Windows 10...

I just found out that the included Solitaire game apparently has ads and will nag you to upgrade to some "premium" version

So much for "free" upgrade, eh?



http://www.pcgamer.com/windows-10-solitaire-requires-a-subscription-to-remove-ads/

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Meanwhile, here is a sample of what I can download and use absolutely free with my absolutely free operating system, Fedora Linux:

 

I upgraded...I may still do a clean install. Anyway, thus far I would describe Windows 10 as a hybrid...7 & 8.1The Start menu is back and if you like those annoying tiles that dominated 8.1, those are back too, but in miniature. The user has the option to organize those tiles but from the Start menu. It's a much cleaner appearance in my opinion. Again though, one word of advice, do NOT opt for the Express setup when prompted, which essentially gives Microsoft the rights to snoop and sell the data to 3rd parties. Opt for the custom set-up. For those wanting to upgrade, it will take about 1 hour...my rig runs an I7 quadcore @ 3.2 GHz; and even with that it took a full hour to do it's thing. It's basically a 3 step process, first is to copy files, then install, then setup, it will automatically re-start after each step.

I do recommend a clean install if possible and I may still do that, as you need to upgrade first before you can run a clean installation of Windows 10.

Candy Crush is free...big whoop, but Direct X 12 is also included which I will use.

So far no serious bugs or glitches, I give it a thumbs up.

 

I think it is great, but the mail is screwed up; your inbox might not be empty. I put it on an eeePc too, when they told me when I got it that it wouldn't run Windows 7 and it had to have Starter, it now runs windows 10 pro, no problems.

Yes, click the little tiny custom setup. The Cortana seems nosy too, I only turned on to check it out, can't even rename it Hal, talk about tracking everything.

 

Cortana is, I'm guessing, Microsoft's response to Apple's Siri. I agree it seems nosey and don't use it much. i forgot about the "Edge" browser also. This is included with the upgrade to version 10. I haven't used it much it seems about the same thing as bing. I use Google Chrome myself and probably won't mess with "Edge" very mush. One cool thing about "Edge" is being able to search directly from the address bar. Nevertheless, I run a dongle that casts my PC to my TV and that requires Chrome, so that's my main browser. I forgot about Cortana though, good point.

 

All in all I think the nightmare is over.

The Edge did stump me, I couldn’t figure out how to organize this horrible mess of favorites I imported, like duh, grab it and move it. My brain is too old for that.

The Map app is better than the free Ipad one I needed once, download maps like of your whole state and use offline, make favorites before you do and the route will be there while offline; if have tablet or laptop so much cooler for a road trip.

{ On my TV I use an HDMI cable, and windows can’t detect or properly size my TV. It cuts off the edges, had to change that with the Intel app custom aspect ratio, which I forgot about and had a cow until I remembered that was all it took. And on the laptop, since I plugged it into the TV’s PC plug and was buzzing along happily I forgot the changes to regedit I previously made, like this "Display1_DownScalingSupported" from "0" to "1" to get the extra resolution, and didn’t notice because the loss of resolution wasn’t apparent until I was just using the laptop and messing with the Email app and an important button was behind the taskbar.

I lucked out though, there were several driver problems with the laptop on 8 and 8.1, had to scrounge around trying different ones from similar computers, now wow, laptop company must have found out that what couldn’t run a full version of 7 now runs 10, they updated the drivers, even the old ones, cool my buttons work without a headache of finding a newer driver to work.

The 8.1 apps had that change where the Metro apps could change size somewhat, and you could snap more than three with enough resolution. Now they can do a stacked or side by side (got to copy out of a book with kindle app), or a cascade if anyone ever really used that; though there are still some limitations. There is this one app called “math playground,” which is similar to the Ipad’s “Pencil Box,” and these changes have made that thing look downright whacked (unusable). They need more apps like that for the kiddies. Having say a Kindle app kind of snapped to one side and what is left of the desktop to play with was not too bad, but snap stuff and all your icons can get shoved over, oops. Extra desktops like Linux…definite improvement.

To play or not to play, that is the question:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer\NoActiveDesktopChanges

On 8.1, while using the laptop, I got so mad at the email app I found where they kept the metro apps and the Email and Calendar app and removed it directly by physically tearing it out by the roots, and then reinstalled. I don’t recommend that at all, there can be complications, like trying to fix audio on Linux without help, but not quite like building your own kernel to get one paperweight working again and having six pages of detailed instructions and it takes 10 hours. I will wait till they fix it. Pinning the Email site to the start menu gets there quick enough. };

It is a little creepy that the email program found the trash, but not my inbox.

Of all apps to fail, Email, I wonder if the Chinese are getting it, or maybe the Chinese are innocent and it’s that guy they said was paranoid.

 

You're a lot more technically minded than I am. One interesting feature with the Edge browser is a converter option that organizes the text from an article into a much more readable form. Gone are the click-bait ads and distractions normally associated with something as basic as a news story. I already downloaded a free app that does the conversion, so Edge is a little late to the game.

I'm sure it is a decent browser but is it better than Firefox or Chrome for folks like me who are set in their ways and don't like having to constantly familiarize to new features. I would say it is not. I do think Windows 10 is an improvement over 8.1, without a doubt. I regard it as a 1/2 step forward, and as the upgrade was free, well worth the hour it took to load it. It was availalbe in beta for a while, and most of the reviews since have been decent. I do recommend it, ideally with a clean installation. 8.1 was a step back from 7, and 10 is a half step ahead again.

