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

Jani_Nykanen 8 years, 9 months ago

Do your computers do that when you shut down Windows 10 you can start the computer simply be pressing a key? It's like WIndows 10 is never shut down completely (and maybe that's why I cannot access the Windows partition on Linux Mint).

Astryl 8 years, 9 months ago

So I decided to do a "downgrade" back to Windows 8.1.

I've had time to work and play with Windows 10, and yes, it's pretty good. But I started running into things I didn't want to wait out a fix for:

- Android ADB drivers don't want to work for my devices

- Nvidia drivers are still glitching (Artifacts in corners of windows when trying to use ShadowPlay)

- The unknown state of licensing post-upgrade period, and the apparent "invalidating" of the original license you used to upgrade once the upgrade period is over.

Not much, but there it is.

Downgrade went off without a hitch, took about 20 minutes.

Cpsgames 8 years, 9 months ago

That's unfortunate. My ADB drivers work fine on both of my machines and my Nvidia drivers have been fine ever since the weird install bug.

Astryl 8 years, 9 months ago

Well, in my case I've got some Rockchip based devices, so they require different and relatively unsupported drivers. As for the Nvidia thing, I have no idea what caused that.

Toast 8 years, 9 months ago

This free upgrade will be free forever, if that's what you're implying. People are getting confused. You can upgrade free until July next year, and then an upgrade wlll cost money. But the ones who did upgrade will have it free forever.

I think they are looking for ways to add subscription services in the future. They are also tracking computer usage more, so they can serve advertisements more - this is the main advantage to giving all Windows 7 and 8 users Windows 10 for free. But I'm confident that free means free.