Windows 10 Update thoughts and questions...

[njbair]

Well reasoned! Thanks for the response. Honestly.

I guess I've mostly lucked out with Windows operating system releases. My 95 box was by no means a beast, but I remember great times on the machine. It was the first computer I experienced MP3s on and the first machine that had a 3D accelerator. At the end of the day, however, it was a just a Pentium 133 MHz box with 16 MB of RAM. My first video card had as much memory as the system I put it in. Pretty funny looking back on it.

Windows 98 SE was on my AMD K6-II with 128 MB of RAM and a 32 MB TNT2 and it ran gloriously. I played the absolute living **** out of Unreal Tournament and Quake III on that box with nary an issue. I remember dropping another 128 MB of RAM in the box and upgrading to a Voodoo 3 toward the end of the cycles with the machine. It was amazing. My brother and I wound up overclocking the K6-II, but never got it stable much over the 400 MHz stock speed.

The Vista box I built was a Intel Q6600 with 4 GB of RAM and an 8800GT, so I guess I never experienced any of the hardware woes people slinging 512 MB of RAM and a Celeron at Vista had. I worked at Best Buy during the release of Vista and spent an amazing amount of time trying to convince people that spending an extra $100 would really give them a much better experience. People are dumb.

My Windows 8 experience was pretty short-lived. I bought a refurb Surface Pro a few months before the Windows 8.1 release. I didn't use it extensively, but it was my travel machine for work and I never had any show-stopping issues. I used the Surface Pro as a laptop, effectively, so I never leaned on the tablet interface of Windows 8 much at all. That said, Windows 8.1 was a welcome refresh and really polished up the UI, which I thought was one of the better Microsoft has put forward since Windows XP.

Either way, people are going to complain. I welcome change and accept a bit of failure along with forward momentum. I get that people like security blankets when it comes to operating systems, though. And to that point, I hope that Windows 7 stays secure in the way that Windows XP (mostly) did for so long. I see a lot of people hovering back to it. For me, however, I prefer to jump in feet first.

My good/bad evaluation wasn't really complaining--there's no use in complaining about a 20-year-old OS. More of a retrospective.

I personally never owned a Vista computer, but I supported several staff members with it. Honestly, I liked Vista because of the modern permissions system. Lots fewer spyware infections to worry about. But it was resource-heavy and a lot of users had bad experiences with it. Say what you will about its sales numbers, but MS swept it under the rug and released 7 pretty quickly. Same with ME and 8. It's just the flip-flop curse.

[heedpantsnow]

Sometimes it seems like people just shouldn't upgrade OS; if you don't want anything to change just...don't upgrade the OS?

[njbair]

Sometimes it seems like people just shouldn't upgrade OS; if you don't want anything to change just...don't upgrade the OS?

To a degree...but I would have advised anyone to upgrade to Vista and deal with the changes. Security is more important than personal preference.

[user 18]

Sometimes it seems like people just shouldn't upgrade OS; if you don't want anything to change just...don't upgrade the OS?

To a degree...but I would have advised anyone to upgrade to Vista and deal with the changes. Security is more important than personal preference.

Even if the changes involve frequent crashes and don't allow you to use the machine? Even a perfectly secure machine is useless if you can't make it do what it's supposed to.

[heedpantsnow]

Btw I didn't mean that to be some kind of passive-aggressive post aimed at anyone here. Just an observation about users I've encountered in IT.

[heedpantsnow]

Sometimes it seems like people just shouldn't upgrade OS; if you don't want anything to change just...don't upgrade the OS?

To a degree...but I would have advised anyone to upgrade to Vista and deal with the changes. Security is more important than personal preference.

IMHO MS closing many of the system hooks that were security risks was an advantage of vista. Unfortunately many badly coded program dlls and drivers used those same hooks that were closed. Which cause so much user angst against MS. Haha.

[baldgye]

Sometimes it seems like people just shouldn't upgrade OS; if you don't want anything to change just...don't upgrade the OS?

