Windows 10 [2014 - 2017]

[Arwin]

My iPhone guesses contact details from emails and such these days as well. It has led to confusing things where I suddenly was listed with my dad's name. Fortunately it does show in the contact window where the info came from and was pretty easy to dismiss the incorrect info.

 

[tangey]

I took the plunge over the weekend to do the free upgrade. Many years ago, I'd have been the one on win10 from day 1, and doing incremental updates as they happened. But I guess as the years go on, you just want a PC that works, and my win7 machine worked just fine. However with the free offer close to coming to the end, i decided I needed to get into 2016.

I cloned my SSD using acronis to a hard drive I have on the pc for back-up, and went for it. Upgrade was smooth. I was happy to see that my desktop stuff all looked similar to what it had previous. But the PC wouldn't keep going for more than 5 mins before freezing. Sometimes no error was reported, sometime I got a BSOD with "IRQL less than..." message, some time some other message landed.

Did some googling and tried a few things, increase the virtual memory, update the Nvidia 970 drivers, get the latest win10 updates, none of which made a difference. I then saw that acronis 14 was noted to give problems (I have acronis 15), and also that overclocked machines could have issues after updating. So I removed acronis, and dropped the overclock down by a few 100 Mhz, and it's been stable since. I might try increasing the clock back up to see if that was the cause.

Not sure I like all the active tiles that I see in the start memory, but maybe I'm just old fashioned. Some things seem harder to get at i.e. if you want to get to the printers screen in devices, it appears to require some extra clicking, unless you use a windows key shortcut, which i was never into. I've seen reports that win10 boots quicker that win7, but I'm not seeing much if any difference, could be because I'm on an SSD., and my win7 booted up quickly. But operationally it does seem smoother.

I know I'm probably being lazy, but is there a decent website I can go to that'll give me a good overview of what win10 brings over win7.

Should I stay away from "edge" for now ? Is it a finished product, firefox is my usual browser.

 

[Kaotik]

Should I stay away from "edge" for now ? Is it a finished product, firefox is my usual browser.

I've used Edge since day 1 without any major issues. The product is "finished" in the same sense as Windows 10 is - it is finished as in, it's not beta and it's fully functional, but it isn't as in, it's being actively developed further and it's still missing few "basic things" like extension support (which will be included in Win10 Anniversary update) ((but then again, aren't all current browsers being actively developed?))

 

[Blazkowicz]

There may be a way to create a desktop icon shortcut to get at the printer(s), I remember doing something like "control inet.cpl,,2" : opens the third tab of Internet Options, in Windows XP at least (to get at proxy settings on a laptop)

So I found out about this : there are nice "direct access" things like ms-settings:network-proxy , ms-settings:display
http://www.infoworld.com/article/29...s-to-windows-10-settings-on-your-desktop.html
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/launch-resume/launch-settings-app
(what, no ms-settingsrinters in the list?)
(I have no Win10 box here to try out)

 

[Grall]

However with the free offer close to coming to the end, i decided I needed to get into 2016.

Good choice, overall... Win7 don't even get DX11, much less 12. ...Although maybe you're one of those snobbish types who don't actually play games, you just 'appreciate' them... Haha!

Not sure I like all the active tiles

You can just right-click them and get rid of them if you like. I did that; my start menu is as barren as a wasteland.

Should I stay away from "edge" for now ? Is it a finished product, firefox is my usual browser.

Edge was shite last I used it, and I don't know if MS does incremental updates of it like Chrome and FF receives, or if you have to wait for the big yearly patch for something to happen. You could always take a look at it; if you're on a laptop, I saw some noise some weeks back when MS crowed that Edge's power useage was way less than its competitors' - chrome especially I seem to recall.

 

[Grall]

By the way, I've had CompatTelRunner wreaking havoc on my drives at least three times these past couple weeks, and probably more as well. I wasn't even expecting to see that motherfucker again after the original Win10 upgrade, I wonder what exactly it is looking for, and what it's reporting back home to MS HQ.

Funny tidbit: aside from reading huge amounts of data off my drives, it also ramps the CPU to 100% while working. I wonder why. *puts on tinfoil hat...*

 

[Shifty Geezer]

It's officially a crap OS. Installed on a new SSD just fine, boots just fine. Connect up the data HDD to the mobo and I get a bootmgr fault. Not a BIOS boot order thing because the HDD doesn't even show as a bootable drive (because it's not), and I explicitly booted from SSD.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Solved that using F8 boot menu which seemed to make the partition available in BIOS. Then after installing Unity, I try to open a project on the data HDD. I don't have permissions and need to acquire them. Fine, do that...computer busy with no feedback that it's working or progress bar. How long will it take? 5 minutes? 5 hours?

 

[zed]

I feel your pain with the HDD heres my win10 PC 30mins ago

I think the cruical SSD I had in it is now totally fucked (which I was using for data), I cant access any stuffon it. I'll have a decent look this weekend, otherwise Im gonna have to pull it out, I have windows10 on another samsung SSD and also another HDD inside the machine, I may buy a couple more SSD's this week just to be safe
A bad thing with windows10 (and all windows versions) is like now clicking on task manager or ctrl-alt-del etc should display task manager in a nanosecond, here it took ~30 secs. I remember back in the bad old days of HDDs and not much memory and some program would stuff up and GRIND the HDD so you would want to kill ASAP, you'ld go ctrl-alt-del but task manager would take a lifetime to startup. Its like the OS goes OK got the message start up taskmanager OK understodd, I'll get on that right after I've finished processing this infinite loop, what should happen as soon as a task manger etc message is recieved is stop all else and prioritize that tiny app

 

[Shifty Geezer]

That's something the Amiga always had, and MS has never managed to pull off. I have had SourceTree stuff up me PC doing nothing on Windows7 - one of the reasons to switch to Win 10, and hope it works properly (like it used to, before deciding for no good reason to be crap on Win 7).

