Windows 10 Announced - Released 29-Jul-2015

Microsoft exec sees autumn release for Windows 10

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/10/us-microsoft-windows-idUSKBN0JO2FY20141210

 

Rumours about Windows 10 pricing scheme. Free basic version + subscription for premium features?:

http://www.extremetech.com/computin...soft-could-move-to-a-subscription-based-model

 

I've just replaced Windows 8.1 on one of my laptops with build 9879 of Windows 10. I'm really impressed so far. It running really fast on a 10 year old 32 bit CPU with a measly 2GB of RAM installed. Even scolling though webpages in Internet Explorer is perfectly smooth and fast with absolutely no lag. This is particuarly impressive considering my laptop has a really high 1920 x 1200 resolution, but an old 256MB video card.

I had major issues with audio latency. This was a major issue since the laptop's speakers are really high quality and have it has a built in amplifier to power them, so having audio glitches was very unwelcome. I found the laptop's Intel WiFi was causing the problems. A quick Google search suggested replacing the WiFi driver with an old Vista one supplied by HP would fix the latencty issues. The old drivers have provided a huge improvement, but when my system is under load I still get minor audio glitches, which is toally unaccaptable to me. I'm going to try using a mini USB WiFi adapter for my wireless and disable the on board wireless to see if it fixes my problems.

Edit: I'm using the USb WiFi adapter now - Windows very quicky found and installed the required driver, and the situation has improved quite a bit, but I still have some audio glitches when the laptop is under load. At first everything seemed fine. But, when I repeated launched Windows Explorer windows I was getting regular audio glitches.

The latency issues now seem to be isolated to soundcloud.com. I'm playing a video on YouTube, and continually launching Explorer windows does not affect the audio.

 

I've just installed Windows 10 in the main laptop that I use. I did an upgrade from Windows 7 instead of a clean install. Please don't tell me that not doing a clean install is a bad idea, because I already knew that, but did not want to have to start from scratch again. If I was unable to do an upgrade install I would have stuck with Windows 7.

At first, Windows 10 refused to install, but the installer was not able to tell me why. I just recevied an exceptionally vague message: "We can't tell if your PC is ready to continue installing Windows Technical Preview. Try restarting setup."

After doing some searching, it seeed that the problem may be related to my video driver, so I let Windows Update install a replacement driver. The driver had been listed for some time under optional updates. It would not install due to problems with registry permissions which I fixed with tweaking.com's Windows Repair. After that, I was able to update the driver and then install Windows 10. It was quite possibly the registry permission and not the driver stopping me from updating, but that doesn't matter now.

The update completed without any further issues along the way.

Here's what I have found so far:

Software
All the programs I had installed under Windows 7 are still there in Windows 10, and the few programs I've launched have worked. I really don't know why, but Windows Restore was disabled after I updated. It's not something I usually would have noticed for a while, but Kerish Doctor informed be about it.

Devices
I opened Device Manager , and the infrared port driver was not working, and there was no driver installed for the video controller (although my video driver is loaded and shown under display adapters). I was able to fix the infrared driver problem by deleting the driver and then scanning for hardware changed, after which Windows installed a working driver (not that I ever use the infrared port anyway). I was unable to get Device Manager to find a video controller driver. However in the process of doing some scans with driver update software, Windows fixed the driver problem and now there is no missing driver shown. The video issue may have been due to a problematic video chip, as from time to time under Windows 7 the screen would go blank, and the only way to fix it was to put the computer into sleep mode, and then resume it from sleep. It will be interesting to see if I continue to have the same problem under Windows 10.

System Restore
The update to Windows 10 disabled this. Kerish Doctor was quick to alert me it had some new suggested fixes for my computer - one of which was enabling Windows Update. If not for Kersih, I probably would have not noticed this for a while.

Overall Experience
So far I'm very happy. I'm really impressed that I was able to update from Windows 7 to 10 and keep all my applications. Considering I've installed and uninstalled hundreds of programs in the last few months I was expecting there to be some problems with my Windows 7 which would prevent me from updating. But this was of course not the case, and everything is working fine. When Windows 8 was first released I was unable to upgrade from Windows 7 on another laptop I have. In time, I will try and upgrade to Windows 10 on that same laptop to see if I can succeed in upgrading now.

For those of you who are unhappy with Windows 8 or 8.1 due to the lack of a start menu, Windows 10 is a welcome change. It's nice to not only have a start menu back without needing to install 3rd party software, but to have the "dreaded" start screen gone for good unless you manually enable it.

Now I'm going to find an antivirus to install.

 

Me too.

Clean-installed the 32-bit on a six year old E8400/G35 box running with a 40 GB PATA drive, 2 GB RAM, and on-CPU video. I was surprised at the speedy speed of the install and, like you, how smooth and fast the OS turned out to be. It certainly is as efficient as I remember with the WinXP it used to run off the SATA drive-that-died. Connected to my local NAS no problemo.

