Windows 10

turboswimbz · 07/31/2015, 07:40 PM

Well I upgraded, and after taking time to read and stop all the privacy issues. Which honestly people should know by now NEVER use the default install settings. hitting the custom screen pops up the privacy defaults and you can easily turn them off.

However,

Mine is glitchy as hell. I am experience it not recognizing the antivirus. and severe screen flashing. There does not seem to be a cure for this. Except rolling back. If anyone hears of a cure I missed, let me know. My computer is essentially a brick with it flashing, since you can't click anything.

BigusSchmuck · 08/01/2015, 10:35 AM

Quote from: turboswimbz on 07/31/2015, 07:40 PMWell I upgraded, and after taking time to read and stop all the privacy issues. Which honestly people should know by now NEVER use the default install settings. hitting the custom screen pops up the privacy defaults and you can easily turn them off.

However,

Mine is glitchy as hell. I am experience it not recognizing the antivirus. and severe screen flashing. There does not seem to be a cure for this. Except rolling back. If anyone hears of a cure I missed, let me know. My computer is essentially a brick with it flashing, since you can't click anything.

The nice thing about that upgrade it automatically upgrades your Windows 7-8.1 key into Windows 10. I usually suggest doing a fresh install instead of a upgrade as upgrades always seem to have some lingering issues...

NightWolve · 08/01/2015, 01:03 PM

Funny you mentioned that, Bigus, I got to feeling "lucky" so I decided to do a nice clean install after the upgrade... Was a lot more work, it's not for the faint of heart! Feel better about it though, ~~but still missing one driver at present - FIXED with DriveForLife's help!~~. Don't try this unless you're reasonably techy with experience!!

0) You will definitely need a USB keyboard and mouse, and likely a USB hub to connect both at the same time! I used the microUSB port for power, but then I had to use it to boot off my USB memory stick! The touchscreen mousing drivers are not likely to be included with Windows 10 and popup keyboard might be flaky even after!! My tablet is nice in that I have a 2nd full size USB port, and a microUSB port which is normally for power.

1) First do the upgrade with the popup Windows app normally! This will associate your product key with 10. After a full upgrade, if it works reasonably well and all drivers are accounted for, then you can try for a clean install! I hadn't used my tablets long enough to care too much about established settings and apps, so I didn't care.

2) If your system has no Windows product key sticker, then it's embedded in the BIOS or the UEFI partition by the OEM, etc. It's also stored in the Windows registry in binary form so you need an app to decode it to readable form - a link to one that works is below! Write it down because on a clean install it'll ask you for it and not find it on some custom partition.

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/product_cd_key_viewer.html#DownloadLinks
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/produkey.zip

3) For tablets with restore options, you'll have to make a decision about the ~4GB of space that was allocated for a clean copy of the original OS! I deleted that partition and joined it with the main one for a full 28.9 GB of space - My WinBook TW100 is a 32GB tablet! Only 100 MB is allocated at the start for the UEFI. So yeah, the Windows installer gives you a basic Partition Manager screen for deciding where to install it. You can delete/create/format/etc. It'll likely refuse to touch the custom reserved partitions as it did for me. (I wasn't feeling THAT lucky to research other fan software or maybe Linux to nuke that UEFI and upgrade it to 64-bit - don't need to risk bricking my tablets!)

4) Download "Win10_English_x32.iso" or "Win10_English_x64.iso" from Microsoft. It will ask you for edition, choose the FIRST one, "Windows 10" (the others are hacked versions for Europe due to their crazy money-stealing legal courts!), then choose language as "English" and you should get buttons for 32-bit or 64-bit.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10ISO

5) Making a bootable 4GB (or more) USB memory stick with a Win10 32/64-bit ISO was easy enough with an app called Rufus.

https://rufus.akeo.ie/

a) First you browse for the Win10 ISO, "Win10_English_x32.iso" or "Win10_English_x64.iso"
b) Select MBR partition scheme for UEFI
c) FAT32 (default) for File system
d) 4096 bytes (default) for cluster size
e) MAKE SURE to type something short for volume label like "WIN10" - if it generates its own long one, it might error out on formatting and not tell you why it failed.
f) All other settings leave to default

With your USB memory stick plugged in, it should've detected it and pressing the "Start" button will begin. If it succeeds, your memory stick will be load with win10 and be bootable.

