Windows 10 - Deeper Impressions

[dencorso]

And that is why I use Windows XP SP3. It is even more secure.

Now, let's let things as they are, my friends: no reason to start a session of "did NOT!" / "did TOO!" at this point, right?

We all know and respect each other's positions, AFAICR... right?

[JorgeA]

 

I embrace change.

 

 

So let me ask you this: suppose that, one morning, you woke up to discover that the doorknobs had all been moved to the opposite edge of the door and were located five inches off the floor; that your stereo system had been replaced by a tinny transistor radio and your windows were now as opaque as the walls; and that cameras were installed to watch everywhere that you go in your home, what you do there and for how long -- would you "embrace" this "change"?

 

--JorgeA

[Kelsenellenelvian]

I embrace change.

So let me ask you this: suppose that, one morning, you woke up to discover that the doorknobs had all been moved to the opposite edge of the door and were located five inches off the floor; that your stereo system had been replaced by a tinny transistor radio and your windows were now as opaque as the walls; and that cameras were installed to watch everywhere that you go in your home, what you do there and for how long -- would you "embrace" this "change"?

--JorgeA

That makes life interesting at least

[dhjohns]

I embrace change.

 

So let me ask you this: suppose that, one morning, you woke up to discover that the doorknobs had all been moved to the opposite edge of the door and were located five inches off the floor; that your stereo system had been replaced by a tinny transistor radio and your windows were now as opaque as the walls; and that cameras were installed to watch everywhere that you go in your home, what you do there and for how long -- would you "embrace" this "change"?

 

--JorgeA

That would suck, but it is doesn't apply in this situation. The change I am talking of is going to sleep in a shack, and waking up in a beautiful mansion. This is analogous to going to sleep with Windows 7 on my computer, and waking up with 10!

[NoelC]

DHJohns, I'll bet your posts cause some gnashing of teeth amongst readers here.

 

To me it seems a bit like eating candy even with the spectre of tooth decay, yet still saying you love candy.  It's impossible to argue that candy does not taste good to you, but other folks may feel they see a bigger picture and may even think you're being irresponsible.

 

If you could not get Windows 7 or 8.1 to do what you needed and now you somehow find Win 10 works so much better that you consider it "a beautiful mansion", well then it's no surprise you feel the way you do. 

 

But considering that others who know a thing or two find the Win 10 "upgrade" more like a "shack with holes in the roof", some may wonder whether you did not try hard enough to find all the good in the older system, and that a fresh installation along with all the effort you've put into Win 10 might have yielded the same result or something even better.

 

Maybe you just have radically different needs for your computing experience.  Maybe you now have a much better computer than when you tried those older systems.  You've said some things in the past (e.g., about Win 7 booting slowly) that aren't seen by others.  

 

What I find most interesting is that you appear to be getting everything you want, and having a quite positive experience, from Windows 10 - while others are expressing very much the opposite.  Opposing views always intrigue me, especially in light of my own findings.

 

For me, on a scale of Hell No to Hell Yes, I've landed just short of the middle.  I've got my Win 10 build 10586 setup looking good again, trimmed per my liking, and it's stable.  I can do all my desktop work with it, and I've even muzzled it completely from a privacy perspective.

 

But when the dust settles, for me there are just two obvious facts:

 

• As I have no use for "Toy Apps" (windowed or otherwise) and will not choose to enable UAC, Win 10 doesn't do anything more for me than 8.1.  Not one thing, literally.  My greatest disappointment is that Microsoft has abandoned working on everything but Metro/Modern/Universal for 5 years now.
   
• Win 10 comes with some pretty negative baggage - most importantly a 4 month forced in-place upgrade cycle.  I put a solid week into whipping 10586 back into shape, and I don't want to have to go through that every 4 months on a system I have to rely on.  To top it off it just no longer does some things, like play media, as well as its predecessors.  As a company Microsoft isn't going in a good direction.

 

For me, with my particular needs, even after having put all the effort into making it work as well as possible and with all the facts known, Win 10 balances to a net loss.  And so for me Win 10 stays on a test VM and I remain using an older system for my production work that's stable and meets my needs better.

 

DHJohns, perhaps you still find pleasure in reworking the OS after each in-place upgrade.  I admit, figuring out what works and how to overcome limitations is interesting as well.  But it's just getting to be excessive, for me, with my needs and expectations.

 

After reflection, hate / like / love of WIndows 10 pretty clearly boils down to what each individual needs and wants.  It's obviously better for some than others, and there's nothing that says the situation can't change, though you have to understand that those of us looking for Real Innovation out of Microsoft can only take disappointment for so long.

 

-Noel

[mikedigitize]

There are a few glitches in the 1511 release. I have read about bitlocker issues, and I have noticed a few issues involving task scheduler, and recently I can't open device manager, or disk manager which is very strange. I suppose when MS re-releases it a clean install is in order. I really don't need device manager right now, and anything disk manager can do, I can do in powershell. But, I do like to have everything working flawlessly. I think they pushed the release a bit too early, at least to the general public. I DO EXPECT issues in insider builds, but not in public releases.

I got a crash this weekend on my 10586.11 insider ver. I think it was in conjunktion with nivida (win update) and last cumulativ update. After restart it was really slow and no metro-apps... I had to go severel restore points back before it clear itself up....

[TELVM]

... The change I am talking of is going to sleep in a shack, and waking up in a beautiful mansion. This is analogous to going to sleep with Windows 7 on my computer, and waking up with 10! ...

