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Usacomp2k3
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Re: How bad is Windows 10 Really?

Fri Feb 08, 2019 5:17 pm

synthtel2 wrote:
I don't dispute that remote access is great when you do have a use for it, I'm just a bit skeptical that TR readers are as likely as you say to have reasons to run a remote access server on their main desktop.

I have no remote access setup for the only pc in our house; my wife's computer. *shrug*.
My work laptop does and when I bring it home to get real work done, I plug it into power, turn it on, and then remote desktop into it using the "use all my monitors for the remote session" option so I can have 3 screens versus just the laptop display.
 
ronch
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Re: How bad is Windows 10 Really?

Sat Feb 16, 2019 9:18 pm

ludi wrote:
ronch wrote:
Several old games don't work ok as well, but it seems those issues somewhat existed with those games already with some earlier Windows hardware/software configurations, and Windows 10 just makes them resurface, and, sometimes, makes them worse. This applies to games like Amnesia (jumping mouse), Thief 3 (invisible mouse pointer.. too bad.. because this is a timeless favorite of mine), and missing DX files in System Shock 2.

Have you tried using Compatibility Mode?


Not yet, but thanks for the reminder. I don't always use the laptop that has Windows 10.
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Waco
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Re: How bad is Windows 10 Really?

Sat Feb 16, 2019 11:02 pm

This reminds me - the lack of remote desktop in Windows 10 Home is idiotic. The two Windows 10 tablets we have both block remote desktop, so I have to install third-party remote desktop apps to get the same functionality we've had for years in older Windows versions. :/
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CScottG
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Re: How bad is Windows 10 Really?

Sun Feb 17, 2019 12:19 am

I believe that "Home" can act as a client/master for a server/slave with "Pro" (etc.), just not the other way around.
 
Waco
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Re: How bad is Windows 10 Really?

Sun Feb 17, 2019 11:07 am

Yeah. You can remote from them, just not to them.
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Usacomp2k3
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Re: How bad is Windows 10 Really?

Sun Feb 17, 2019 9:50 pm

Home has never had it all the way back to xp
 
Waco
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Re: How bad is Windows 10 Really?

Mon Feb 18, 2019 11:04 am

Really? My memory must be going, or I never had a home edition till 10. :P
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Ifalna
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Re: How bad is Windows 10 Really?

Tue Feb 19, 2019 12:08 am

synthtel2 wrote:
Ifalna wrote:
Or, get proper internet. I hardly even notice when Win10 updates itself.

How fast is proper (for Windows) internet, in your opinion? 25 Mbit still isn't there in my experience, but I haven't spent much time lately on connections faster than that. A lot of people in the US still can't even get 25 Mbit, and according to this the US average is only 42 Mbit.

For any other purpose in my own use, 25 Mbit is somewhere between great and overkill.

25Mbits should be fast enough for the small cumulative updates that happen once per month to not be bothersome.

The big semi annual updates are felt even with a 100MBit connection like mine.
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synthtel2
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Re: How bad is Windows 10 Really?

Tue Feb 19, 2019 6:12 pm

Updates that complete faster aren't the real solution, updates that don't interrupt other stuff in the first place are the real solution. They're doing pretty well at the former now, but if the latter doesn't work even on 100 Mbit they've still got a problem. There are a lot of people out there who have good reason to go for the real solution and can't buy a connection that even approximates being fast enough.
 
just brew it!
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Re: How bad is Windows 10 Really?

Tue Feb 19, 2019 7:28 pm

synthtel2 wrote:
Updates that complete faster aren't the real solution, updates that don't interrupt other stuff in the first place are the real solution. They're doing pretty well at the former now, but if the latter doesn't work even on 100 Mbit they've still got a problem. There are a lot of people out there who have good reason to go for the real solution and can't buy a connection that even approximates being fast enough.