6) Booting off a memory stick for a tablet could be tricky... I HAD to use the microUSB port, so I needed a male microUSB to female full-size USB cable to plug the memory stick in! This means I had to rely on the battery of the tablet since I couldn't have the power cable connected to it!

But before that, you need to change the BIOS Boot Order! You can do this 2 ways! Windows 10 can do it for you in Settings or you can use one of the F keys when you turn your system on with keyboard connected (mine was F2)! On Windows, click the new start menu, hit Settings -> Recovery -> "Restart Now" and that'll take you to a menu to "Use a device" where you will choose "USB HDD." So Windows will change the BIOS order to boot first off a USB memory stick before the internal flash drive and that should do the trick!

7) THE REALLY BIG PROBLEM: You need to copy your existing "C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore" folder as one way to *help*, find driver detecting and installing apps as another way...

a) Here's one app that found 2 drivers for me: http://drp.su/
This one is also freeware: http://www.drivethelife.com/free-drivers-download-utility.html

b) In my case, Intel made many driver installer programs that you have to find for things like the camera, microphone, speakers, etc. I got it from this link: http://support.lenovo.com/us/en/downloads/ds040016

Now everything is working, ~~except I only have one unknown device driver and I don't know what it is just yet~~... So this MAY or MAY NOT work out well for you, it's a tad risky and it puts you in the same situation as upgrading an Android tablet/phone, you need to research a bit simply because a clean Win10 install will not have ALL of the drivers in it for every known piece of hardware out there... Microsoft just isn't that good and even the Windows Scan/Update feature will not detect everything and find a driver for it, etc.!

Additional Info for Drivers:
http://answers.microsoft.com/how-to-install-and-update-drivers-in-windows-10/

Conclusion: If you're not a techhead, just stick with upgrading. All Win7/8.1 drivers present are imported, upgraded if a Win10 version was created, and things are just more likely gonna go smooth! If you're like me and got to feeling lucky plus have experience in this, then give it a shot, but FAIR WARNING!

EDIT: With the help of http://www.drivethelife.com , I was able to determine what the final device was! It didn't install a working driver though, so I grabbed the files from a Win8.1 install, picked the correct INF file and installed over with the Device Manager. This concluded my full upgrade and everything is now fully working and looking in order! It looks like this software is what you need, it can backup important driver sets such as from Intel, and you can save that on your USB memory stick for a clean install attempt.

Either way, good luck should you attempt this yourself!

turboswimbz · 08/01/2015, 01:49 PM

Quote from: BigusSchmuck on 08/01/2015, 10:35 AM
Quote from: turboswimbz on 07/31/2015, 07:40 PMWell I upgraded, and after taking time to read and stop all the privacy issues. Which honestly people should know by now NEVER use the default install settings. hitting the custom screen pops up the privacy defaults and you can easily turn them off.

However,

Mine is glitchy as hell. I am experience it not recognizing the antivirus. and severe screen flashing. There does not seem to be a cure for this. Except rolling back. If anyone hears of a cure I missed, let me know. My computer is essentially a brick with it flashing, since you can't click anything.
The nice thing about that upgrade it automatically upgrades your Windows 7-8.1 key into Windows 10. I usually suggest doing a fresh install instead of a upgrade as upgrades always seem to have some lingering issues...

That would be nice, except it requires imput of a password. The issues won't allow for this, I've gone ahead and rolled back to windows 8.

esadajr · 08/03/2015, 02:22 PM

Quote from: GreatBlueSwirlof99 on 07/30/2015, 03:13 PM I still use Windows 98 ( to play Army Men II and I haven't got a reason to upgrade so yeah.. ).

There you go. Win98 forever! Nothing beats running your legacy apps on "real hardware".

esadajr · 08/03/2015, 02:32 PM

I was using it during the insider preview phase, till my test laptop died. Promising in a lot of aspects, my biggest concern comes from how app oriented it is and the potential for monetization (and other nasty practices). I think the Solitaire scandal proves it. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

If everything is nice and dandy under Win7, then by all means just keep it.

NightWolve · 08/03/2015, 03:43 PM

People with 16GB Windows 7-8.1 tablets will have a helluva time upgrading! For my small Winbook 7", I failed about 5-6 times with the upgrade app downloading the 3 GB installer files each time, then failing by running out of disk space, deleting everything it downloaded, and you having to free up every last byte thinking you gained enough only to try and fail again! Hah! You need at least 9 GB free, and a 16GB tablet usually only has like ~10 GB total with half taken by the current OS, and where 4-6 GB has been taken away by the manufacturer to store a clean image of the default OS for disaster recovery!

