I’ve tried installing it on one laptop so far and hit a show stopper already. Windows 10 isn’t activating. Laptop is a HP with 8.1 on it. Now, there’s one detail I didn’t check so it may not be Win10’s fault. I copied the old HD to a SSD in preparation for Win10. I didn’t double check that was activated after I did so, although I thought it was. I’m reverting back to 8.1 now and will see how it goes from there.
Other boxes with it reserved haven’t been pushed the download yet. I’m in less hurry to update Win7 boxes which the rest are. Just 8.1 I dislike.
Edit: wow, reverting to 8.1 took about 5 minutes. And sure enough, 8.1 is showing as activated. Do I go back to 10 again and see if it changes its mind? Updating to 10 took over 4 hours, but to be fair about 3 hours of that was trying to get 2.7 GB down on the test net connection at work which has the capacity of a bit of wet string.
That was my 2nd guess. Haven’t seen reference to that yet.
I’ve got 10 going back on once again, after I updated the AMD drivers in 8.1 first as there aren’t newer ones for 10 yet. Disappointment is the 2.7GB download is starting from zero so it didn’t cache it from before, and I’m too lazy to find out if you can upgrade from iso. Download is no faster than it was at work, averaging at best 3 Mbit/s of my 50meg connection. So by that measure, it’ll finish after bedtime and I’ll have to look again in the morning.
My current main and gaming desktops are registered but aren’t offered the download yet. Also have my better laptop and my older desktop to check but they’re not even powered on.
Haven’t decided if I’m going to upgrade to 10 yet…
I’ve got a mate who wants a fresh install done of Win 7 on his PC and after mentioning about Win 10 being a free upgrade, he now wants me to put that on for him, so I’ll get to have a little play before deciding if I want to switch to 10…
I only dumped XP last year so I’m not quite sure if I’m ready for 10 yet!!!
I think installing Win10 is a definite yes if you’re on 8.x. Less clear cut for those on Win7. I’d still say yes, longer term. I will be updating all my home PCs eligible for the free update over time, although doing my main desktop last! Note if you want the free upgrade, you must do an upgrade install first to get the licence. Only then, you can either do a clean install, or some say the built in “reset” function does the job.
Back to my laptop, the install indeed finished after bed time. I’m now logged in and it is activated. So maybe like DT said the servers were a bit slow, or something else happened and it sorted itself out. There’s also been a point release of the AMD driver package overnight. No new Windows updates other than the MS anti-virus updates. I haven’t gone through yet to make sure everything is working. AMD quick stream threw a wobbly but I hope the driver update will fix that. Also the laptop’s HP pre-installed support stuff wasn’t terribly happy either but I’ve yet to look at that.
Instead of waiting for the Windows Update, I’ve downloaded the ISO to manually update some Win7 boxes now.
One I just installed was a recent build, Haswell i5-4570S with 8GB ram, 240GB SSD, and GTX 960 which I use as my gaming box. It literally has nothing installed other than Windows, drivers, and games. No background stuff to bog it down. The install was made form DVD (could have used USB stick but I can’t find a spare one). Since it was upgrading from Win7, I didn’t use a MS login account so local only, and went fine. Win10 is showing as activated. Only niggle so far, is the video is stuck in low resolution.
GeForce experience offered a new driver, but it fails for unknown reasons. Downloaded latest Win10 nvidia driver for it, and same again. Not good… I think the less technically aware would be swearing or worse at Win10 by now. Shall reboot and kick it a bit harder next…
Reboot got me a high res desktop. Then I saw my first Win10 BSOD. This is going to be fun…
The error message in the BSOD meant no more than it did in previous versions, and only on the second time it happened did I catch a screenshot. When next booting up I noticed Speedfan wasn’t starting up correctly. I killed it as soon as I could and uninstalled it, and no more BSOD. Video driver installed fine after that. And everything seems ok too. Haven’t actually ran any games yet. I’m only active in Elite Dangerous and there have been reports with performance problems and Win10, so will see if I’ve been affected also.
Edit: Elite Dangerous wouldn’t start. Launcher was ok, but no game. I hit verify files and it reported it couldn’t access the files, saying if it was installed as admin, it had to be run as admin. After a change to the shortcut to set admin, it ran fine and performance seemed to be comparable to Win7.
