Windows 10 Update

[Judge]

I repasted the CPU and cleaned the motherboard and fan, then took the laptop to a shop that will have a look for free (always check out all the local shops as they do different prices and deals - another local shop charges £20 just to look at it), they tested the RAM cards and found the faulty one, so all it cost me was a new hard drive, RAM card and OS, which I installed myself.

You can download free RAM diagnostics like MemTest86 and Windows Memory Diagnostic right off the net. I've used them for years.

Use the program like any boot disk and it lets you know if any of your memory is faulty. Quite handy on occasion.

 

[Spiller]

You can download free RAM diagnostics like MemTest86 and Windows Memory Diagnostic right off the net. I've used them for years.

Use the program like any boot disk and it lets you know if any of your memory is faulty. Quite handy on occasion.

Excellent! Downloading as I type, thanks Judge

 

[Beverly]

I did it last night and after the two additional updates for Win 10, up and running happily with it.

Just a note for others, when you initially upgrade to 10, you will have very limited screen resolutions available and, your graphics drivers may not install. Run Windows updates, then try to reinstall your graphics drivers again. That is fixing it for most people, me included.

 

[wyverary]

Another heads-up, wireless sharing is turned on by default, so be sure to go in and disable that.

 

[Bikutoso]

I still haven't had time to try Windows 10, and i should probably test it in VMware in the near future.
I won't replace my Windows 7 until im sure it works, since Windows 8.1 didn't work properly on my system.
I also have to test Windows Server 2016 to be up to date on the server side.

 

[Beverly]

Crozix I think it's worth testing. I have one program I use that did not work with 8 or 8.1 but, it does work with 10. It also worked in 7 but not Vista.

I've used Windows since it was just plain WINDOWS and, this is proving to be the most bug free release so far. I'm satisfied. maybe MS got it right this time.

10 does feel a bit like 7 and 8.1 had a baby and that baby is 10. I love Cortana, it saves a lot of typing and so far seems to be as good as Apple's Siri.

 

[Judge]

Another heads-up, wireless sharing is turned on by default, so be sure to go in and disable that.

Yeah, I don't like that at all. Nice article on going about this though:

http://betanews.com/2015/07/31/stop...-connection-to-share-updates-to-other-people/

 

[Judge]

Looks like Microsoft finally gave the Windows 10 update icon an option to permanently hide it. Nice.

 

[wyverary]

Finally updated my Boot Camp partition. Here's my assessment (so far) -

• It's fast, runs much more smoothly than Windows 8 and probably even better than 7. Serious under-the-hood improvements in that regard.
• It pretty much *is* Windows 7, with some slight GUI changes, and I think anyone used to 7, after grumbling about the minor changes, would get the hang of it pretty quickly.
• Finally, my Macbook's trackpad and Windows play nice together! I no longer have to snap my fingers three times and clutch a magic crystal to make sure two-finger clicking works successfully every time, and scrolling is much more natural. No more need to carry around a wireless mouse.
• Related to the above - the function keys no longer work. I'm still working on that one. But that issue is only related to the idiots like me who use Boot Camp and is utterly unsurprising.
• Microsoft has finally realized that you can't make a single operating system work equally well on a tablet and a PC. 10 has a Tablet Mode (which I haven't tried) but the default UI is much more friendly for The Rest of Us. I'm actually now toying with the idea of buying a Surface tablet at some point.
• Microsoft Edge is, in fact, a really nice browser, much less clunky and more lightweight and faster than IE or even Chrome. (Yeah, there's equivalent browsers out there, but it's nice seeing Microsoft making such a successful effort - someone finally caught on to the fact that Internet Explorer has been the butt of a lot of jokes for like a decade.)
• I'm not sure about the Home Edition, but the Pro edition I have actually has PowerShell, which I am eager to try out (probably one of those features reserved only for nerds)
• I have had only one program that turned out to be incompatible, and that is a much-obsolete version of a program that 99.999% of people would never use. (Secunia PSI is a program you should have anyway, but if you don't, put it on your computer and make sure everything is up to date.)
• Maybe this isn't exclusive to Windows 10 and I only recently heard of it, but with a quick bit of magic, you can install God Mode, which makes navigating system settings a breeze.
• Battery life is about the same, at least on my system.

General notes to keep in mind during installation: Don't use the default settings, do a custom setup, don't let them make you sign up for a Microsoft account. Uncheck everything to the level of privacy that you desire. Run CCleaner, and dust up the registry before and after the installation. Disable all your startup items before you install. And it should go without saying - Download a copy of the ISO and keep it along with the product key in a safe place.

Bottom line: I whole-heartily recommend it.

