Windows 10 [2018]

[Silent_Buddha]

Except you now have the barrier to entry set to a price point. And again the transition wont just be windows 10 to 11. There will be people with machines originally running windows 7 that have been through the full upgrade path .

It doesn't matter an upgrade is an upgrade regardless of whether you paid for it or not. It doesn't matter if their machine originally ran Windows 7, they are most likely running Windows 10 now. It doesn't even matter if Windows 10 didn't have free upgrades. They'd still be running Windows 10. The only difference is that they'd either have paid for an upgrade or they'll be running a pirated version.

That last bit is the whole reason that MS went the free upgrade path. They felt it was better to have people running a non-pirated version of Windows that is less likely to come already infested with malware (which includes the potential for pre-installed botnets) than it was to have revenue from non-corporate/OEM versions of Windows. It didn't hurt that revenue from non-coporate/OEM versions of Windows was relatively negligible.

Also, your assertion that people that pay for Windows will also pay for better hardware isn't necessarily true. I paid for Vista Pro, Windows 7 Pro and later Windows 8 Pro to run on a Windows XP machine that I never upgraded. I know plenty of people that did that as well. I also know plenty of people that ran "free" (pirated) versions of Vista/Win7/Win8 on ancient Windows XP machines as well.

And while I do upgrade bits and pieces of my main desktop, there are still bits and pieces in there that were in there when I had Windows XP, some from Vista, some from Win7, some from Win8 and only a few things were upgraded for Win10. And this was a machine where I paid for the Pro versions of Windows Upgrades except for Win10.

I don't mind paying for it. But I also don't mind that it's free. Especially if free = less infested Windows installations out in the wild being used to DDOS some internet service that I want to use.

Regards,
SB

 

[Eolirin]

2) We don't want in place upgrades because as I said you can be carrying forth issues from 2 to 3 generations of windows upgrades. Windows 7 to 8 to 10 to 11. It can cause a ton of issues. Its why if I was microsoft I would want to ditch upgrades completely and require fresh installs. And yes I have fixed computers that were originally windows 7 that were then running windows 10 and those people have already asked me to put windows 11 on it when they come out but they want ot keep all their old stuff including programs. You can see where the issue is. It should be possible but it will be a service nightmare

You do understand that the way MS has been doing all of the major updates to Windows 10 for its entire lifecycle has been via inplace upgrades right? It's not a service nightmare. Some small precentage of users have migration issues and everyone else doesn't have a major headache.

 

[eastmen]

My recollection is that the cost for an upgrade license, rather than a full license, for windows 7, was $50, and that the Vista upgrade license was similar. It's been ages, so I may be off on that, and that may have been edu pricing. But Windows has always provided an upgrade path for devices that supported the new minimum specs of the OS, even when those specs were significantly increased, ala Vista. Also, you obviously can't continue to rely on those Windows 10 updates, because it will go out of service, which means you will stop getting security updates. Windows 10 end of support date seems set to either 2024 or 2025, I forget which. If I buy a high end system now, the expectation, given the way things have been, is that that hardware will still be viable in 3-4 years and shouldn't need to be replaced. Being able to move that system to Windows 11 is necessary to keep it up to date with security patches. But note I never said it needed to be free. Not once. I don't really care that much as long as it's reasonably priced. Not having a free upgrade isn't the same as not providing an upgrade path, and I think those are getting conflated. Forcing everyone to do fresh installs of the OS to upgrade is nuts. Windows has been set up to handle migration of data and settings for forever now.

That being said, I will point out that one of the consequences of it not being free is that the security environment is made significantly worse as people fail to upgrade machines that are not near end of life. The other issue that used to exist around feature support fracturing the market for app dev is much less of an issue now because of the work they've been doing on decoupling APIs and frameworks from the OS. But the security issues are still a huge problem, and a large part of the motivation behind Windows as a Service in the first place. Windows 7 going end of life was not nearly as bad as XP thanks to the work put in to make the move to 10 easier, and even then it was far from ideal. So there's a really good reason to keep it free, but I don't have a huge stake in it either way. MS'll do what makes sense to them on that front.

But as to next gen systems launches, the telegraphing is extremely obvious, the release dates are always end of year, generations tend to have similarly long life spans, they start making announcements telegraphing where things are going well ahead of the actual announcement, etc. Cars are like clockwork, new models every year at around the same time, as are most other forms of consumer electronics. If it's June, you don't buy a new Surface device until after October, because that's when they'll announce new stuff. And so on. OSes have expectations of upgrade paths for devices that can still support them because OSes are usually shorter lived than the hardware running them. Again these do not need to be free. But they do need to exist. No one sells their perfectly functional desktop gaming rig that can play everything at high frame rates just because they want a new OS version, and no one should have to.

Okay but how much did you pay for windows vista vs windows 10 ? MS never gave an os upgrade out for free before 10. So going by prior history doesn't always work.

