Poll: Do You Plan to Upgrade to Windows 10?

[W2R]

F had the same problem with one of his computers that he had upgraded to W10, when it got the Anniversary Update I guess a week ago. He thought it was hung too, due to the black screen stuff, interrupted it and went back to no AU and so on and then finally tried letting it update again. It apparently finally did complete the update after hours and hours and hours, and I guess all is well now.

I was wrong! I asked him about it, after posting the above in a previous post on this thread. He is still wrestling with that computer trying to get the Anniversary Update installed and working. This is one that did not originally have Windows 10. He has had no trouble with his other computer that had W10 pre-installed.

Count me in as one that has some issues with the anniversary update.

Among them, I have a program that is set to automatically start when Windows starts, but that doesn't work anymore.

More noticeable is the update messed up my power (sleep, hibernate) settings. I turned hibernate which helped some, but as for sleeping, I'll just say the computer is a bit restless .

How crummy that your sleep settings are messed up, and that that program doesn't work any more. Guess it could be worse, but still, it's quite aggravating I am sure.

 

[Car-Guy]

Has anybody experienced any problems with the recently released Windows 10 anniversary update version 1607 ? I upgraded a desktop and a laptop from win 7 back in March and I was beginning to get used to it until last week.

My desktop was updating windows 10 only to have a black screen with rolling dots for hours. I unplugged the computer then started up again and after a few attempts it restored my previous version and I was good until it attempted the update again the next night with the same outcome. Finally after a few reboots the old version has been restored and thankfully no new attempts to update to the new version for the last few days. This morning my laptop was attempting the upgrade and the same thing is happening for the last two hours, a black screen with rolling dots. Unfortunately Microsoft does not give you the option to opt out of the upgrade at least not that I know of.

Apparently lots of problems have been reported with this upgrade

I got it "unexpectedly" last week. I didn't ask them for it and they didn't tell me about it until after the install process had started. (I guess that's MS don't ask, don't tell policy) Anyway, it disrupted me (my primary laptop) for about two hours. After about 3 or 4 restarts it "appeared" to be complete. I have found a few changes it made in my configuration that I don't like but can live with until I fix them back the way I like them. The biggest thing is the PC is now a "lot" slower on startups. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd think MS was in cahoots with the PC manufactures to slow down the older PC's to make you want a newer faster machine. Reminds me, I need to recheck my security settings, for all the good that will do!

 

[easysurfer]

How crummy that your sleep settings are messed up, and that that program doesn't work any more. Guess it could be worse, but still, it's quite aggravating I am sure.

Sure doesn't feel like progress to me to break something so fundamental as a power saving feature

 

[easysurfer]

A Good Thing For Free Software

Boo about the Windows 10 Anniversary update messing up the power management.

But the good thing is I found a couple of free programs that when paired together does a pretty good job of replacing the sleep setting I lost .

 

[RonBoyd]

... I found a couple of free programs...

Would you be willing to share the Links to these programs?

 

[easysurfer]

Would you be willing to share the Links to these programs?

Sure, I'd be happy to share:

AMPsoft - Freeware programs - Utilities & games

Both programs are by the same author.

Amp WinOFF for the sleep/shutdown utility. Screen Saver Control for the screen saver.

As you can see, been some time before the last updates. But Amp WinOFF is the only shutdown utility I've found that can do so base on inactivity (no mouse, keyboard movements). I've only used with that enabled and not the other options (such as CPU usage) in the program. For the screen saver, not sure if the monitor off is working with Win 10 as I can't see where to set the time and clicking on power off the monitor doesn't stay off, but the screen saver works. As for WinOFF's inactivity setting, the max time is 99 minutes. Works for me, but cutting things a bit close as every morning, my computer automatically runs Macrium Reflect as I'm still snoozing, which takes about 60 minutes. Also, when I run a Malewarebytes scan, that takes about 75 minutes. For longer than 99 minutes, say if I want to run something and go out shopping for groceries, WinOff allow me to an interval to shutoff/sleep after a specified elapsed time in hours/minutes.

Anyhow, if Win 10 breaks your power management settings like it did me, then these program may be for you.

I also use the Amp Calender program as my quick glance at calendar on my PC.