 

While we're so metaphorical:

 

 

[NoelC]

Funny that last one, but Win 8 provides about the same spyware as 10, based on my observations.  Microsoft apparently woke everyone up with all their EULA changes, and so people started figuring out that Windows is blabbing online by default.

 

Today, courtesy a tool dencorso recommended (Svchost Viewer) I found yet another service running (on both 8.1 and 10) today that I disabled to make my Win 8.1 system even more private - and save a few resources:

 

Network Connection Broker

 

Brokers connections that allow Windows Store Apps to receive notifications from the internet.

 

Lo and behold even though I have long since removed all Windows Store Apps, based on the traffic reduction I've seen in the past few hours, the remaining Network Connection Broker was yet another source of constant attempts to communicate online with various servers.

 

Now, after having disabled that service, my Win 8.1 system is FINALLY settling down to be as quiet as I've made my Win 10 system.

 

Moral:  Don't think privacy suddenly just got much worse with Windows 10.

 

-Noel

[JorgeA]

The beautiful edifice of Windows 10 came crashing down on me Friday afternoon.

 

Don't know what happened, but I rebooted into Win10, only to be greeted by a blue screen announcing that a CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED and inviting me to look that up on the Internet. There was no alphanumerical error code and, of course, no useful information to be found on the Internet for such a vague statement.

 

This is a really nasty one. Startup Repair didn't work, I couldn't boot into Safe Mode, and even Reset failed. I tried running an SFC /SCANNOW via the troubleshooting DOS box, but while it ran and found integrity violations, it told me at the end of the scan that it couldn't proceed with the repairs. I don't know what else there is to do.

 

No, I didn't have a backup image -- after all, it is merely a tertiary, test system -- and the "upgrade" to 10586 stupidly reset System Restore back to Off.

 

I think I've had quite enough of this piece of cr*p. It was already getting tiresome, having to recheck settings and tweak countless things after every new build; this one in addition introduced the need to reinstall certain programs which it claimed were "incompatible" but which worked just fine once they got reinstalled.

 

The Win10 fanbois no longer have the excuse that "this is only beta software": we're on live TV now.

 

Anything else one might try to rescue the existing Win10 installation, or is the only option to download 10240 and start from scratch?

 

--JorgeA

 

[NoelC]

the "upgrade" to 10586 stupidly reset System Restore back to Off.--JorgeA

 

Thank you!  I KNEW there was something else I wanted to add to the Windows 10 10240 to 10586 upgrade change reports thread.

 

-Noel

[JorgeA]

Glad that little tidbit helped!

 

Any ideas as to what I could do either to investigate what happened, or to rescue the system? 

 

--JorgeA

[NoelC]

I'm sorry but I don't have any strong suggestions...  Even though I'm running Win 10 in a VM, I am keeping both snapshots and backups, as well as having made my own ISO image from the ESD file Windows Update downloaded. 

 

I have seen 10586 ISOs offered online, but not by Microsoft directly.  Seems like finding one and downloading it, then installing another in-place upgrade (of the same version) might work.  Can you get into the Windows Recovery Environment?  I have Win 10 booting through a 5 second delay in which the Advanced Boot menu is available.

 

That they've left you high and dry without an obvious recovery method really underscores the blatant disrespect Microsoft has for anything that's ours, doesn't it?

 

-Noel

[JorgeA]

I'm sorry but I don't have any strong suggestions...  Even though I'm running Win 10 in a VM, I am keeping both snapshots and backups, as well as having made my own ISO image from the ESD file Windows Update downloaded. 

 

I have seen 10586 ISOs offered online, but not by Microsoft directly.  Seems like finding one and downloading it, then installing another in-place upgrade (of the same version) might work.  Can you get into the Windows Recovery Environment?  I have Win 10 booting through a 5 second delay in which the Advanced Boot menu is available.

 

That they've left you high and dry without an obvious recovery method really underscores the blatant disrespect Microsoft has for anything that's ours, doesn't it?

 

-Noel

 

It sure does.

 

You know, in the more than two decades that I've been using Windows (I was a DOS guy until the mid-'90s), this is the first time that a Windows installation has gone completely kaput on me. I've had hard disk failures and BSODs galore in my time, but never before now a case where the Windows OS failed irretrievably.

 

Noel, if by the Windows Recovery Environment you mean the blue-background screens that offer you choices such as which OS to boot, whether to go into Advanced options, Reset the PC, and the like -- then yes, I can get into that. Since Friday's disaster, typically this involves trying a normal boot, having it fail with the "critical process died" message, and then rebooting at which point it starts "diagnosing" the PC and eventually offers a choice to either restart or try other options.

 

--JorgeA

 

P.S. Does Windows keep logs anywhere of how things go in a bootup process? I found a file in some folder named "Srt" that records when the computer booted up and whether the process was successful, but it doesnt't give reasons for when they fail, only that they did fail.

[NoelC]

As much as I have learned about Windows, I can't answer your question about logs.  I so rarely boot, and even so much more rarely have any bootup problems (can't remember when...) I haven't really looked at the bootup process in decades.  I know Magic Andre (Ziegler) has a thread somewhere around these parts about diagnosing bootup problems - specifically having to do with slowness, but maybe it would yield some insight as to how to diagnose a failure.

 

Maybe someone else can chime in and assist...

 

-Noel

[JorgeA]

Thanks, Noel, this must be the thread you have in mind.

 

I'll checkit out and see if there's anything there that I can use in this case.

 

--JorgeA