Windows 10

sedrosken

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Spybot Anti-Beacon kills the Telemetry crap.
GWX Control Panel does a good job killing the upgrade offers.

+1 for Anti-Beacon, it's very comprehensive and it can refresh your immunizations on every bootup if you want it to. Between Anti-Beacon and the fact that I just don't have anything to hide (if they want to look at my computer, they deserve what they get) Windows 10 is actually tolerable for me now.

Uncovered some settings that made the virtual desktops less of a toy and more something I'd actually use. Had to find a newer version of T-Clock for real Windows 10, the version I sang the praises of in the useful tools thread is no longer maintained and only works up to the 10 previews. If you guys want I can post a link in the useful tools thread, but I'm sure if it was something you wanted you'd have likely found it by now.

As for GWX control panel, I also have Never10 on a 7 VM I have for running a very specific game that means enough to me to have its own VM.
 

sedrosken

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So the update process has finally made me seriously mad -- it, without any warning, just closed everything and restarted. I had stuff open that I can't get back now because those idiots decided to take that sort of control away from me.

So I went into group policy editor and found the policy that disables automatic updates. I let it automatically download them since I'm going to be doing it eventually anyway, but it will NOT install them without me specifically making it do so. Works very well, but I'm updating to the Anniversary update later today and I have an ominous feeling that MS may have corrected that "oversight".
 

ddrueding

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Some critical security updates will still auto-install, regardless of what settings you use. The best practice is to not keep deferring updates; the computer will not auto-update/restart without you declining at least once.
 

sedrosken

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I generally don't defer them for that long, just long enough that I can finish/save what I'm doing and restart gracefully.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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I'm doing the underhanded "Assistive Technologies" upgrade loophole just now. I installed Windows 8.1 on a machine and I'm going to try moving it to 10. It's painfully slow compared to just installing off a flash drive but if it works, I think I'm OK with that.

Also, if you're getting the Windows 10 Anniversary upgrade, be aware that it makes a whole new Windows.Old folder with 10GB+ of crap in it.
 

mubs

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I'm doing the underhanded "Assistive Technologies" upgrade loophole just now. I installed Windows 8.1 on a machine and I'm going to try moving it to 10. It's painfully slow compared to just installing off a flash drive but if it works, I think I'm OK with that.
What's that? Have I missed something here?

Also, if you're getting the Windows 10 Anniversary upgrade, be aware that it makes a whole new Windows.Old folder with 10GB+ of crap in it.
I did the upgrade, but don't have a Windows.old in the root directory or inside the Windows folder.
 

sedrosken

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Also, if you're getting the Windows 10 Anniversary upgrade, be aware that it makes a whole new Windows.Old folder with 10GB+ of crap in it.

Just did this -- started the upgrade then cancelled because it was taking too long just to prepare (figuring I'd just do it later). Some time later (enough that I had almost forgotten about it) it's like "Hey, we're about to shove this OS upgrade you decided not to install onto your machine, restart within 30 minutes or we'll do it for you" dialog.

Aside from that the process was pretty quick and painless. It installed all the MS pack-ins again and made them the default yet again, and tried to get me to change my telemetry settings to allow them to get my data. By the way, it seems the wording is more clear on what it actually does now -- it let me know that setting one of my settings to 'off' was going to make it only send basic data instead, how nice -- anti-beacon to the rescue I guess... but if I were to gripe about that it'd be expecting too much from MS. My Group Policy settings and even 99% of my user settings were still very much intact, and all of my applications (even the ones a true Windows upgrade would call 'incompatible') are still installed and functional. They rearranged some stuff, made the UAC dialogs look like a five year old drew them, and made metro apps even more confusing to navigate IMO. Everything else I couldn't possibly care less about, but at least I'm not stuck on a soon-to-be-abandoned platform anymore (said platform being build 10586).

Seems like they finally learned a thing or two about making OS upgrades less annoying. I know upgrading from 7 to 10 wasn't even half this convenient, it basically gave me a fresh user account with all the default settings then.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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I did the upgrade, but don't have a Windows.old in the root directory or inside the Windows folder.

Do you have a small SSD? My classroom systems upgraded over the weekend and they seem to. They were upgraded and then fresh installed, so they shouldn't have had a Windows.old otherwise.

But yeah, if you search for it, you can find a place to get Windows 10 via an upgrade loophole regarding Assistive Technologies. The language surrounding the upgrade is vague and includes a provision for future rather than immediate needs. There doesn't seem to be a way to make an ISO. You have to go through an immediate on-line upgrade to get the copy to activate, but it does work.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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The Assistive Upgrade goes straight to the Anniversary version, too. Oh, and it didn't uninstall Spybot 2.4, like previous major Windows 10 updates have.
 

sechs

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I've been having this weird problem where if I have my desktop set to High Performance, it bounces out of hibernation, i.e., it hibernates and immediately restarts. If I set the power setting to Balanced, it works as expected.

Any idea what's going on?
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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I ran in to something like that on my Thinkpad. I just disabled Hibernation. I've never seen a Windows machine where it's not buggy in some way.
 

mubs

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Do you have a small SSD? My classroom systems upgraded over the weekend and they seem to. They were upgraded and then fresh installed, so they shouldn't have had a Windows.old otherwise.

