Windows 10 [2014 - 2017]

[Cyan]

Those users who can't imagine Run as Admin could be in a submenu probably shouldn't be using Run as Admin in the first place ;-)

yup, totally agree. for security reasons I use a standard account. I think 99% of people should do that. Have a admin account whose password they know for delicate changes, and their day to day account should be standard.

What bugs me to no end is the tendency of many Win32 programs to ask for the admin account during installation or for certain operations. It can be okay sometimes. But there are games that do this, for instance, and if you run then with an admin account they work perfectly, but if you are on a standard account, the saves are never recorded in your account profile but that of the administrator. Problem with this is that if you run the game as a normal user, your saves and tweaks are nowhere to be seen.

 

[Cyan]

Intel is telling Microsoft and Qualcomm that they shouldn't think of emulating the X86 to run Windows 10

http://bgr.com/2017/06/10/intel-vs-arm-qualcomm-x86-lawsuit/

Intel, comfortably the largest manufacturer of desktop processors, is no stranger to throwing its weight around to protect its core business. It has spent years fighting a massive $1.2 billion fine from the EU for violating anti-trust law to shut out AMD, its only real competitor.

Now, in a new blog post, Intel seems to be quietly warning companies like Microsoft and Qualcomm not to even think about using emulation to run proper Windows 10 on mobile-style processors.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Intel is telling Microsoft and Qualcomm that they shouldn't think of emulating the X86 to run Windows 10

http://bgr.com/2017/06/10/intel-vs-arm-qualcomm-x86-lawsuit/

It depends on the implementation. There's nothing they can do if a company is translating x86 calls into a format suitable for another architecture.

Regards,
SB

 

[3dilettante]

It depends on the implementation. There's nothing they can do if a company is translating x86 calls into a format suitable for another architecture.

Regards,
SB

A direct link to the Intel statement that was referenced indirectly previously:
https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/x86-approaching-40-still-going-strong/

One of the potentially relevant sections:

Intel carefully protects its x86 innovations, and we do not widely license others to use them. Over the past 30 years, Intel has vigilantly enforced its intellectual property rights against infringement by third-party microprocessors. One of the earliest examples, was Intel’s enforcement of its seminal “Crawford ’338 Patent.” In the early days of our microprocessor business, Intel needed to enforce its patent rights against various companies including United Microelectronics Corporation, Advanced Micro Devices, Cyrix Corporation, Chips and Technologies, Via Technologies, and, most recently, Transmeta Corporation. Enforcement actions have been unnecessary in recent years because other companies have respected Intel’s intellectual property rights.

However, there have been reports that some companies may try to emulate Intel’s proprietary x86 ISA without Intel’s authorization. Emulation is not a new technology, and Transmeta was notably the last company to claim to have produced a compatible x86 processor using emulation (“code morphing”) techniques. Intel enforced patents relating to SIMD instruction set enhancements against Transmeta’s x86 implementation even though it used emulation. In any event, Transmeta was not commercially successful, and it exited the microprocessor business 10 years ago.

Intel did not accept Transmeta's emulation defense, and Nvidia's cross-licensing agreement with Intel around the time of Denver's development had an explicit ban on x86 emulation. Denver was introduced as an ARM processor, although rumors/leaks had x86 as a target and some of Denver's quirks seemed to make it less ARM-specific than it could have been.

In the space of instructions, there were other examples of patents associated with instructions--such as some involving MIPS that constrained most reasonable implementations. Intel also has IP in x86 emulation, in part because Itanium's x86 block was eventually replaced by a software emulation layer.
The permissiveness of IP enforcement may extend some of Intel's hardware patents to catch any reasonable hardware hooks for emulation, or its emulation could ensnare software methods. If not at an instruction level, perhaps there is a way to take the fight at the level of the Google and Oracle copyright lawsuit. Currently, an interface is considered copyright-protected, and it would require a case-by-case fair-use determination to prevent a damaging finding of infringement.
Even if there's nothing that Intel can do successfully, it might not be determined except at the end of a very protracted legal campaign.

I've also seen speculation that this might not just be a shot at Microsoft and Qualcomm, depending on the validity of speculation that Apple might want to get its CPUs into product ranges with x86-compatible binaries.

 

[Cyan]

It depends on the implementation. There's nothing they can do if a company is translating x86 calls into a format suitable for another architecture.

Regards,
SB

it entirely depends on the kind of patent too. Some patents should have expired by now. Then there are formats like ISA which is compatible with x86 but it is currently AMD64 and not from Intel.

 

[hoom]

So there's a new Cumulative Update https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4022725/windows-10-update-kb4022725
And yet again my computer spazzed out.

