Windows 10

Romi,  you should really know what a back up is - its a program that's in all computers to make a copy of your system & files on another disk.   If something goes wrong or is lost, then you can roll back to the last backup.  Please either read up on this or get someone who knows computers to teach you.  

The Microsoft Win-10 upgrade will not loose anything - documents, photo's etc. are all kept intact,  ditto your e-mails, favourites & & & &   The only thing that changes is how the screen will look & how the system operates for you.

Since the Win-10 upgrade was launched on 29 July, many millions of people had done it, there were 14 million upgrades completed on the first day alone  

Hi Joe, my laptop touchpad won't scroll yet (Packard Bell with an Alps device). You come across anything to sort it in your travels by any chance? PB contact/help, doesn't actually help at all and I can't see anything relevant on Alp either...

I think you need to download the driver from the OEM site, and install it using compatibility.

Yeah, did that but something in W10 wasn't having it and on restart, 'new' driver wasn't there or was somehow replaced by some other generic driver from Synaptics. However, bizarrely, just tried downloading ALPS driver through lenovo site for W8 and it works perfectly. Strange. But sorted.

Synaptics touchpad in Windows is a device from HELL, anyone using a MacBook will know precisely what I mean.

Luckily, the Synaptics touchpad on my Dell laptop got somewhat sorted by Windows 10, and it is now more or less usable Before Windows 10, it always did opposite what I wanted to do, it moved left when I wanted to moved right, selected text when I wanted to scroll, etc.

Hi Joerand, when I referred to a slow process, it wasn't the start up and shut down speed of the pc using windows 10.  It's that I can't start up the pc and first select which user to open.  It opens to the default user screen.  It's only when that user is up and running that I can select and open another user. The start up speed, though certainly not just seconds, is a little quicker than the same pc was using W10.  I want to turn the pc on, select user, which was possible under W7.  Apart from this problem all other processes I've tried have worked normally.

Mike -B In regard to back up I will get my daughter to teach me.

In regard to The Microsoft Win -10 I hear what you say but if updates for Frimware are capable of losing saved play lists by error in the downloading process then surely it is not unreasonable for me to tread carefully as to downloading updated Windows 10.  Since you confirm that the downloading process only effects how the screen will look and how the system operates and does not touch upon in any way physically or any other way saved material then I shall bite the bullet and download Windows 10.  

Never trust any setup scheme to protect you.  Always back your stuff up before upgrade/re-install...you can do this free using OneDrive.  With all the free cloud storage out there, no reason to every lose anything again.

Get your documents folders, music, also your favorites and playlists.  Don't forget saved games and stuff like that.  It's smart to move everything (except music and videos, etc.) under Documents so you can back it all up in one shot...always simply put stuff in Documents.  If you have a lot, get an external USB drive and then have that backup to the cloud. 

Most products won't let you backup a NAS cheaply but even a 3TB is like $35 per year with Backblaze.

It's also good if you have a older machine to snag all your updated drivers *before* in re-up.  Win10 should install on just about anything with no issues though.

Thank you for your wise advice, from my experience with Frimware what you say makes a lot of sense. 

To build a smokin' machine...get a 250GB PRO SSD for your primary physical disk.  Get a WD 3TB Black for your secondary physical disk.  Use Backblaze or some other service to back the entire thing up for the price of 3 drinks per year. 

Put all non-OS documents on 2nd drive...upgrades become the most simple thing you've ever seen.  Put only program files on primary.  Change your Libraries to point at D: as they will currently point to C: and again this simplifies things.

With this configuration, even 4GB memory is great!  We've been trying to speed up our computers with tons of memory and faster video cards, quad cores...but all the time it was the damned hard disc.

Guess what the #1 source of failure in a computer is?  You guessed it, the one that spins at 7,200 RPM or faster. 

SSD changes the world.

Windows 10 upgrade went well here.. No issues at all... Even iTunes sharing to AppleTV worked without a blink on it...Just a case of re authorising the computer within iTunes. I think MS must have very much learnt from previous upgrade experiences.

Windows can give you a completely new identity within the OS between logins, and reset all your settings to EOL.  There are some things you can do to invalidate any cached credentials, one of them is upgrading your OS.

If you have admin privileges, you can go back to the old identity under c:\users and get your settings.  If you upgraded to Win10, you should see: Default.migrated under c:\users.

Similarly...if you are using Bit Locker and you change your boot order, your BL key becomes invalid and you have to enter the original seed.  Restoring the boot order will make that go away and you can get in normally.

Another interesting case is an online backup system, your system gets a hash based on various components like CPU, etc.  If you change one of these components, or you lose the computer the hash on the new computer is invalid and its not recognized as the same computer-- you can: download the image, purchase a drive of the contents to be mailed to you, leave it and buy a new PC backup slot, or delete that online copy and start a new upload of the entire machine!

Supposedly.  They've been known before to make claims that some of their sound-cards wouldn't work on the 'new' Windows 7 so people would have to buy new one's.  Then some intrepid individual took their driver, fiddled about with it and produced a working driver for Windows 7.

Basically Creative Labs were 'at it' and they threatened the guy with legal action.  He used to post on their forums and made the drivers available to people.

Looking at their website it seems the estimated dates differ depending on what sound-card you have.  I'm currently having to use the Realtek that's built into my mobo.

It sounds like a simple function to rebuild the directory storing the CD's you have ripped.  Nothing to worry yourself over.