 

I have both Opera and Firefox on the taskbar, Firefox has some cool add-ins like DownThemAll! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/downthemall/

That comes in handy for grabbing web-pages to read offline, it can go deep enough that the links work for most stuff offline.

I didn’t do a clean install, got too much stuff I didn’t want to start over yet. Clean is what happens when the box is toast.

There were no problems even with several users, and I used the MediaCreationTool for two machines. Got back 30gb with Disk Cleanup.

Set up a Local user with no frills. With a Local user and Firefox or Opera I would think the spying would be somewhat minimal, that is if you never sign in to a Microsoft account while in there, and especially don’t use Edge to do it, as it looks to be tied into every spy apparatus. No freaking cloud! That is something I want for Christmas, a personal cloud. Word 2013 was like saying, “please, please, go on the Internet.”

I did use a shared document and a shared Onenote a couple of times, when doing some school thing with the kiddie, and even the cloud has a recycle bin.

Might as well accept it, everything we do is tracked and cataloged, if not for law enforcement for the new “door to door” salesmen in bed with Google…kind of like face recognition at the mall, to help your shopping habits and send you emails. Law enforcement doesn’t know what to do with a tip, they wouldn't know a Saddam call to Jihad from any other, but all the tracking stuff looks cool after the fact.

 

I haven't had a chance to sit down and use it long enough, but my niece's hdd failed a couple weeks ago so I did a fresh install of Windows 8 and upgraded to Windows 10.

BIOS based keys make life so much easier for us who have been appointed the family's tech guru and don't always have access to install discs.

The only glitch I personally ran into after full install was that her computer, a laptop, shows a blank black screen after Windows has loaded post-boot AND when she plugged her AC in. I haven't really sat down with it to sort it out, but I went ahead and installed the latest display driver, but it didn't help.

I also, during the process, put a spanking new SSD drive in her computer. It took a bit of work to get Windows to acknowledge that it existed (had to wiggle some BIOS settings) even though BIOS ID'd it fine. Apparently this is a common issue with newer SSDs because drivers aren't preloaded on the install disk.

 

Reminds me of that paperclip from Win 98.

 

The new version of the picture viewer makes it easier to edit photos.

Something weird happened to my computer the day before the release which weirded me out. I had been watching youtube for about an hour and suddenly I got an error to the OS that the 8.1 windows automatic repair couldn't fix. I eventually got it straightened out, but since that has never happened to me before ever, it made be wonder if it was somehow tied to the release of 10 since I had already authorized its download.

 

Did the "free upgrade" to Windows 10 from Windows 7 that I had loaded on a test-bed computer, and it was interesting from the standpoint of being noticeably worse than Windows 8.1 in a number of respects.

The upgrade process itself took about an hour and twenty minutes. Nominal. No big deal. But, after everything is installed and optimized, the new-and-improved OS is supposed to shut down, and boot up at least as fast as Windows 8.1... right?! No fricking way is this thing as fast as 8.1. I can do a dead-start on a Win 8.1 box in no more than fifteen seconds (one of my Win 8.1 notebooks boots in seven seconds flat!). The boot times I'm getting with Win 10 are no less than 100 seconds! I'm not making this up! In two words -- THAT SUCKS LIKE AN INDUSTRIAL VACUUM CLEANER!

The Edge browser is, uh, OK, I guess. Anything would have been better than Internet Explorer. Actually, for about a month now, I've been using Opera, and I've been very happy with it. It is fast, and very easy to use. It doesn't have the extensions vulnerabilities of Chrome, and it's faster than Firefox.

Beyond that, yes, you do get a START button in Windows 10, and that's going to make the vast majority of computer users ecstatic! Of course, you can download a legacy-looking start button and menu for Windows 8.1 from a lot of sites, including Ninite, and skip all the other somewhat superfluous bull(*)(*)(*)(*), but, whatever.

I'll keep playing with 10 on this test-bed system to see if there's anything besides these hyped whiz-bang features to recommend it , but based on what I've seen so far, until there are games out there that actually use DX12, I'll see no (NO) reason to upgrade any of my other computers to 10 -- especially not my big gaming computer. If Microsoft would put DX12 as an add-on in Windows 8.1, I'd probably never do another upgrade to 10 at all....

 

There is one thing I really dislike about Windows 10--it keeps trying to aggregate all my porn into the media folder no matter where I hide it in my computer. I am now going to have to have a porn external drive I suppose to keep it hidden.

 

Suggest storing anything you don't want others to see on a better-class thumb drive, or, an external (they're cheap now), not on your computer. Anything you encrypt somebody else can decrypt....

 

I have both. I usually transfer my media files to the external and my docs to thumbs eventually. I just do not do it as often as I should. I have a non-web attached computer I use more often with that stuff like work files and such that I transmit back and forth that requires me to move them to the online computers periodically.

 

I finally have the Windows 10 boot-time down to about 25 seconds, from Windows splash-page to desktop (although it continues to sputter around for about another 15 seconds before you can actually do anything). The earlier delay was probably due to Windows "doing things" with updates in the background where you unable to see it.

It's not a bad operating system... I just don't see any advantage of Win 10 over Win 8.1. And I still say that 8.1 is faster, and so far, easier to navigate.

Oh, my test-bed system: E8400 dual-core proc running at default 3.0 GHz, 8 GHz DDR2 RAM. Not state-of-the-art, just a thing I threw together from leftover parts. My gaming system is an i7, with 16 GB of RAM, and a 500 GB SSD, plus an nVidia evga GTX970 SC (with 4 GB RAM). The video card will do DX12, but there's no games out to my knowledge that feature DX12. So, I'm going to wait, perhaps for a long time, to upgrade the gaming rig.