But yeah, it took many hours across a few days to get it right... I basically tricked it on the 5th time into running off an external 16GB microSD card to work, and after upgrading, I did a clean install, got to the partition manager, and nuked that recovery partition, so now I have a full 14.3 GB available for the internal SD and can use an external 32 GB microSD card or the USB slot for more space for other stuff!

I do NOT recommend you trying the full format+clean install afterwards because of the driver tracking situation you'll be left with!!! There's a whole industry out there for both payware and freeware software to detect your devices and offer info on where to grab the driver software for them! It took many tries, many pieces of software whose trustworthiness could be questionable to finally get it working right and have all drivers accounted for. So it is booting proper now, touchscreen is fully working, audio has been restored with Intel/Realtek drivers, etc. but with all that difficulty, most people don't need all that headache so just stick with upgrading!!

If there was a universal website that handled driver detection and installation, it'd be great! Microsoft's update service is surprisingly not that powerful and it's weird to see that this whole industry has popped up surrounding this area! Anyway, it's cool to have upgraded both my tablets and gotten a chance to regain the partition space for their internal drives to maximize space. The 16GB tablet really needed it! It just means for disaster recovery, you need to make an external bootable USB memory stick or SD card and that's what you'll have to use instead of relying on the manufacturer's recovery partition idea which basically replaces the disaster recovery CD/DVD that you get with a full PC.

BigusSchmuck · 08/03/2015, 04:57 PM

Quote from: NightWolve on 08/03/2015, 03:43 PMPeople with 16GB Windows 7-8.1 tablets will have a helluva time upgrading! For my small Winbook 7", I failed about 5-6 times with the upgrade app downloading the 3 GB installer files each time, then failing by running out of disk space, deleting everything it downloaded, and you having to free up every last byte thinking you gained enough only to try and fail again! Hah! You need at least 9 GB free, and a 16GB tablet usually only has like ~10 GB total with half taken by the current OS, and where 4-6 GB has been taken away by the manufacturer to store a clean image of the default OS for disaster recovery!

But yeah, it took many hours across a few days to get it right... I basically tricked it on the 5th time into running off an external 16GB microSD card to work, and after upgrading, I did a clean install, got to the partition manager, and nuked that recovery partition, so now I have a full 14.3 GB available for the internal SD and can use an external 32 GB microSD card or the USB slot for more space for other stuff!

I do NOT recommend you trying the full format+clean install afterwards because of the driver tracking situation you'll be left with!!! There's a whole industry out there for both payware and freeware software to detect your devices and offer info on where to grab the driver software for them! It took many tries, many pieces of software whose trustworthiness could be questionable to finally get it working right and have all drivers accounted for. So it is booting proper now, touchscreen is fully working, audio has been restored with Intel/Realtek drivers, etc. but with all that difficulty, most people don't need all that headache so just stick with upgrading!!

If there was a universal website that handled driver detection and installation, it'd be great! Microsoft's update service is surprisingly not that powerful and it's weird to see that this whole industry has popped up surrounding this area! Anyway, it's cool to have upgraded both my tablets and gotten a chance to regain the partition space for their internal drives to maximize space. The 16GB tablet really needed it! It just means for disaster recovery, you need to make an external bootable USB memory stick or SD card and that's what you'll have to use instead of relying on the manufacturer's recovery partition idea which basically replaces the disaster recovery CD/DVD that you get with a full PC.

Unless you got a recent Lenovo or a Dell laptop, those guys have Windows 10 drivers already. I'm currently virtualizing it on my Windows 7 desktop at work, going to wait a bit methinks..

NightWolve · 08/03/2015, 05:06 PM

Yeah, I mean if you decide to repartition, format, and then boot off a clean Win32 or Win64 image, you will not get the benefit of driver importation as you did when you first did a basic upgrade... Just in case people misread me, you MUST do the regular upgrade so that your Windows Product key is converted to Windows 10 and then see how things work, and then if you wanna try a format/clean install you can go the next step, but like I said, you'll be faced with driver hunting and will need the help of other software if you hope to be successful! I think http://www.driveridentifier.com/ might be OK trust-wise and you can log in with your Google account with them, just click that you're not a commercial entity, and they'll let you get to a needed driver download after their app detects what's needed on your system. But yeah, that's all a big headache and probably not worth it for most people, so just do a regular upgrade with their popup app and leave it be...

