Windows 10

1) http://www.wired.com/2015/07/stop-windows-10-auto-updates/
2) Agreed... but Stardock already has an app........... I wouldn't ever trust my system to it though!!!

 

I'm 24 hours in on this current install, still won't activate.

I initially upgraded 8.1 -->10, worked fine and was activated. Decided I was ok with it, so did a clean install, got everything installed and working, but not stuck with the "Activate Windows" watermark in the bottom right corner of screen.

 

Does anybody else miss the standard Win8 picture viewer where the mouse scroll wheel zoom in and out, the Win10 version has no zoom.

John.

 

WHAT?! Are you on a laptop with a trackpad? It may be that they changed it to two finger zoom for laptops... give me about 15 minutes or so and I'll check...

 

I have an 20" Tablet with an separate keyboard and mouse, see my signature.

John.

 

This may be of interest of you. I don't know if it fixes the scroll issue or not though.

http://forums.mydigitallife.info/th...ks-amp-Fixes?p=1082869&viewfull=1#post1082869

 

It works great, it bring back the old windows photo viewer.

Thanks

John.

 

A few registry tweaks for Win10 there maybe one you like.

http://www.askvg.com/collection-of-windows-10-hidden-secret-registry-tweaks/

John.

 

SO. MUCH. PURPLE.

 

NVM

 

OK, all done. Mixed feelings about Windows 10. Here's my "mini-review" based on the experience with the M18xR2, along with a butt-load of performance information. All things considered, this is more or less exactly what I expected, mostly what I predicted, but not what I was hoping for.

Installation:
Downloaded using a link rather than the "Get 10 App" crap back on 7/29. The App was saying my GTX 780M cards were not compatible. The recommend fix was buy a new system. Bad first impression right there... buy something new... yeah, right. Upgrade was fast, easy and uneventful, but the OS was buggy. I have never found an upgrade in place to be a good option and doing a clean install is always the best practice, so no surprised look on my face here. After activation to register my hardware, I did a diskpart clean on the drive and did a fresh install from ISO on 7/30. All necessary drivers were native to Windows 10 except the Compal EC (Alienware OSD), Alienware Command Center and NVIDIA display drivers. Those are the only hardware drivers that I had to install, so that part was pretty sweet. Warning to those running AeroGlass for Windows 8/8.1. Either delete, rename or move the AeroGlass folder before upgrading or you will have all of the same issues that were encountered going from Windows 8 to 8.1 -- you can thank me now, or wish you had listened if you do not do this.

My LCD went bad about an hour after the clean installation. I shut down and was later greeted by 8 beeps on the next power up. I initially thought it was GPU related, but it wasn't. Tested new LVDS cable and no luck. I borrowed the LCD from the M18xR1 and that fixed it. Now the M18xR1 has 8 beeps, so I will be buying a new display, but that's about 1/3 the price of a GTX 780M so it could be worse. I would love to blame this on Micro$lop, but I think it was just the timing of bad luck, LOL.

Bug #1:
Windows installed a spanking new driver for my Sound Blaster Recond3Di. It seemed to work fine, but when I started to bench and game I discovered the headphone jacks would not work. They were ignored and sound continued to blast through the speakers. After wasting about 30 to 45 minutes tinkering with configuration settings for audio (and confirming everything worked fine under Windows 7) I gave up. I removed the Sound Blaster Recon3Di drivers and manually installed the standard Windows 10 generic audio driver and now everything works as expected.

Bug #2:
Many of you are aware of issues that I and a few others (Alienware and Clevo SLI machines) have been experiencing with GTX 780M SLI throttling with drivers released after 345.20. There is good news and bad news with Windows 10. Good news first... at STOCK clocks they do not throttle like Windows 7 and 8. Rock solid with Windows 10. Now, the bad news... when overclocked, the throttling is MUCH worse with Windows 10. So, definitely some naughty NVIDIA cancer sauce has been added to the works with Windows 10. My conspiracy theory is that changes NVIDIA began to implement with drivers since March have been geared toward Windows 10's enhanced abilities to cripple machines to make them stay within arbitrary specs for power and thermals.

Bug #3:
Windows 10 keeps telling me to enable virus protection even though Defender is turned on and everything enabled. It appears it checks too soon during the startup process because the warning takes place before Defender has a chance to start working. I cannot find a way to fix this yet, so I am probably going to just totally disable everything in Windows Security Center, which I already do on Windows 7 and 8 anyhow.

