Firewall it all you want!
Win10 will update via carrier pigeon if need be! And they are now implementing carrier ants. Aim a surveillance camera at your pc, when you see an ant with a microSD, thats your update!
Even when told not to, Windows 10 just can’t stop talking to Microsoft arstechnica. Also bypasses system-wide proxies.
A friend updated his cheap notebook from 8.1 to 10. Now the display is nowhere bright enough. I have set the max brightness through device manager but still not bright enough. The function keys no longer control brightness. I checked on the internet and there are others with the same problem. A fix sometimes is related to the display driver. His display driver is for a generic screen. I can’t find any display driver specific for his laptop.
Still got my WIN XP SP3
My audio driver got messed up on my HP probook after the Win10 update. It’s only half as loud as it used to be under Win7 Pro. It must have updated my audio driver on its own, using one that is not as good… I’m guessing.
Edge browser is not faster for me than Chrome, at all. In fact, I’m still seeing the entire OS is laggy, hesitates, and slow on my Probook. Marked difference from Win 7 to 10. I’m not hating it… as the more I use it, the more I learn how it works and how to use it functionally… but that does NOT mean I am pleased with it, or enjoy it one bit.
Aesthetically I can’t stand it. It’s as if they took Jonny Ive’s iOS 7 “flat” concept to the extreme and went overboard. I would have much preferred a more Win 7 appearance with some of the added function and features from Win 8.1 and what went into 10.
I’ll probably roll back to 7 Pro soon.
As was said, it feels that even after all the tweaking, blocking, etc. that MS still has more control over the OS than I do.
You might double check the system volume if you’re playing through the music app rather than media player. When you adjust the volume and it’s running full screen, you might forget that’s for the app only and there is a separate system volume mixer in the desktop mode. I made the same oversight on Win 8 and wondered why it was so quiet.
KuoH
Is ANY Microsoft software ready for prime time? Most seems to either be still-born or well past its’ prime, decayed, rotten, and bloated up to insane proportions…
I said it before. I'm sticking with Windows 7 after my disastrous experience with Windows 10. And this has nothing to do with the UI which sucks! Microsoft needs to get their act together, or I will go 100% with Mac's OS after they stop supporting Windows 7.
I took my first serious steps into Linux when I could not get on with Win 8. I tried all the major styles but found that Linux Mint was the best for me although I did like Zorin too. For my old, old computer Xubuntu proved best. I recently purchased a new laptop though with Win 8.1 and it took me literally a full day to set it up into a computer I was happy to use. A FULL DAY!! The Mint laptop and desktop took just over an hour total. Sadly Windows is so wide spread occasionally I find I do have to use it so I still have one desktop and and the one laptop running it. (I’m not rich I just like to buy second hand old stuff and revitalize them).
You can dual boot window and linux on the same computer.
Run any OS you want in Virtual Box ...
Win 8.1 , very nice .. No issues with it ..
Win 10 , added TinyWall ( sweet ) ... Door looks to be locked ..
Will add XP to VB as time permits ( still lots of software that needs 32bit XP )
Unfortunately XP does not support my hardware ( only in VB )
Run 3 flavors of Linux in VB ATM , SUSe looks to be a nice Linux flavor ATM ..
Ok so it seems that I was one of 14 people that had little or no issues with the upgrade. I did have a bit of a wait during the install that made me supper nervous, I thought it had hung on the upgrade for 20 minutes. It finally finished and boom it was slow as hell. Like so slow I was about to uninstall and give MS the big single finger salute. I took a few deep breaths and then rebooted, and created a back up of the registry first thing.
After the Fourth reboot. (force of habit to get a few registries backed up.) I started to notice a speed up and things working correctly. Before the reboots I did go through and set all the privacy settings in a half dozen tech articals I could get my hands on. I also made sure previous to upgrading I had the newest drivers installed and the win 10 drivers on usb stick ( thank you work for a 256GB usb 3.0 
good times.)
Now that I have been running win 10 for about a week, three things. One, get a different web browser, Chrome or firefox. Two Check and recheck all settings, Privacy, default applications ect, and display settings and drivers. Three kill what ever her name is (Coriena?), it is slowing your computer down and it is useless unless you have a tablet or need voice commands and MS to be looking over your shoulder as big brother. Next weeks project is getting the surface pro running 10.