Anyone else have similar issue when MS release updates?
RAM usage shoots up, wind up paging so hard my GPU driver crashes, gotta painfully slowly close everything or force reboot, run the update & only then things get back to normal.

 

[orangpelupa]

My vaio tablet did that with every update.

Microsoft compatibility telemetry service always slows the whole system down. Need to keep killing it manually

 

[BRiT]

Never have issues yet on the multiple desktops and VMs when they update.

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

Updated my main pc to Windows 10 yesterday and its working much better than it did over a year ago when I first tried 10.

So far it seems to work. Didn't install any chipset or audio drivers as the Asus update only lists 1 or 2 year old drivers for my mainboard and things seem to be working fine like this.

Generally things seem to just work, not sure if I'd say its better than 7 but at least it is not as frustrating as last time I tried. I still think its ridiculous you get so much preinstalled and hard to remove software installed by default. After an update I suddenly had a few games installed as well as LINE (messaging app used a lot in Asia) and a password manager.

There are also so many privacy sliders and in so many different windows that I'm not sure I switched them all off. Pretty annoyed by the fact that Windows 10 doesn't come with the old style photo viewer as default either. I don't want a picture viewer that requires me to make accounts and whatnot.

On the plus side onedrive is now easier to get rid of than before though you still need to go into the registry to remove it from quick access.

I've also managed to make the start menu less useless/ugly by disabling the app list and pinning my most used apps to the start menu. I still think its a halfassed solution but at least its somewhat workable.

The config panel is still poorly designed as well with too much empty space and the fact that its still not a full replacement for the old control panel is rather ridiculous.

BTW I don't know why window animation are on by default by the way, it makes your pc feel slow as hell.

But my wireless xbox one controller adapter got picked up right away, which is nice.

Overall the bad taste I had from last time is somewhat gone and the added security is nice. This is something I kinda started to get worried about with Windows 7. That said, is there any need for additional AV software on 10? I'm only using defender now. On 7 I used AVG but these days AVG is more of a virus/malware than most real virusses/malware...

 

[Cyan]

Updated my main pc to Windows 10 yesterday and its working much better than it did over a year ago when I first tried 10.

So far it seems to work. Didn't install any chipset or audio drivers as the Asus update only lists 1 or 2 year old drivers for my mainboard and things seem to be working fine like this.

Generally things seem to just work, not sure if I'd say its better than 7 but at least it is not as frustrating as last time I tried. I still think its ridiculous you get so much preinstalled and hard to remove software installed by default. After an update I suddenly had a few games installed as well as LINE (messaging app used a lot in Asia) and a password manager.

There are also so many privacy sliders and in so many different windows that I'm not sure I switched them all off. Pretty annoyed by the fact that Windows 10 doesn't come with the old style photo viewer as default either. I don't want a picture viewer that requires me to make accounts and whatnot.

On the plus side onedrive is now easier to get rid of than before though you still need to go into the registry to remove it from quick access.

I've also managed to make the start menu less useless/ugly by disabling the app list and pinning my most used apps to the start menu. I still think its a halfassed solution but at least its somewhat workable.

The config panel is still poorly designed as well with too much empty space and the fact that its still not a full replacement for the old control panel is rather ridiculous.

BTW I don't know why window animation are on by default by the way, it makes your pc feel slow as hell.

But my wireless xbox one controller adapter got picked up right away, which is nice.

Overall the bad taste I had from last time is somewhat gone and the added security is nice. This is something I kinda started to get worried about with Windows 7. That said, is there any need for additional AV software on 10? I'm only using defender now. On 7 I used AVG but these days AVG is more of a virus/malware than most real virusses/malware...

with defender and using a standard user account, you shouldn't have security problems. When in doubt, you also have virustotal.com to check your files

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

I thought about that but I googled a bit and apparently Steam/games don't play nice with normal user accounts?

 

[Malo]

I thought about that but I googled a bit and apparently Steam/games don't play nice with normal user accounts?

My kids accounts on their PC are standard users and I haven't had much trouble. It's not a lot of games as far as testing goes and I'm sure there are some badly written ones that don't like standard users but I don't believe Steam itself is restrictive for standard users.

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

A standard user won't have problems with installing steam game updates? I suppose the first time you run a game will still have to be through the admin account?

 

[Malo]

A standard user won't have problems with installing steam game updates? I suppose the first time you run a game will still have to be through the admin account?

It still needs escalation to authenticate the install, which is just the admin login, but you don't have to swap users or anything.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

The config panel is still poorly designed as well with too much empty space and the fact that its still not a full replacement for the old control panel is rather ridiculous.

