Computer Problems

[viberunner]

Her machine's manufacturer have now emailed her to say they recommend not installing 10

 

If the machine can run anything after Vista (i.e. Windows 7 onwards) then it should be able to run Windows 10.

 

If I might inquire, who is the manufacturer and what's the model?

[zaria]

If her machine meet the windows10 specification requirement then she can upgrade it.

[Spindles]

To be honest the requirements aren't that heavy.  2gb Ram requirement is the only real increase since 8.1

 

I've read alot of nonsense, some of it from so call IT professionals, about windows 10.  It always seems that whenever a new MS OS comes out the same bunch are always lining up with the same ill informed scare stories, these people live to bash something that they themselves have never used simply because it is MS.

 

I've used the test version for a few months, it happily upgraded to a full activated version without my having a legit product key.  Over the weekend the motherboard died on my media box machine, so I got a second hand one off ebay cheap and installed Windows 10 without a hitch, again with no legit product key and again got myself a fully activated OS.

[eFestivals]

I've read alot of nonsense, some of it from so call IT professionals, about windows 10.  It always seems that whenever a new MS OS comes out the same bunch are always lining up with the same ill informed scare stories, these people live to bash something that they themselves have never used simply because it is MS.

Oh come on.... MS have a 30+ year history of not being innovative, and of creating OS's that are over-bloated for their functionality, whilst doing a poor job of the important things such as security. It's certainly a fair consideration to wonder if Win10 isn't more of the same.

 

I questioned it above, and had Barry tell me that Win10 has less need of hardware resources than previous windows versions. You've just stated that Barry's win10 defence is a crock of shit.

(I've not looked into it, so I don't know either way)

 

It's no stitch-up to recognise and state that MS's dominance is the result of some lucky circumstances followed by some shrewd business decisions, rather than from being outstanding with what they create.

Edited August 6, 2015 by eFestivals

[frostypaw]

It's no stitch-up to recognise and state that MS's dominance is the result of some lucky circumstances followed by some shrewd business decisions, rather than from being outstanding with what they create.

In all fairness everyone else was pretty crap too.

DR-DOS was brilliant but nothing more ever came of it. The only windowing system to ever compete was OS/2 which was both brilliant and retarded at the same time and since then it's just been the two big apple/microsoft ecosystems

Not that I'm denying what you've said - they did spend too long on bells and whistles rather than core OS issues - but MS's shrewd business moves were almost all buying people developing similar software, they never really had to fight anyone fairly.

I don't think he was talking about a little doubt and dissing though but rather the Linux fanboys - I just had a nice fb chat with one mate bitching about Windows10's interface being unpolished and too plain and dull - offensive to his eyes.

his favourite OS is linux mint.

no bias there....

[eFestivals]

In all fairness everyone else was pretty crap too.

DR-DOS was brilliant but nothing more ever came of it. The only windowing system to ever compete was OS/2 which was both brilliant and retarded at the same time and since then it's just been the two big apple/microsoft ecosystems

Not that I'm denying what you've said - they did spend too long on bells and whistles rather than core OS issues - but MS's shrewd business moves were almost all buying people developing similar software, they never really had to fight anyone fairly.

You say 'everyone else was pretty crap', but everyone else was at-least matching MS with a fraction of the resources.

And as you recognise, they made sure they didn't have any real business competition.

I don't hate MS, but I'm perfectly happy to see them justly criticised. The same applies with Apple and anything else.

We tend not to get the fair comment, because mostly people are fan-boys of something or other.

Me, I say if you wanted a proper operating system in the 80s and 90s, then OS/400 shitted over everything.

[frostypaw]

You say 'everyone else was pretty crap', but everyone else was at-least matching MS with a fraction of the resources.

True, I was thinking more in terms of the actual fight - marketing and partnerships to push the product etc. Back in MS vs DR-DOS barely anyone had even heard of the latter past reading something about a settings change in a manual they might have glanced at.

That was something apple got very right - people wanted computers almost like consoles - what os you're actually running on it is something 95% of people never want to think about

The whole here's your pc.... now what you do want on it? what's the difference? ah well let me get this laaaaaarge document... oh you've gone. Hell most of the Mac vs PC bitching comes down to interface twiddles and availability of software rather than actual genuine OS considerations.

Was about when you started seeing those sticky labels telling you This PC was designed for Windows etc everywhere

[windy_miller]

This is what is wrong with windows 10 (slightly over the top, but make a good point)...

https://i.imgur.com/DiQbvqa.jpg

[frostypaw]

That doesn't seem like the ravings of a madman at all, not one bit....