We will see what they do. I hope from a user experience they stop with upgrade editions and require a full clean install to windows 11. Like I said MS has support for windows 10 to oct 2025 and then there will be the extended life edition. If you bought windows 10 today you would still have 4 years of use of the OS until it stops receiving updates but will still recieve security updates through its extended life cycle just like previous windows

 

[Eolirin]

Okay but how much did you pay for windows vista vs windows 10 ? MS never gave an os upgrade out for free before 10. So going by prior history doesn't always work.

We will see what they do. I hope from a user experience they stop with upgrade editions and require a full clean install to windows 11. Like I said MS has support for windows 10 to oct 2025 and then there will be the extended life edition. If you bought windows 10 today you would still have 4 years of use of the OS until it stops receiving updates but will still recieve security updates through its extended life cycle just like previous windows

My recollection is that I paid $50 for Vista. That may have been edu pricing on the upgrade license, or a discount to beta testers, I honestly don't remember. So $50 more. That license has carried across numerous system builds, was upgraded to Windows 7 and then Windows 10. License transferability and the lower cost of licensing upgrades accelerated my hardware purchases, it did not slow them down.

Upgrade licenses have been around since at least Windows 95, and possibly earlier, I was too young to really process how versions earlier than 95 were handled. Windows 10 made them free, sure, but they have existed for at least 25 years. Breaking that kind of precedent is much bigger than a shift in cost for those upgrades. And to do so for seemingly arbitrary rather than technical reasons makes even less sense. Hell, I can't even imagine what no in place upgrades would do to enterprise deployments, so they'd need to put the engineering work in anyway. Never mind that it's how Windows does feature updates now in general. Arbitrarily denying that to non commercial and small business users despite previously offering it with every release is supposed to help the ecosystem how?

What benefit exactly are you seeing for making it harder to upgrade instead of easier? Why would Windows 11 having fewer users because MS made it more painful to upgrade benefit the ecosystem in the long run? I can get min spec bumps. It's time to drop 32 bit at the very least. Not every system running Windows 10 needs to be able to move to Windows 11. Though there are definite limits to how much they can up requirements if they still want to service the lower end education markets. But why are you arguing for artificially depressing adoption of the OS beyond what's necessary from a technical perspective? Isn't it better if as many users as it's feasible to move over are actually moved over? I will grant that the general decoupling of API and frameworks from the core of the OS that they've been doing means that feature adoption for apps and games isn't going to be affected by the size of the install base the way that it used to, but I can't see how it helps to have slower adoption. Windows 10 has a massive install base. If it's hard for people to move on, they just won't. And then we hit end of support and it's absolute mess, just like it was with XP.

 

[DmitryKo]

How would you lock it ?

By actually checking for these specific hardware features (XD/NX bit, CMPXCHG16B, LAHF and SAHF, PREFETCHW) which are required to run 64-bit x64 editions since Windows 8.1.

People can just spoof the hardware information if need be or install it on another machine and stick the drive inside the older machine to get it to run.

I can understand when people hack their Intel Macs, since Nehalem / Sandy Bridge / Haswell CPUs are fully capable of running any recent version of OS X / macOS, in spite of longstanding Apple policy of forcing premature obsolescence.

But why even bother to run Windows 11 on Pentium 4 HT - arguably the worst desktop CPU ever released by Intel, which would be an absolute minimum configuration required for either 32-bit or 64-bit edition?

There are a lot of people who will upgrade cause its the new OS . There are plenty of people who upgrade IOS or Andriod just because its new

Good for them, why force everyone else to clean install even if their PC is perfectly compliant with the hardware requirements of the new OS?

In place upgrades bring a lot of baggage even things you might not realize are on there that anti virus programs miss. Registry errors , software you might have installed years ago that is just sitting there and so on and so forth.

In-place upgrade actually performs a 'repair install', where the Windows setup will rebuild the registry and Windows Update catalogue, reset file and registry permissions, repair WinSxS store etc.

I just would hope they would make windows 11 a clean break from what came before and require a new purchase and fresh install of the OS. It would be whats best for the platform as a whole along with very high system requirements

Again, there were multiple attempts of forcing such a 'clean break', starting with Windows RT for ARM processors, Windows Runtime in Windows 8, Windows 10 S / S Mode, and the recently cancelled Windows 10X.

Windows users responded by entirely ignoring these OS editions.

 

[DmitryKo]

Pentium 4 641 seems to run it fine. Its a cedar mill core which would be a 2006 chip

It's an artificial, anachronistic testbed, since it uses an Intel P43 motherboard from 2008 with DDR3-1066 memory. Core 2 Quad Q95xx would be a far better match for this system, even though it's still four times slower than quad-core Core i5-11600 'Rocket Lake'; single-core Pentium 4 HT 640 is further three times slower than Core 2 Quad Q95xx.

taking a windows 7 machine , upgrading to windows 8 then to 8.1 then to 10 and all the updates in that and then to windows 11 and all the while the machine is used daily to vist porn sites or torrets or what have you is a recipe for a huge service nightmare for MS

Clean install is not a replacement for antivirus/malware protection - if instead of preventing the infection you just keep clean installing Windows, the actual problem has not been solved.