Thankfully, it's not actually a replacement for the control panel. That still exists and isn't going anywhere.

The new settings panel is structured to be more friendly to non-computer literate people as well as touch interfaces. Think of it as the more casual way to access most settings.

Computer savvy people should already know how to access the control panel. It's just a right click on the start menu or win-X. And there's even a way to put the old control panel on your desktop from within the settings app (settings -> personalization -> themes -> desktop icons).

Basically it isn't even really hidden. Just put out of the way so your average non-computer savvy user doesn't access it by accident.

Regards,
SB

 

[Kaarlisk]

Thankfully, it's not actually a replacement for the control panel. That still exists and isn't going anywhere.

Actually, it is going. There are many settings that only exist in the new Settings app.
Also, there is one major irritation with the settings app. If I open one setting (like windows updates), minimize it, then open another settings panel (like wireless), then instead of opening in a new window, it opens in the already open Settings app, i.e. it navigates away from that Windows update settings panel I had opened and minimized.

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

@Malo Thanks. I'll turn my account into a normal user and see how that goes.

@Silent_Buddha To be honest I don't find it that easy to use. There are a lot of (sub) menus and most of them don't sound particularly easy to understand to the average user. To be honest I don't think the average user will ever look at the control panel anyway to begin with.

By the way I don't find the interface that smooth. I turned on windows side by side and the are you sure you want to delete this file message and for whatever reason it just doesn't feel a 100% smooth.

 

[Cyan]

A standard user won't have problems with installing steam game updates? I suppose the first time you run a game will still have to be through the admin account?

well, from personal experience with steam and gog -which I tend to favour- and being a standard user, Steam haven't caused a single issue at all, it just install the games and that's it. GoG on the other hand uses drm free executables although they ask you to install the games using administrator privileges. That's the only issue I've found with GoG. That doesn't happen with Steam but Steam asks you for the administrator password in some games or apps like 3DMark.

That being said, when you can experience some trouble is when you have a game like say Stalker and like me you want to use DxWnd to play in a window (which I used to do in my previous laptop, although not now). Dxwnd requires administrator privileges and I remember launching the game from Dxwind and whenever I launched the game normally, ALL my saves didn't exist, were gone.

The issue is that games that require administrator privileges tend to save the files in the administrator account, not in the actual account profile you are using, but as I said that's not an issue with steam and gog, from personal experience at least.

 

[zed]

Just booked a flight with microsoft edge, get the confirmation popup window
OK I go better save that page just in case browser resets or whatever
right click (nothing) hmmm, lets try menu (well I cant access menu button on a popup but still bear with it) WTF that can't be right it must be possible, google 'save html page microsoft edge'
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us...-browser/6c6f4095-f62e-48e8-8512-3fb47f981f88
short answer - you can't save a page with the edge browser
unbelievable

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

well, from personal experience with steam and gog -which I tend to favour- and being a standard user, Steam haven't caused a single issue at all, it just install the games and that's it. GoG on the other hand uses drm free executables although they ask you to install the games using administrator privileges. That's the only issue I've found with GoG. That doesn't happen with Steam but Steam asks you for the administrator password in some games or apps like 3DMark.

That being said, when you can experience some trouble is when you have a game like say Stalker and like me you want to use DxWnd to play in a window (which I used to do in my previous laptop, although not now). Dxwnd requires administrator privileges and I remember launching the game from Dxwind and whenever I launched the game normally, ALL my saves didn't exist, were gone.

The issue is that games that require administrator privileges tend to save the files in the administrator account, not in the actual account profile you are using, but as I said that's not an issue with steam and gog, from personal experience at least.

I've not really tested yet but looks like Batman is OK (well, after forcing it to run in windowed mode the first time, otherwise I'd simply crash on startup. Arkham Knight really is a horrible port) when running as a normal user. Installing did require admin rights obviously.

One other weird thing I ran into is, and I think this happened on W7 as well, that with an AMD card you cannot change the resolution on the 2nd monitor if the primary monitor is off.

My monitor is DVI and I got my tv hooked up as a second screen through HDMI. However Windows thinks HDMI is the first monitor and so far I haven't managed to set it as the second one.

The weird thing this causes is that I cannot change the resolution of my monitor (not that I need to, but the option is grayed out and advanced options cannot open either) and I cannot open the advanced catalyst control panel either. It says something like not advanced options are available right now. Steam Big Picture mode also fails with an D3D error.

When I switch to my tv all is well.

Edit: Just to be clear, the DVI monitor is set as the primary monitor but identified as monitor #2.