then forced the update to Windows 10.

Bill - How do you force it? I imagine I am 847,567,432nd in line, so if there's a way to jump the line, I'd appreciate it.

I have a several machines waiting to proceed...

I also have a Sony Vaio Win-7 Notebook which I am told cannot be upgraded to Win-10 since Sony has not provided updated Video drivers. It's one of those hybrid video setups which uses Intel in-the-mobo video for "energy-saving" and switches to an NVidia discrete card for "performance mode". I'm truly amazed it worked so well with original drivers, and am not really surprised. I'll wait a few months and try again, but likely Sony's idea is that I should buy a new Win-10 PC. But surprise - it won't be a Sony!

[Gerson W. Barbosa]

(07-31-2015 12:01 AM)rprosperi Wrote:  I imagine I am 847,567,432nd in line, so if there's a way to jump the line, I'd appreciate it.

I also forced the upgrade from Win 7 to 10 this morning, using the following link:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-.../windows10

[Katie Wasserman]

I'm following this thread with interest because I feel no need to upgrade to Windows 10 at all. Given that many (all?) of us are into old technology that works well I'm baffled at the desire to mess around with the latest and buggiest technology out there.

I have a lot of computers, many still running WinXP, I'm of the mind to let Windows 10 get debugged by everyone else and waiting until I have to install it. While I can enjoy beta-testing a calculator I want a computer I can count on and that works with all the "stuff" I have plugged into it.

Usually I see the interest in exploring many of the same things that other people here find interesting, but in this case I fell exactly the opposite. What am I missing out on?

[Bill (Smithville NJ)]

(07-31-2015 12:01 AM)rprosperi Wrote:  

(07-30-2015 11:19 PM)Bill (Smithville NJ) Wrote:  ...then forced the update to Windows 10.

Bill - How do you force it? I imagine I am 847,567,432nd in line, so if there's a way to jump the line, I'd appreciate it.

I had read the CNET article and then went to the Windows site. Worked fine.

CNET Article

In my case, I didn't even reserve a copy. After I had installed Windows 7, I then spent the next two hours doing Windows Update until I had installed all the Win 7 updates; at that point, I received the update message that I could Reserve Windows 10. I then just went to the windows site and did the update to Windows 10. The last check was to make sure it got Authenticated.

The only item that didn't update was the video driver. In Windows 10, ended up with the standard Microsoft Driver. I'll have to see if I can upgrade the video to the ATI driver. But overall, I was pleased with the upgrade.

Bill
Smithville, NJ

[Garth Wilson]

Windows 10 may be free, but it comes at a huge price to your privacy

Windows 10 automatically shares your Wi-Fi password, blowing a hole in enterprise security, experts warn

[Bill (Smithville NJ)]

(07-31-2015 01:05 AM)Garth Wilson Wrote:  Windows 10 may be free, but it comes at a huge price to your privacy

Windows 10 automatically shares your Wi-Fi password, blowing a hole in enterprise security, experts warn

The Sky is Falling!! The Sky is Falling!!

I've read these articles and many others. Like ALL computers, cell phones, and other devices today, you need to be careful what you agree to.

First thing I did after installing Win 10 to my Laptop was to turn off the Wi-Fi sharing features. Also turned off Cortana. It would be nice if they were defaulted off and then asked you before turning on. Of course, it will be interesting to see if Microsoft tries to re-turn them back on in a future update.

My computers do NOT have Microsoft accounts. Well - I have a cheap 8" windows tablet I bought which I did set up with a Microsoft account. I bought it mainly to check out the MS App store and didn't want to pollute my other computers.

I'm trying to remember - I don't think I have ever shared the password to my home system with anyone - including my family members. In fact, they are not allowed to even touch my production computer. My granddaughter once wanted to check her Facebook page, and I made her use her cell phone.

When it comes to computers and cell phones, I am not a "sharer".
No Facebook, etc.

But it is getting harder to not accidently share - which is what they want you to do.

Bill
Smithville, NJ

[rprosperi]

(07-31-2015 12:45 AM)Katie Wasserman Wrote:  Given that many (all?) of us are into old technology that works well I'm baffled at the desire to mess around with the latest and buggiest technology out there.

If you're running Win-7 and don't like the improvements Win-10 offers, then I agree, stay where you are, and come back in a few months.

If you're running XP/Vista, it's OK to keep them as long as these are not your primary internet access machines; they're just not safe, and will keep getting worse. But for doing things like connecting to old calculators, etc, as a secondary machine, their fine.

If you're running Win-8 or 8.1, run, don't walk to get Win-10. You have suffered long enough.

Read as many articles as you want, but it all boils down to the above.

[Dave Britten]

I've upgraded three machines so far. The two Asus systems had an issue with updating the touchpad drivers (which are awful to begin with), requiring a trip into device manager to remove the touchpad device after installation was complete. Windows then automatically installed the updated driver after a reboot. My desktop at work didn't have any trouble, even with the weird ATI + Intel onboard video combo I'm using to run 3 monitors.