 

[DuckRabbit]

I have had to get a new laptop - coincidentally right at the time that Windows 10 was made available (29 July). There were 3 things wrong with my old laptop:

1. I tripped over the headphones, yanking the wire out of the socket which damaged the socket meaning I can't use earphones or anything to use Skype and listen to music etc.
2. The MS Office 2010 I have on it may have a bug; it works perfectly but it adds 'invisible' blank pages to 1 particular document; everything else works fine though. I tried reinstalling it but this was a nightmare - I wonder if this is because it came at a special price when I bought my old laptop.
3. My outgoing video has not worked for ages (I can see others on Skype but they can't see me).

But there are 2 things beautifully right with my old laptop:
1. It has Windows 7 .
2. It has MS Office 2010 - with the wonderful Office Picture Manager (which Office 2013 has dispensed with - not because it wasn't used and loved by billions of people any more but because it wasn't 'new' - this mindless glorification of the new ).

Mainly because of the damaged earphones socket, I decided to bite the bullet and get a new laptop - faster processor, bigger storage etc. The big drawback is however Windows 10 which seems to have zero privacy. With the voracious collection of data from all activity on your laptop, Windows 10 is essentially a poisoned chalice. My new laptop may as well be infected by a virus - as some of the comments note on this article below: Windows itself has become spyware! Nothing is private anymore, not even your documents or photos.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...ten-privacy-watchdogs-warn.html#ixzz3hrmJZ7Zq

3 options re. my computer:
1. Have my old computer sent away to fix the earphone plug socket so I can resume listening to iTunes and using Skype on it (I can't really afford to be without it though );
2. Use both computers . Continue using old laptop for work (documents, pictures). Use new laptop as a radio/CD player and Skype/phone only and just manually transfer onto it only the document I'm working on for portability;
3. Bite the Windows 10 bullet and just hold my nose about the lack of privacy. But I don't feel like uploading years and years' worth of documents and pictures onto it - knowing it's safe & private now but the minute it's on the new laptop, it's out there in there world/ cloud .

The online comments show that everyone is clinging on madly to Windows 7 - which is my wont too. It was so simple and sufficient - any changes after Windows 7 isn't development, it's cancer. One funny comment described Windows 8 as "diabolical".

Can anyone advise which of these pairs of comments is true?:
------------
[1]
clubman, Dublin, Ireland, 4 hours ago
7's good for at least another 5 years with full support, I'll decide then. Am not moving from 7 as I need an OS not a Service!

Ricky Spanish, Yorkshire Dales, United Kingdom, 4 hours ago
@clubman: Mainstream support for Win 7 without Service Pack 1 ended in April 2013, and for Win 7 with SP1 ended in January this year - you are already on extended support until it goes End Of Life in 2020, which means security fixes only.
------------
[2]
Cityslacker, Leeds, 4 hours ago
I have seen a very good online discussion about Microsft's Terms of Service for Win 10 and they are very scary indeed. One of them is that they can effectively look at anything that you have stored on your PC at any time. I kid you not.

Nemesis101, Altrincham, United Kingdom, 1 hour ago
Well of course they're going to store email content - they house the servers it resides on, same as for every ISP and email provider worldwide. Handing it over to legal entities seems to be a legal thing our respective goverments have implemented for dubious reasons. But the file thing is implausible - you're describing creating a real-time replica of everyone's PC on MS servers. This would saturate everyone's internet connection, (in fact drag the whole internet down with it) and the hardware/storage costs at Microsoft would be ludicrous. Why would a PC reference a remote image of itself to find something locally - painfully slow? Windows has been using local file caching and indexing for this for years.
------------

It seems not even computer technicians know much about Windows 10 - it's all unfolding right now, with not a few nightmare tales to tell already e.g.,
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...-collection-transformed-slideshow-repeat.html

 

[Judge]

Can anyone advise which of these pairs of comments is true?:

Ricky Spanish, Yorkshire Dales, United Kingdom, 4 hours ago
@clubman: Mainstream support for Win 7 without Service Pack 1 ended in April 2013, and for Win 7 with SP1 ended in January this year - you are already on extended support until it goes End Of Life in 2020, which means security fixes only.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/lifecycle

 

[wyverary]

I have had to get a new laptop - coincidentally right at the time that Windows 10 was made available (29 July). There were 3 things wrong with my old laptop:

1. I tripped over the headphones, yanking the wire out of the socket which damaged the socket meaning I can't use earphones or anything to use Skype and listen to music etc.
2. The MS Office 2010 I have on it may have a bug; it works perfectly but it adds 'invisible' blank pages to 1 particular document; everything else works fine though. I tried reinstalling it but this was a nightmare - I wonder if this is because it came at a special price when I bought my old laptop.
3. My outgoing video has not worked for ages (I can see others on Skype but they can't see me).

