Windows 10...first impressions

When I got into work this week, my laptop had decided to throw a right wobbly over the weekend.  Unable to see VM samba shares, Windows update mechanism completely borked, really wonky behaviour.  Unable to get any work done at all.  Would it be too cynical of me to suggest that M$ are deliberately ruining W7/8 boxes to 'persuade' people to upgrade to 10?  Hell, that's what I'd do ;-)

Anyway, faced with a choice between defenestration and some other desperate measure, I burned a W10 Enterprise DVD and upgraded.

MAN, have they not streamlined that process!  4 hours to upgrade the OS?  Blimey.  Eventually the deed was done, my immortal soul pledged, evidence of the crime hidden.

You get a choice as to what to share with the cloud/M$ on first start, i.e. as little as possible (diagnostics stuff seems like a good idea, but pretty much nothing else).  I got really annoyed at the stupid Cortana thing in the task bar; something that looks like a search box and which says, "Search the computer and the web' (or something like that) should be a bloody search box.  So Cortana got disabled.  Nice.  Not tried the new Edge browser yet, AIUI it's a complete re-write not an IE re-skin.  I had to go back to using Firefox recently despite it's ludicrous resource hogging as Opera has really lost pace with current website development and just doesn't work properly with a lot of websites any more, which is a real shame but they just don't have the resources to keep pace.  I intend to see how Edge behaves wrt Firefox.

Other than that, it's same-old, really.  New skin.  I now know where Presonus got their idea for the Studio One v3 UI design.  Bonus: the bloody horrible Metro UI crap has gone.  Good riddance to bad rubbish; stop shoe-horning tablet/touch-screen UI's into full fat machines ffs.  They have tried shoving a reduced version of it into the start menu, which I find annoying.  'Life at a glance'?  Who comes up with this garbage?  Fortunately I have a very sophisticated built-in Marketing BS filter which runs in tandem with my British Ultra Cynicism (TM).  You can unpin stuff from there, but have not started doing that yet as I'm not currently sure if the icons will just be auto-replaced with even more annoying stuff.  Pictures of bloody cats, most likely.

I like the thinner, tighter windows-edge lines.  I like the fact that the command line has finally been given some attention and is now actually a proper window.  It still ain't no Unix shell, but it is better.

For some inexplicable reason, the VirtualBox-side network settings got borked during the upgrade process, so I had to reconfigure DHCP and such but that was only a couple minutes work.

One thing I don't like (perhaps this can be configured) is that hovering over icons in the systray area no longer pops up tooltip-like information as to the state of the utility (was that part of aero?)  e.g. if I hover over the Pulse VPN client icon, it no longer tells me if I'm connected or not, or as another example, hovering over the volume icon no longer tells me the current volume setting.

[Aside: Guthrie Govan is a bit good isn't he]

System Endpoint Protection has been replaced with Windows Defender.  Um, didn't Endpoint Protection previously replace Defender?  I think it's pretty much the same software under the hood tbh, there's a bit more 'corporate' stuff behind Endpoint Protection perhaps.

So...do I plan on upgrading any of my personal machines (my work laptop is actually my own machine, 'cos work are tight-asses who try to fob Dell garbage off on me)?  Maybe...I might upgrade the HP 360 Chrome Book Killer, and *maybe* my full-fat laptop, but my W7 Pro main DAW machine?  No.  Not broken, don't need to fix.

fireberd
If you haven't found it, RIGHT click on the start icon and it will give you a menu similar to Win 7. 

 
Hmm, well...kinda.  Just plain text, little or no hierarchy...seems really out of place in the rest of the UI.  I'll probably install Classic Shell tbh (as I've done on the W8 lappy at home).
 
So I tried Edge out a bit more...I don't really like the way that UI elements change and move about based on where your mouse is and what you may have clicked on.  Still not had a proper chance to see what its resource usage is like yet.  The 'default' (new tab) page's behaviour does make me grind my teeth to powder though, I have no idea which jerk thought that infinitely scrolling web pages were a good idea (does anybody?) and on that basis alone I will probably stick to Firefox.

Start10 is good - and keeps things just a little more "familiar" ;-)
And it's only $5.

I haven't played with Edge yet (can't really be bothered) but I haven't had any problems at all going from Win 8.1 to Win 10. I think it's a pretty painless upgrade.

WMP is still there for me. I just changed all the default file types for MP3 etc, from Groove music back to WMP.
 
NOTE: Windows keeps trying to change these back, as well as the default type for pdf files back to "Edge" - but I just keep changing them...

Perhaps WMP is going to be phased out..?

I hope not. If it does, we'll just have to find a 3rd party one - or I'm sure we'll be able to keep our old versions of WMP (and I'm sure there will be archives to download from the web if we ever need to do a fresh install of Windows...)

For a song collections I use Mediamonkey Gold. Its a really good player librarian.  It will take a little work to understand it but worth it. 

You know what? Yesterday, I humoured it, and left my default association for pdf files, set for Edge.
(I keep setting it for acrobat reader and Windows keeps puttingit back). I actually like Edge better for reading pdf files! Acrobat is getting too wacky - like trying to set up the icons you like, across the top - and Edge is nice and simple. I think I'll keep it this way ;-)
 
I might even try Edge as a browser. I actually figured out how to replace Bing as the default search engine. It *does* seem nice and simple and straightforward (like a browser is supposed to be...)

Control Panel?
 
You can just hit the windows button in the bottom left and then type the name of the control panel component you want to change.
 
e.g.
 
click 'doze button
type: 's o u n d s'
First hit is: 'Change system sounds\n Control Panel'
 
click 'doze button
type: 'p r o g r a m s a n d'
 
First hit is: 'Programs and Features\n Control Panel'
 
Given that M$ had already hit the absolute nadir of searching with Windows 7, they only had one direction to go in for W10.  It's a *kind* of strategy I suppose... ;-)

I was liking W10 until it did a big ol' update 2 days ago. Now I have Cortana when I didn't want it (unchecked that on the original install), Edge has become unstable; if I open a new tab it will flash on and off until I shut it down and do it again, and I can't stay logged in to Soundcloud. Minor things, but irritating. Waiting for more...

Oh wow, W10 update has just completely broken my machine, as I was writing the previous post.  No start menu, no second monitor, no right-click monitor options, CTRL-ALT-DEL fails to display sign-in or security options, no right-click icon options the list goes on...although apparently I can make forum posts still :-)
 
 
 

I'm glad to hear it got it's act together!!

 I still like to use Winamp version 2 before AwHell bloated it and ruined it.