 

[RonBoyd]

Sure, I'd be happy to share:

TBH, I was merely curious. I have never used the Sleep/Hibernate function. My two desktop machine run several things (IoT-type stuff) that require an always-on state. I do, however, turn off the monitors when not in use. With the laptops, I simply close the lid or shut down completely. In any event, I am always curious of other ways to do things.

my computer automatically runs Macrium Reflect as I'm still snoozing, which takes about 60 minutes. Also, when I run a Malewarebytes scan, that takes about 75 minutes.

Macrium Reflect is interesting. I have used Acronis True Image for many years and I probably should look a competing products once in awhile.

I have the backups done nightly around 1:00 AM. I don't use any "real-time" backup activity --I only have an i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40 Ghz and 16 GB RAM -- as I quite often go past my resource limits.

I have the True Image backups set to incremental and do a full backup every 6th iteration. The "Full" backups do take about an hour. Malwarebytes takes about a half hour -- I have about 30 TB of storage. FWIW, I have Malwarebytes and Spybot - Search & Destroy monitoring for virus-type stuff at all times.

I also use the Amp Calender program as my quick glance at calendar on my PC.

I try not to schedule things. <chuckle> Unfortunately, doctors, for instance, don't agree with that so I do have to knuckle under some times. I use MS Outlook as my calendar and have it send my an e-mail prior to the time.

 

[easysurfer]

TBH, I was merely curious. I have never used the Sleep/Hibernate function. My two desktop machine run several things (IoT-type stuff) that require an always-on state. I do, however, turn off the monitors when not in use. With the laptops, I simply close the lid or shut down completely. In any event, I am always curious of other ways to do things.



Macrium Reflect is interesting. I have used Acronis True Image for many years and I probably should look a competing products once in awhile.

I have the backups done nightly around 1:00 AM. I don't use any "real-time" backup activity --I only have an i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40 Ghz and 16 GB RAM -- as I quite often go past my resource limits.

I have the True Image backups set to incremental and do a full backup every 6th iteration. The "Full" backups do take about an hour. Malwarebytes takes about a half hour -- I have about 30 TB of storage. FWIW, I have Malwarebytes and Spybot - Search & Destroy monitoring for virus-type stuff at all times.



I try not to schedule things. <chuckle> Unfortunately, doctors, for instance, don't agree with that so I do have to knuckle under some times. I use MS Outlook as my calendar and have it send my an e-mail prior to the time.

I'm always in the lookout for good useful software that makes things (fingers crossed) easier.

I really like Macrium Reflect that I even purchased instead of just using the free version. With the free version, I think one only can do full images and backups but not incremental.

 

[easysurfer]

TBH, I was merely curious. I have never used the Sleep/Hibernate function. My two desktop machine run several things (IoT-type stuff) that require an always-on state. I do, however, turn off the monitors when not in use. With the laptops, I simply close the lid or shut down completely. In any event, I am always curious of other ways to do things.



Macrium Reflect is interesting. I have used Acronis True Image for many years and I probably should look a competing products once in awhile.

I have the backups done nightly around 1:00 AM. I don't use any "real-time" backup activity --I only have an i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40 Ghz and 16 GB RAM -- as I quite often go past my resource limits.

I have the True Image backups set to incremental and do a full backup every 6th iteration. The "Full" backups do take about an hour. Malwarebytes takes about a half hour -- I have about 30 TB of storage. FWIW, I have Malwarebytes and Spybot - Search & Destroy monitoring for virus-type stuff at all times.



I try not to schedule things. <chuckle> Unfortunately, doctors, for instance, don't agree with that so I do have to knuckle under some times. I use MS Outlook as my calendar and have it send my an e-mail prior to the time.

Been using that WinOFF sleep/hibernation the past few days and found the program even smarter than I thought. There's a "power blocks" setting to not sleep when certain activities like if media is playing (CD, youtube) or system active like when I'm running malwarebytes scan and Macrium Reflect backups. This way, think I can just set the idle time for 20 mins like before sleeping like I regularly do .

 

[Sojourner]

I made the leap to Win 10 recently (just before the "free upgrade" deadline passed), and overall I've been pretty happy. However, there is one major pet peeve I have that I'd be curious if anyone else shares.