I also reinstalled Speedfan, same version as before. That also works now, although it might take longer to start up than under Win7.
Went to update my old desktop, which is a Core 2 generation box, but found out I had nicked the DVD drive from it so that scuppered that, for now.
Instead I went to update my main laptop. This is a 1st gen i5 with now out of date Radeon HD5000 series GPU. Install on this went smoothly with no major software quirks. Well, Speedfan again causing a minor niggle as when I uninstalled it I forgot to exit it first, so something was left behind and complaining a bit. A reinstall sorted that out quickly. Running the system and checking everything was working, I did find one oddity. Sometimes the text and graphics on screen seemed blurry, but other times it was as sharp as normal. It took a while to figure it out, but it looks like Win10 on this box turned on text scaling to 125%. This is both good and bad. The laptop has a 1920x1080 15" screen, so in normal use text is on the small side, but that’s what I’m used to. The scaling meant things were a similar subjective size to other displays of similar pixel density. The problem was the scaling just didn’t look good. If it did, I might have left it alone. But it looked soft and blurry, so that ruined it.
Also playing with using an online account instead of local ones. It was a bit unexpected but it copied the colour scheme and wallpaper, amongst others, between systems. I’m going to have to keep an eye on that, and see if it might sync things I might not want synced like mouse settings, since I optimise it for each mouse and display combo to get the right speed for me. This doesn’t seem to be a problem so far.
So far, everything is still positive. I’ve only got two systems left to update now, which is my old desktop as soon as I find a DVD drive, and my main desktop I’m leaving to last.
I’m wondering if I might even get a new licence for my WHS2011 box, since that goes out of support early next year and I don’t use any of the servery bits of it anyway. Just a simple file share. (no, I never got along with any of the “free” NAS OSes)
There have been issues with graphics drivers in Win10 on the Elite Dangerous and Facebook sites, but I’ve also had issues with the GEForce Experience software in Win 7. I used the option to “optimise” Elite Dangerous and it reduced my resolution from 1920x1080 down to 1366x768 for some unexplained reason and made the text and graphics all fuzzy. The game was running perfectly OK in the higher resolution beforehand. I’m expecting this when the Win10 update is on board as well, so the driver issue has reared its head again as it did when Win8 was released. Others I’ve spoken to have downgraded the suggested Win10 driver, back to the one they used before the Win10 upgrade and it seems to have cured these issues. I’ll keep you apprised on my experience when it comes around.
I haven’t done extensive testing in ED as I’m 5kLY out at the moment and heading away from civilisation, so if there are impacts elsewhere I might not notice them until I return. Or I could try the training scenarios. I don’t doubt some have problems, but I think this is a vocal minority and most are running happily without problem. I had been running ED on Win10 preview also without any noticeable performance difference relative to Win7. Do drivers make a difference? For sure, but I don’t think it is as simple as version x is good, version y is bad, so everyone go back to x.
I have no idea what GeForce experience is up to either, and personally I’m inclined to ignore it. It does suggest to me ED at Ultra and 1920x1200 (my monitor native) but it suggests Witcher 3 run at 1680x1050. To avoid scaling effects I wish there was a way to persuade it to run best it can at native. Well, I might look into that another day since I only have it as it came free with my last GPU purchase, and isn’t something I’d normally look at.
I found my first glitch with Win10. On my Sony laptop there’s fn-f5/f6 to change the brightness of the display. It is still there, but the adjustment range of it only goes from dim to slightly less dim. Not good. I found Windows’ control for the same and that has the expected range. So the mapping between them seems to have gone off. I can see the Windows control change slightly when using the keyboard shortcut.
Edit: had a poke around Sony’s support site. In short, my laptop wont have updated Sony stuff for Win10 as it is a Win7 era box. They’re only going to provide updates for Win8 era boxes, sometime this “summer”. They go as far as to say don’t update yet.
I’ve updated two Q6600, one E6600, one T7400 box and no obvious problems so far. I suspect non-standard features like those found on laptops might have higher risk of problems.