ClodBusted · 08/03/2015, 05:09 PM

YES, Dell confirmed that they tested the Win10 upgrade for my Vostro 3360 and thus officially support it.

Now I just have to check all important programs and peripherals I use for compatibility. It would be a shame if my PCE Flash cart software (not Everdrive) wouldn't be supported by Win10.

SephirothTNH · 08/15/2015, 08:27 PM

For some reason my laptop popped up saying it was ready to install win 10 last night. I wasn't planning on doing it and had only signed up for the upgrade on my old desktop. My Desktop still says it's waiting and I wanted to try it out so I figured what the hell.

Bottom Line up Front: I like it. It's definitely an upgrade from 8/8.1 IMO. Everything about it feels better. It's still to early to tell if I like it more than 7 but I at least like it as much as 7.

This laptop is ancient so like I said I wasn't planning on upgrading it. It's an Acer Extensa 4620z. Intel 965 chipset so dick all for graphics and originally 2gb ram and a Pentium dual core 1.4ghz. Needless to say it was crap. But I upgraded some things. Swapped out the processor for a 2.4ghz core 2 duo and upped the ram to 4 GB about a year ago. Also Installed windows 7 and it turned into a pretty nice laptop.

The only problem I experienced with the upgrade was with windows chosen WDDM version of the GMA 965 driver. There where no glaring problems after the upgrade and it wasn't until I went to play ppsspp on it that I discovered the problem. All of a sudden it didn't work anymore. It kept telling me my opengl version(1.1.0) wasn't high enough. I looked online and the GMA965 supports opengle 1.5. And it worked before the upgrade. So I went to Intel's website and downloaded the latest Win 7 drivers and installed them. Despite the warning that the already installed version was newer the older drivers restored my opengl performance.

A minor problem I just noticed today is that Applocale no longer works in 10. It hasn't been officially supported since Vista I think and it seems that now it is no longer an option. I've moved on to some other program to make up for it.

Beyond that I'm completely happy with the upgrade. And will be upgrading my main rig which I hadn't been planning on doing.

BigusSchmuck · 08/19/2015, 02:18 PM

I'm still pissed it doesn't have RSTAT tools nor can I use virtual box to virtualize Windows 7/8.1 in case there are things I can't run on it yet. Once RSTAT and virtual box works with it, I'll jump ship.

sirhcman · 08/19/2015, 02:19 PM

Quote from: BigusSchmuck on 08/19/2015, 02:18 PMI'm still pissed it doesn't have RSTAT tools nor can I use virtual box to virtualize Windows 7/8.1 in case there are things I can't run on it yet. Once RSTAT and virtual box works with it, I'll jump ship.

Dual boot with another version of Windows, worked fine for me.

NightWolve · 08/19/2015, 02:39 PM

I have a bit of performance issues to report on my WinBook 7" tablet which previously ran fine on 8.1.

* I've started to see outright crashes for the FIRST time on this tablet... All of a sudden it's literally stuck and I have to hold the power button down to shut it off and restart.

* VLC is my preferred video player as I found it always produced the best video quality of any movie, general video file, etc. It used to work perfectly fine on 8.1 playing 720p or 1080p MP4 video files. Now however, it's completely buggy and it appears to suffer from extreme lag. Video can get stuck, crap out in a pixelated mess, it just doesn't seem like the CPU is powerful enough to handle it... I tried raising the process priority, but that only helped mildly. It appears the native video player by Microsoft works fast enough though, but it's basic and lacking all the bells and whistles.

So yeah, VLC no longer works for me and I've started to see outright crashes for the first time on this tablet. There was a pretty big patch update with Windows Update, so hopefully it will perform better next time around, I'll have to see. I had these problems a bit before this update which happened yesterday. Another thing about said update, when it started off, the system just DID IT while I was playing a video and rebooted on me WITH NO NOTICE/WARNING WHATSOEVER...... If I remember correctly, this was a default behavior on Windows Vista and you had to change a flag in the registry, 'xxxxautoreboot' or something, to stop it...

MotherGunner · 08/19/2015, 02:50 PM

I just did two laptops (for my parents).

They opted to upgrade to SSDs first as they have pretty decent laptops with 2.6ghz CPUs and 8GB Ram and wanted clean installs...holy shit.