Mine is a clean install using a W7 Pro key; this is the one that does not have the Windows.old folder.

SSD is a Samsung 840 Series 240GB, partitioned as follows:
- 72 GB for my previous W7 Ultimate installation now upgraded to W10
- 96 GB for the main, above-mentioned clean-installed W10
- 65 GB for over provisioning for the SSD

Since I'm booted into the clean-installed W10, I can't check if the W7-->W10-->Anniversary-Update version has the Windows.old folder or not. When I reboot, I'll check and post back here.
 

mubs

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Both my W10 installations have the Anniversary update.

The W10 that was initially clean-installed does not now have the Windows.old folder.

The installation that was upgraded from W7 Ultimate has, and this folder is taking 24.5 GB on disk. I confess I don't know if this popped up right after upgrading or popped up after the Anniversary update.
 

Stereodude

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I haven't seen the Anniversary Update on any of the Windows 10 machines I have.

Hah! My work computer running Windows 10 Pro somehow hasn't even checked for updates since 12/2/2015.
 

mubs

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Is it safe to delete the Windows.old folder? I presume it's there to revert back to your previous OS. But if they don't let you do that after 30 days, they should delete that folder after that period, no?

IMP: What is the correct version / build after the anniversary update? My clean install W10, with the problem of sfc check failing and the only remedy being a re-install, is showing:

2016-08-12: Version: 1511, Build: 10586.494 - pre anniversary update

2016-08-13: Version: 1511, Build: 10586.545 - post anniversary update

I read somewhere that post the update, the build should be 1607??

Please?
 

Stereodude

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So my work computer, a Yoga 3 Pro, installed a bunch of Windows 10 updates yesterday, including the anniversary update (I think). Now it won't shut down. :cursin:
 

mubs

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I'm in trouble.

Firstly, I thought the Anniversary Update comes with the regular updates. In my case it didn't. I read somewhere how to get it; Start Menu --> Settings --> Update & Security --> Learn More.

This takes me to a MS web page where it says click here to get the AU. I click, and it downloads a 5.5 MB file to my HDD. Then I double click that, and the trouble begins.

On my 20 mbps speed connection, it takes 26 minutes to download ( ~ 3.9 GB ?); then says verifying downloaded file; when this hits 92% verification, it will again say downloading file, and start from 0%. When download is complete, it again says verifying file, then says:

Windows 10 installation file is corrupted, please try again.
You can contact Microsoft support for help with this error. Here is the error code 0x8007000d

This double download happened twice on my main install.

Then I booted into my ex-W7 updated to W10 install, and the same thing happened there. WTF is going on? Is the stuff on MS' website corrupted?

Since I have to put the AU on multiple systems, does anyone know where I can download it once to apply to all the systems?

The other possibility is that both of my W10 installations are themselves corrupt. I know my clean install is, since the sfc check won't pass. This seems to be a known problem with only one solution; re-install. I don't know if the same problem exists on my W7 upgraded to W10 install. Haven't run sfc on it.
 

sechs

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I ran in to something like that on my Thinkpad. I just disabled Hibernation. I've never seen a Windows machine where it's not buggy in some way.
This is the first time that I've had any real problems with it.

I want to have hibernation on for power outages. Generally, hibernation is more reliable than shutdown, as shutdown can hang.
 

mubs

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The AU seems to be hit or miss. I finally got my two production systems installed with the AU; just kept trying and for no reason, it'll work. I also got one W10 VM updated on the first try. The other W10 VM just won;t; I've tried about 6-8 times over the last week. Same issue I described earlier.
 

sechs

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What do you need to do the assistive technologies update?

I have a friend who missed the boat by asking someone else about upgrading a year ago....
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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Can the assistants be disabled afterwards or does that annihilate the Win 10 later?

There's no real difference. It's just Windows 10. I've done it a couple times now and other than not being installable from the ISO, it's completely normal. The license terms even say something about planning to use Assistive Technologies in the future, so it's not like you need them NOW.
 

sechs

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For the record, I updated my friend's computer with no extra effort. I just downloaded the special installer and let it go. Did not have to set up any assistive technologies first.

Except for the period for downgrading being ten days instead of the thirty for the open upgrade, it doesn't appear to be any different.
 

Stereodude

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So, I had another instance of Windows 10 just rebooting my computer randomly for an update. This time on my laptop. It hadn't been rebooted in probably over a week. I had been using sleep. I had a browser open and was using the computer. I stepped away for a minute or two to use the restroom and when I came back I found the computer in the process of shutting down while installing and update and then it rebooted. No prompts or warnings were given.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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If you go in to Settings, you can give Windows a 12 hour window in which it will not reboot or install updates. Unfortunately, you can't give it less than 12 hours when it CAN.
 

sechs

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You can actually set Windows to not automatically download and install updates. This does, however, mean that you have to do it yourself.

On my system, I get notifications in the action center when there are new updates, so it's not as if you have to manually go in and check.
 

Stereodude

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Microsoft got me again today. This time with the anniversary update. No warnings. No prompts. I walked away for a few minutes and when I came back it was installing.
 
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