Windows 10

Sounds very familiar to my story, except I have been doing the same for SWMO for the last 20 years.

Well, been married nearly 44 years now.   She acquired her (first and only) laptop 5 years ago.  She's still a one finger typist, and once every 2 weeks I take it off her and go through it removing all sorts of adware, browser add-ons and so forth.   Almost every day she brings it to me to sort out some 'problem' or other (sigh)

No taxation without representation! Revenge finally! mwahahah!

Capitalist Imperialist dogs! 

Oh yes...the spyware/malware/Trojan/virus author and the average housewife...a match made in heaven.  Back in the day we referred to this housewife and possibly her mother collectively as "grandma."

The quality bar is simply this:  It must work for grandma.  Can grandma figure it out?

P.S.  This is a very high bar indeed, never being able to be met.  Reason is the OS works on too many devices and allows for too many components...often times which haven't be made yet, but must adhere to a planned standard.

P.S.S.  Apple has grandma figured out...lock down the hardware...limit the control of the software and user privileges.

Do I take it that you're running Windows "Home"? We gave up on that version a long time ago, and I moved all our machines from 32 to 64 bit OS a year or so ago. For photography purposes, my wife allows me to use her Lightroom & Photoshop CC versions. I quite like them.

Or in my case, a sister.....no, don't ask!

OTOH, we've managed to train the daughters

Windows 7 Home 64bit (retail), upgraded to Windows 10 64bit.

I use DxO OpticsPro 10 for initial raw conversion, correction & processing.  I use Picture Window Pro if I need to do photographic editing and Photoline if I need to do technical image editing (all are 64bit applications, using 16bpp internal working space).

My working colour space is  ProPhoto (saved using 16bit TIFF working files) and the display is 102% NTSC gamut connected to a FirePro V4900 via DisplayPort and calibrated using an i1 Display Pro.

The Adobe CC Photography plan is a good deal, with Photoshop, Lightroom and Bridge.  Wife has this and is my up and coming 2nd shooter.

I have the full, because I also use Premier Pro, Audition...and want to start playing with illustrator.

Well my enterprise with Windows 10 has been thus, I figured 1 month was enough time for MS to get any major issues resolved :

1) Two VM Ware virtual Machines ( v10 not the new v12 ) – Win 7 and Win 8.1 – gave SVGA errors with the MS ‘auto update’ after being activated, but put up no fight when using the MS ISO tool to create a 32bit image of Win 10 Pro DVD.  It took some, but all was well when done.

2) 4 year old $500 Gateway laptop from Win 8.1 with same DVD.  No issues, just a bit of time.

3) 5 year old i7 Dell XPS main PC.  This was going to be a bit tricky as I wanted to swap out the 240GB SSD primary drive for a new 960GB SSD.  I went to do a ‘clean’ install of Windows 10, but as no prior software was loaded when it came to activate it, up came a ‘License Blocked’.  After being on hold with MS I got out the Win 7 Ultimate disk…  several hours later and after about 250-300 downloaded ‘updates’ ( why for the life of me, MS can’t create intelligent patching where it analyses the file level and then builds one file to bring you to the current level … ) and Win 10 was ‘ready’ for updating to Win 10 Pro x64.  It went smoothly from that point on.  The image seems to take about 30GB, and kept the Win7 as 'windows.old' so at some point soon I will delete that.

No major issues on the main PC other than I had to get Win 10 drivers for Printers/Scanners and dbpoweramp had updated a minor revision. I had to assign some drive letters in Computer Management which had been hidden.  And once Office 2013 was installed, wait for a ton more updates.  One Device Manager issue though was resolved when I enabled a setting in the Settings/Devices/Connected Devices “Download over metered connections”, this was off by default, but when enabled it downloaded a couple of drivers for attached devices and fixed a driver issue for a USB 3 PCI card.  So for me the main PC took a bit more time than I wanted, but an existing PC upgrade should take no more than a few hours.

Recommendation, if you are going to do a clean install of Win 10, buy a license and save time rather than doing the old install and then installing Win 10 over the top.  As the ‘limited’ time update is just that, I’m not sure how people will go about doing clean installs in the future ( especially with Hard drive changes ) as no ‘code’ is provided for the Win 10 as it relies on the previous Windows.  I am finding my PC moving fast, part Win 10, part new SSD I think, but QNAP NAS and music DAC are playing back with no issues. So from this thread I seem to be one of the ‘luckier’ ones.

If unhappy with the free upgrade, just ask for a refund.

Or ask to be paid as a beta tester.

Since I did the 8.1 to 10 back to 8.1 thing, my email spam has exploded like one of these

Those come and go actually, Hotmail catches every bit of spam that comes in barely ever does it get through.  Sometimes due to spam botnets and stupid stuff like that there is a huge increase, other times they shut one down and it decreases. 

It could also be some new people don't like you and signed you up for Viagra and local sluts.

People that run spam operations should be hung.

Viagra. That could be it. I recently ordered some from a very reliable overseas supplier. Supposed to increase blood flow to the extremities, right? Thought it would help my hearing. So far all that has happened is that my ears perk up when I hear the voice of Shakira.

MS are following the Apple model, lets get everyone on the same level - especially if you don't turn off the privacy settings, so they can sell you're data - so it's easier to upgrade in the future and no one can argue with free right ? :-)

Actually, and I'm not a business person...they knew they could not sell Windows for much longer and would have to give it away.  This happened to SQL too...basically due to market forces...many operating systems have become free. 

Everything becomes commoditized or free eventually in the capitalist, open-market system.  Anything seen as expensive or hard to get...is attacked and made cheap and simple...or free.

The data everyone gets on you is still gotten without an special features...Google and many others can follow you around almost click for click and know who you are.

I have just upgraded from 8.1 to 10.

The only issue is that the cursor now has a small blue flashing circle  as a companion.

Any ideas, please?

As you were: I restarted and the issue has gone away.

I can't see MS being around in 10 years, what with the massive recent loss

Yeah, go Big Blue! IBM's pivotal business choices in the PC market have been historically stellar, haven't they? For their own sake, probably best IBM give up the ghost and abandon PCs all together. 

As far as MS not being around in ten years, I can't see it. You might be a student, (graphic) artist, or otherwise in an occupation fortunate enough not to be tied to a PC and do all your business via a smart device or MacBook; however, the business world remains largely desktop and laptop driven and MS has a >90% share of operating systems on those devices. Even the "unsupported" XP garners a 12% share, and Windows 10, at just over 5%, already exceeds the Mac OS.

http://netmarketshare.com/oper...d=10&qpcustomd=0

I did a lot of my early work on VMS (a VAX 750)

Main programme structure in Pascal

Mathematical modules in Fortran

IO modules in Basic

Linked using the common type and object model.

VAX750?    Luxury! When I were a lad all we had was a PDP 11!

Yep, started with one of them; by the time I got to it, it had been massively upgraded (to 32k of core RAM).  The VAX arrived within 6 months, so I didn't really get to know the PDP11.

In our labs.  circa 1975 we used  DEC pdp8e's on our spectrometers .16k of memory running on machine code(I think). Prog. loading was via twin R toR magnetic tape or paper tape on a teletype. 1980 we used pdp11's running 64k on Fortran code. Twin 7" floppy disc drives.

Our central comp[uter was later updated to VMS.