Windows 10

[Dave]

A heads-up, based on a message I read this afternoon in a USENET newsgroup:

> Microsoft Strikes Again...
>
> Needed a re-boot this morning to install some updates, and half my
> "load-on-startup" utilities didn't.
>
> Tracked it down to you now have to give full permissions for all users
> for those programs to start up when non-administrators are logging in.

[Warrl]

I would think either that, or configure each of them to run as {insert administrator-group account} and have the appropriate password as part of their configuration.

[Dave]

The latter would probably be safer (assuming that it's possible - I don't know modern Windows well enough).

Giving all users "run everything" administrator-grade access, certainly makes the potential damage worse if a normal user happens to open up some malware.

[TazManiac]

Client's Netbook; an ASUS that 'failed' right out of the carton, is a system with internal Bluetooth & Wifi, two USB ports, a micro-SD port, and, and, and a port for the power supply.

Dats it.

It wouldn't be so bad but the Broadcom wifi chipset is fubar, across the board, vendor wise. Samsung, Toshiba, Lenovo, etc, etc...

What that means is tablets, and small laptops, that make use of it cant run Win8.1 nor Win10 because they lack any other way to get on the Internet, (sans a third-party USB based wifi/network adaptor).

The drivers are crap and I haven't, Yet, found the answer- I had been pining my hopes on installing Win10 and then rolling the wifi drver back to the previousWin8.x version buuuuut- nope. just today I tried that and it's still 'fubar'.

I'm thinking of investigating Win7 just for kicks and Linux because it's my go-to OS, bu I think I'm going to end up giving the dam'n thing back with the lowest profile USB wifi do-dad I can come up with.

I'm perfectly fine with hand rolling my own drivers, compiling from source, uninstalling the default and installing the 'right' version- but the damn thing is supposed to work when all the jumping through hoops is over.



I'm going to be 'back in town' in a few days so we'll see what comes of the next step in the Odyssey..

[DinkyInky]

Client's Netbook; an ASUS that 'failed' right out of the carton, is a system with internal Bluetooth & Wifi, two USB ports, a micro-SD port, and, and, and a port for the power supply.

Dats it.

It wouldn't be so bad but the Broadcom wifi chipset is fubar, across the board, vendor wise. Samsung, Toshiba, Lenovo, etc, etc...

What that means is tablets, and small laptops, that make use of it cant run Win8.1 nor Win10 because they lack any other way to get on the Internet, (sans a third-party USB based wifi/network adaptor).

The drivers are crap and I haven't, Yet, found the answer- I had been pining my hopes on installing Win10 and then rolling the wifi drver back to the previousWin8.x version buuuuut- nope. just today I tried that and it's still 'fubar'.

I'm thinking of investigating Win7 just for kicks and Linux because it's my go-to OS, bu I think I'm going to end up giving the dam'n thing back with the lowest profile USB wifi do-dad I can come up with.

I'm perfectly fine with hand rolling my own drivers, compiling from source, uninstalling the default and installing the 'right' version- but the damn thing is supposed to work when all the jumping through hoops is over.



I'm going to be 'back in town' in a few days so we'll see what comes of the next step in the Odyssey..

I thought they "fixed" that bug during XPSP3...

[TazManiac]

Well, the first swipe at Win10 upgrade over the top of Win8.1, then 'rolling back' the wifi driver to a Win8.x version didn't work.

I have a copy of all the original partitions of the Win8.x setup, so i'm going to try again with a clean install of Win Ten, just to see if I can get the wifi working, else I'm off to Fry's for the cheapest, but more importantly Smallest, wifi-usb adapter I can find...

[TazManiac]

Update on the 'brand new PC wont run under Win8 nor 10 due to faulty wifi drivers' saga;

I went all over the world today, figuratively, and all I ended up coming home with was an old 300Gig IDE hard drive and an old Sony Video capture card-
nothing in fact related to the Windows Ten netbook drama.

OTOH- this morning a DID successfully do an Upgrade in place from 8.1 to 10 for a Dell touchscreen PC I'm supporting in the neighborhood.

Went fine, Reinstalled Avira afterwords (because I noticed two entries in the Win8.1 setup...), did a manual check for Windows Update and after a few reboots left it running Defraggler.

(wow- Did I just give the spell-checker a workout...)

Wed I'm going small (nano) usb-wifi shopping. Again...

[TazManiac]

News and an Update;

I seem to be on a WinTen roll here;

I'm just finishing up a Toshiba laptop (w/ touchscreen) being upgraded from 8.1 to Win Ten

aaaaaand

I purchased an Airlink nano sized USB-wifi adapter this AM and it worked right out of the box on the temperamental netbook w/ the funk Broadcom chipset support.

(I didn't even have to use an installer CD that came with the device.)

Still haven't found a working solution to the 'it's never worked, even out of the box' failure of the internal wifi device.

I'm temped to crack the damn thing open and swap out the module, if thats how's it's built on this model, for a more well supported version of a mini-wifi card.

(I reserve the mangling of grammar and spelling in the pursuit of artistic license...)

[AmriloJim]

Okay... Win10 just installed an update on my primary machine, a Toshiba Satellite laptop. When it booted back up, my screen was black. Figuring it was the display driver snafu that crops up on occasion, I dumped power to do a cold boot. Guess what? No machine splash screen! So I haul the machine over to my 'office' setup and borrow the external monitor. That works fine. Tried reinstalling the AMD Radeon driver package (again)... still black.