The issue is with desktop icons redrawing themselves multiple times per day. On my system, this happens more or less like clockwork every morning, shortly after I start browsing to various websites. I'll be reading something in the browser, and suddenly I'll see all my desktop icons (or most of them) turn white and then slowly, one by one, they go back to their original state. This happens every single day, and usually happens twice per day at least.

As a former software developer, it boggles my mind why this happens the way it does. It's hard to understand why a modern operating system developed and honed over decades cannot seamlessly keep the desktop icons up to date without these ugly, distracting rebuilds that turn nearly every icon white for several seconds. When I upgraded to Win 10, I figured that surely this was something that Microsoft would fix, since it happened pretty much the same way in Win 7. But maybe no one other than me really notices it or is bothered by it.

Anyone else notice this kind of thing in Win 10 (or 7)?

 

[W2R]

Wow, I have never seen that happen in either Win 7 or W10, Sojourner!

Now I am wondering if I am just unobservant, or what. I'll start looking for it. I usually maximize my browser, so the browser and the icons aren't both visible at the same time. So, maybe that has obscured my view of this phenomenon.

 

[The Rodent]

FWIW, a few months ago I bought a new PC that came with W10. Yesterday Windows performed an automatic update. Now at least 2 of my programs won't open. Error message........ .net framework 3.0 not found.
UGH

 

[RonBoyd]

How to stop failing Windows Updates from bothering you | PCWorld

There’s a bug going around that’s affecting some Windows 10 Anniversary Update users (including me), making it impossible to install update KB3194496 from September. Microsoft says it’s working on a fix that will roll out soon. Until then, I’m stuck as Windows will try and download and install the update every time I want to reboot or shut down my laptop.


Luckily, there’s an easy way to hide that Windows update until Microsoft gets its act together.

 

[Richard4444]

So far I'm glad I am still running Win 7. Updates until January 14, 2020. If I am able to keep this computer running, I'll likely buy a new one Xmas 2019, and install it just after Jan 1 so that I can make sure to have all end of of year stuff, especially on Quicken, hopefully intact. In three years from now, who knows what will be - meanwhile Win 7 meets all of my needs.

Rich

 

[explanade]

Cortana is turned back on after the Anniversary Update.

You have to go through some hoops to turn it off.

One way is to log out of the MS account and log in with a local account.

 

[harley]

I'm a sad panda tonight. My old faithful Dell Latitude (Win7) laptop is dying. It's been a workhorse, and I've ridden it hard and put it away wet, so to speak. So now I'm typing on my new Dell XPS 15 that I bought last summer to use up a bunch of Dell points that were going to expire. It's a fine machine, but it came with Win10 preinstalled. So I've been migrating files and software to it all day. But it's a major PITA. Lots of things don't run. I've been updating software and drivers off and on all day. I can't even get Netflix to stream. I did finally get youtube videos to run. The first thing I tried to do was create a recovery flash drive. That failed many times. I'm sure though that I'll be able to debug the problem since they gave me such a detailed error message - "Something happened". I haven't even gotten to un-spywaring it yet. I'm not exactly sure which problems are Dell vs. MS, but I'm putting the mortgage on MS for the most part.

Maybe I can just buy a new hard drive for the Latitude.

 

[Sunset]

I bought an SSD for my travelling laptop, and it was pretty easy to duplicate the entire disk to the new one (even though the new one was smaller). It came with software to do this.
The SSD is lightning quick....

 

[W2R]

I'm a sad panda tonight. My old faithful Dell Latitude (Win7) laptop is dying. It's been a workhorse, and I've ridden it hard and put it away wet, so to speak. So now I'm typing on my new Dell XPS 15 that I bought last summer to use up a bunch of Dell points that were going to expire. It's a fine machine, but it came with Win10 preinstalled. So I've been migrating files and software to it all day. But it's a major PITA. Lots of things don't run. I've been updating software and drivers off and on all day. I can't even get Netflix to stream. I did finally get youtube videos to run. The first thing I tried to do was create a recovery flash drive. That failed many times. I'm sure though that I'll be able to debug the problem since they gave me such a detailed error message - "Something happened". I haven't even gotten to un-spywaring it yet. I'm not exactly sure which problems are Dell vs. MS, but I'm putting the mortgage on MS for the most part.