I backed up their personal folders and favorites, then installed factory images on each. Had to go through the entire Win7 flow just to retain the original OEM programs they got for free and drivers. Then wait a couple a days until every last update was installed, then forced the Win10 install. Like someone said, NOT for the faint of heart. It was a true exercise in patience.

ProTip - remember to go back and delete Windows.Old via disk cleanup. You will regain about 20gb which is necessary on an SSD.

NightWolve · 08/19/2015, 03:10 PM

Yeah, the driver hunt was "fun" if you choose to repartition/format and do a clean install! Upgrading simply imports all that data and allows for a far smoother, problem-free experience.

http://www.driveridentifier.com/

As I mentioned, I found that website to be the most trustworthy for this process and you can use it for free if you log in with your googlepages account and click "not a commercial user" when needed.

I did learn some new things and because of that website, I also ran it on my Vista PC tower, and was surprised to find some new versions of drivers like for my PCI Express USB 3.0 card which I purchased about a year ago on the cheap so I could at least provide this old 2008 machine with some up modernizing and to complement the 2 TB external USB 3.0 backup drive I had purchased since it didn't have eSATA. But yeah, the Windows Update feature cannot fully help you with driver update/maintenance... I'm surprised at how lacking in power it is...

BigusSchmuck · 08/19/2015, 03:12 PM

Quote from: guest on 08/19/2015, 02:19 PM
Quote from: BigusSchmuck on 08/19/2015, 02:18 PMI'm still pissed it doesn't have RSTAT tools nor can I use virtual box to virtualize Windows 7/8.1 in case there are things I can't run on it yet. Once RSTAT and virtual box works with it, I'll jump ship.
Dual boot with another version of Windows, worked fine for me.

Well this is for my pc at work, I haven't even started my pcs at home yet. lol I will say it is pretty snappy for my I5-2500k with 8gb of ram and 256 ssd (took about a total of 2 minutes to install office 2013). I don't see my workplace jumping ship from Windows 7 anytime soon (hell we just finished upgrading/replacing 85 xp machines this year!) as everyone here is using their pcs as a dumb terminal to remote into RD land.

sirhcman · 08/19/2015, 04:59 PM

Quote from: BigusSchmuck on 08/19/2015, 03:12 PM
Quote from: guest on 08/19/2015, 02:19 PM
Quote from: BigusSchmuck on 08/19/2015, 02:18 PMI'm still pissed it doesn't have RSTAT tools nor can I use virtual box to virtualize Windows 7/8.1 in case there are things I can't run on it yet. Once RSTAT and virtual box works with it, I'll jump ship.
Dual boot with another version of Windows, worked fine for me.
Well this is for my pc at work, I haven't even started my pcs at home yet. lol I will say it is pretty snappy for my I5-2500k with 8gb of ram and 256 ssd (took about a total of 2 minutes to install office 2013). I don't see my workplace jumping ship from Windows 7 anytime soon (hell we just finished upgrading/replacing 85 xp machines this year!) as everyone here is using their pcs as a dumb terminal to remote into RD land.

Ah okay, I ran a dual boot when the Windows 10 developer preview was out without any issues. I was hesitant but pleasantly surprised how well the OS runs on my aging rig (6 year old intel i7 920 w/ 6 gig ram and a 7200 rpm drive). I have been really happy with the upgrade to this point, especially the XBOX One integration and streaming feature

jeffhlewis · 08/26/2015, 02:44 PM

Been on 10 at home for about 2 weeks with no real issues...all my Hyper-V test stuff works like a charm without missing a beat...Adobe Creative Suite running fine as well. Haven't done a ton of hobby development recently though, so it's not like I'm exactly putting the machine through the paces.

I did have to fiddle with Nvidia drivers post-install though, but that just involved grabbing the latest WHQL drivers.

KnightWarrior · 08/26/2015, 06:44 PM

How do you get rid of the Win 10 Icon on my taskbar?

I'm fine with Windows 7 Home Premium

SuperDeadite · 08/26/2015, 08:24 PM

Quote from: KnightWarrior on 08/26/2015, 06:44 PMHow do you get rid of the Win 10 Icon on my taskbar?

I'm fine with Windows 7 Home Premium

You need to uninstall the Windows Update that adds it. Just google it.

