Windows 10 Review

Posted by Astryl on July 30, 2015, 10:45 a.m.

I'll be writing a cumulative 'review' here, along with any problems and workarounds I encounter.

Day Zero

The download of the upgrade finished at about 11PM. I was tired already, and had work the next morning.

Nevertheless, I thought I'd start the installer and leave it running.

I remembered after the fact that I have a non-standard boot setup.

My PC has two physical drives. The first is my "Windows" drive, and contains the EFI boot partition for Windows.

The Second is my Debian drive, and contains a boot partition for GRUB.

This didn't cause any problems, just a minor annoyance. The way I have Grub set up is to boot into Linux if I don't enter a response (About 4 seconds to respond).

And the setup process restarted about 5 times in total. So I sat wrapped in a thick blanket with the cat on my lap, half asleep, watching the numbers crawl.

Took about two hours from start to finish.

Crashed in bed as soon as I could and decided to leave it for the next day.

Day One

Woke up late, so it was a mad dash to get ready for work. I quickly peeked at my 'new' installation and noticed that my primary display wasn't usable. Needed to install the drivers for my Nvidia 750.

I set that to download and ran to work (Ended up forgetting my lunch).

Got back and booted up.

And all told, everything is looking pretty good. The system is basically exactly how I had it before I started the upgrade. Icons in the same place across both screens, network mappings intact, applications intact, etc.

Even my slightly weird startup batches are working fine (One of them is a call to SUBST to map my C:\Dev\ folder to a drive letter on startup).

And the only thing I was a bit leery of, the "forced" updates, was easily solved by a trip to the Group Policy Editor. Details at bottom of blog.

So far, so good. Everything works that I've used so far. I have yet to play any games, but my normal "work" stuff is perfect.

Will update tomorrow.

EDIT: Oh, and Microsoft has finally changed the default CMD font:

And in the process of poking around CMD, I found that my entire MSYS style setup was still in place, as well as my SSH stuff.

Heck, even my context-menu entries are intact and working as intended.

EDIT2: All my games seem to be working so far. Also tried out Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition, which led me to poking around the XBox app, which further led me to discover that it supports XBox Live Avatars and even has an app for creating them.

Then there's the built in game recording tools. They're pretty decent, showing a measure of elapsed time on the top of the screen.

But I've already got both OBS and ShadowPlay to use.

Speaking of ShadowPlay, I had to turn it off and on again before it would work (Probably had to reinstall the service layer). Working flawlessly now.

Day One Point Five / Two

Woke up earlier than normal this morning and tested a few things out.

I could post a long checklist of what works and what doesn't, but I literally haven't encountered anything that doesn't work as normal.

The Command Line spontaneously returned to its old self again, and I have encountered one or two runtime errors while using the Windows Store and the new "Settings" app.

Hasn't happened since.

Performance wise, I did a comparison with The Witcher 3. I intentionally set it up on my Windows 8 installation so that it was running at a sub-par framerate (40FPS), and tried it with the same settings in Windows 10. Again, 40FPS. So no major improvements (DirectX12 doesn't affect everything just by existing, as many of my misguided customers seem to think).

Anyway, so far my experience is "normal". I've set up the Email app for a bit of use testing, and it's far better than that piece of crap in Windows 8.

The Notification/Action Center is a welcome addition, and I haven't properly used Task View yet (Though I did discover that additional desktops retain settings between reboots).

This weekend I plan on testing out my build environment and compiling the most complex project I have on-hand: Exile.

Workarounds and fixes

This only works for Windows 10 Pro. The option for other users is to disable the Windows Update service, but I wouldn't recommend it.

> Open Search and type in "gpedit", hit Enter.

> Traverse through Computer Configuration->Administrative Templates->Windows Components->Windows Update

> Double click on the entry labeled "Configure Automatic Updates"

> In the window that pops up, click on "Enable" and choose one of the familiar options from the dropdown below (I chose Notify before Download & Installation)

Comments

Astryl 8 years, 9 months ago

@death: Yeah, I've seen that happen on a few PCs. Their reservation tool is kinda buggy, so most people are just using the Media Creation Tool to upgrade.

On another note, some Reddit users discovered that there's a "bug" in the Windows 10 activation process that allows you to upgrade as many machines as you want.

Basically, when you "upgrade" your Win 7 / Win 8 key, it switches you to a generic key that checks on an MS Hardware whitelist.

The old key is still valid though.

So a few people have been upgrading their not-so-legitimate Windows installations to 10 successfully.

Also, I've read up on the terms of the free upgrade, and there is something that potentially bothers me. As mentioned above, activation is tied to hardware IDs.

If something on my machine screws up and needs to be replaced after the first year of upgrading is up, I'll basically be "forced" to buy a license.

At that point, I'll either be making the full jump to Debian, going back to Windows 8.1, or "bypassing" activation.

Toast 8 years, 9 months ago

Which hardware would have to change to invalidate it? A new hard drive, for instance?

I don't even know what the rules are with old Windows tbh. I guess it's tied to the motherboard? (Unless you have a full retail copy)

Astryl 8 years, 9 months ago

Motherboard or CPU mostly. May or may not be sensitive to RAM changes.

Alert Games 8 years, 9 months ago

Quote:
Boom, you wake up one morning to deliver a project expected in three hours and all of your obscure no-longer-supported software which you're stuck with has suddenly broken thanks to a forced automatic update. As you sit around waiting for the tech guy to show up, or struggle with the accent of the support man on the phone, your client is in the process of looking for someone else to do the work. Two days of work and potential referrals lost.
This is a very compelling reason why companies choose to develop for customers on linux. But microsoft is very convenient for internal use I'd argue.

Alert Games 8 years, 9 months ago

@Steve: That's why a lot of software that can be made into web apps are done that way now because its the most cross-platform. I also like certain chrome apps from their app launcher which is also cross-platform and sync'ed. But otherwise Microsoft is just easy to develop for :P

death 8 years, 9 months ago

Quote: Toast
@death You can now directly download Windows 10 at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10, you don't have to go through all of the reserving shit. If you have a valid 7 or 8.1 license key I don't see how it will have a problem

(you have to choose the upgrade option though, in order to get a windows 10 key)
Thanks I'll try that out. Downloading now, taking ages just to get a few percent to go up :\ 15 minutes = 8 %

death 8 years, 9 months ago

Well finally finished installing Windows 10. Took so long to do it. I left it running all night while I was sleeping. AVG had to update as well and required several restarts so that was annoying. Also I've always been annoyed that you can't change the start up image.

Anyway everything seems to be working fine for me. I like the high contrast themes but the only issue I have with it is that it also overrides internet browsers and causes webpages to be difficult to view since many images won't appear.

I'm not massively pleased with the start menu. The left side of the menu is blank and I can't drag anything into it. Why is this empty space here? I got rid of all the default icons on the right side and put in what I used to have in my start menu. So that's fine but the menu itself is much larger than I would want it to be. I'm sure somebody will add the old start menu back in and I'll probably use the older one once that's the case.

Other than that, everything pretty much feels the same.

flashback 8 years, 9 months ago

The left side of the start menu should be filled with, well, start menu-y things…

Also if you're referring to the Windows 10 logo during boot, you actually can change that in am EFI environment.

Astryl 8 years, 9 months ago

Quote:
I'm sure somebody will add the old start menu back in and I'll probably use the older one once that's the case.
Yeah, there's already a version of Classic Shell for Win 10.

Toast 8 years, 9 months ago

I have to say it keeps growing on me. The theme no longer annoys me, it looks really sharp. They fixed everything wrong with Windows 8.1 for me