Maybe I can just buy a new hard drive for the Latitude.

I am so sorry to read that your favorite computer is dying! What a miserable experience and believe me, I have BTDT and truly sympathize. I guess the silver lining to that cloud is that is happening slowly, so that you can backup and save whatever files you need to have.

I don't know if it's just me, or if the entire internet is hosed this week. But anyway, internet downloads have been difficult and slow for me too, ever since about last Thursday or so. It seems worse on some sites than others. The slowdown exists both on my W10 machine and is even worse on my iPad, which has been almost unusable for web surfing lately.

I'm hoping it will fix itself. I should probably re-boot my router instead of making excuses and waiting for the internet fairies to fix things for me, but haven't got around to doing that yet.

Sunset, how cool to have an SSD drive! Maybe some day...

 

[easysurfer]

My Windows 10 Anniversary Updated desktop has been randomly crashing on me (a couple of times during the past week). The symptoms all started after the anniversary update. After doing some investigating, the issues seems to point to an old graphics card driver that Win 10's update doesn't play nice with. Just updated the driver and hopefully, my desktop is back on track. At least til the next big update .

 

[tfudtuckerpucker]

Grrrr, DW's Win7 laptop installed the latest windows updates this week, and "THIS COPY OF WINDOWS IS NOT GENUINE" garbage shows up. Apparently I am required to locate the original windows license number on the battery cover, which is now barely legible, and with the aid of a large magnifying glass type it into the verification app. This is a 6 year old Acer, that came with windows pre-installed. I've never messed with the OS, except for the untold hours fending off Windows 10 and fighting to get the @&%! windows updates installed. And now Microsoft is accusing me of stealing it. Unbelieveable.

 

[explanade]

Win 10 is suppose to be free?

 

[harley]

Well, I think I've got most everything working. It only took about 10 hours and I don't know how many updates. I'm still having a couple of problems with old Win95 era programs I still like to use, but I can't really claim to be too surprised by that. Still not a fan of the Start button, very cluttered and unfriendly, but I'll eventually get it personalized. Next chore will be shutting down the MS spyware and removing the Dell bloatware, but I'll wait a couple of days for that. At least Netflix and Amazon streaming are working now. Especially since the new, super thin, high speed laptop doesn't have an optical reader, so no DVD unless I spring for an external. Oh well, at least it has a headphone jack.

 

[meierlde]

Well, I think I've got most everything working. It only took about 10 hours and I don't know how many updates. I'm still having a couple of problems with old Win95 era programs I still like to use, but I can't really claim to be too surprised by that. Still not a fan of the Start button, very cluttered and unfriendly, but I'll eventually get it personalized. Next chore will be shutting down the MS spyware and removing the Dell bloatware, but I'll wait a couple of days for that. At least Netflix and Amazon streaming are working now. Especially since the new, super thin, high speed laptop doesn't have an optical reader, so no DVD unless I spring for an external. Oh well, at least it has a headphone jack.

Note that for dos level games there is dosbox (also runs Win 3.1) and if you have a copy of Windows XP you can use virtualbox to run it.
Interestingly you can find emulators to let your machine look like virtually any machine that has existed, for example a mainframe, a vax, a dg nova,
or even a Cray x-mp.

 

[bUU]

And now Microsoft is accusing me of stealing it. Unbelieveable.

I'm not sure how else Microsoft could tell the difference between folks like us who are licensed and someone else who is stealing.

Win 10 is suppose to be free?

Not any longer.

 

[W2R]

Well, I think I've got most everything working.

Great! Whew, what an ordeal. Glad things are better now, though.

Still not a fan of the Start button, very cluttered and unfriendly, but I'll eventually get it personalized.

I didn't like it either, so I put a dozen shortcuts to my very most frequently used programs on my taskbar. Then I made folders of other shortcuts to frequently used programs on my desktop (like back in Windows 3.1 days, remember that? ). Then there are other shortcuts strewn all over my desktop. Messy but I know where everything is.

Also, I can get to any less frequently used programs through Windows Explorer which is one of the shortcuts on my taskbar. I don't use the Start button at all any more, except to right click on it to get to that right click menu.

I figure it's MY computer, and I'll do things my way (cue Frank Sinatra).