Windows 10

[snowhiker]

Sometimes it works practically instantly.

Sometimes it takes ages.

Sometimes it doesn't work at all.

Rule Clint applies.

I guess. My only issue that it always worked near instantly before so I thought any delay meant a problem. Good to know for future reference.

 

[Mercutio]

With regard to upgrading an existing install to a Pro install, you just do it by clicking "Change Product Key" in System Properties. That makes sense, right?

 

[Howell]

I upgraded my T510 over the weekend. Luckily I had my work laptop with me for research because toward the beginning and after a reboot the machine would only come up to a blinking cursor in the upper left corner. Take a guess what the install decided to do for me.

 

[Stereodude]

I upgraded my T510 over the weekend. Luckily I had my work laptop with me for research because toward the beginning and after a reboot the machine would only come up to a blinking cursor in the upper left corner. Take a guess what the install decided to do for me.

No idea, but you don't have a desktop or another computer at home without your work laptop? :erm:

 

[mubs]

Take a guess what the install decided to do for me.

Prithee do tell. This Win-10 saga (oops, fiasco) is endlessly fascinating.

 

[sedrosken]

I'm guessing it borked itself over? That's a possibility with any sort of Windows upgrade. There's a reason they tell you to make a backup before you do it.

Still, no excuse for it to do that. This isn't like the jump from XP to Vista. It's still fundamentally the same as Vista, after all.

 

[Tea]

There's nothing stopping you from running a local WSUS server or or a third party tool that emulates it. I linked to a tool that will mirror the complete content of Windows Update for any selected products in the Toolbox thread I post to occasionally. Tannin being a screwdriver shop owner, I figured he'd jump all over that.

Been doing that for a while, Merc, with WSUS, but not with any great success. Quite often I apply 184 updates (or however many it is now) only to have the machine insist on downloading and applying the whole bloody lot again. I don't know why it does this. On the whole, the time I'd spend troubleshooting is probably not justifiable. I've mucked about a bit, of course, but I have a rooted objection to spending more than (say) an hour of non-billable time on anything that isn't something I feel like doing for my own amusement anyway.

WTF? Bandwidth is cheap and I can always just leave a machine running and do something else. (Such as go home.) Sooner or later it will sort itself out. Why work harder than I have to?

 

[Chewy509]

Has anyone else had problems with recent Windows 7 updates borking the installation? I've had 4 installations (2 in VMs, and 2 laptops - both w/AMD APUs) boot directly to the System Recovery console and attempt to repair the system. The SRT log shows the cause to be bad patches and/or patch installations as being the cause and repair was not possible? In all cases, full re-installations were required.

Note: All installations are at least 12mths old...

If I were wearing a tin-foil hat, I might consider MS slowly dropping the reliability of Win7 to push people onto Win10...

 

[Stereodude]

I haven't had that happen on the 4 systems I have running Windows 7, though all are Intel based.

 

[CougTek]

I've not experience that, or heard it happened on the 400+ Windows 7 computers we have at the office. Although I haven't followed this much for the past two weeks since I was on vacation.

 

[Stereodude]

I bet it has something to do with the way the machines interact differently with the coriolis effect in the southern hemisphere. :bstd:

 

[Howell]

I upgraded my T510 over the weekend. Luckily I had my work laptop with me for research because toward the beginning and after a reboot the machine would only come up to a blinking cursor in the upper left corner. Take a guess what the install decided to do for me.

The internet had no general diagnosis for this symptom but it seemed to be a boot problem very early in the process as it would only make it through BIOS. Both a W10 installation stick and a W7 DVD confirmed that the partition was still intact but I'm not sure how the boot process steps through to completion. I guess UEFI is not strickly tied to BCD?

I'm not exactly sure the minimum it would have taken to fix but here's what I did:


First I asked the W7 disk and W10 stick to fix startup. I later read that running it multiple times might be needed but I didn't.


Second I ran through all of the BOOTREC fixes: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/927392. Even after backing up and rebuilding BCD I would still see the message: "Total identified Windows installations: 0"


Third on a wag I booted in recovery mode and changed the active partition:
DISKPART and press Enter.
LIST DISK and press Enter.
SELECT DISK N and press Enter (N represents the disk you want).
LIST PARTITION and press Enter.
SELECT PARTITION N and press Enter (N represents the partition you want).
ACTIVE and press Enter.
EXIT and press Enter.
Startup repair reboot


Upon reboot I now had a new problem error:
File: \boot\bcd
Status: 0xc000000f
Info: An error occurred while attempting to read the boot configuration data.




I ran a startup repair again which discovered 2 installations. My first partition is a 1G factory reset partition and is the partition that I previously found was set active. In the end, I'm not sure if I have returned the machine to is original configuration or just a configuration that works. My second attempt at Updating to W10 was successful and I am enjoying the increased speed from the same hardware. Hopefully my pain will help someone else more quickly resolve the same error.