100% agree!
And it's why I didn't upgrade from 7 to 8

[fohat.digs]

So, help clarify if I'm wrong, but it seems uncharacteristically magnanimous of Microsoft to give away its Operating System, which was its only product for the first several years. Are they really rewarding us "faithful" previous consumers with a permanent free operating system and upgrades, for the foreseeable future? Have they actually said that they will not start charging subscription fees after some months or years?

I understand that "the Cloud" and subscription products like Office365 are the moneymakers of the future, and that a free OS is probably the best way to keep customers in the Microsoft ecosystem, but it still seems "too good to be true" so I can't help but think that it isn't.

Have any of you seen definitive official statements that you could point me to?

Thanks!

[baldgye]

So, help clarify if I'm wrong, but it seems uncharacteristically magnanimous of Microsoft to give away its Operating System, which was its only product for the first several years. Are they really rewarding us "faithful" previous consumers with a permanent free operating system and upgrades, for the foreseeable future? Have they actually said that they will not start charging subscription fees after some months or years?

I understand that "the Cloud" and subscription products like Office365 are the moneymakers of the future, and that a free OS is probably the best way to keep customers in the Microsoft ecosystem, but it still seems "too good to be true" so I can't help but think that it isn't.

Have any of you seen definitive official statements that you could point me to?

Thanks!

I don't have links, but for the time being the OS is a free upgrade to those on 7 and 8, I imagine as an incentive for those who switched to a new OS not so long ago to upgrade so that everyone is on the same OS. This is because it's cheaper and easier to support one OS as opposed to three (or four) and they have there own store on 10 that they take a cut from.

[Altis]

So, help clarify if I'm wrong, but it seems uncharacteristically magnanimous of Microsoft to give away its Operating System, which was its only product for the first several years. Are they really rewarding us "faithful" previous consumers with a permanent free operating system and upgrades, for the foreseeable future? Have they actually said that they will not start charging subscription fees after some months or years?

I understand that "the Cloud" and subscription products like Office365 are the moneymakers of the future, and that a free OS is probably the best way to keep customers in the Microsoft ecosystem, but it still seems "too good to be true" so I can't help but think that it isn't.

Have any of you seen definitive official statements that you could point me to?

Thanks!

I don't have links, but for the time being the OS is a free upgrade to those on 7 and 8, I imagine as an incentive for those who switched to a new OS not so long ago to upgrade so that everyone is on the same OS. This is because it's cheaper and easier to support one OS as opposed to three (or four) and they have there own store on 10 that they take a cut from.

In addition to both of your points, there's also the fact that Windows 10 seems to collect a great deal more information from your use. It seems pretty common for "free" to often mean that your information is the cost. // Tinfoil hat

[baldgye]

So, help clarify if I'm wrong, but it seems uncharacteristically magnanimous of Microsoft to give away its Operating System, which was its only product for the first several years. Are they really rewarding us "faithful" previous consumers with a permanent free operating system and upgrades, for the foreseeable future? Have they actually said that they will not start charging subscription fees after some months or years?

I understand that "the Cloud" and subscription products like Office365 are the moneymakers of the future, and that a free OS is probably the best way to keep customers in the Microsoft ecosystem, but it still seems "too good to be true" so I can't help but think that it isn't.

Have any of you seen definitive official statements that you could point me to?

Thanks!

I don't have links, but for the time being the OS is a free upgrade to those on 7 and 8, I imagine as an incentive for those who switched to a new OS not so long ago to upgrade so that everyone is on the same OS. This is because it's cheaper and easier to support one OS as opposed to three (or four) and they have there own store on 10 that they take a cut from.

In addition to both of your points, there's also the fact that Windows 10 seems to collect a great deal more information from your use. It seems pretty common for "free" to often mean that your information is the cost. // Tinfoil hat

Your not wrong, though I doubt this will actually ever impact you.

[fohat.digs]

It seems pretty common for "free" to often mean that your information is the cost.

There is always that.

Who was it who said: "If you are not paying for the commodity, then you are the commodity."?