Personal Preferences:
You can take this section with a grain of salt if you actually thought Windows 8/8.1 aesthetics were acceptable, but I find Windows 10 is just too ugly for words. Not quite as bad as Windows 8/8.1. Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clear down to the bone... and Windows OS X is butt ugly. It's going to take some major tweaking to make me like it. I hate the tiled Start menu. I hate that I cannot resize it more narrow... just too wide and obnoxious. The abuse of light colors, especially the hideous monochrome white windows is no less atrocious than Windows 8/8.1 were. That lack of Aero transparency is disgusting. Aeroglass 10 is still in beta, so I am waiting for Big Muscle to release that to fix the problem. The AeroGlass for Windows 10 beta works great, but I don't do desktop watermarks or debug command windows running 24/7, so I will wait for it. It looks a million times better with Aero transparency, just as Windows 8/8.1 does.



Tweaks:
I have killed Windows Automatic Updates in Group Policy along with other atrocities. Maybe Micro$lop assumed most of us did not know how. So far, no updates... still waiting for something to go wrong here. But, all of the obnoxious balloon "tips" and taskbar toaster pop-up garbage are now officially as dead as a door nail on my system. Those on-screen messages literally bugged the crap out of me within the first 5 minutes of installing Windows OS X. I DO NOT want to be told my touchpad is disabled, how to take a screen shot, or anything else. Killing them was my second priority, right behind disabling UAC. The animations in Windows 10 are the most obnoxious I have ever seen, so all of those are now turned off. Windows 10 feels much smoother and snappier with all of that worthless and annoying garbage disabled.



Performance:
As most of you have either heard me complain or already discovered on your own, physics (CPU) performance was crippled by Windows 8, wasn't fixed by Windows 8.1 and I am very sad to report is slightly worse under Windows 10. The extent to which this affects overall performance varies based on what you are measuring, but any performance hit whatsoever is unacceptable and inexcusable. So, Windows 7 still dominates 8 and 10 here. Windows 10 needed to be equal to or better than Windows 7 in ALL performance measurements. So, as expected, Windows 10 cannot replace Windows 7 for me on this basis alone. On the basis of performance, I will continue using Windows 7 as my primary OS and keep Windows 10 stuffed away in an inconspicuous corner of my system for the small sample of benchmarks it actually excels at, and for when DX12 titles are released.

So, without further adieu, here is the single most important thing I wanted from Windows 10. It's a mixed bag and overall I am not pleased with the results.

All testing was done with games and benchmarks installed on a common drive (4TB RAID0 volume with cache acceleration) using the exact same configuration files and settings among all three operating systems.

3DMark Validation Links:

• Fire Strike Comparison
• Sky Diver Comparison
• 3DMark 11 Comparison
• Vantage Comparison

(Be sure to look past the "overall" scores and see how the physics and combined tests fared. The overall score can be misleading with Fire Strike and Sky Diver.)​

Many of these benchmarks are within a normal margin of error, so for most users Windows 10 performance will be largely irrelevant. It's not an upgrade, but it's not a massive downgrade either. For those that were convinced Windows 8/8.1 were faster than Windows 7 at everything, here's more proof you were mistaken and proof that Windows 10 is nothing to write home about where performance is concerned. DX12 will make it better, but only on DX12 games and benchmarks. As you can see, Windows 10 isn't so hot if you like playing some older DX9 or DX10 titles.


> Album of supporting validation screenshots <

 

Thank you for the great review.

As for resizing the start menu....

Resize the Start Menu
You can quickly resize the Start Menu by simply moving your mouse to the top edge of the Start Menu and resizing down.



It’ll make the Start Menu wider if you have live tiles pinned.

Source: http://www.howtogeek.com/197836/8-ways-to-customize-the-windows-10-start-menu/

Also please look at this:

How to Make the Windows 10 Start Menu Look More Like Windows 7

 

This is how my Start Menu looks:

 

Thanks, Brother @Matrix Leader for those tips.

I'm actually OK with the height, but I cannot get it narrow enough. If I remove all of the tiles it still has blank space even if I grab the right edge and drag it over to the left. If I could have all small tiles and just one or two columns with no blank space it would be more tolerable. I will play with it more to see if I can make it more to my liking. I'm going to investigate whether StartIsBack has a classic replacement for it and get rid of the crappy Windows 10 menu altogether if I can.