Bingo. Nag me all you want if there's a critical update, but let me have the final say regarding when updates actually happen. Don't trigger unexpected system reboots, don't arbitrarily delay system reboot/shutdown because you've decided updates MUST be installed NOW, and don't remove existing functionality as part of an update without a damn good reason.
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Ifalna
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Re: How bad is Windows 10 Really?

Wed Feb 20, 2019 9:12 am

just brew it! wrote:
synthtel2 wrote:
Updates that complete faster aren't the real solution, updates that don't interrupt other stuff in the first place are the real solution. They're doing pretty well at the former now, but if the latter doesn't work even on 100 Mbit they've still got a problem. There are a lot of people out there who have good reason to go for the real solution and can't buy a connection that even approximates being fast enough.

Bingo. Nag me all you want if there's a critical update, but let me have the final say regarding when updates actually happen. Don't trigger unexpected system reboots, don't arbitrarily delay system reboot/shutdown because you've decided updates MUST be installed NOW, and don't remove existing functionality as part of an update without a damn good reason.

I agree that forced reboots, forced updates (hey there, compatibility issues) no matter the client activity is pretty darn retarded.

That being said: as a user that shuts down his comp for every night anyway, I don't see any problem.
Barring f*** up patches ofc.
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Waco
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Re: How bad is Windows 10 Really?

Wed Feb 20, 2019 11:26 am

Forced reboots are the most annoying. Thankfully easy to avoid but seem to reenable themselves periodically.
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ludi
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Re: How bad is Windows 10 Really?

Wed Feb 20, 2019 1:28 pm

synthtel2 wrote:
but if the latter doesn't work even on 100 Mbit they've still got a problem. There are a lot of people out there who have good reason to go for the real solution and can't buy a connection that even approximates being fast enough.

Eh? I've got a half-dozen Windows 10 machines around the house, ranging from an Ivy Bridge laptop to a low-end Skylake desktop, and a 60mb cable connection. The only updates that can't normally download, install, reboot, and complete in 15 minutes or less on any of these are the really big equinox updates. What's all this about a 100mb connection not being enough?
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captaintrav
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Re: How bad is Windows 10 Really?

Wed Feb 20, 2019 1:56 pm

The cumulative updates are seeming to get bigger and bigger, this month's CU KB4486996 for 1709 was about 900 mb and takes some time to install. We even ran into a new issue where our AV (unfortunately mandated by security "experts") was causing an issue because it was taking too long to scan the huge .cab files. Now we have an exception. Not a Microsoft problem, but definitely the updates are getting bigger. The fact we still have facilities on 1.5MB copper connections makes deploying the updates ever harder too. Thankfully some sites are finally getting fiber, but at the cost of several hundred thousand dollars per site. Not everyone can get 100mbit connections easily even nowadays.
 
Waco
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Re: How bad is Windows 10 Really?

Wed Feb 20, 2019 2:04 pm

If you haven't enabled it, the local discovery for updates works *very* well. My HTPC typically pulls down the patches first (it's always on) and then the other machines on the local network grab them directly.

https://www.digitalcitizen.life/how-set ... k-internet

I set mine for local only, it works exceedingly well in practice.
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SuperSpy
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Re: How bad is Windows 10 Really?

Wed Feb 20, 2019 2:36 pm

Ifalna wrote:
I agree that forced reboots, forced updates (hey there, compatibility issues) no matter the client activity is pretty darn retarded.

That being said: as a user that shuts down his comp for every night anyway, I don't see any problem.
Barring f*** up patches ofc.

My completely ordinary evening routine when leaving work:
1) shut down laptop
2) place in briefcase
3) go home

Oops I just put a laptop with a 45w cpu running flat out in a sealed case.

Apparently MS couldn't think of such an odd and rare occurrence or how that might end up badly.
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Waco
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Re: How bad is Windows 10 Really?

Wed Feb 20, 2019 2:57 pm

Yep. The shutdown process on laptops is just *bad*. I routinely have to leave mine cracked and running while waiting for it to finally shut down. Thankfully it's an NVMe OS drive, but it's obnoxious as hell when I'm about to walk out the damn door. I can't imagine how much worse it'd be on a spinner.
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DancinJack
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Re: How bad is Windows 10 Really?