There's been quite a few more rational articles about turning off the intrusive bits, some of these guys I put into the same category as the yanks with a bunker full of guns and tinned food

[viberunner]

Oh come on.... MS have a 30+ year history of not being innovative, and of creating OS's that are over-bloated for their functionality, whilst doing a poor job of the important things such as security.

 

Don't take this the wrong way mate but that's a load of bollocks. Apple have had the massive advantage that their users don't mind be locked away from their own files and they have a fixed hardware platform.

 

Ubuntu?

 

This is a very important tutorial. The last several releases of Ubuntu are less than stellar when it comes to installing Nvidia drivers on your machines. You are likely to end up with an unbootable system, just by using the same methods that used to work flawlessly in the past. To wit, this very detailed guide, which should save you a lot of trouble.

 

 

The article made me want to die more-than-a-little inside and I have a degree in this stuff and professional experience with Unix.

 

MS have made an operating system were the user can do what they want, any hobbyist programmer can do what they want, and it has to run on trillions upon trillions of hardware configurations. Oh AND it has to maintain a decent level of backwards compatibility.

 

I went online to find some egregious examples of MS bloatware. It turns out one man's bloatware is another man's utility. Everything from media players, antivirus software, to internet browsers to office utilities... are bloatware. But they're only bloatware if you don't want them. And for the most part you can, erm, uninstall them.

 

Yes, Microsoft's consumer OS installs have been getting larger. And not all are wild successes (Vista!). But the hardware options are getting exponentially larger, hardware items are getting ever more powerful, and new hardware an software options are becoming default norms.

 

But I'll hand it back over to you: what, specifically, would you name as some of Microsoft's most egregious bloatwares?

 

Bonus points if you don't Google your answers for you.

 

I mean, Windows 10 comes with Minecraft and XP came with solitaire. But it turns out a lot of Windows users actually enjoy having those games (especially office-bound types who are not allowed to install games but those games come on office installs).

 

Another big one from MS was the MSN Toolbar, now the Bing Bar. It's not something I want personally but it is actually pretty feature-rich (and easily uninstallable). Blocking popups, notifying of email, able to one-click send current page to email or messenger, etc. etc.

Edited August 6, 2015 by viberunner

[viberunner]

 

I don't hate MS, but I'm perfectly happy to see them justly criticised. The same applies with Apple and anything else. We tend not to get the fair comment, because mostly people are fan-boys of something or other.

 

Despite how you could read my tone, I'm not a fanboy of anyone. But I want the criticism to be, as you say, fair. From my perspective the requirements of what a new OS install has to provide are gobsmackingly nontrivial.

[eFestivals]

But I'll hand it back over to you: what, specifically, would you name as some of Microsoft's most egregious bloatwares?

i said 'over-bloated', not 'bloatware'. The OS - not its bundled utilities - is over-bloated. Often thru silly and unnecessary ideas which are specifically designed to try and keep people locked into using windoze - stuff from the past like active-X, and IE being an integral part of the OS. I'm guessing they've not given up these sorts of tricks...?

 

You flag up a driver issue with Ubuntu, but driver issues with Windows happen too. The only difference around them is created by the market position of each, where a windoze driver is always going to be created by the manufacturer while support for other platforms is initially iffy.

 

And if you want to talk tinker-able, then linux blows windows away there.

 

The issue around flavours of linux always used to be horrible install routines, but the last linux install I did (Mint) was easier than the last windows install I did (win7).

 

Windows isn't crap, it wouldn't have survived if it was ... but that doesn't stop me from disliking some of what's been done with it, or knowing that MS has often bought up superior products to destroy them rather than pursuing the best that a computer could be.

 

Remember, stuff like linux has often been knocked together by keen amateurs in their spare time, without the massively huge resources of MS.

 

I've been working with computers for 25 now, so I've seen a hell of a lot of changes along the way. I'm quite happy to say that eventually MS managed to do what win95 should have been with XP - decent - and that win7 is very good.

(then again, I was massively impressed with the win95 betas, cos compared to win3.1 it was dreamworld ... meanwhile my main job of looking after an AS/400 showed what a crock of shit win95 was in reality).

 

Win8 tho looks like another of those famous MS cock-ups where MS have completely missed where the market is going; it sounds like at least some of that is being rectified with win10.

 

[frostypaw]

i said 'over-bloated', not 'bloatware'. The OS - not its bundled utilities - is over-bloated. Often thru silly and unnecessary ideas which are specifically designed to try and keep people locked into using windoze - stuff from the past like active-X, and IE being an integral part of the OS. I'm guessing they've not given up these sorts of tricks...?

I think that's a little disingenuous - having a built in HTML renderer in your OS is far from ridiculous bloat when you look at how the world has gone, if anything it was inspired.

Active-X was trying to be too sneaky but such tactics are far from theirs alone. Apple are vastly more guilty with it's iTunes dominance and it's actually won.