On my Asus T100 convertible tablet, the new "tablet mode" is a nice improvement over what 8.1 offered. In 8.1, "Desktop" was essentially one big app, so if you wanted to snap, say, Excel and Firefox side by side, you'd have to go to the desktop, and fiddle around with sizing the windows. Now that "metro" apps are windowed just like any other Win32 apps, everything is much more consistent. Switch to tablet mode, and all apps run full screen and can be snapped side-by-side just as you'd expect. Very nice. They've also really cut down on the constant bezel swiping to get to hidden menus, and the taskbar remains on screen in tablet mode, not unlike the soft key bar on an Android tablet.

The new "task view" button by the start menu works like Expose on a Mac, showing you thumbnails of all your open windows. Nice to finally have that capability. And another minor thing I noticed is that it'll tell you the estimated time until your battery is charged if you float the mouse pointer over the battery icon.

OneDrive has been switched back to a desktop sync client like in Windows 7. This is great for me, because syncing in 8 and 8.1 required you to sign in to the computer using a Microsoft account, and I need to stick with local accounts. I was using a 3rd party app to handle the sync instead, but it wasn't terribly reliable all the time, and eventually totally stopped functioning on my T100.

The one major annoyance is that the upgrade clobbered my start menu tile layout, lumping them all into one big column/group. I don't have so many pinned tiles that it was a huge time investment to reorganize them at least, but doing it on 3 computers was tiresome.

The new Edge web browser seems promising. If they add some kind of extension capability and AdBlock makes it over there, it might be a contender. It's definitely not the IE engine with a fresh coat of paint; I loaded up our company Reporting Services site and saw all the typical rendering problems of a non-IE browser like Firefox or Chrome.

So in a nutshell, I like it so far. But if you do upgrade, make sure you dig through ALL the privacy settings and turn off all the stuff that has no business being on by default.

[eried]

(07-31-2015 02:40 AM)Dave Britten Wrote:  The one major annoyance is that the upgrade clobbered my start menu tile layout, lumping them all into one big column/group. I don't have so many pinned tiles that it was a huge time investment to reorganize them at least, but doing it on 3 computers was tiresome.

I thought that windows shared settings when you logged with an MS account.

My update went smoothly -5 year old machine, AMD/8 gb ram/256 gb ssd- took about 50 mins, the only problem is that the VIA HD Audio driver does not support the speaker fill, so music does not come out the 7.1 speakers anymore... expecting they to fix that because it seems to be a known issue.

(07-31-2015 01:31 AM)Bill (Smithville NJ) Wrote:  

(07-31-2015 01:05 AM)Garth Wilson Wrote:  Windows 10 may be free, but it comes at a huge price to your privacy

Windows 10 automatically shares your Wi-Fi password, blowing a hole in enterprise security, experts warn

The Sky is Falling!! The Sky is Falling!!

I've read these articles and many others. Like ALL computers, cell phones, and other devices today, you need to be careful what you agree to.

It does not shares the plain password, it shares an encripted "access" to internet for your contacts. It is pretty handy, no more asking for wifi password if someone comes over, I use it all the time since Windows Phone 8.1 (it does not share your network stuff, only internet access)

[Dave Britten]

(07-31-2015 03:47 AM)eried Wrote:  

(07-31-2015 02:40 AM)Dave Britten Wrote:  The one major annoyance is that the upgrade clobbered my start menu tile layout, lumping them all into one big column/group. I don't have so many pinned tiles that it was a huge time investment to reorganize them at least, but doing it on 3 computers was tiresome.

I thought that windows shared settings when you logged with an MS account.

I think it does, but I don't use an MS account for computer login, due to privacy and functionality concerns (thus why I had no native OneDrive sync in 8.1).

And the layout clobbering looks like it was due to some pretty fundamental changes they made to the way tile layout works. Overall it's for the better, but it was a little annoying to fix everything up again. If that's the worst upgrade issue I run into, though, I'd call it a success.

[Bill (Smithville NJ)]

(07-31-2015 01:31 AM)Bill (Smithville NJ) Wrote:  

(07-31-2015 01:05 AM)Garth Wilson Wrote:  Windows 10 may be free, but it comes at a huge price to your privacy

Windows 10 automatically shares your Wi-Fi password, blowing a hole in enterprise security, experts warn

The Sky is Falling!! The Sky is Falling!!

I've read these articles and many others. Like ALL computers, cell phones, and other devices today, you need to be careful what you agree to.

After I wrote "The Sky is Falling", I realized that there may me some here that may not know what I was referring to. Please see following:

Chicken Little

I was referring to the way the media uses it's headlines to indicate that a disaster is imminent when it really isn't.

Question: Is the Chicken Little Story, or variation of it, commonly known around the world?

Bill
Smithville, NJ

[Thomas Radtke]

Any software besides drivers that may fail? I have a zillion of packages installed like Adobe CS, Altova stuff and so on - most of them 32 Bit.

For the time being, I'll likely skip this offer.

[Thomas Radtke]

(07-31-2015 12:01 PM)Bill (Smithville NJ) Wrote:  After I wrote "The Sky is Falling", I realized that there may me some here that may not know what I was referring to.