Wed Feb 20, 2019 3:05 pm

Waco wrote:
Yep. The shutdown process on laptops is just *bad*. I routinely have to leave mine cracked and running while waiting for it to finally shut down. Thankfully it's an NVMe OS drive, but it's obnoxious as hell when I'm about to walk out the damn door. I can't imagine how much worse it'd be on a spinner.

Mac laptops waive hello, smirking.
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ludi
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Re: How bad is Windows 10 Really?

Wed Feb 20, 2019 3:14 pm

captaintrav wrote:
The fact we still have facilities on 1.5MB copper connections makes deploying the updates ever harder too. Thankfully some sites are finally getting fiber, but at the cost of several hundred thousand dollars per site. Not everyone can get 100mbit connections easily even nowadays.

I'm not sure how you're maintaining any sort of facility at that speed. We had 1.5mb DSL up until two years ago. What finally forced the upgrade to cable (25mb initially, then they raised it later when the tiers were restructured) wasn't necessarily the Windows updates, it was anything trying to update, including Android and iOS mobile devices.
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The Egg
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Re: How bad is Windows 10 Really?

Wed Feb 20, 2019 3:15 pm

Would hibernating rather than shutting down the laptops prevent W10 from forcing updates?
 
sweatshopking
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Re: How bad is Windows 10 Really?

Wed Feb 20, 2019 3:17 pm

The Egg wrote:
Would hibernating rather than shutting down the laptops prevent W10 from forcing updates?

No.
 
captaintrav
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Re: How bad is Windows 10 Really?

Wed Feb 20, 2019 3:31 pm

ludi wrote:
captaintrav wrote:
The fact we still have facilities on 1.5MB copper connections makes deploying the updates ever harder too. Thankfully some sites are finally getting fiber, but at the cost of several hundred thousand dollars per site. Not everyone can get 100mbit connections easily even nowadays.

I'm not sure how you're maintaining any sort of facility at that speed. We had 1.5mb DSL up until two years ago. What finally forced the upgrade to cable (25mb initially, then they raised it later when the tiers were restructured) wasn't necessarily the Windows updates, it was anything trying to update, including Android and iOS mobile devices.


It's really hard to keep machines updated, even for them to function with basic tasks, but these places are really in the middle of nowhere. Satellite internet still sucks, the latency sucks and the uptime sucks. Can't divulge details but in some cases the reliability of a copper connection trumps everything else even if it's really slow. Some of the users are just running remote desktop sessions to elsewhere now and that helps, but it's still unbelievably painful.
 
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Re: How bad is Windows 10 Really?

Wed Feb 20, 2019 3:55 pm

DancinJack wrote:
Waco wrote:
Yep. The shutdown process on laptops is just *bad*. I routinely have to leave mine cracked and running while waiting for it to finally shut down. Thankfully it's an NVMe OS drive, but it's obnoxious as hell when I'm about to walk out the damn door. I can't imagine how much worse it'd be on a spinner.

Mac laptops waive hello, smirking.

The silly part of all of this is that on average, updates on macOS take quite a bit longer to install. But they are consistent. On my '17 MBP, they take between 20 and 25 minutes, and when it's done, all my running apps are back as if nothing happened. I can safely start the update, and go to lunch, and be 98% certain when I come back my laptop will be ready to use again.

That's the thing that MS doesn't seem to understand. I would gladly install updates if a) I was fairly confident it wouldn't break something or install something I don't want (sup Candy Crush) and b) Didn't indiscriminately kill everything that was running and force me to restart everything manually.

I have a VM at work that will consistently reboot for updates without warning, spend 45 minutes doing something, reboot again, then sit with a blank screen doing nothing until I power cycle it. 2-3 days later the process restarts. There is nothing special about this machine, just a generic install of 10 Pro running under Hyper-V.
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DancinJack
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Re: How bad is Windows 10 Really?