End users would prefer to follow UAC prompts and antivirus warnings for untrusted and/or unsigned code, rather then having to wipe clean their PCs at regular intervals.

In fact I think your going to be paying monthly for it as part of a subscription or your going to be required to pay for it out right.

If you bought a desktop or notebook with Windows pre-installed, you have already paid for your Windows license.

Subscription model is highly unlikely, Windows is not office productivity software or web hosting service. For starters, what would happen when your OS subscription expires?

 

[Davros]

How would you lock it ?

require sse 4.2

 

[Cyan]

This article mentions how Windows 10 became much slower after each update compared to the original release.

https://ntdotdev.wordpress.com/2021...indows-10-slow-down-with-each-feature-update/

 

[eastmen]

This article mentions how Windows 10 became much slower after each update compared to the original release.

https://ntdotdev.wordpress.com/2021...indows-10-slow-down-with-each-feature-update/

hopefully the one feature update a year allows them to keep better tabs on performance metrics

 

[orangpelupa]

@DmitryKo

Any idea how to fix fingerprint sensor that's completely missing from device manager after the driver was Uninstalled and installed again?

Its also not there when I set device manager to show hidden devices.

Googling windows 10 missing fingerprint device manager also result in lots of unsolved posts since half decade ago.

Edit:

Also any idea how to fix windows store "install" button do nothing when clicked?

I still can install just fine from the "library" menu in windows store.

 

[DmitryKo]

how to fix windows store "install" button do nothing when clicked

Settings - Apps & Features - (search and select) Microsoft Store - Advanced Options - Repair​

If doesn't help, try Reset.

If that doesn't help as well, you can reinstall it from the command line: Right-click Start, choose Windows PowerShell (Admin), then copy-paste the following:

Get-AppxPackage -allusers Microsoft.WindowsStore | Foreach {Remove-AppxPackage "$($_.PackageFullName)"}
Get-AppxPackage -allusers Microsoft.WindowsStore | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppxManifest.xml" -DisableDevelopmentMode}​

Run Microsoft Store and pin it to the Taskbar.

Any idea how to fix fingerprint sensor that's completely missing from device manager after the driver was Uninstalled and installed again

Make sure you've installed the latest fingerprint scanner driver available from your notebook manufacturer. What is your notebook model and part number?

Also try opening C:\Windows\System32\WinBioPlugIns\FaceDriver directory, then right click each .INF file there and choose Install.

 

[orangpelupa]

none fixed the issue. i guess i;ll reinstall the windows again

EDIT

scratch that, windows 11 iso will come out tomorrow right? i'll just nuke the whole thing and install W11 preview

 

[orangpelupa]

anyone have any idea how to clean up orphaned windows store apps/games?

for example i have Gears 5 on E: drive. But its missing from my computer, and the space is not reclaimed.
If i redownload to E: drive, the download process will instantly goes to 100% and i can properly uninstall the game.

But how to directly clean the orphaned games/apps without dong this reinstall dance?

 

[Davros]

boot into linux, delete the folder

 

[Cyan]

anyone have any idea how to clean up orphaned windows store apps/games?

for example i have Gears 5 on E: drive. But its missing from my computer, and the space is not reclaimed.
If i redownload to E: drive, the download process will instantly goes to 100% and i can properly uninstall the game.

But how to directly clean the orphaned games/apps without dong this reinstall dance?

happened to me when I switched to Window 11. This solution works like a charm.

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-delete-windowsapps-folder-windows-10

 

[orangpelupa]

turns out "windows sonic for headphones" name is misleading.

1. it also works for 5.1ch surround speakers
2. it properly upmix stereo to 5.1ch (for example, a stereo music will have the rear channels playing a more atmospheric audio and have no voice/vocal)

 

[hughJ]

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/coreaudio/spatial-sound

I think the mixing behavior is dependent on how the application is utilizing the spatialization features. It looks to me like they've done a lot of work to that portion of WASAPI in the last few years because I remember tinkering with some examples/tutorials and some of this documentation doesn't look familiar.

Reading through this stuff now it sure seems like the audio routing+mixing for spatialization is even more obfuscated from the user than I remember, as that single spatial audio checkbox produces a variety of non-obvious results depending on how the application is written and how your audio endpoint/speakers are detected. There's a dedicated chunk of the API now for HRTF, presumably was added for Hololens and VR which bypasses all the other stuff. Dynamic audio objects seem to be supported now, but I'm left wondering what games/engines are actually utilizing any of this...

 

[Davros]

Can audio be hardware accelerated ?

 

[BRiT]

Can audio be hardware accelerated ?

Yes. It has been with consoles for a couple of generations now.

 

[Davros]

It was on pc's (still is if you use openal and a few others like trusound is that still a thing?) but it was removed from direct x with vista
does that mean it's coming back to direct x ?