Windows 10 [2014 - 2017]

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It seems to suggest that because the update hit the business level of quality control, therefore it's pushed out and forced on all PC's.
 
Game Mode explained ...
The idea behind Game Mode is consistency, rather than performance boosts.

Game Mode will prevent system tasks from taking resources from your games, making frame rates and performance generally more consistent. You should see fewer dropped frames as a result of Game Mode, specifically during scenes and situations that are more intensive on your system's hardware. Game Mode will also limit CPU thread contention between your games and existing system processes, helping to speed things up even further. The concepts behind Game Mode are already available on Xbox One, which gives games priority access to system resources.
...
Microsoft told me that while Win32 PC games (typical of Steam) will see some benefits from Game Mode, it will be UWP games (typical of the Windows 10 Store) that see the biggest improvements. This is because the UWP environment is a little more standardized than Win32, and Microsoft can more easily optimize the feature as a result. Microsoft is working with their hardware partners, including Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA, to make sure Game Mode is as good as it can be, optimizing for the most popular hardware configurations available.
...
I asked Microsoft to describe a scenario where you might want to disable Game Mode, and the engineer noted a situation where he wanted to continue rendering at high-speed in Adobe Lightroom in the background, while still enjoying Diablo 3 in the foreground. To that end, it's good that Microsoft is providing players with the option to disable Game Mode manually for those rigs capable of intensive multi-tasking.
http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/details-windows-game-mode-explained.html
 
What I'd really like to see is per-application screen resolution, so I can run some things full screen on my Surface Pro in a lower res as appropriate while using native for general use.
 
What I'd really like to see is per-application screen resolution, so I can run some things full screen on my Surface Pro in a lower res as appropriate while using native for general use.
Isn't rendering resolution scaling in games a better solution than changing the actual resolution?
 
I'm not talking games. Some Windows apps fail to work well on SP4's super high res screen. I'm forced to run it well below native (1840x1216 instead of 2736x1824) for those occasions I want to run such apps. I expect some games could benefit too though. Anything using bitmap UIs could end up with tiny icons on super high res screens, certainly on older games. And it seems to me with no knowledge of the inner workings of Windows that this should be a trivial feature to add in the Compatibility Mode settings - Full Screen Resolution.
 
I'm not talking games. Some Windows apps fail to work well on SP4's super high res screen. I'm forced to run it well below native (1840x1216 instead of 2736x1824) for those occasions I want to run such apps. I expect some games could benefit too though. Anything using bitmap UIs could end up with tiny icons on super high res screens, certainly on older games. And it seems to me with no knowledge of the inner workings of Windows that this should be a trivial feature to add in the Compatibility Mode settings - Full Screen Resolution.

From the notes for the latest insider build:

Improved high-DPI support for desktop apps: Continuing from our work with Build 14986, Build 15002 brings more goodness in the way of high-DPI support. First, much like we did with Microsoft Management Console (MMC), we’ve updated Performance Monitor (Perfmon) to now be more crisp on high-DPI PCs. Second, while we’ve enabled these improvements by default for some Windows desktop apps, you can now enable them yourself for other GDI-based applications, too! To do this, you’ll need to find the application’s .exe file, right-click on it, and select Properties. Go to the Compatibility tab, and turn on System (Enhanced) DPI scaling, and click OK. This setting overrides the way that applications handle DPI scaling (which sometimes uses bitmap stretching and can result in applications rendering blurry) and forces them to be scaled by Windows. The setting that was previously labeled Disable display scaling on high DPI settings is now referred to as Application scaling. This works only for apps that use GDI.

Does this address your issue?
 
From the notes for the latest insider build:
Does this address your issue?
Might do. Will have to see how it works.

if you want to run an app at 640x480 run it in a 640x480 window
Windowed is far from the same experience! I want to run art apps full screen as a canvas. ArtRage has tiny icons in native res and is too slow while the tools can be buggy when oversized. If I run it in high DPI mode it's just upscaled and pixelated. Hence I run it at 1840x1216 as a compromise, which requires the whole system runs at that res. Similarly my video editor has unusably tiny controls in native or not enough screen space and pixelated icons in high DPI mode, and benefits from a lower-than-native res.
 
Yeah, they are working hard at fixing that issue right now. So hopefully they will get it right soon, it is also pretty essential for their plan to run x86 apps on phones.

The push to anniversary happened to my work laptop too. It was deferred there by policy because they weren't ready to support it, but I got it anyway. Personally I am happy because it is just better and more stable. It deleted my IIS feature which was a bit of an unpleasant surprise, but I could enable that easily enough (after I figured out not to select ASP.Net 3.5, which I didn't need anyway).

Also it reenabled a feature that caught me out the first time I came across it. Apparently my by now pretty old laptop still has orientation detection. Imagine my surprise that my screen was upside down and then on its side when I walked to a presentation with it. Easily disabled again in display settings but still amusing.
 
Is now the time to stop using antivirus?
Former Firefox developer Robert O'Callahan, now a free agent and safe from the PR tentacles of his corporate overlord, says that antivirus software is terrible, AV vendors are terrible, and that you should uninstall your antivirus software immediately—unless you use Microsoft's Windows Defender, which is apparently okay.

Read more of this interesting article at; https://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2017/01/antivirus-is-bad/
 
At home I've done so years ago, settling for Defender as well. Cross my fingers but no issues so far. Randsomware scares the shit out of me though. I've seen some serious people become victim of that.
 
I've never seen Defender stop anything and I have seen, for instance, Kaspersky stop real threats which Defender did not stop.

But yeah, antivirus can open up a bigger attack surface but imho it is only really a big deal if you are being targeted. And if you are being targeted and the attacker has vast resources and they know about your config, you are probably screwed anyway because they will probably have access to 0-day exploits for your OS/AV/browser etc.
 
At home I've done so years ago, settling for Defender as well. Cross my fingers but no issues so far. Randsomware scares the shit out of me though. I've seen some serious people become victim of that.

Very scary as it can kill your back ups, your networked storage..
So you need good or at least decent back ups, stuff multiple hard drives or media - if you do the right thing by backing up but your only copy is plugged in (e.g. USB hard drive) when the malware strikes, it's bad. Although there might be ways to mitigate, e.g. the malware can only acces what your user account can access and only a separate "user" can write to back ups. This would assume most malware is lazy and make do with user privileges. (like, they don't really need to "own" the whole PC and get admin privileges anyway)

Just to say, good back ups are what should bring peace of mind, they always suck because you can use the money for a CPU upgrade etc. instead but it's something that we likely need to remind or tell people often, especially professionals and perhaps students.
These days, you might use a bunch of full size SD cards on the cheap (e.g. a 32GB one will store a lot of documents and pictures and such), as well as the otherwise dreaded "cloud" (for the paranoid, a password protected .zip or .rar might do if you don't want microsoft and governments etc. read your essays and look at family pictures)
 
One of the better defenses i have seen for ransomware is a free plugin that a community developer put together for unraid server software. It uses bait files and bait shares, monitors them for modification, and switches the entire server into readonly mode or into offline mode within a second of detection.
 
Ive been saved by my firewall several times
If anything unknown tried to connect to the internet it gets blocked and the firewall notifies me.
 
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