[PunksDead]

i just signed up for the office 365 monthly sub, and immediately got an email that there were problems processing my order. I have been on the phone for over an hour now...

i will not be upgrading to 10, if im having issues just paying for my office 365 sub off my paypal, i cant imagine the nightmares of calling for a real problem

[njbair]

So, help clarify if I'm wrong, but it seems uncharacteristically magnanimous of Microsoft to give away its Operating System, which was its only product for the first several years. Are they really rewarding us "faithful" previous consumers with a permanent free operating system and upgrades, for the foreseeable future? Have they actually said that they will not start charging subscription fees after some months or years?

I understand that "the Cloud" and subscription products like Office365 are the moneymakers of the future, and that a free OS is probably the best way to keep customers in the Microsoft ecosystem, but it still seems "too good to be true" so I can't help but think that it isn't.

Have any of you seen definitive official statements that you could point me to?

Thanks!

I had read a hanful of articles within the past few years where industry analysts said Microsoft's smartest move is to start giving away Windows. I remember thinking that would never happen, but it seems I was wrong.

I don't think we fully realize how valuable the user base is to Microsoft, even if they haven't fully actualized its potential. It's kind of how startups like Twitter were making huge stock gains without ever being profitable. That almost doesn't matter anymore--that will be the next CEO's job.

Regarding the idea that MS might turn around and start charging a subscription, there's actually nothing that prevented them from doing that with the previous releases. Unless there's something buried in the Windows 10 EULA that hasn't been discovered yet.

[baldgye]

So, help clarify if I'm wrong, but it seems uncharacteristically magnanimous of Microsoft to give away its Operating System, which was its only product for the first several years. Are they really rewarding us "faithful" previous consumers with a permanent free operating system and upgrades, for the foreseeable future? Have they actually said that they will not start charging subscription fees after some months or years?

I understand that "the Cloud" and subscription products like Office365 are the moneymakers of the future, and that a free OS is probably the best way to keep customers in the Microsoft ecosystem, but it still seems "too good to be true" so I can't help but think that it isn't.

Have any of you seen definitive official statements that you could point me to?

Thanks!

I had read a hanful of articles within the past few years where industry analysts said Microsoft's smartest move is to start giving away Windows. I remember thinking that would never happen, but it seems I was wrong.

I don't think we fully realize how valuable the user base is to Microsoft, even if they haven't fully actualized its potential. It's kind of how startups like Twitter were making huge stock gains without ever being profitable. That almost doesn't matter anymore--that will be the next CEO's job.

Regarding the idea that MS might turn around and start charging a subscription, there's actually nothing that prevented them from doing that with the previous releases. Unless there's something buried in the Windows 10 EULA that hasn't been discovered yet.

If you had to pay a subscription to use the 'next' Windows, no one would ever buy it.

[Leslieann]

Win10 has been monetized in various other ways.
Solitaire is no longer free, there is also the Windows store and they are also doing Office subscriptions.

You also forget how Microsoft locks you in. Once you use Office and Windows, it's hard to leave and they know you will have to replace that computer at some point.

[baldgye]

Win10 has been monetized in various other ways.
Solitaire is no longer free, there is also the Windows store and they are also doing Office subscriptions.

You also forget how Microsoft locks you in. Once you use Office and Windows, it's hard to leave and they know you will have to replace that computer at some point.

wut? how are those too even related?

[Fire Brand]

Win10 has been monetized in various other ways.
Solitaire is no longer free, there is also the Windows store and they are also doing Office subscriptions.

You also forget how Microsoft locks you in. Once you use Office and Windows, it's hard to leave and they know you will have to replace that computer at some point.

wut? how are those too even related?

Also to add you can quite easily move windows licences now anyway as even OEM ones can be deactivated on new systems after 8 and again thand same with office.

[rowdy]

Win10 has been monetized in various other ways.
Solitaire is no longer free, there is also the Windows store and they are also doing Office subscriptions.

You also forget how Microsoft locks you in. Once you use Office and Windows, it's hard to leave and they know you will have to replace that computer at some point.