Next orders of business:

• Try to install/mod 344.75 or 345.20 drivers for Windows 10 to cure my 780M SLI throttling when overclocked
• Repeat the same tests with the Panther beast with overclocked GPUs
  (I could not test with the M18xR2 overclocked because of the 780M throttling with newer drivers)
• Tweak the crap out of the nasty Windows 10 UI to make it look more like Windows 7

 

Try
Classic Shell 4.2.3 RC

 

I'll look at it, but never cared for the Windows 8/8.1 classic shell. (Hated it, in fact.) If StartIsBack doesn't have one, I'm sure this will be better than the stock Windows 10 menu. Thanks for the link. I've been so busy testing and disabling the most grievous atrocities that I haven't taken time to investigate third-party utilities. They were absolutely required to make Windows 8/8.1 sufferable and the same will be true for 10.

 

StartIsBack and others have one major flaw.

Example:

You run a program from your start menu, let's say the program is CCleaner

Next time you click on the start menu, you see CCleaner in the frequently used apps. Great! that's how it is in Windows 7.

Now for some reason, you decide that you know what, you don't want CCleaner to always show in the frequent programs on the left, so you right click on it and choose remove from this list.

But after sometime, you notice you are using CCleaner a lot and would like to have it back on the left in the frequently used programs, so you run it, but it doesn't get added back to the frequently used programs. So you close it, run it again, and again, and again, nope! That's it, you removed it once and now you won't have it back unless you pin it to the start menu.

This is NOT how the real Windows 7 Start menu behaves.


Classic Shell does not have this bug.

I even contacted the developer of StartIsBack via email and Twitter and he never cared to reply back after explaining the problem. Not surprising from a d00d who uses a GMAIL as an official company/developer email.

Classic Shell FTW

 

interesting with the overall decrease in performance.

 

I've used it, but unfortunately I simply cannot accept how it looks. StartIsBack and Start8 both look better and aesthetics are what I loathe most about Windows 8/8.1 and 10. StartIsBack looks cleaner and allows me to precisely match the coloring and transparency of the windows and taskbar. Classic Shell and Start8 were both always off a bit and that drove me nuts. I'm just OCD that way.

Yes, it sure is... but, it is exactly what I expected. Basically, Micro$haft released this turd with all of the same performance issues I found at the start of the Insider Preview.

 

i might test it in dedicated mode and see if the issues i have are gone or still there.

 

Try my XML file and tell me how you like it, attached in this post, just import the settings

 

Giving win 10 a try now.

Sent from my HTC One using Tapatalk

 

TBH, the puke factor for me is low. I understand how people live for synthetics as I used too as well. I guess I've gotten too old as I care still but I care a lot less.

Edge just stinks, set to IE 11 for defaults for now but plan on firefox soon.
The Zune video default player sucks as well, set back defaults to media player.

Still things to play with.

 

Hmm...so far so good, i think. it's a bit slow because, well, i installed it on an HDD so will see how it is over a few days.

currently sitting on dedicated mode.

EDIT: in win 8.1 the win 10 report says my 980M was not compatible because of a lack of drivers. I know that was BS so i just went and installed the ISO. after a few reboots while installing drivers etc i only allowed a few to be installed and i think it didn't download any nvidia drivers because my 980M is not compatible (and in a way that was good cos it means win 10 won't download the drivers for it). I haven't seen any issues so far with the OS dropping the 980M but I'll keep an eye on it.

also, I wonder how i can take my win 7 OEM key from Dell and use it as my upgrade to 10 path?

 

At first even on a SSD it is slow. There are house keeping chores like indexing and what not. You need to give it a few hours to settle down.

 

i am more worried about getting black screens on boot.

 

I can tell you that sometimes, especially since it has to settle out, those screens show up but be patient as it ma just be a while before it goes to the next screen.

 

So I had the day off and installed an ENT copy on one of my machines.

To me, they managed get the start menu functionally worse than 7 and 8 combined for people with multiple monitors
Noticed that my windows key shortcut start menu only opens on the main desktop, no more on the last focused window (8.1) or assigned to monitor (8)
Can't seem to find an option to set this anymore .

The complete disappearance of charms is a huge bummer even though I basically used it as a glorified clock and a start screen replacement.
They further removed the search filters, now it just searches everywhere

Without connecting to a domain, the option I see for WU settings is defer Updates.
At least they made it easier to manually join an AD right after install, though way too late since can be automated.