When you update your PC to Windows 10, all your files will still be there inside Windows 10 and in the same places like My Documents, or My Pictures folders. 

Plus, on top of that, Windows 10 saves another copy of your files in a folder called 'Windows.old', which is like an extra layer of protection for the files you have on your computer.

My 'Windows.Old' folder is 28.5GB in size and has all the data that I had before upgrading to Windows 10.

Romi,

If using Windows 7 makes you a dinosaur what does the fact that I'm still carrying on with Windows XP on my tower PC make me? A trilobite?

I have discovered a major problem in the Windows 10 update - it's behaving like a virus.

One the download has started, the process isn't cancelable, nor can you delay it till your choice of time (despite what Microsoft claim).  You can only delay it 'til Microsoft's choice of time (not more than three days).

This is serious as the upgrade wizard also lies - it said all my applications were compatible.  However, it had an interesting view of compatibility - on my laptop, it made my anti-malware package compatible by disabling it WITHOUT ANY WARNING, so leaving the laptop completely open and vulnerable.

By the time I noticed this I had already started the download on my main system. This is when I tried to stop the update process on my main system.  When it automatically re-started itself, I did a system restore to a time BEFORE I started the Windows 10 upgrade.  Even after the restore Microsoft are still pushing updates to my machine to force the Windows 10 upgrade to re-start.

The only way I have found to stop this is to disable the Windows Update service, and KILL it's executable ( <End Process> ) in memory (telling it to close doesn't work even from an administrator account).  However, disabling updates causes a security weakness in itself, as finding updates then relies on human memory to run the process manually

This is quite possibly a violation of the Misuse of Computers Act (but it would need a test case).

The other thing to note is that I have a Retail Licence for Windows 7 (not an OEM one) so they can't even claim that they're acting within the licence terms.

This behaviour is much more like classic Apple tactics.

This set of misinformation, lies and underhand tactics is particularly unnecessary and uncalled for as I believe that Windows 10 is actually good, and particularly a vast improvement on Windows 8.x.  So I don't want to dissuade people from upgrading, but it's probably best to clone your existing system drive before using Windows Update, or download the ISO file to a recordable DVD and use that.

I still run Windows 2000 (but in a virtual machine) to support one application, so am I a stromatolite?

I was thinking Primordial Soup, but I think I'll reserve that for anyone still running NT3.5!

..........  sympathy Huge,  but it flies in the face of the many millions who have successfully installed (14 million is the MS claim for the 1st 24 hrs)

I'm working on a problem that's come up on my Synology hibernation since Win-10 arrived,  it wakes up every 30 mins.  Its somewhere on the PC or LAN as it hibernates when PC is off/sleeping  & also stays hibernated when its ethernet is disconnected. 

I might have to dig deep to ID it,  but busy weekend starts from 14:00, so back to it Monday.  

I think on balance I'm with Microsoft on them forcing security updates on PC's.  I know people may think 'this is my PC' but your PC does not exist in isolation.  It's connected to a world wide web and if, for example, MS introduce a security patch that helps secure PC's from being taken over as part of a bot network then imo they are right to do this.

 Edit.  My Synolgy NAS is still snoozing away so not sure what could be wakening yours.  I'm using Windows 10.

Thanks for feedback info Jota

If there is a vulnerability so severe that normal anti-malware systems can't prevent it, then yes.

But that's not the issue here:

Microsoft are trying to force an update that will disable my anti-malware and not even report the fact; so making my system much more vulnerable to being taken over without my knowledge!

Their actions have made things worse not better.

I'm not seeing any changes in security or malware protection.

its working OK with my BT Netprotect (McAfee) that runs a constant virus/malware scan & another McAfee package I use.   It shuts down Win Defender & tells you so & asks if that's OK  & if McAfee is shut down, then Defender takes over until McAfee comes back.  

Seems all OK to me (?)

Mike, unfortunately I can't say which A/V package I use (due to privileged information).

However, after install of Windows 10, it was left installed, but left in an inactive state.  The only things active were Windows Defender and the (vestigial) Windows firewall.  Hardly adequate protection, but still better than absolutely nothing.

The only evidence that my A/V package wasn't operating was the absence of it's icon in the system tray (the background user level component).  I only realised when I tried to start its UI to review its settings, and the UI informed me that it was unable to start the protection components, as it's not compatible with this operating system.  The UI components can be started OK but Windows 10 had closed both the background user level and the system level components without reporting the fact.

I have since sorted this, but it's a glaring error that it happened without any information to the user.

It was only because of this that I tried to stop the Windows 10 update after it had started the download but while the update install was still pending and hadn't yet started.  This should have been possible (with Administrator privilege), but Microsoft's approach has made the system update code destabilise my existing OS install, even after reverting to a previous state.  In other words, rather than increasing security by pushing updates, those pushed updates are now destabilising my machine and reducing security.

I'm currently considering whether I can trust the current forced Windows 10 in place update install at all, or whether I am now forced to perform a complete clean install of Windows 7 so that I can do the update install of Windows 10 from the DVD I've just burned.

I installed Windows 10 recently just on my HP laptop, which I use infrequently. There is a problem with a large number of HP Notebooks/laptops where the sleep option fails. The screen goes blank but the machine does not power down, the only option is to restart by powering down manually. the problem is due to the chipset for which Intel have now updated the driver and the sleep otion works fine.

I have had every iteration of Windows and I must say that I much prefer 8.1 to windows 10 much slicker for me and also faster, on my Laptop at least.