I’m leaving my main desktop to last. It is the only system I haven’t updated yet and has the most software to potentially break…
Found another niggle. Setting up boxes for crunching and attempting to do some benchmarking. The MS free anti-malware is now really annoying! Unlike the Win7 version, the Win10 version seems to want to do a complete disk scan shortly after boot. Presumably you could nudge it to run overnight if the box is left on, but it does mean it will kill performance for as long as it takes depending on the amount of stuff you have on disk. The old Win7 behaviour was just to change the icon to orange to warn you it hasn’t scanned in a while, allowing you to manually run a scan when you feel like. Does it really expect you to get a million new viruses while the computer was switched off?
This is only re-enforcing my long term view that AV is basically a waste of time (for power users). Even when “free” it will cost you. I’ve had exactly zero viruses detected for as long as my memory goes. I’ve had many annoying false positives and performance reductions. The Win7 one was unintrusive enough I tolerated it being installed, but the Win10 one must die.
To make matters worse, the Win10 one doesn’t seem easy to fully disable without 3rd party tools. And there will always be a question how long it might be before it gets stealth-reinstalled, and how many nags there might be that you don’t have AV. So far at least, it looks like you can still disable the nags from the security centre reached from the link on computer properties, NOT through the new settings area.
Got another one. On my two laptops I’ve now disabled the free AV, but noticed the System process doing things in the background. On my Sony it takes just over one core of CPU when the system is idle. If I move the mouse for example, it stops doing whatever it is doing. Then after a few minutes idle, it goes off again. Thinking it would eventually finish I left it alone, but it has been going on for perhaps a couple hours now. It doesn’t appear to be using any significant ram, nor disk/network activity. Of course, as I write this it seems to have finally finished. Question is, was that a one-off or not? Now it is done whatever it was doing, hopefully it wont need to again. Or will I see this on future boots? Hmm… will restart now and see.
I noticed something similar but different on my HP laptop. This time the CPU usage wasn’t so much, but it was really hitting the disk. On the positive side, this did settle down by itself relatively quickly and is idle again.
I haven’t noticed similar on desktops but they tend to be higher power in general and I leave them on (unattended) for longer periods.
Had it working on my gaming rig as a test and so far all seems OK. The only things I’ve had to update is my version of AVG to the later version, which went without a hitch and my Nvidia driver, which I was expecting anyway. Other than that all seems to be working not dissimilar to Win7, except for the tiles on the Start menu.
The only gripe I would say is an issue, is that my “waiting for things to finish” games, Freecell and Mahjonng have gone and it took me a while to realise where they were. They’ve basically been replaced with “apps” some of which are pay for only and based around the Xbox store, a place I won’t be visiting. I know the upgrade is free but why take away something like that? Just a niggle really
The work laptop is next for the upgrade and I’ll keep my main business desktop till last.
The conspiracy theory is so they can sell them back to you for some money? Licence issues aside, I wonder if it is possible to copy them over from an older Windows system? Otherwise I’m sure there are some free 3rd party copies if you’re really desperate.
After the issues I encountered today I’ve decided to hold off updating my main desktop indefinitely. Since my turn in the reservation had come up, it was constantly nagging me to update so I had to un-reserve to shut it up.
I’ve pretty much decided to build a new desktop anyway now that Skylake is out, so will make sure that is up to speed before I look back at updating my current desktop.
Completed the laptop upgrade OK last night and all my proggys are working OK so far, even my old Paint Shop Pro 7 which must be getting on for 15 years old if not more. Upgraded System Mechanic and AVG as well as it was a free option for me on both counts. Don’t like Groove Music, so I’ve stuck with Media Player. It works for me. Haven’t tried the new video player, but VLC works OK. That’s about all I’ve done so far.
I’m still using PSP7 too! Hmm… haven’t tried it since Win10 but it is installed on my laptop which has been updated. The only quirk I remember was from about Win7 onwards, the hiding or not window button on the tools didn’t show up on the window top, but could still be clicked if you click where they are. From memory by default they auto-collapse and I liked them fixed, so I have to do that on every install.
It’s a great little program and well worth what it cost me all those years ago. The only other issue I’ve come up against is the new IE replacement. Can’t find the Internet Options menu to set up a Home page. I use IE on the lappy for work as it links to 2 sites that I use when on site at the RAC. I’ll do a bit of research on that unless someone already knows where they’ve hidden it.
On menu bar, click the three dots to the right then settings. Then undo the MSN crap and put in what you want, remembering to press the + button after to add it.
