I read a lot of "it's faster" - really ? how many seconds are we talking about ? faster boot ? ok, how many times per day do I boot ? am I really willing to put at stake everything I use for the sake of a few ...seconds ? I am not working some sweatshop assembly line where I have to crank out 200 pieces per hour or be taken out back with a bullet - I like a moment to contemplate things please.
 
just my 2 cents

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]

kevinwal
 
Many of us called for sticking to the plan and to move forward and fully implement the vision staked out in Windows 8, but new leadership wimped and basically changed the visuals back to W7, keeping only the fonts, color scheme and icons. All imho, of course.
 

Kevin I agree with most of what you say except for the above. Having been involved with the changes at MS through various generations including the Vista-Win8 period, there was definitely a marked difference here. While I was happy for MS pushing the envelope and developing a hybrid model scalable across devices form factors, management lost sight of a key factor which is what ultimately led to the failure. What matters most to users is the *software* running on Windows not Windows itself. There was a sense of arrogance with the Win 8 management to force all developers to switch to the metro model even through many of us pointed out why the model was flawed and unsuitable as a replacement for the Win32 based desktop API. 
 
I think its fortunate that the new management realized this mistake and changed course. You can't blindly stay the course and expect success when the vision is flawed :) I don't see it as caving but as understanding a mistake and taking proper steps to rectify it. 

Noel,

Sigh. Yeah, management certainly seemed to think they had a lot more than what was actually there. Many of us expected to see WinRT continue to evolve into a real competitor to iOS and Android from the disappointingly stripped down version that was shipped, and we certainly didn't expect that Metro would be positioned to partners as a viable replacement for the desktop model. It wasn't ready for that in the first case, and in a great many scenarios it wasn't appropriate for that in the second. And yeah, I certainly saw the uneasy relationship between metro and desktop and was very hopeful that a more elegant UI framework would evolve to help them coexist more comfortably.
 
But --
Surface showed just how game-changing the metro idea could really be, and I can only imagine the kinds of things you guys at Sonar could do if WinRT had a great threading and async capability coupled with a thouroughly modern and highly capable audio and MIDI foundation. I love my Surface and I love Metro on the Surface, and my great fear is that they'll throw the really great things out in a mad scramble to put the mistakes of the past behind them.

John T
 
This chimes with something I've found myself thinking, using Win 10, which is this: you can really tell that an engineering guy is back in charge. I think Nadella is fairly impressive in lots of ways, and this is the first substantial release on his watch, and I've not been disappointed. I feel they're back on the track MS are good at. Not necessarily innovators, but technically very solid.

Win 8 felt like a panicked reaction to the iPad. MS are better when they don't panic. And in Win10, they've come up with something that actually might make me ditch apple, when I next buy a tablet. It competes in a less obvious, but more effective way, I think.

John, I sincerely hope you're right. I think windows 10 is a great piece of work; the desktop/tablet mode work (including the new start screen!) should have been in Windows 8 from the start. If they had done those two things the buzz around Windows 8 would have been dramatically different.
 
I'm most hopeful about the new investments in the audio and MIDI capabilities and I hope to see those enhancements applied to WinRT and the universal app model as well. It's also my fervent wish to see ASIO become an unnecessary redundancy someday soon.

kitekrazy1
I've noticed a lot of FW Sapphires going on sale. I wonder if those will be future doorstops.  The latest Focusrite FW units will work with a Thunderbolt adapter.
I hope you take this up with Focusrite support.  My list of bo not buy hardware vendors gets longer. If I could do it all over again it would be nothing but RME and possibly Focusrite.
I have an old Intel machine that has onboard FW. That use to be a standard on Intlel boards.  I still have an AMD system with FW that's a VIA chipset and never had a problem with that.  

My MOTU 8pre (FW) is getting a little long in the tooth and I'm eyeing USB interfaces as we speak given that FW is a languishing technology, not to mention something of a pain. I'm still wondering why thunderbolt is so all that compared to USB but an willing to be convinced.

arachnaut

Doktor Avalanche
... All the start screen was anyway was an extra large start menu.

Actually I would beg to differ a little here.
 
The model for the Win 8 start screen was a touch pad with a fingerprint as the de facto scale factor. That made things much larger than a mouse pointer requires. But, moreover, the model was flat, not hierarchical. One had to scroll to see everything. With a mouse pointer and a hierarchical structure (folders, if you will), it was much easier to organize into compartments of functions that could all be seen in a small area.
 
The start screen has no folders and the compartments are small columnar areas with names at the top. That made scrolling over a large installation rather tedious, even if one placed all the most common stuff on the main screen area. So there is a tradeoff of extra mouse clicks into a hierarchy or extra hand swipes to move over a screen.
 
Naturally desktop mouse users would stay on the desktop where things were practically unchanged since Windows 7, so long as a start button replacement was provided.
 
In Windows 10, I still use the Classic Start Button enhancement as my 'Start' corner icon, but configure the Windows key to trigger the Win 10 Start menu. So I can use either rather easily.
 
My own feeling is that touch oriented things are best suited to small devices where portability is important and one doesn't want to carry a bunch of add-ons like a mouse or keypad.
 