Wed Feb 20, 2019 4:41 pm

Yeah, the whole "just works" stuff that a lot of Mac advocates spout is occasionally true.
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sweatshopking
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Re: How bad is Windows 10 Really?

Wed Feb 20, 2019 5:08 pm

rumors are that windows is moving towards a similar update model to other os' in that rather than patching files they just create a new image and then just boot to the new image next time it starts. expected to dramatically reduce update time, but will require additional storage space.
 
Redocbew
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Re: How bad is Windows 10 Really?

Wed Feb 20, 2019 5:19 pm

I don't know of any "other OS" which does that, but maybe that's just me.

Unless you mean how linux installs new kernels side by side with the old one and doesn't switch over until you reboot, but that's not really the same thing as installing an entirely new image. It doesn't seem like the recent snafu's with windows updates have really involved the kernel much either.
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synthtel2
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Re: How bad is Windows 10 Really?

Wed Feb 20, 2019 5:38 pm

ludi wrote:
synthtel2 wrote:
but if the latter doesn't work even on 100 Mbit they've still got a problem. There are a lot of people out there who have good reason to go for the real solution and can't buy a connection that even approximates being fast enough.

Eh? I've got a half-dozen Windows 10 machines around the house, ranging from an Ivy Bridge laptop to a low-end Skylake desktop, and a 60mb cable connection. The only updates that can't normally download, install, reboot, and complete in 15 minutes or less on any of these are the really big equinox updates. What's all this about a 100mb connection not being enough?

It's a short interruption by the time you get to 60 Mbit, but it's still an interruption (with opaque and inconsistent behavior, even).

sweatshopking wrote:
rumors are that windows is moving towards a similar update model to other os' in that rather than patching files they just create a new image and then just boot to the new image next time it starts. expected to dramatically reduce update time, but will require additional storage space.
Redocbew wrote:
I don't know of any "other OS" which does that, but maybe that's just me.

Nothing like this happens in the foreground on other OSes (AFAIK), but some filesystem magic makes it work out similarly (but finer-grained). On Linux, if an update replaces a file that was open at the time, whatever had opened it still sees and can keep using the old version. The old version only really disappears once nothing has it open.

This sounds like it could cause all kinds of mismatched version havoc if you forget to reboot afterward, but the only place I've run into that problem is with Wine, and nobody else even claims those reboots are necessary except to get the new kernel running.
 
DancinJack
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Re: How bad is Windows 10 Really?

Wed Feb 20, 2019 5:51 pm

Redocbew wrote:
I don't know of any "other OS" which does that, but maybe that's just me.

Unless you mean how linux installs new kernels side by side with the old one and doesn't switch over until you reboot, but that's not really the same thing as installing an entirely new image. It doesn't seem like the recent snafu's with windows updates have really involved the kernel much either.

Android does (and I'm sure some other forms of Linux do it that we don't know about).
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Redocbew
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Re: How bad is Windows 10 Really?

Wed Feb 20, 2019 5:56 pm

Yeah I suppose you could call mobile devices much more image based. It just seems like an oddball way to go about it when versions and whatnot haven't really been part of the problem so far. I could be wrong about that since I obviously don't have any inside information, and I don't claim to have any understanding on what's going on in Redmond these days.
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ludi
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Re: How bad is Windows 10 Really?

Wed Feb 20, 2019 6:34 pm

synthtel2 wrote:
It's a short interruption by the time you get to 60 Mbit, but it's still an interruption (with opaque and inconsistent behavior, even).

The inconsistent behavior I'll grant (and have seen it, particularly in the networking subsystem), but I think the rest of that is your tacit admission of exaggeration. Not everyone can get a 50+mb connection but anyone that can get at least 10mb will be able to deal with the update process more or less gracefully. And given that the majority of systems in the wild will never be updated manually, I'll take the mild inconvenience of the auto-update process over the drive-by system pwnings and botnet attacks that characterized the latter days of XP and, to a lesser extent, Win7.
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