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

flashback 9 years, 1 month ago

I put 10 on my tablet today - tablet mode is very nice, and the integration with desktop apps is excellent. Really happy with the upgrade.

Astryl 9 years, 1 month ago

Quote:
Do you guys still browse for stuff manually? :S
I've been using ControlPad for years, and Windows Search is definitely fast enough to be useful since Windows 8. So no :P

Toast 9 years, 1 month ago

@Steven What annoyed me about Windows 8 was the seperation into two completely different guis with zero coordination between the two. Suddenly windows was the complete opposite of windows. So yeah, I don't use the start menu either, but my god was the home screen annoying.

flashback 9 years, 1 month ago

And now that's all unified, quite elegantly. They did a good job on UI this time.

death 9 years, 1 month ago

Quote: Mega
Yeah, there's already a version of Classic Shell for Win 10.
Downloaded it. It's awesome.

Call me old fashioned but I still love the windows 7 start menu so I'm sticking with that. I stick with 12 of my most frequently used apps in the start menu and the All Programs has everything else (and I keep that folder as neat as possible). I just don't like the bulkiness of the tiles and the empty space of the new start menu.

What's with the mail app? It's horribly slow, freezes often and doesn't sync automatically / refresh. I've noticed a few of the new apps are laggy and the start menu / taskbar occasionally crashes if I do something it doesn't like and takes a while to load back up and when it does, it doesn't load my settings properly and I have to change them. Not cool.

Astryl 9 years, 1 month ago

Quote:
What's with the mail app? It's horribly slow, freezes often and doesn't sync automatically / refresh.
I had to tell the app to auto-sync each account I added (Am working with three). Set it to a ten-minute interval, and it has been working fine.

death 9 years, 1 month ago

Yea i have mine set to auto too but it doesnt work. Last i checked it said latest sync was 9 hrs ago. I didnt see any settings for the interval either.

Edit: also I had a weird thing happen yesterday when I shut down. My computer took a while to power off even after nothing was being sent to the monitor and than eventually the power light went out on the tower but my mouse remained lit as if receiving power. I was really bothered by this so I turned my power strip off which powers everything and the mouse STILL remained lit. So maybe that has to do with my mouse but this has never happened before and I've had this mouse for years. It eventually stopped being lit about 40 seconds after turning the power strip off.

flashback 9 years, 1 month ago

That there'd be the effects of capacitors both on your motherboard and in the mouse taking time to drain.

Sometimes my desktop will shut down but still provide power to my keyboard and mouse - I've gotten used to it.

flashback 9 years, 1 month ago

I mostly have nightmares about dating a girl who accidentally melts her family, forcing us to flee the country in a flying train.

death 9 years, 1 month ago

What I don't understand is why this is happening only after switching to Windows 10. Never happened when I was using Windows 7. It can't be just the fault of my motherboard, it has something to do with Windows and how it shuts down. I read a few posts about it on the interwebs and others have had this issue before but no solutions so far.