Sigh ... have to relearn the new settings locations and remembering to look bottom left.

 

Thanks! I do like it. I did some additional tweaking to get the aesthetic a little more to my own preferences, but this is a HUGE improvement over the garbage Windows 10 Start Menu. Those icky tiles were just disgusting and I hated the alphabetical categories on the All Programs sub-menu. I am super glad all of the retarded hot corners and charms bar are gone. I disabled that junk with Windows 8/8.1, but those idiotic fly-out pieces of focus-stealing trash always seemed to have a way of creeping back into my half-baked Windows 8 experience.

 

Funny, I remember long ago hot corners were introduced in the KDE. It didn't take long for me to disable after a month of misfires.
Guess what the first thing I tried to do when 8 came out with it

As for the focus-stealing trash of a charms bar, to me, I found both Win 7 / 8 / 10 start still too large.
Seriously, they should made it just a search bar like the charms (Win - Q+W) except much shorter, a tad narrower.

I like to keep my hands on the keyboard like 90% of the time. The mouse is reserved for games or software that lack keyboard shortcuts.

 

That is a mean clean start menu ... Sorry for the noob question but how can I use the file to get that looks?

 

Has anybody had problems with shutdown, every other time i get a black screen and expect my laptop to shut off, but it does not, and the drive activinty led is not flashing at all, i have to do an hard shutdown.

Oh, I found the story below as well.

Windows 10 spies on you by default

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/foreign/01-Aug-2015/windows-10-spies-on-you-by-default

John.

 

Credit to @Matrix Leader for the XML that I started with. http://www.classicshell.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=4803

 

"in Microsoft’s 12,000-word, 45-page terms of use agreement: “We will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to.”

access, disclose and preserve
!

 

Well, "when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to" is just as messed up. It should say, when compelled by court order and only when disclosure is required by law. That they even select "good faith" as language for the EULA is laughable. They don't operate on good faith... and haven't for a good while. Remember, "actions speak louder than words."

 

you just install Classic Shell FTW then go to its setting and choose Import XML file

 

+rep for all the testing (when I can give it!). Your performance comparison between Windows 10 & Windows 7 is generally what I have seen too, although your percentages of difference are larger than my comparisons when it comes to comparing your CPU results between Win 10 & 7. Game testing for me has shown to be identical with Windows 7, apart from 4% less performance in Arkham Origins on Windows 10, and a noticeable & significant performance improvement in Titanfall for Windows 10 on more troublesome maps like Lagoon & Swampland. Unlike you I quite like the appearance of Windows 10, and haven't had any issues with it since upgrading - so far I'll be keeping Windows 10.

EDIT: played some more Titanfall today, nope I was mistaken - not an increase in performance for Titanfall in Win 10, the same as Win 7.

 

I decided to keep my Steam Box rig on Windows 8.1 Pro. I was using my laptop last night and Windows was updating my video drivers without notifying me as such and couldn't figure out why my screen kept going blank. Come to find out it was updating my Nvidia drivers and installing all features of the drivers which I don't use like 3D Vision and Geforce Experience.

I don't need that hassle on my gaming rig.

 

sorry i mean that the screen would go black as in the backlight goes away.

 

That could be a screen timeout. Check your power settings and see where the timer is at. You might want to increase it temporarily until you sort out the problem.

 

I checked the event viewer and the nvidia driver kept crashing. Not seeing it at the moment.

Sent from my HTC One using Tapatalk

 

Be careful this does not happen to you

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/technology-science/windows-10-man-updates-pc-6175142

John.

 

That is too funny.

 

Gentlemen gratitude * +rep for making my experience with W10 mildly bearable

 

how long do i have before i can't revert to 8.1 if i need to? 30 days?

 

yes, using the systems reversion. Do not delete the windows.old files etc..

 

ok, i have done a clean install just to trial it out for a few days - maybe a week so probably won't be doing much gaming rather than seeing if it's stable.

 

If you have a clean install then you will need to use your backup to get the old OS back. TBH I am not too sure if there will be an issue with the key activation.

 

i have 8.1 on my main SSD so the only issue would be the nvidia drivers. even if the win 10 report says a part is not compatible would it block the upgrade?

 

I am surprised as there were no major blowups, other than my own. I caused that one by trying a programed hack that did not work and then could not log in. FYI no F8 that worked but the ISO allowed me to access system restore.