KnightWarrior · 08/26/2015, 11:19 PM

Well if I did that, Windows might end up updating it with other updates for my PC

So forget what I said

NightWolve · 10/01/2015, 03:13 AM

Grrrrrrrr. So here's my latest Windows 10 fun: I can't get my 10" tablet's speakers to work properly, a 3.5mm headphone plug must be plugged in for them to activate, so when you pull your headphone cable out, the native speakers turn off; it essentially has reversed normal behavior in controlling the combo headphone/mic jack... Cannot fix this with neither old nor new drivers and I didn't have the problem before I did another clean install of Win 10 again... :/

esteban · 10/01/2015, 07:42 AM

Quote from: NightWolve on 10/01/2015, 03:13 AMGrrrrrrrr. So here's my latest Windows 10 fun: I can't get my 10" tablet's speakers to work properly, a 3.5mm headphone plug must be plugged in for them to activate, so when you pull your headphone cable out, the native speakers turn off; it essentially has reversed normal behavior in controlling the combo headphone/mic jack... Cannot fix this with neither old nor new drivers and I didn't have the problem before I did another clean install of Win 10 again... :/

Damn.

BigusSchmuck · 10/01/2015, 12:48 PM

Quote from: NightWolve on 10/01/2015, 03:13 AMGrrrrrrrr. So here's my latest Windows 10 fun: I can't get my 10" tablet's speakers to work properly, a 3.5mm headphone plug must be plugged in for them to activate, so when you pull your headphone cable out, the native speakers turn off; it essentially has reversed normal behavior in controlling the combo headphone/mic jack... Cannot fix this with neither old nor new drivers and I didn't have the problem before I did another clean install of Win 10 again... :/

Had a similar issue with my work pc and the headphone jack. It would max out the speakers if I unplugged them and had to turn it down. Also, usb connections would drop off unless I turned off the stupid power settings in the usb hub in device management.. Overall, I still like it better than 8.1 due to the rstat tools and native hyper v capability.

Dicer · 10/01/2015, 12:58 PM

My screensaver stopped working at random, seems to be a thing and no fix in sight as of yet, what a weird thing to stop working...

Otherwise it's Windows, awe fast upon install and then it slowly slogs, and I keep a lean system, pretty free of too many unneeded programs always keep registry clean and whatnot, just Windows being Windows...

geise · 10/01/2015, 01:21 PM

I love it. Everything I do works well with it. I was worried there would be some things that wouldn't work quite right since I have a lot of programs to do my work. Even my virtualization stuff in VMWare is working. Edge is a crappy browser though. No one will use it anyways so it's not really worth mentioning.

BlueBMW · 10/01/2015, 01:37 PM

I guess I've been lucky so far and havent had any issues really. One program broke on me upgrading from 7 to 10 and that was sony vegas. I havent tried uninstalling and reinstalling it yet but that may fix it.

Only thing I kind of miss is the aero look from vista/7. I like the rounded transparent window corners etc. Windows 10 is kind of industrial looking. Reminds me of Windows 2k or NT. I also dont care much for the way the all apps list organizes / looks. Icons are too big and spaced out. I like the more concise list style of windows 7.

CrackTiger · 10/01/2015, 01:54 PM

I had problems with my PC chugging whenever I'd switch between open programs, but I just updated my video card drivers and it's been fine since.

ClodBusted · 12/10/2015, 02:55 PM

Quote from: guest on 08/03/2015, 05:09 PMYES, Dell confirmed that they tested the Win10 upgrade for my Vostro 3360 and thus officially support it.

I made a backup of my harddrive and then the Upgrade last weekend from Win7 Pro 64 bit to Win10 Pro 64 bit.

Everything went allright. The upgrade downloaded and installed the majority of important drivers from Dell automatically. Windows 10 works fine now.

The only thing missing during the upgrade was the newest chipset driver, which prevented further Windows updates from being installed. So I went to the Dell support website using Microsoft Edge browser, ran an automatic driver check (using my Dell service tag) and was prompted to install the chipset drivers.
Windows updates are now working fine, too.

I like Windows 10, since it co-operates well with my Lumia 620 smartphone, e.g. calendar sync and other things.
One fear I had about Win 10 was that it could make my laptop slow down. But fortunately, it runs the same or even better than Win 7.

wilykat · 12/10/2015, 09:12 PM

My desktop has 10 installed and on a high performance SSD connected to SATA 6G. When it does regular shut down and power up, it only takes a few seconds. The BIOS screen takes longer than Windows takes to boot.

BlueBMW · 12/14/2015, 01:35 PM

One add on you guys might consider is a program called Classic Shell. It replaces the start menu with a more windows 7 like menu. Its all windows 10 needed for me to like it.