But there are 2 things beautifully right with my old laptop:
1. It has Windows 7 .
2. It has MS Office 2010 - with the wonderful Office Picture Manager (which Office 2013 has dispensed with - not because it wasn't used and loved by billions of people any more but because it wasn't 'new' - this mindless glorification of the new ).

Mainly because of the damaged earphones socket, I decided to bite the bullet and get a new laptop - faster processor, bigger storage etc. The big drawback is however Windows 10 which seems to have zero privacy. With the voracious collection of data from all activity on your laptop, Windows 10 is essentially a poisoned chalice. My new laptop may as well be infected by a virus - as some of the comments note on this article below: Windows itself has become spyware! Nothing is private anymore, not even your documents or photos.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...ten-privacy-watchdogs-warn.html#ixzz3hrmJZ7Zq

3 options re. my computer:
1. Have my old computer sent away to fix the earphone plug socket so I can resume listening to iTunes and using Skype on it (I can't really afford to be without it though );
2. Use both computers . Continue using old laptop for work (documents, pictures). Use new laptop as a radio/CD player and Skype/phone only and just manually transfer onto it only the document I'm working on for portability;
3. Bite the Windows 10 bullet and just hold my nose about the lack of privacy. But I don't feel like uploading years and years' worth of documents and pictures onto it - knowing it's safe & private now but the minute it's on the new laptop, it's out there in there world/ cloud .

The online comments show that everyone is clinging on madly to Windows 7 - which is my wont too. It was so simple and sufficient - any changes after Windows 7 isn't development, it's cancer. One funny comment described Windows 8 as "diabolical".

Can anyone advise which of these pairs of comments is true?:
------------
[1]
clubman, Dublin, Ireland, 4 hours ago
7's good for at least another 5 years with full support, I'll decide then. Am not moving from 7 as I need an OS not a Service!

Ricky Spanish, Yorkshire Dales, United Kingdom, 4 hours ago
@clubman: Mainstream support for Win 7 without Service Pack 1 ended in April 2013, and for Win 7 with SP1 ended in January this year - you are already on extended support until it goes End Of Life in 2020, which means security fixes only.
------------
[2]
Cityslacker, Leeds, 4 hours ago
I have seen a very good online discussion about Microsft's Terms of Service for Win 10 and they are very scary indeed. One of them is that they can effectively look at anything that you have stored on your PC at any time. I kid you not.

Nemesis101, Altrincham, United Kingdom, 1 hour ago
Well of course they're going to store email content - they house the servers it resides on, same as for every ISP and email provider worldwide. Handing it over to legal entities seems to be a legal thing our respective goverments have implemented for dubious reasons. But the file thing is implausible - you're describing creating a real-time replica of everyone's PC on MS servers. This would saturate everyone's internet connection, (in fact drag the whole internet down with it) and the hardware/storage costs at Microsoft would be ludicrous. Why would a PC reference a remote image of itself to find something locally - painfully slow? Windows has been using local file caching and indexing for this for years.
------------

It seems not even computer technicians know much about Windows 10 - it's all unfolding right now, with not a few nightmare tales to tell already e.g.,
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...-collection-transformed-slideshow-repeat.html

My CIT instructor is working on a blog post covering these concerns. I'll let you know when it's posted.

 

[DuckRabbit]

Ricky Spanish, Yorkshire Dales, United Kingdom, 4 hours ago
@clubman: Mainstream support for Win 7 without Service Pack 1 ended in April 2013, and for Win 7 with SP1 ended in January this year - you are already on extended support until it goes End Of Life in 2020, which means security fixes only.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/lifecycle

Thanks Judge, that makes me feel marginally better about the changes I've made. Thanks for trawling through my post - as you can probably tell I'm quite worked up about computers at the moment! A necessary evil...

 

[Xenocity]

As much as I love 10, I miss the titles menu from 8.1 (I loved 8.1, despite a few minor issues)

 

[Beverly]

I'm still getting used to 10 but, I do like Cortana and, the pop up start menu being back. I hated having to switch screens to get to start menu items form the desktop in 8.1. I never saw the point of having a program launch icon on both the desktop and start meu but, 8.1 forced me to have them duplicated because you couldn't get to start from the desktop and, you couldn't see the desktop if you opened the start menu.

I put things I use while my browser, or other full screen app is open on the start menu and, full screen apps on the desktop and, I want to be able to click either just once to launch whatever I wasn't, hip hopping between multiple screens was a pain.

 

[DuckRabbit]

My CIT instructor is working on a blog post covering these concerns. I'll let you know when it's posted.

Thanks - I'll be sure to read this.

A useful article for improving the privacy settings on Windows 10:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/07/30/windows-10-privacy-settings/

 

[wyverary]

As much as I love 10, I miss the titles menu from 8.1 (I loved 8.1, despite a few minor issues)

You can use Tablet Mode in 10, but it is decidedly different from 8.

Thanks - I'll be sure to read this.