 

[Howell]

SD, I have many machines at work I could bring home if needed and I don't have a current need for another workstation at home. The NAS is headless. Also unfortunately, the wife's laptop decided to fail a part on the same day.

sed, unfortunately a backup only gets you back to where you were. It doesn't give you any information about moving forward.

 

[mubs]

KB2952664 & KB3035583 in the latest updates seem to push the "Get Windows 10" out to Win 8.1 and Win 7 users. I unchecked them.

 

[snowhiker]

KB2952664 & KB3035583 in the latest updates seem to push the "Get Windows 10" out to Win 8.1 and Win 7 users. I unchecked them.

Yep. Those KB updates you mentioned are two of the KB updates removed by the script posted up thread. "Hide"ing the updates in Windows update does nothing, they just re-appear. I printed out a list of KBs to avoid and uncheck those on the list below before I update.

For reference:
kb update description
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
kb971033 update for windows activation technologies
kb2902907 description not available, update was pulled by microsoft
kb2922324 description not available, update was pulled by microsoft
kb2952664 update for upgrading windows 7
kb2976978 update for windows 8.1 and windows 8
kb2977759 update for windows 7 rtm
kb2990214 update that enables you to upgrade from windows 7 to a later version of windows
kb2999226 update that enables you to run windows 10 applications on earlier versions of windows
kb3012973 upgrade to windows 10
kb3014460 update for windows insider preview / upgrade to windows 10
kb3015249 update that adds telemetry points to consent.exe in Windows 8.1 and Windows 7
kb3021917 update for windows 7 sp1 for performance improvements
kb3022345 update for customer experience and diagnostic telemetry
kb3035583 update installs get windows 10 app in windows 8.1 and windows 7 sp1
kb3044374 update that enables you to upgrade from windows 8.1 to windows 10
kb3046480 update for migrating .net when upgrading to later version of windows
kb3050265 update for windows update client for windows 7
kb3050267 update for windows update client for windows 8.1
kb3065987 update for windows update client for windows 7 and windows server 2008 r2
kb3065988 update for windows update client for windows 8.1 and windows server 2012 r2
kb3068708 update for customer experience and diagnostic telemetry
kb3075249 update that adds telemetry points to consent.exe in windows 8.1 and windows 7
kb3075851 update for windows update client for windows 7 and windows server 2008 r2
kb3075853 update for windows update client for windows 8.1 and windows server 2012 r2
kb3080149 update for customer experience and diagnostic telemetry
kb3083324 update for windows update client for windows 7 and windows server 2008 r2
kb3083325 update for windows update client for windows 8.1 and windows server 2012 r2
kb3083710 update for windows update client for windows 7 and windows server 2008 r2
kb3083711 update for windows update client for windows 8.1 and windows server 2012 r2

 

[LunarMist]

I bet it has something to do with the way the machines interact differently with the coriolis effect in the southern hemisphere. :bstd:

Don't they have SSDs?

 

[Chewy509]

MS are extending the spread of the "Get Windows 10" application to domain connected systems now. However, they are also releasing GPOs to assist in removing the pop-up notification for those systems, if the sysadmins don't wish to have end users notified... (which is a good things, as it's the sysadmin's job not the end-users job to determine if or when to perform the upgrade). The good news is, those same GPOs can be used by home users who also run Pro editions of Win7/8, even when not connected to a domain...

Source and further reading: http://arstechnica.com/information-...opt-out-of-windows-78-to-windows-10-upgrades/

 

[Chewy509]

Has anyone else had problems with recent Windows 7 updates borking the installation?

Came across another one today...
Have found a patch was released just around end of Dec that would cause issues with the ntfs.sys driver (typically a BSOD on shutdown, the cause was reported being in ntfs.sys). MS have redacted the original patch, and re-released it.
The only thing in common from effected systems was AMD CPU/chipsets, so guessing it was something between and older version of the AMD APU chipset driver (all had v12.14 of the chipset drivers) and the updated NTFS driver... Just a bad combination.

 

[mubs]

I is screwed

Skylake users given 18 months to upgrade to Windows 10

Next generation processors, including Intel's "Kaby Lake", Qualcomm's 8996 (branded as Snapdragon 820), and AMD's "Bristol Ridge" APUs (which will use the company's Excavator architecture, not its brand new Zen arch) will only be supported on Windows 10. Going forward, the company says that using the latest generation processors will always require the latest generation operating system.

So no matter how much I rant, if my hardware dies (CPU / motherboard) I'm out of luck and have to go to Win 10. The possibility of finding a replacement CPU or motherboard is pretty slim as time goes on. So even if my hw dies within the Win 7 / 8 support window, I'm screwed. Worse, I guess I'll have to pay for Win 10 when changing hw.