Oh, and Win10 is still throwing me errors claiming I'm low on internal RAM (even though MemTest86 says the 4GB on board returns no errors), and the error dialog advising me to close CCleaner to avoid information leaks.

As you might imagine, I am not happy, and I'm too tall to be Grumpy.

Tosses a Disney DVD to the jar.

[Dave]

That sounds as if your BIOS configuration may have been switched to "external monitor only" in a persistent fashion. You might be able to get into Setup using an external monitor, and then reset the monitor-priority setting and save configuration and then reboot. A full BIOS configuration reset to defaults would be a last resort.

[AmriloJim]

I was thinking along those lines, Dave. Thank you.

[GlytchMeister]

Great balls of fire, why are you people having so much trouble with Windows 10???

I'm loving it. Not only is it working flawlessly, it fixed my computer!

I'm beginning to wonder if there's something going horribly wrong with my laptop but I just haven't noticed it...

[Alkarii]

I've noticed that tech people are always bitching about the newest version of Windows every time a new one is released, but they can never specifically say what's wrong with it, and the only specifics about 10 that I've actually heard is the spying crap that you can turn off.

[TazManiac]

I'm only having trouble w/ a Driver situation but it's not Win10 specific, the same trouble was cropping up in Win8 too.

I've gotten around it by installing an external, small, usb-wifi adaptor.

Win Ten is soooo much better to deal with than Win 8.x.... so far.

[jwhouk]

People hate it because it's different.

I notice the glaring differences between using 7 at work and 10 at home (insert "split" joke here). I like using the drag-and-organize feature in WinX, but get frustrated by the Alt-Tab feature as well.

The hardest part is getting it set up to how you like it. Everything else is just add-on.

[shadowinthelight]

I've noticed that tech people are always bitching about the newest version of Windows every time a new one is released, but they can never specifically say what's wrong with it, and the only specifics about 10 that I've actually heard is the spying crap that you can turn off.

Tech people complain the most because they are the ones who actually understand what is going on instead of being sucked in by the marketing of the supposed latest and greatest like the common consumer. If you haven't heard specifics then you haven't been listening. W10 has caused driver issues for a lot of people who have been forced to downgrade back to regain full use of their systems. Forced updates are also a bad idea when when buggy updates end up being pushed out before they can be fixed which Microsoft is infamous for and has already happened with W10. This insidious push to get people to upgrade has nothing to do with offering a better product. It's all about mining data which the new "features" will provide for them in spades.

[Alkarii]

I'd forgotten I'd heard about the drivers, though, when you think about it, there's a ton of code involved with an OS, and I wouldn't expect them to be able to account for every driver out there before the initial release. I don't think Microsoft could make sure every driver that worked with the previous iteration of Windows will work with the newest.

I still haven't run into anything with 8.1, but I'm not trying to do a bunch of stuff with it. In fact, the only compatibility issue I had was a chipset issue.

Also, I gotta ask:

If you (Edit: Not you specifically, though) hated one version of Windows, and complained about all the rest, then why bother with any later versions?

That's like saying you hate all the particular versions of a certain soda, let's say Coca-Cola. Classic, diet, vanilla, whatever. And then when a new kind of Coke comes out, you buy it.

If you hated the rest, and hate the manufacturer and virtually everything to do with them... Why in the world are you expecting to not hate the newest thing?

It seems to be on an individual basis if certain parts work or not. However, I don't really see much point in getting Windows 10 right now. I'm still seeing products say they're compatible with Vista, 7, and 8, so it isn't like there's any reason to get the new one.

To be perfectly honest, though, I only have Windows because I have older games that require Windows. I think that the next computer I build for myself will have whatever that one OS was I heard about that's a version of Linux but doesn't have the data mining crap that supposedly has gotten into damn near everyone else's software.

[Warrl]

I don't think Microsoft could make sure every driver that worked with the previous iteration of Windows will work with the newest.

That should be the easiest thing in the world to do. It's a very simple rule: if something used to work (in software that was released to the general population), it must continue to work and to do the same thing (possibly adjusting for context). You can ADD capability, but you can never take it away. If a subroutine is tolerant of bad parameters, you cannot make it less tolerant.

More serious software evolution can be allowed for by having versions of the interface specification, and having software (including drivers) specify what interface version it uses. Then the OS must support the multiple specifications, and validate the version number against the versions the OS supports.

Or, of course, by having different routine names. If you look through the Windows API (Application Programmer Interface) specs, you'll find a lot of cases of a routine named DoThisThing and another routine named DoThisThingEX - they do essentially the same thing, but have somewhat-different parameters and the latter is more powerful/flexible in some way.

However, Microsoft has a bad history on this point. They have more than once changed existing software in a way that broke backward compatibility. And not just in major releases of Windows; sometimes in very small updates that are supposed to be completely routine.

[Alkarii]

I have a Windows related question, but for 8.1 instead of 10.

I'm wanting to uninstall it so I can install the 64 bit version. I tried looking online, and those keep saying to do a clean install, but not how to do a clean install. I searched for how to uninstall what I have, but couldn't find an answer.

[AmriloJim]

Alkarii, I need the reverse. I've got a Win7 Home 64-bit that I need to be 32-bit to run some legacy software... and I'm on a 6-day deadline to accomplish that. I'll share what I find.