I can say I was truly shocked. Now My system (just under a year old) is decent and previously to the upgrade from 8.1 boot to desktop (not including timing the password) it was taking around 26 seconds to boot. Now it is under 23 seconds. Yes I have a SSD (500 gb samsung), yes I have 16 gigs of ram, yes I am over clocking the I7 processor (4.4ghz) on a water cooled closed loop system.
It did speed up my boot time, I checked it 6 times last night to make sure lack of sleep and high volumes of caffeine in the blood stream were not playing games with my head. None of my applications have to date crashed on me. 2, 3d design apps, Adobe Photoshop/lightroom, Office 2013, 3D printing software, autocad. All seem to work for me without issue. Games so far are good. L4D2, Robocraft, TF2, Minecraft, Wow (just to see if it would), Canon software for my digital camera, It all seems to just work.
Like I said I must be in the very small minority to not have any problems with the upgrade. (Yes I am knocking on wood right now.) I am still learning about it and like for the most part everything. Is it perfect? Nope. Is it better than 8.1? Yes very, in almost every way.
I would seriously urge anybody who does not rely on their PC for gaming to at least try a flavour of linux… Although I will acknowledge that it’s not for everyone, and in the past I’ve given up with certain hardware, but on the whole I have great success.
I see linux a bit like a modded light - the possibilities and choices are endless, which is where it gets confusing. The growing popularity of Ubuntu, and it’s improvements in GUI wizards etc has made linux so much more accessible over the past 10 years or so.
In case some windows users were not aware, you can try pretty much any flavour of linux WITHOUT INSTALLING IT! Just download the ISO, burn it to disk or install to a bootable flash drive, and restart your PC… If you really don’t get on with it, it’s either cost you nothing, or the price of a blank DVD.
To give non-linux users an idea of what your desktop might look like, here is my current desktop with a few normal windows open. I should also add that with a standard installation of most linux flavours, you won’t have to install much else - as a full office suite, media players, PDF readers, browser and torrent software come as standard, although software is easily removed and installed through the built in software centre.
And I am not a Windows hater… I have to go back to it for some applications, I just find that linux does things faster, cleaner and with far less fuss!
The upgrade went fine on my G74 but boot time was actually longer than with 7, did a clean install that changed nothing to the boot time (yep i have all options for fast boot time), not a big deal, went fine for a few days, yesterday had my first BSOD in like 5 years…had 2 different in fact…
I upgraded and I like it. It did keep throwing a blue screen until I swapped wifi dongle, there is an issue with drivers I think. With Windows 8 I could never start programmes, it was a nightmare, as I could not remember the name, I’d have to search the programmes folder and double click the exe. Madness. Otherwise Win 8 was mostly nice. Win 10 seems good.
Regarding browser, just install Firefox. And Thunderbird too. Much better than Microsoft.
I do wonder how a company could have released something as unusable as Windows 8, I mean, what were they thinking. A fundamentally decent OS with serious useability issues.
For comparison, I have a regular Thinkpad laptop that’s a couple of years old with a Samsung 840 Pro SSD, and Ubuntu Linux boots from POST to the login screen in 8 seconds flat. So it looks like Windows still has some optimizing to do on its boot process. Of course Linux and Windows are two entirely different beasts, but I bet you could easily see 5 second boots with Linux on that sweet rig of yours, and even less if you wanted to spend a bit of time tweaking the boot process and the kernel.
Yeah, I have to agree that Linux machines do generally boot much faster than Windows. However, not all of the boot process belongs to the OS. I’ve seen some machines that take several seconds to hand over control of the boot process to the OS. Also, if you don’t have quick-boot selected in the BIOS, it takes even longer, as it does various boot-time checks of the hardware.
Edit: Oh yeah, for kicks and giggles - I had a 2007 HP Compaq Laptop with 2.9 GHz AMD Dual-core processor that originally came with Vista installed. I can’t remember the exact numbers, but I generally recall it took less than 30 seconds for Ubuntu to reach a usable desktop - including the time it took me to log in. The BIOS took a few seconds to hand over to the OS on that machine. Vista literally took minutes to get to a usable desktop. Windows Seven got its chance on that hardware too, and was much better than Vista in every way. But, yeah, Ubuntu rocked it!
I have a modest PC with 500GB SSD and it booted in seconds under Win 8, and now under Win 10, both pro versions. There must be something wrong somewhere if it is slow. Oh and my work PC boots fast too.