Linux - you're in my sight.

It hasn't happened, but can; both the systems in the home can die sorta together. It'll make the task of buying / building new hw AND downloading Linux quite tough. So far only one has failed at a time, so was able to manage.

 

[Howell]

You can still get a pre-skylake system and be completely supported on 7 or 8.1 until 2020 or 2023 respectively. That's a long time. Use the time to learn linux if you wish.

Buy the maximum supported hardware and keep a spare on the shelf.

 

[Mercutio]

My thought: So?

You're not going to want to use today's Sky Lake hardware in 2021 any more than you'd want to run Windows XP on Sky Lake now. It's probably possible (I suspect it'll be technically possible to make 2021-era CPUs run Windows 10 as well, unless there's a huge change in driver model). You're not going to hold on to Sky Lake or Windows 7. What you move to in the future, whether it's Windows or Linux or Plan9, it's going to be based on what's being sold at that time, and it's not like you're going to deliberately handicap yourself by mating ancient OS with state of the art hardware.

 

[mubs]

My system is already 3 years old. I expect it to live for another 3 (CPU & MB). My fear is that it may fail in that interim period. It usually makes sense to buy the latest hw so that it can have a long life. By the time support for 7 & 8.1 ends, of course, all bets are off. I would have expected MS to support newer hw on 7 & 8.1 till support for those OSes ended. They have decided they won't. What will companies do that for compatibility reasons cannot move to Win 10 but have to buy new hw?

As Howell said, I will probably need to jump to Linux sooner than later.

A surprising number in the extended family have moved to Macs, fueled by their iPhone experience. I don't see myself there, though.

Am I being too paranoid about W10? If I am, be brutal and tell me so!

 

[Howell]

You are being too paranoid. However, you have that right.

The select models of skylake that will supported for the next 18 months would be coming of lease about the right time for you to buy one of them used. You would no longer have official support but that would be the newest hardware most likely to work with 7 and 8.1. And it would still be upgradable to 10 should MS change policies back in line with your expectations.

 

[Handruin]

If Intel and Windows 10 scares you, you might still have options with AMD if they're still around. I agree with Howell; I think you're being too paranoid but I also agree you have the right to. This could also be that extra push to get you to Linux. Move to Linux and run a Windows 7 VM on Skylake. You may even be able to do a physical to virtual clone if you're running Win 7 now and want to preserve it.

 

[sedrosken]

It seems they're taking the "any attention is good attention" route. I haven't heard a single good thing about them or Windows 10 for quite a while.

As for me, I'm wondering who they're going to screw over next. They're certainly generating an awful lot of interest in Linux. Of course, Linux has its faults as well, but at least they're open about it.

Geddit? :bglaugh: Open?

 

[LunarMist]

It seems they're taking the "any attention is good attention" route. I haven't heard a single good thing about them or Windows 10 for quite a while.

As for me, I'm wondering who they're going to screw over next. They're certainly generating an awful lot of interest in Linux. Of course, Linux has its faults as well, but at least they're open about it.

Geddit? :bglaugh: Open?

Linux will never be a popular consumer OS.

 

[ddrueding]

Microsoft is making it very clear that they only want to support a single OS. I can't really blame them. I was very surprised when Win10 didn't represent a transition to a subscription model.

Win10 is fine, and you can expect the experience in anything else to be bad and get worse.

 

[mubs]

Thanks guys. My paranoia stems from the facts that a) MS is now spying on us and b) They're not telling what the updates do.

I'm also concerned that despite the "I'm on a metered connection" setting, Win-10 will become a data hog. Even you guys in the US are now running into data caps, albeit of an extremely high cap compared to here.

The choices are clear: embrace Win-10 or dump MS and move to Linux and do what Handy said: run W7 in a VM. Still undecided. In any case I better start playing with Linux like Howell said. Dig your well before you're thirsty!

 

[LunarMist]

Thanks guys. My paranoia stems from the facts that a) MS is now spying on us and b) They're not telling what the updates do.

I'm also concerned that despite the "I'm on a metered connection" setting, Win-10 will become a data hog. Even you guys in the US are now running into data caps, albeit of an extremely high cap compared to here.

The choices are clear: embrace Win-10 or dump MS and move to Linux and do what Handy said: run W7 in a VM. Still undecided. In any case I better start playing with Linux like Howell said. Dig your well before you're thirsty!

Does 10 work without an internet connection?

 

[ddrueding]

Does 10 work without an internet connection?

Yup. The computer I built for my kid has never been on the internet. I put in the same Win10 key as I did for my home machine, copied drivers and software over via thumb drive, and it has been working well for about a month now. No intent to hook it up to the net for years, so it can be a long-term experiment.