If I had my way, this would all be voice activated like Star Trek computers so we could avoid all physical gestures.
 
One thing I find happening often on my laptop is that the touchpad sometimes triggers a mouse click event and things get activated/launched rather than selected/highlighted. The settings have to be tweaked and the fingers have to be trained. If I went to a different computer I might have to re-learn those instincts. I don't know if the touchscreen has similar issues. I do have a 10-point touchscreen, but I almost never use it. My hands stay in the keyboard/mouse area, not the screen area.
 
I suppose in the end it all boils down to one's habitual ways of working as seeming the best way to do things. And we all have a reluctance to change long-established habits.
 
Before the mouse came along, everything was keyboard-oriented and the new-fangled mouse seemed like an unnecessary add-on, but now I think of it as a keyboard extension.
 
 

 
I liked the flat screen, I hate digging through folders for stuff. To each his own.
 

stxx
I went to 10 and stayed for under and after an hour went back to 7 (which to my surprise both the upgrade to 10 AND the revert back worked perfectly!)    First, the Firewire controller and drivers would not load.   I have FW 1884 that uses legacy FW driver and that would be come up.   There are fixes out there that I looked up but I just didn;t want to go through that.   Also, some of my plugin's stopped working or wouldn't load correctly and since everything really was working perfectly on 7 and I started to panic and get an anxiety attack, I went back to 7 which I think is awesome anyway.   I had told myself awhile ago,  if it ain't broke, don't fix it so why I went to it 10 in the first place really is beyond me.    Someone also had posted some SONAR performance comparisons between 7 and 10 and there really was not any major compelling data to really support a move.   As for Windows support, I have NEVER in the now 20 some odd years of using Windows (since 3.1) ever call Microsoft for support so the fact that at some point, likely MANY years away, when Win 7 goes out of lifecycle, whatever is wrong will likely have a solution out there in some knowledge base or forum and I still won't ever need to call them.  
 
Latest song fro my latest CD release coming up:
http://allenlind.com/bugs..2015/01%20Track%201.mp3

 
 
I think you did the right thing going back to 7 given the driver and plugin issues you encountered. MS did a really good job making 10 a painless upgrade and even sunk quite a bit of effort making it easy to undo if problems cropped up. I'd hold off until all my critical vendors provide clear Windows 10 guidance. If I had that in hand though, I'd make the move for sure, particularly if I had a multi-processor machine.

I have updated old Atom based computer from Win7 to Win10 several days ago. Win7 with all updates and optimizations installed was "no go" even for mails. With Win10 this computer is back to life.
 
I know on better hardware the difference can be subtle, but my observations means they have done a good job optimizing everything.
 
Also note that we have 1 year only for free upgrade.

Doktor Avalanche

Skyline_UK
I upgraded my laptop from 7 to 10 yesterday. Text characters are now blurry. A search on the net shows this to be a major problem experienced by many. No solutions seem to be available and MSoft aren't fessing up. There's no way I'm going to risk upgrading my desktop DAW until this is fixed; it would be a disaster for the small detail in Sonar and audio apps etc.

Drivers again...
I am guessing you have an nvidia adapter, what's supplied with Windows 10 here is generally sub optimal. Simply visit nvidias web site and do a clean install of the latest driver for your display adapter. Then reboot. If issue still persists afterwards go to nvidia control panel and adjust the resolution to the max for each monitor.
 
Or do something similar with ATI or whatever...
Should fix it...

No, it's not the drivers. It's apparently a MSoft change to make text appear clearer on mobile devices and 4k monitors. Typical of the geeks who inhabit MSoft they believe that all laptop and desktop users  (millions of business and public sector organisations included...) should abandon them and  instead throw themselves into bean bags with whizzy tablets and iPhones in order to do their work. Morons.
 
Also,
(1) W10 failed to transfer the two standard (HP and Lexmark) network printers I have - it couldn't find ANYTHING on my home network, even when I placed my laptop right next to them!
(2) My mouse arrow also slid and floated anywhere it wished.
(3) I haven't found a SINGLE new feature, app or whatever in W10 that was of any use.
 
So, last night I rolled back to W7. Now, the best thing about W10 is how easy it is to roll back to W7 - ten minutes.
I now have my crisp fonts back as well as my printer corrections.
W7 is where I'm staying. I'm just glad I did this nightmare experiment on my laptop and not my desktop DAW.
 
 

@Skyline

If your text was blurry it was either wrong resolution, zoomed in the wrong level or drivers. I've seen this regularly occur after installing windows 10 (mainly crappy nvidia drivers bundled). Also perhaps it needed another reboot afterwards. Win fonts are NOT blurry on desktops. Not sure where you grab your conclusions from (references?).

(1) Did you download install HP and Lexmark printer drivers afterwards from their websites? The other approach would be to uninstall the current drivers and reboot and see what it picks up.

(2) Same as (1) for your mouse driver

(3) Oh well. Guess you can't please 'em all.

Cheers..

A quick goggle gives more info on these 'blurry' fonts:
http://www.tenforums.com/.../7423-blurry-text.html