A useful article for improving the privacy settings on Windows 10:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/07/30/windows-10-privacy-settings/

Let's just say, my instructor went on quite the rant this morning. And it didn't go the way I expected. He defended Microsoft's collection of anonymised user data, saying that without it it's impossible to develop an operating system that will satisfy users. As for the wifi sharing that's been sounding alarms all across the Internet, that is only for the purposes of pushing updates - which is to say, if you have one computer in your house that gets the updates, it can push them to the other computers in the house to save bandwidth. He went on to point out the irony that everybody loves to post all about themselves and where they are on social media but somehow get wigged out when their desktop wants to do anything remotely similar.

I'm not saying i agree or disagree with him, but it comes down to personal choice.

ETA: This is a guy who gets super worked up when it comes to security, to the point where the general public would suggest he just go all out and get a tinfoil hat.

 

[DuckRabbit]

You can use Tablet Mode in 10, but it is decidedly different from 8.


Let's just say, my instructor went on quite the rant this morning. And it didn't go the way I expected. He defended Microsoft's collection of anonymised user data, saying that without it it's impossible to develop an operating system that will satisfy users. As for the wifi sharing that's been sounding alarms all across the Internet, that is only for the purposes of pushing updates - which is to say, if you have one computer in your house that gets the updates, it can push them to the other computers in the house to save bandwidth. He went on to point out the irony that everybody loves to post all about themselves and where they are on social media but somehow get wigged out when their desktop wants to do anything remotely similar.

I'm not saying i agree or disagree with him, but it comes down to personal choice.

ETA: This is a guy who gets super worked up when it comes to security, to the point where the general public would suggest he just go all out and get a tinfoil hat.

How interesting! How differently people perceive things. How self contradictory/ inconsistent people can be. Is it naive to think MS is putting the user first? An OS that would satisfy me as a user is one that doesn't spy on your files and have spying ads!

And not everybody loves to post all about themselves - not everyone is on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. Some people are not on such social media precisely because they don't trust the privacy settings. The point is to choose what you want to reveal - not have it revealed on your behalf.

Thanks for the update - it's good to know what people are thinking.

 

[Beverly]

My ISP warned me to turn off sharing updates over the internet when I called and asked them about it because of my limited bandwidth. It uses a P2P (peer to peer) format if you leave that on and, my ISP sees that as possible illegal file sharing so, would have flagged my account and given me a warning to stop, then suspended my account if I did not stop.

Leaving it on for local network is fine but not for over the internet, that basically makes your home computer an update server for anyone that has Windows 10. If you ISP monitors for pirating, you could be flagged for suspected pirating if you leave that on.

As for the other stuff, I turned it all of. I run an ad blocker that stops 99% of ads anyway so what they are for makes no difference to me. I also block Flash and any auto play of videos. I like Windows but, I don't want ads and garbage. If I want to know about a product, I will search for it either in local stores or online on my own. If I don't want that product, I don't need ads telling me about useless garbage that might be sort of like something I searched for or, already own.

I could care less about it reporting my location since it's never right anyway. my ISP makes sure of that.

 

[Judge]

You can use Tablet Mode in 10, but it is decidedly different from 8.


Let's just say, my instructor went on quite the rant this morning. And it didn't go the way I expected. He defended Microsoft's collection of anonymised user data, saying that without it it's impossible to develop an operating system that will satisfy users. As for the wifi sharing that's been sounding alarms all across the Internet, that is only for the purposes of pushing updates - which is to say, if you have one computer in your house that gets the updates, it can push them to the other computers in the house to save bandwidth. He went on to point out the irony that everybody loves to post all about themselves and where they are on social media but somehow get wigged out when their desktop wants to do anything remotely similar.

I'm not saying i agree or disagree with him, but it comes down to personal choice.

ETA: This is a guy who gets super worked up when it comes to security, to the point where the general public would suggest he just go all out and get a tinfoil hat.

Thanks for sharing, Wyv. Just another bonus in maintaining Windows 7. Let others be beta testers for Windows 10.

If anything, time may well expose whether or not Microsoft has a gaping security flaw here. But I also see such functions as another "sign of the times", with everything on your hard drive exposed to some kind of cloud concept. Larry Ellison's vision was right about that...much to my dismay- and probably yours as well.

However as a former commercial insurance underwriter I'd wager that Microsoft has weighed their products liability exposure (the ability to promptly and successfully deliver security updates) above their ability to keep user data secure. Probably the right call given the prevalence of products liability issues and their subsequent litigation costs on a daily basis. To the average user these two exposures may appear as one and the same, but they really aren't, especially when you consider a frequency of occurrence factor. Frequency can often drive higher exposure to risk.

IMO it's far less about "satisfying users" than a multi-billion dollar corporation covering its own arse for good rea$on.