Remember, stuff like linux has often been knocked together by keen amateurs in their spare time, without the massively huge resources of MS.

That's the problem though - it limits it's audience by that very fact. You need teams of thousands of beta-testers from computer newbies to experts grannies to kids and teams of designers and market researchers etc to get a level of finesse to a system such that anyone can use it - the vast majority don't care what's under the hood as long as it goes where they point it and push the pedal thing

I'm not saying it makes it fundamentally better, but it makes it better for most users.

[eFestivals]

I think that's a little disingenuous - having a built in HTML renderer in your OS is far from ridiculous bloat when you look at how the world has gone, if anything it was inspired.

It wasn't just that, tho, was it?

And even that part was a sham, because it very deliberately didn't stick to the HTML standards.

 

It's not like they claim the standards were evolving too quickly for them to keep up, seeing it was a bought-in browser (I forget which one now) that was standards-based - and they deliberately took some of them out! It was deliberately knobbled!

 

Amusingly, Win95 wasn't even designed to work on the internet, the internet was going nowhere according to Bill. It was all about 'Blackbird' (which became MSN after a few quick mutations). I'd been using the net for 4+ years already and knew Bill was very very wrong.

[viberunner]

ActiveX had at the core of it entirely valid functionality, that is easy cross-program support, so Explorer, Office, the programming Studio suites, Media Player, etc., could handle objects uniformly. For example ActiveX Data Objects permits a programmer to accesses data from a database without prior knowledge of how that database is constructed, along with server requests, etc., and these relatively advanced techniques can be used from within (say) VBScript with very easily. The worst part of AX was not the attempted implementation of it but the lack of security - you simply couldn't trust AX web controls.

 

But otherwise, are you unhappy with the idea of a .NET framework, for example?

 

MS stated IE was integral to Windows conceptually. Back in the day a tiny minority of Windows users would ever connect to the Internet. Then more did. Then many more did. Then it came to a point the majority did and that rate was going to increase. So MS bundled IE with it to give an immediate browser to be using. However it was never technically integrated into a Windows platform that I can think of - you could always uninstall it.

 

But again, I fail to see what's so wrong with an Operating System bundling a browser, particularly in the "everyone goes online" era. Downloading your preferred browser without a browser to download via is a pain in the nipples. For example, the only time I've ever used IE on this machine was to download Chrome. But without IE on this machine that process would have been an utter pain.

 

You needed an AS/400 to show you Win95 was a crock of shite? LOL. Amiga Workbench could have shown you that both Win95 and AS/400 were crocks of shite. For my money Workbench is the single finest OS ever released and it's a tragic comedy that it has died a death (outside of emulator nerd circles).

[frostypaw]

Hah MSN ridiculous idea when the data already showed AOL/Compuserver were becoming gateways

I bloody hated the standards race kept me paid well but what a PITA constantly. Glad to be out of that, just ignore it now quite happily and waft criticism at poor design nonetheless

[eFestivals]

ActiveX had at the core of it entirely valid functionality, that is easy cross-program support, so Explorer, Office, the programming Studio suites, Media Player, etc., could handle objects uniformly. For example ActiveX Data Objects permits a programmer to accesses data from a database without prior knowledge of how that database is constructed, along with server requests, etc., and these relatively advanced techniques can be used from within (say) VBScript with very easily. The worst part of AX was not the attempted implementation of it but the lack of security - you simply couldn't trust AX web controls.

 

But otherwise, are you unhappy with the idea of a .NET framework, for example?

 

MS stated IE was integral to Windows conceptually. Back in the day a tiny minority of Windows users would ever connect to the Internet. Then more did. Then many more did. Then it came to a point the majority did and that rate was going to increase. So MS bundled IE with it to give an immediate browser to be using. However it was never technically integrated into a Windows platform that I can think of - you could always uninstall it.

 

But again, I fail to see what's so wrong with an Operating System bundling a browser, particularly in the "everyone goes online" era. Downloading your preferred browser without a browser to download via is a pain in the nipples. For example, the only time I've ever used IE on this machine was to download Chrome. But without IE on this machine that process would have been an utter pain.

I did start to write about the very many factual inaccuracies in that, but it's not worth it.  

 

You needed an AS/400 to show you Win95 was a crock of shite? LOL. Amiga Workbench could have shown you that both Win95 and AS/400 were crocks of shite. For my money Workbench is the single finest OS ever released and it's a tragic comedy that it has died a death (outside of emulator nerd circles).

 

yeah, cos i'm sure you've got a lot of AS/400 experience to know.

 

 

 

 

[frostypaw]

*slinks away from impending pissing match and cries about Netware*

[eFestivals]

*slinks away from impending pissing match and cries about Netware*

 

lol ... yep, me too ... back in the mists I picked up their techie qualification ('NCE', was it? I forget). But gawd, Netware was the stuff of nightmares.