ClodBusted · 12/14/2015, 02:38 PM

Thanks for mentioning.

To be honest, to me personally the Win10 start menu is fine as it is. But then, I'm already accustomed to tiles since I got my Lumia in 2012.

NightWolve · 12/31/2015, 06:53 PM

Update on my Win10 experience: I've had trouble with the upgrades for my tablets, but the new 1511 ISO/release restored VLC media player to full speed and no more buggy choking on MP4 movies (just as it worked when the device was running 8.1) on my Microcenter WinBook 7.1", so hooray, it works like before... Because these 7" models are 16GB, it's impossible to upgrade with such little space so you need to wipe the drive (preferably), create a bootable USB memory stick and do a clean install.

I also ran into the reverse operation bug of the headphone jack where the internal speakers only work when a 3.5mm plug from a pair of headphones is plugged in, but I solved that by uninstalling every audio related driver in Device Manager and letting it reinstall the drivers again... This method did not work with my bigger 10.1" 32GB tablet on the older Win10 build, so I'll have to try it again after doing a clean install with the new 1511 update/release.

Conclusion: If you're already using Windows 10 and it's asking to update to with this 1511 labeled release, do it.

* A Windows 7 add-on does sound good. Am getting used to the current style, but could try that some time.

BigusSchmuck · 12/31/2015, 07:35 PM

Quote from: NightWolve on 12/31/2015, 06:53 PMUpdate on my Win10 experience: I've had trouble with the upgrades for my tablets, but the new 1511 ISO/release restored VLC media player to full speed and no more buggy choking on MP4 movies (just as it worked when the device was running 8.1) on my Microcenter WinBook 7.1", so hooray, it works like before... Because these 7" models are 16GB, it's impossible to upgrade with such little space so you need to wipe the drive (preferably), create a bootable USB memory stick and do a clean install.

I also ran into the reverse operation bug of the headphone jack where the internal speakers only work when a 3.5mm plug from a pair of headphones is plugged in, but I solved that by uninstalling every audio related driver in Device Manager and letting it reinstall the drivers again... This method did not work with my bigger 10.1" 32GB tablet on the older Win10 build, so I'll have to try it again after doing a clean install with the new 1511 update/release.

Conclusion: If you're already using Windows 10 and it's asking to update to with this 1511 labeled release, do it.

* A Windows 7 add-on does sound good. Am getting used to the current style, but could try that some time.

Yeah my buddy at work had a similar issue with his desktop and headphone jack issues. Installed the update and blamo fixed it. Fixed my wireless trackball too. Overall, I'm still with 7 over on my home pcs as I still haven't found a compelling reason to upgrade yet..

Sadler · 12/31/2015, 07:47 PM

I had VLC stuttering issues as well that seem to be fixed, super happy about that!

The two other issues I have that seem to be Win10 specific are WiFi dropping and my Surface waking itself up after being put to sleep. The WiFi dropping can be fixed by disabling, then re-enabling the wireless adapter. This is a pain, but fortunately I don't see it much. The sleep issue apparently can be solved by selecting all your input devices in device manager and disallowing them from waking up the machine. This works, but honestly I'd like for my keyboard and mouse to wake up my machine!

Overall, I remain pleased with the upgrade. My ancient Atom netbook and crappy i3 desktop both work way better than they did on Windows 7 and the touch controls on my Surface still work well. Some of the default apps I like quite a bit. I use the calendar, mail and weather apps probably daily. I haven't messed with Xbone streaming, but it is pretty awesome that a micro USB cable will allow you to use your Xbone pad on Windows 10.

NightWolve · 12/31/2015, 07:56 PM

Quote from: Sadler on 12/31/2015, 07:47 PMThe WiFi dropping can be fixed by disabling, then re-enabling the wireless adapter. This is a pain, but fortunately I don't see it much.

Aha, so that's what's happening, it's OS level bugs causing dropouts! Yeah, I too randomly discovered disabling/reenabling the adapter got me reconnected... See, I thought I was randomly being punished by Windows 10 for my...ahem...BitTorrent usage as that's the only time this happens, when a gigabyte+ download gets going... ;)

EvilEvoIX · 12/31/2015, 08:29 PM

Finally upgraded from 8. It's certainly better than 8 but not as good as 7, I was a fan of 95, XP (Best Ever), and 7. Ten can grow on me I think.