I was reminded of the chief from the Asterix comic books. What was his name? Majestix?

German: Der Himmel wird uns auf den Kopf fallen.

[Bill (Smithville NJ)]

(07-31-2015 12:46 AM)Bill (Smithville NJ) Wrote:  The only item that didn't update was the video driver. In Windows 10, ended up with the standard Microsoft Driver. I'll have to see if I can upgrade the video to the ATI driver. But overall, I was pleased with the upgrade.

Okay, I was able to get the correct ATI display driver installed.

I went to Dell support site and downloaded the Vista ATI driver. Executed the file which unzipped the files and then tried to install. The install failed - said I didn't have any supported hardware.

I then brought up the Device Manager, selected the Display Driver (which was the standard Microsoft Driver), selected update and pointed it to the unzipped ATI files. It then installed but said there was an error. But now the Device manager said I had an ATI Display Adapter instead of the Microsoft Adapter.

I then updated the Adapter again, this time letting it search the web for the driver. It updated and then I rebooted.

I now have the correct Display Adapter installed and the screen looks great. Much Much better than the default Microsoft Adapter.

Bill
Smithville, NJ

[Manolo Sobrino]

The deal breaker for me is mandatory updates. I understand the benefits for many users, but there's simply no way I'm getting there. I want to have the last word on what's on my computer, because it's my tool, with mandatory updates it's Microsoft's. Now they're adding features, later they might remove them or even ban things that I can do now and there's no way to go back (Microsoft do botch updates from time to time and include drivers you may not really want). If I wanted a closed ecosystem I'd be using a Mac, thank you, but no thank you.

To add insult to injury, there's this new policy of switching to rolling releases by forcing Home version users to test the patches that Pro version users will have to apply four months later whether they like it or not. Have they lost their mind?

And then, there's the point that Katie raises. It's bonkers to go through a system upgrade in a production machine to get a beta OS on day one. They have rushed this release for strategic reasons, there's a big update coming in October (Threshold wave 2), and something like Windows 10.1 coming up next year (Redstone). You have one year to upgrade for free and very likely get a more stable version.

Sounds like overall the upgrade has been a success, that's a great accomplishment for the company, it wasn't easy at all. There's a lot of things that can go awry in such an upgrade (I've checked tomshardware forum because I couldn't believe it's been that smooth for everybody, and yes indeed, it broke some machines). Under the hood, Windows is a very, very complex beast prone to break in esoteric ways. For instance, try to fix a corrupt .NET setup. No, it can't always be done without wiping the whole thing.

My latest machine (Lenovo laptop with an awesome not U version i7 Haswell) came with Windows 8.1. I finally got it to work just like I want it. Removed the silly corner actions save for one, installed Classic Shell (why did I hesitate for so long?) and Classic Explorer (no more breadcrumbs, yippee!!). It boots to the desktop, has a great Start menu without metro stuff there and virtual desktops via mDesktop happen to work fine. I also changed font rendering, I hate the new one. I have disabled automatic updates and I can remove whatever I want. It has support until 2023, don't have to worry about what "supported lifetime of the device" means for Windows 10 (is it OEM support? is it 2 or 4 years?) and it is working beautifully. A free upgrade is not worth my time. There's no reason for me to switch to Windows 10 and a few for not to (besides mandatory updates, there's the deprecation of even more good old APIs I'm used to, want to change default programs?). I don't need Cortana, nor a browser (not really using Microsoft web browsers for a decade) without extensions that can't block ads, nor a huge Start Menu that really isn't, nor even more notifications and yet another UI change, this time with no contrast between active and background windows. The only cloud service I need is Dropbox, and that can be replaced as well.

After 20 years of Windows registry tweaking, my next desktop is going to be a Linux one with any Windows-only stuff virtualised. At least that would be my own choices system. Not sure about the distro right now, I don't have a clear picture about what's going on with systemd. I have a soft spot for Slackware -not so sure about it for the desktop- and I have to test Arch. Maybe I'll go back to Debian and Ubuntu or give another chance to FreeBSD. I've been moving to platform-agnostic software for a while getting ready for it. For the next laptop, I'll wait and see. I've always liked Apple's Air breed... On the other hand, Thinkpads are linux-friendly .

BTW, does anybody know if Voidtools' "everything" search engine works with W10? There's a 'without everything' and a 'with everything' way of dealing with your thousands of relevant files, the latter being the more productive by a huge factor.

[BobVA]

I tried installing Linux (Mint 17.2) in a dual boot with the Win 10 installation on the Win 7 upgraded machine I mentioned above.

It worked for a bit, but then something broke and Win 10 refused to boot (Linux was still fine). The malfunction was sufficiently tragic to also prevent the Win 10 boot DVD repair tools from either fixing the boot issue (presumably re-installing the standard MBR?), or "resetting" the machine.

Considerable fiddling only made things worse, including a re-installation of Win10. I finally put the entire partition table in the bin and am now reinstalling Linux as the sole OS on that machine.

Maybe it's just me, but if you want to try to dual boot Linux with Win 10, I'd recommend caution. Hopefully the GRUB gurus will figure out if there's really an issue and fix it soon.