Solitaire is free, but you get ads.

You need to pay a subscription to remove the ads.

[Leslieann]

Win10 has been monetized in various other ways.
Solitaire is no longer free, there is also the Windows store and they are also doing Office subscriptions.

You also forget how Microsoft locks you in. Once you use Office and Windows, it's hard to leave and they know you will have to replace that computer at some point.

wut? how are those too even related?

Also to add you can quite easily move windows licences now anyway as even OEM ones can be deactivated on new systems after 8 and again thand same with office.

While it seems simple enough, and moving from Word to Writer is easy, ask an office using Outlook with calendar integration to switch to Google Calendar and see what happens.

As for moving licenses, that depends on the license. If you have a retail copy, yes, you can move it. If you have an OEM license, it may be married to the motherboard bios and will not be transferable. This is becoming more and more common with EUFI and secure boot. However, OEM licenses that come pre-installed are considered are single use, so even if you could, it would be illegal. You can however buy an OEM license for about 1/2 price, and that could possibly be transferred, but may require a call to MS to activate it each time you move it.

Considering how many simply buy a new computer, and the fact that MS can make 4x as much on retail copies, they still make plenty.

Win10 has been monetized in various other ways.
Solitaire is no longer free, there is also the Windows store and they are also doing Office subscriptions.

You also forget how Microsoft locks you in. Once you use Office and Windows, it's hard to leave and they know you will have to replace that computer at some point.

Solitaire is free, but you get ads.

You need to pay a subscription to remove the ads.

True, either way, they still get paid.

[baldgye]

Why ask an office, what office is even considering moving to Windows 8, let alone 10?

For a home user you can use Office on lots of OS's hell even iOS...

[Fire Brand]

Win10 has been monetized in various other ways.
Solitaire is no longer free, there is also the Windows store and they are also doing Office subscriptions.

You also forget how Microsoft locks you in. Once you use Office and Windows, it's hard to leave and they know you will have to replace that computer at some point.

wut? how are those too even related?

Also to add you can quite easily move windows licences now anyway as even OEM ones can be deactivated on new systems after 8 and again thand same with office.

While it seems simple enough, and moving from Word to Writer is easy, ask an office using Outlook with calendar integration to switch to Google Calendar and see what happens.

As for moving licenses, that depends on the license. If you have a retail copy, yes, you can move it. If you have an OEM license, it may be married to the motherboard bios and will not be transferable. This is becoming more and more common with EUFI and secure boot. However, OEM licenses that come pre-installed are considered are single use, so even if you could, it would be illegal. You can however buy an OEM license for about 1/2 price, and that could possibly be transferred, but may require a call to MS to activate it each time you move it.

Considering how many simply buy a new computer, and the fact that MS can make 4x as much on retail copies, they still make plenty.

Win10 has been monetized in various other ways.
Solitaire is no longer free, there is also the Windows store and they are also doing Office subscriptions.

You also forget how Microsoft locks you in. Once you use Office and Windows, it's hard to leave and they know you will have to replace that computer at some point.

Solitaire is free, but you get ads.

You need to pay a subscription to remove the ads.

True, either way, they still get paid.

Ohh when I say OEM I mean what used to be the cheap system builder licences those can be moved unlike before where they where locked.

[katushkin]

My PC keeps turning itself on...

[baldgye]

My PC keeps turning itself on...

did you turn off the auto updates thing?

[katushkin]

My PC keeps turning itself on...

did you turn off the auto updates thing?

I forgot...

[Leslieann]

Why ask an office, what office is even considering moving to Windows 8, let alone 10?

Offices need new computers at some point, and when they do, odds are it will be 10. It's not like stores keep an inventory of current computers running older operating systems. 

[Touch_It]

My office is considering windows 10. At least for laptops.  We also have some windows 8 servers.  Currently most everything is on 7.  Side note, I'm excited I will be getting a new work laptop soon.  I know it will have an Core i7 and a Samsung 540 Evo ssd and 12-16 of ram.  We are on a 3 year computer replacement cycle.  I'm half hoping I can "opt" into a win 10 test phase.  I like windows 10 so far.  My only issue is not being able to hit the windows key while in a game.  Idk yet if it's keyboard remapping software or not.