So, I figured what the H and clean-installed the 64-bit with the same impressive results. Except the PATA DVD burner is in the dev manager; no biggie as this is just a system for fun. I may scratch around for driver, however unlikely that'll turn out.

With "only" 25GB remaining on the HD, I'm running low-impact portable apps off a 32GB USB stick. Which is where I've pointed system and user temp variables, app caches and the like.

Creation of an encrypted container with TrueCrypt 7.1a went without a hitch on the 64-bit build. My Thunderbird.tc container I dragged over from the "big-rig" opened and ran A-OK.

My current W7x64 i7-3770K/Z77 rig will be 3½ years old by the end of next year. An OS refresh will be in the works and if the budget allows it, Win10.

Running with resident Defender for now. I haven't run a "real" Bitdefender since v8, so maybe a trial of IS to see what I've been missing.

Looks like build 9901 gonna roll in soon.

Cheers.

 

Ridiculous, I hate that Metro style "PC settings" screen. Just give us the regular Windows style.

 

I'm waiting for the setting that let's us Disable Metro Completely....

 

I'm part way there. I've disabled UAC. Doing so prevents the App Store or any of the modern (metro) apps from running.

 

Does this also work on Win 8? I don't think so, but I do need to sign with a M$ account to make most apps work.

 

I've played a bit with it, it works smoothly but still is pointless and horrible. And the only way to kill these apps (which run with "AppContainer" rights for security) is to kill them with a task manager like Process Explorer. You also can not control them with security tools.

 

Yes, I believe so. But, you need to do option 2 here to fully disable it.

 

I never used Win8 so this Win10TP is my first experience with it. Now that I've a few days with it.. Hate Metro. Deep, intense hate.
If I ever have to use it on a production system, I'm hoping there's a classic shell available, free or paid.

UPDATE: But, off course...
http://www.classicshell.net/
Beta version 4.2.0 for Win10!

 

One needs to do the registry tweak AND the Never notify setting in the Control Settings panel?

 

Disable the store...
http://www.howtogeek.com/111933/how-to-disable-the-windows-store-in-windows-8/
This also ends the relentless connections to the Web by WWAHost.exe.

 

I'm running a trial Bitdefender Windows 8 Security. Very nice. Like their Internet Security without the other crap.

 

Actually, I have no reason to specificallyu disable the store. But, becuase I actually disabled UAC completely it can't actually run - it gives me an error message saying it won't work with UAC disabled.

As for an antivirus, I was running Virus Chaser briefly, but uninstalled it when it started using 50% CPU use for no aparent reason. I was not running a scan at the time and it was not updating. Maybe it just doesn't work well with Windows 10, as I had no such issue under Windows 7. For the moment, running Bitdefender itself is not an option as it is too heavy for my old laptop.

 

I started having major DPC latency issues with my audio (i.e. glitches in audio playback) which I found my wireless was causing. I'm now using an external Ralink based wireless USB adapter instead of my laptops Intel wifi. Doing so has made a massive difference, but, I'm not completely free of audio issues. I also tried an Atheros wifi adapater, but the Ralink seems to cause less latency issues.

I was thinking I might have had to switch back to Windows 7 to fix the audio problems, but for now I can live with Windows 10. The Intel drivers are over four years old, but there are no more recent drivers from Intel, whereas the Ralink drivers are just 6 months old.

 

I turned off UAC on Win 8, so that didn't work.

Cool, I will check it out.

 

Regedit didn't work? If you set UAC slider to its lowest level, UAC won't be completely disabled (unlike in Windows 7) and some operations will still prompt you to ask for permission for elevated access.

 

My bad, I will try the registry tweak.

 

Driver management needs improvement for sure.

The optical drive (Lite-On burner) which is recognized in the BIOS and from which I can load up bootable CDs and DVDs all day long and which I used to install Win10 itself was never present in Disk Management. In Device Manager, it's "Currently, this hardware device is not connected to the computer. (Code 45) To fix this problem, reconnect this hardware device to the computer."

Sound has been just fine. Until today where the now red-x tray icon tooltip is reporting "No audio output device is installed." Device Manager has two "This device is working properly" High Definition Audio Device entries. All that appears in Sound-Playback is Remote Audio as the default device.

Probably to be expected on a mobo that popped of the assembly line 8 years ago even with 2010 bios firmware, its latest.

The system is otherwise still at ease with Win10-TP.

Cheers.

 

@FOXP2 there are some major driver issues. For example my wifi often refuses to connect a network after my laptop resumes from sleep. The first time this happened, I ran network diagnoastics, which tried to reset the adapter by disabling and enabling it, but it my wireless adapter remained unusable. When I had a look in Device Manager, it told me I needed to reboot to get my wireless adapter working again.

 

Anyone know when there will be a Release Preview?

 

Looks like January...
http://betanews.com/2014/12/22/wind...-10-technical-preview-through-windows-update/