 

My fav name of old is Borland, so good that MS licensed a chunk of their technology for use in Office (was it the 'jet engine'? I forget, yet again). I'm still occasionally using what started off as Borland Delphi, now owned by a company called Embercadero.

[viberunner]

yeah, cos i'm sure you've got a lot of AS/400 experience to know.

 

The second platform I ever professionally coded was on one. Does the job for an SME but the Amiga was an OS was fucking lightyears ahead of it - though it should be said we're comparing a Ford Transit to a Bugatti Veyron (you're not going to get a 1-ton commercial load into a Veyron).

 

 

I did start to write about the very many factual inaccuracies in that, but it's not worth it. 

 

 

Don't be wordy then. Just a note and an example. 

 

I'm not great fan of MS, my fandom is reserved for the Atari Amiga (which it was at heart if not in production) and MS are extremely easy to criticise and ridicule from the outside, but to take an OS from a 386 with 8 MB of ram over twenty years of vast amounts of hardware, middleware and application variants, is actually a monumental technical task.

 

I repeat, the worst thing about them was the security flaws they didn't seem able to keep on top of. But the entire "MS has bundled a browser with its OS" was always Netscape going "waa waa waa" and wanting free promotion for a once-good but every increasingly shitty product. Where the fuck is Navigator now? If they wanted Windows users to migrate to their browser they should have ensured it's the best and people would have used it anyway, like Firefox and Chrome manage these days.

Edited August 7, 2015 by viberunner

[LondonTom]

 

This is what is wrong with windows 10 (slightly over the top, but make a good point)...

https://i.imgur.com/DiQbvqa.jpg

 

Most of those privacy "complaints" would basically cripple most of the functionality most people want from their OS these days if MS didn't implement them.

[Spindles]

Not to mention that most are present in windows 7 and 8

[viberunner]

One of the more sane and balanced articles regarding Windows 10 privacy.

 

https://www.petri.com/windows-10-privacy-concerns-are-overblown-but-perception-matters

 

However, Windows Update Delivery Optimization - basically Microsoft use your bandwidth to update other Windows 10 computers so they don't have to foot the bill - is turned on by default. Fucking cheeky.

 

http://www.redmondpie.com/how-to-turn-off-windows-10-update-delivery-optimization-feature/

 

There's also a little utility that seems to be the current go-to bit of Software to manage all your W10 privacy settings in one place.

 

http://pxc-coding.com/portfolio/donotspy10/

[windy_miller]

I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade my Windows 7 laptop to Windows 10.  Its not actually that bad.  Much better than 8.  The Aero apps are actually usable now, without them commandeering your whole screen.  I like the way you can link the Calendar and Mail apps to your google account.

 

Had a couple of teething issues..

 

- It completely hung a few seconds after booting into the desktop for the first time.

- Command Prompt and Notepad were crashing whenever I started typing.

- My touchpad was behaving strangely.

 

The first two resolved themselves after rebooting / updating.  I removed the driver for the touchpad and hid the update (using Microsoft's "Show or Hide Updates" tool) and its working much better now.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3073930

[viberunner]

According to Ars Technica even tuning Windows 10 to maximum privacy doesn't  stop it.

 

Windows 10 will periodically send data to a Microsoft server named ssw.live.com. This server seems to be used for OneDrive and some other Microsoft services. Windows 10 seems to transmit information to the server even when OneDrive is disabled and logins are using a local account that isn't connected to a Microsoft Account. The exact nature of the information being sent isn't clear—it appears to be referencing telemetry settings—and again, it's not clear why any data is being sent at all. We disabled telemetry on our test machine using group policies. 

 

[Also] some traffic seems quite impenetrable. We configured our test virtual machine to use an HTTP and HTTPS proxy (both as a user-level proxy and a system-wide proxy) so that we could more easily monitor its traffic, but Windows 10 seems to make requests to a content delivery network that bypass the proxy

 

[As] Web searching and Cortana are disabled, we suspect that the inference that most people would make is that searching the Start menu wouldn't hit the Internet at all. But it does. The traffic could be innocuous, but the inclusion of a machine ID gives it a suspicious appearance.

 

 

 

http://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2015/08/even-when-told-not-to-windows-10-just-cant-stop-talking-to-microsoft/

 

AT are not tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists and they fully  understand the need to scour for data and send it for the likes of Cortana to function, but they're right that disabling these services should also disable the feedback - let alone identifiable feedback.

 

I'm not anti-MS by any means, I think Windows is a technological in that it works at all given the vast myriad of historic hardware configurations, but Windows 10 seems fucking creepy.