[njbair]

My office is considering windows 10. At least for laptops.  We also have some windows 8 servers.  Currently most everything is on 7.  Side note, I'm excited I will be getting a new work laptop soon.  I know it will have an Core i7 and a Samsung 540 Evo ssd and 12-16 of ram.  We are on a 3 year computer replacement cycle.  I'm half hoping I can "opt" into a win 10 test phase.  I like windows 10 so far.  My only issue is not being able to hit the windows key while in a game.  Idk yet if it's keyboard remapping software or not.

Isn't this a good thing for gamers so that it doesn't toss you out of your fullscreen game to show the start menu? Accidental winkey presses are behind some of the greatest tragedies in gaming history.

[baldgye]

who the hell plays in fullscreened mode anymore? Hello Fullscreen windowless boarder

[Lord of Narwhals]

who the hell plays in fullscreened mode anymore? Hello Fullscreen windowless boarder

It's different depending on the game but there always seems to be more input lag in windowed than in fullscreen.

[njbair]

I don't know if this is still the case with modern compositing, but back in the day framebuffer mode was always faster than windowed.

[baldgye]

who the hell plays in fullscreened mode anymore? Hello Fullscreen windowless boarder

It's different depending on the game but there always seems to be more input lag in windowed than in fullscreen.

Never encountered that

[keshley]

I ran into the same nvidia issues pretty much everybody had, but with a single twist.

Both my desktops are SLI (980s in one, 670s in the other). Had to go through the same hoops to get the drivers loaded properly, but on my 670 setup, the drivers only installed for one card. No SLI, etc. I had to manually go in and install the driver for that card. Just odd.

My Start Menu was empty yesterday after I rebooted for a driver update. Another reboot fixed it. I am so used to just typing out whatever app I wanted to launch due to crappy Win 8 tiles interface, it wasn't that big a deal, we'll see if it happens again.

Other than that, its been pretty smooth. Fixed my bizarre focus issue I was having in 8.1 as well; something was grabbing focus while gaming, alt-tabbing me out. But it was so inconsistent, I never managed to get a procmon when it happened to figure out what it was.

[katushkin]

My PC has turned itself on twice in the last 2 days and I have the automatic updates turned off.

WTF.

[Leslieann]

My PC has turned itself on twice in the last 2 days and I have the automatic updates turned off.

WTF.

With Win10?
It re-enables itself after a time, even with Enterprise and Pro, they can only defer them.

However, it can be killed.
The easiest way to kill updates is to disable Windows Update Service, which also disables Cortana and the Windows store. Even if you try running an update it will error out with this method. Not sure if this works on Home, but does on Enterprise and Pro.

[rowdy]

http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/why-windows-10-sucks.html

[baldgye]

http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/why-windows-10-sucks.html

Isn't that like a Microsoft fanboy site making a list of why Mac OSX sucks? Lol



Also sleep mode has some problems, every time I put my PC to sleep I come back from work to see it awake, I googled around and there is a cmd line you can type out and see what device is waking it up, it's my audio driver... And I've no real idea how to stop it from waking up my machine... So for the moment sleep mode isn't useable, which is kinda lame. It also wakes from sleep mode and auto logs me in :/

[rowdy]

http://linuxfonts.narod.ru/why-windows-10-sucks.html

Isn't that like a Microsoft fanboy site making a list of why Mac OSX sucks? Lol



Also sleep mode has some problems, every time I put my PC to sleep I come back from work to see it awake, I googled around and there is a cmd line you can type out and see what device is waking it up, it's my audio driver... And I've no real idea how to stop it from waking up my machine... So for the moment sleep mode isn't useable, which is kinda lame. It also wakes from sleep mode and auto logs me in :/

That guy has a longer page of things wrong with Linux btw, he is not just bashing Windows.