 

[Gubbi]

Solved that using F8 boot menu which seemed to make the partition available in BIOS.

So not a Windows 10 problem at all.

Then after installing Unity, I try to open a project on the data HDD. I don't have permissions and need to acquire them. Fine, do that...computer busy with no feedback that it's working or progress bar. How long will it take? 5 minutes? 5 hours?

It has to change ownership on all files on the HDD, that means visiting every single file. This isn't new, it's been like this for over 20 years if you use NTFS partitions.

It can't show progress, because it doesn't know how many files are on the drive until it has visited them. It's an OS, not an oracle.

Cheers

 

[Rodéric]

It has to change ownership on all files on the HDD, that means visiting every single file. This isn't new, it's been like this for over 20 years if you use NTFS partitions.

It can't show progress, because it doesn't know how many files are on the drive until it has visited them. It's an OS, not an oracle.

Cheers

So a file system design fault then.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

So not a Windows 10 problem at all.

I've never had that problem putting other data HDDs into a PC. You just plug them in, the machine boots as if the drive isn't there, and they are available in Windows. If there's no boot sector on the HDD, it should be ignored. And if it doesn't show in the BIOS, shouldn't it be ignored?

It has to change ownership on all files on the HDD, that means visiting every single file. This isn't new, it's been like this for over 20 years if you use NTFS partitions.

Again, I don't ever recall that putting another HDD in. But that said, perhaps I haven't done it in 20 years, because these days you tend to use a caddy.

It can't show progress, because it doesn't know how many files are on the drive until it has visited them. It's an OS, not an oracle.

It could give a warning and estimation based on tests. "This could take several hours.minutes if you have tens of thousands of files".

And here's a bit of contemporary, minimalist, ergonomically daft design in action...



Really looking forwards to the time when designers remember the point of their job isn't trying to create something that'd look good in Tate Modern.

 

[orangpelupa]

I just realized that there are no windows 10 to Windows 10 streaming.

Sure, there are RDP. but it can't be used for games.

 

[Sigfried1977]

I took the plunge as well yesterday. For me the upgrade process didn't work at all. Always aborted the process right at the finish line with a rather non-descript error message. After 3 failed attempts (each of which took hours) I finally did a clean Win7 installation and that solved the problem. Haven't dabbled with the OS an awful lot after that.

 

[Gubbi]

It could give a warning and estimation based on tests. "This could take several hours.minutes if you have tens of thousands of files".

Directories are implemented as B+ trees, the OS doesn't know how many file entries are in a directory until it has traversed it. All it can do is make a bullshit guess, worse than nothing, IMHO.

The "change ownership" *is* a slow operation on traditional HDDs. NTFS journals metadata, which means you get a disk sync on every file. I feel your pain (my Android Studio setup runs from a mechanical HDD )

Cheers

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I took the plunge as well yesterday. For me the upgrade process didn't work at all. Always aborted the process right at the finish line with a rather non-descript error message. After 3 failed attempts (each of which took hours) I finally did a clean Win7 installation and that solved the problem. Haven't dabbled with the OS an awful lot after that.

Do you not have the license key? I used my Windows 7 license key with a clean Win 10 installation from their setup tool. I don't trust 'upgrading' an OS. I expect accumulated crap to cause issues, and the only safe way to do an Windows OS IMO is from scratch.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Directories are implemented as B+ trees, the OS doesn't know how many file entries are in a directory until it has traversed it. All it can do is make a bullshit guess, worse than nothing, IMHO.

I mean tell the user that the operation may take some time, and give them the approximations so they can make a decent guess. Doesn't need to count the files. Just needs to present some ballpark figures so the user can speculate. But also you can do a file count test in a minute or so on many, many files. So do that before asking to change permissions. Although I guess that's not possible if the OS doesn't have permission to count the files! Doh.

When I did my Comp Sci degree many years ago, we talked about HCI and informing users, such as testing if you had enough storage to perform an operation before trying to perform it. It's a bit mindboggling that HCI is still so far from perfect, with interfaces not really doing their job. Windows Mail is another crap feature. Where's the option to 'mark all as read' on newly imported accounts? It was there in Windows Live Mail; why not in MS's new 'improved' email client? Stuff changes but doesn't all that often improve, it seems.

 

[Blazkowicz]

A bad thing with windows10 (and all windows versions) is like now clicking on task manager or ctrl-alt-del etc should display task manager in a nanosecond, here it took ~30 secs. I remember back in the bad old days of HDDs and not much memory and some program would stuff up and GRIND the HDD so you would want to kill ASAP, you'ld go ctrl-alt-del but task manager would take a lifetime to startup. Its like the OS goes OK got the message start up taskmanager OK understodd, I'll get on that right after I've finished processing this infinite loop, what should happen as soon as a task manger etc message is recieved is stop all else and prioritize that tiny app

I like to put the task manager in start up programs, start up minimized (one of the shortuct properties) and the program itself configured or not to minized in the icon tray (which then must be tweaked to always show/never hide the task manager).

 

[Grall]

Doesn't need to count the files.

The funny thing is, oftentimes windows DOES know exactly how many files there are on a HDD, because there's that thrice-cursed indexing service running as standard on 99.9+ percent of all PCs... It's just the matter of one hand of the OS not really knowing (or caring) what the other is doing.

Of course, if you've just attached the new HDD, then the indexing service hasn't yet had time to rifle through your s***...