 

[Howell]

I can't say this (http://www.groovypost.com/howto/manage-windows-10-data-usage/) is a comprehensive list but it should at least let you know that there are knobs available. It is clear that ms expects an always on connection but tries to make allowances.

In the end, I can't imagine all of you concerns couldn't be met by a 3rd party firewall.

 

[Chewy509]

Thanks guys. My paranoia stems from the facts that a) MS is now spying on us and b) They're not telling what the updates do.

Whilst many many people who are technology minded certainly understand your paranoia (and many also have the same feelings), I don't think the average person (who has already handed over everything to Facebook, Google, Apple, etc) really cares about either point. Therefore, as the majority don't care and happily pay for the privilege, Microsoft won't care either. In fact, they'll continue along the path they have already set...

Win10 is a preview of where MS wants to go - locking people into their ecosystem, getting them used to the MS way, then forgetting about interoperability, etc... (which is different from their old MO, the classic: embrace, extend, extinguish. Now it's: lock the bas*&%ds up, feed them crap, tell them that they enjoy it, and soon enough the prisoners will start to believe what the wardens say). Will it work for them? Short term, yes. The average Joe only wants to access Facebook and play games. Long term - I'm already seeing Enterprise installations become very wary of Microsoft's plans for the future... When the enterprise shifts, expect home users to follow...**

What is interesting and is something that I haven't been able to get decent info on, is how is MS handling the various privacy laws in the EU and in other parts of the world in regards to the collection/storage/analysis of data? Whilst using Win10 and agreeing to the EULA may get around the collection aspect (and there are aspects of the EULA that don't hold much hope of enforcement), how does the storage/analysis aspect match the legal requirements as set by nations in regards to citizen privacy requirements?

** Why do I mention this? Well, why do must people insist on having Word/Excel on their home desktops, when a wide range of other solutions will fit their needs? It's what the business uses. If the business moves their desktop infrastructure to Mac and/or GNU/Linux and select (for example) LibreOffice as the primary productivity suite, what do you think will happen at home? Those users will switch to what their enterprise is using...

Linux will never be a popular consumer OS.

To be honest, I only see GNU/Linux only getting close to what Apple have currently market share wise in the next five years, approx 8% of the desktop market... The main reasons: fragmentation, lack of support, and lack of interest from the enterprise to embrace GNU/Linux on the desktop.

(According to this: https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0 there are more people using WinXP than OS X).

 

[mubs]

Thanks Howell, that helps a lot. I'll do some research and decide if I want to jump on the W-10 bandwagon.

Can the regulars here help by telling me who's all using W-10 on their main/primary machine (as opposed to a test or "play-with" machine) ? Thanks.

 

[Handruin]

Thanks Howell, that helps a lot. I'll do some research and decide if I want to jump on the W-10 bandwagon.

Can the regulars here help by telling me who's all using W-10 on their main/primary machine (as opposed to a test or "play-with" machine) ? Thanks.

I'm using it on two primary desktop systems.

 

[sedrosken]

I was, once upon a time. It worked well enough. I didn't care so much about the privacy thing, after all, I do use Facebook, but the whole "download a whole new build of the OS instead of regular updates" thing got old the first time it happened.

 

[Striker]

I'm using Windows 10 on my two computers here as well.
I'm comfortable enough using Spybot Anti-Beacon to stop most of MS spying, not that I was all that concerned to begin with since I am a Google and Facebook user.

 

[Mercutio]

I have Windows 10 on my laptops and mobile Windows devices and also on about 130 desktops that I manage.

 

[Howell]

I have 10 on my home laptop and will move my media pc and the shop computers over when I get some time after checking application compatibility.

 

[ddrueding]

I'm running Win10 on all my personal machines*, and am just waiting on a program compatibility issue (cough, Barracuda VPN Client, cough) to roll it out at work.

*Except this one, Server2016TP4 for added features.

 

[mubs]

Thanks guys. So maybe W10 isn't all that bad; maybe ok if run with all the protection like Anti-beacon.

I also love Handy's idea of using Linux for mainstream use and W7 in a VM for Window's specific things. I do have a i5-3570k, 16 GB RAM and enough disk space, so this should be quite feasible. To get started on this, I'll try to install Linux in a dual-boot config (with my existing W7). That way I can ease into this instead of jumping in cold turkey.

I will wait on this since Linux bug imperils tens of millions of PCs, servers, and Android phones.

For almost three years, millions of servers and smaller devices running Linux have been vulnerable to attacks that allow an unprivileged app or user to gain nearly unfettered root access.

The flaw, which was introduced into the Linux kernel in version 3.8 released in early 2013, resides in the OS keyring.

I'll need to find an LTS release with the fix for this.