[baldgye]

Tbh tho the list of things wrong with Linux is pretty short:

Things wrong with Linux distributions;
1. Everything


That's all I can think off

[katushkin]

I double checked it the second time it turned back on and the auto updates hadn't turned itself back on. So I have no ****ing idea what's going on.

[rowdy]

Tbh tho the list of things wrong with Linux is pretty short:

Things wrong with Linux distributions;
1. Everything


That's all I can think off

Ahahahaha.

Very droll, sir.

[fohat.digs]

Things wrong with Linux distributions;
1. Everything

For me, over the course of 5-6 years of attempting to install/use Linux (Ubuntu and openSUSE flavors, mostly) the absolute incessant, screaming, hair-pulling, recurring nightmares have revolved, almost exclusively, around getting internet connectivity. Ethernet LAN, wireless cards, wif-fi, whatever, there have only been a couple of times that I could get online (via ethernet card, the first time at least, almost never with built-in motherboard connection) without excruciating pain and hours of wasted time, if at all.

Pleas for help on the forums have yielded little help (Ubuntu forum mostly compassionate, openSUSE forum breathtakingly snarky and mean-spirited) because 90%+ of the replies take the form "go online and do x" or "download and run this, then post the result" - HOW?

Without internet connectivity is is just a roundelay of useless exercises and walking around with flash drive files that don't do anything.

[Belfong]

So today I was prompted in Windows 10 to upgrade my current Office to Office 365 and because I am a Windows 10 user, I get 50% off. 50% is pretty good and so I read the T&C. Turned out it is only half off for the first year. Second year onward and I have to pay the $70/year full price. WTF, no thanks Microsoft. I am happy with Office 2007.

[Touch_It]

So today I was prompted in Windows 10 to upgrade my current Office to Office 365 and because I am a Windows 10 user, I get 50% off. 50% is pretty good and so I read the T&C. Turned out it is only half off for the first year. Second year onward and I have to pay the $70/year full price. WTF, no thanks Microsoft. I am happy with Office 2007.

Lol yeah.  I can't imagine most people wanting to upgrade to 365.   Sadly for the less tech savy who have no idea 365 is a yearly subscription, they will be in for a rude awakening.  The last version of office I bought is 2002, lol.  If I need office that bad I'll use 2010 on my work laptop. 

[Belfong]

Rude awakening is such an apt word. I believe many people will be in shock next year!

[JaccoW]

Well, that $70 is for 5 devices so with 3 desktops, 1 laptop and a tablet it's not a bad deal if I was upgrading every few years on all those devices anyway.

I'm using win10 on a cheap HP stream 7 tablet, basically a cheap atom tablet and it's surprisingly much snappier than it was on the original win8.1
There are a few small quirks but so far I like it better than win8.1 which had some really good improvements over the rock-solid win7. Can't wait to upgrade the laptop though. I should finally be able to transform the Wi-Di on it to Miracast.

Edit: But of course I have a Sony laptop with switchable graphics so I have to wait for updated drivers.  )

[tp4tissue]

Office 365...  Officially let microsoft read everything you write evers.

[baldgye]

Who the **** upgrades office? If it wasn't for my dad accidentally buying a family pack of Office 2010 I'd still be on Office '03 lmao

[THSdrummer]

Honest question, has anyone upgraded from 8.1 to 10 and played Fallout 3 and/or New Vegas? Considering making the switch, but I don't want to make New Vegas unplayable. Can you play Fallout 3 on Windows 10? Somehow I imagine not, but if I could play that game for longer than 2 minutes without it freezing, I'd be so happy.

[JaccoW]

Who the **** upgrades office? If it wasn't for my dad accidentally buying a family pack of Office 2010 I'd still be on Office '03 lmao

People who actually use it.

Each and every Office version offered some definite improvements over its predecessor. I'd hate to think of still having to use office 2003. My studies and the sort of work I do require me to write reports and use programs like Excel, PowerPoint and Visio. We are not all programmers here who can just plemp down code all day. XP