[sc:windows-category ]So I’ve had Windows 10 installed for over a month as my primary OS, so what’s the verdict?

The pros and cons I spoke of in the previous articles are all still true, however there have been a few more items that have cropped up:

Long term stability is an issue

My main machine and table are always on.  They never shutdown except for patches.  That’s exposed Windows 10’s biggest single weakness at this point.  The new app architecture has a lot of memory leaks and after 12-24 hours pretty much makes the system unusable.

The biggest culprit seems to be RuntimeBroker.exe, it often consumes all memory and CPU after running for a full day.

On my desktop I’ve actually setup a nightly job to terminate the process and that’s returned the bulk of the stability to my system.  On the tablet it’s much worse.

My Surface 3 can be completely hung after just leaving it overnight.  The Surface has also hung in mid use a few times with a hard reboot required.

Clearly Microsoft will be working on this, but it does show that more testing should have been done before it was released.

Tablet mode and domain logins

I, of course, run a domain at home and I long ago setup the group policy to allow me to login without a Ctl-Alt-Delete.  It’s pretty much required if you’re using Windows with a tablet as otherwise holding the Windows+Power button is a two-handed affair.

I’ve had two issues with the Surface 3 for this.  First, probably 70% of the time Windows still requires me to do a Windows+Power press to get to the login screen.  Randomly it will switch between this and the expected behaviour of just a swipe.

When you have to hit the Windows+Power combo, it also ignores your lock screen wallpaper setting and displays the default one.

To make things worse, the soft Windows key often seems to be disabled when needed.  It doesn’t even give a haptic feedback when pressed.

This makes logging in to the tablet very frustrating sometimes.

This does not appear to be an issue on my laptop or desktop.

Default login wallpaper ‘glitch’

This isn’t a bug so much as an observation.  The default login wallpaper is a nice scene of a beach with the waves crashing in as you look through a stone arch.  It looks great in landscape mode.

In portrait mode the stone arch get’s cut out so you just have the waves, which look exactly like a glitched screen if you just take a quick look at your tablet.

Calendar account settings

On my laptop I often use a WiFi HotSpot to get connected to the Internet when I’m on the road.  Once in a while it loses signal but remains connected.

The Calendar app seems a little sensitive to this and will sometimes come up and tell me my account details are out of date, even though it’s really just a lack of connectivity when it went to check for updates.

Verdict

Overall I’m still in favour of Windows 10, but I think Microsoft could have spent a few more months testing it before release.

[sc:windows-category ]Last week I talked about Windows 10 in relation to use on a desktop, this week it’s going to be all about the applications!

This is part three of three in my Windows 10 review:

1. Windows 10: Part 1 – Tablet Mode
2. Windows 10: Part 2 – Desktop Mode
3. Windows 10: Part 3 – Applications

First off, like all new versions of Windows, backwards compatibility is very good overall, there are a few little things I’ve found with applications I use:

• Firefox 39 cut off the top of some of the menus as Win10 changed top level chrome on desktop applications.  This has been fixed with Firefox 40.
• TortiseSVN seems to have some issues with Icon Overlays in Explorer, it’s not terrible but some of them are missing.

But beyond that let’s talk about the apps that come with Windows 10 or are new universal apps.

Mail

The old Mail app in Windows 8.1 was actually pretty good as long as you didn’t need much beyond basic mail functionality.  Windows 10 takes a few steps back and a few steps forward with the new mail app.

The steps back are:

• Accounts are now buried in a submenu, you can no longer have multiple accounts listed on the left most pane at the same time.  This means you can’t quickly see if you have mail in multiple accounts.
• The live tiles are little flaky, not updating when you have read or deleted messages very well.
• The “reading” pane opens and closes based on if a message is being displayed or not.  This is visually distracting to say the least as by default it shows through to the background image.  I “fixed” this by setting the background image to be a plain white square.

The steps forward are:

• Swipe actions for deleting and other actions.
• A Calendar button 🙂

Overall it still has many limits (can’t import .ics files in to the Calendar, etc.) but works well enough.

I suspect Mail will be one of the apps that gets a lot of updates over the next few months, especially with Windows Mobile on the way.

Calendar

My favorite calendar app of all time was on WebOS, but Windows 10 does a pretty good job getting close.

A few things that could be improved are:

• Ability to see more than a single month in the left hand column.
• Year view.
• Excluding accounts from being displayed, yes you can “uncheck” them, but they still show up in the left hand column.

Like Mail, I expect lots of changes over the next few months on this app.

Edge

Microsoft’s big new browser has a lot going for it.  Fast, light, standard conformant, etc.  These are all good things and I’ve been using it quite a bit.  It’s much better than IE for those things but it does have a few issues:

• Stability is still lacking, once in a while it will just crash for no apparent reason.
• When you create a new tab, often the focus is not on the address field so you can’t type your address directly without reselecting it.
• If you go to a site that fails to load for some reason, there are several options including “search”, but it does not use your default search provider, instead it uses Bing.
• No support for Microsoft’s live tiles or live tiles for web sites.
• Some of the configuration settings are buried pretty deep and aren’t very intuitive.
• No plugins.

We already know Microsoft is hard a work on improving Edge and I’m sure we’ll see lots of improvements over the next few months.

Internet Explorer

Yes it’s still there, and it’s pretty much the same.  The only item of note is that it’s not prominently displayed, instead you have to dig for it.

Weather

The new weather app is slick, it would be nice to be able to turn off the background, but that’s a minor nit pick.

Twitter

One of the big modern apps I used on Windows 8.1 was MetroTwit.  With Twitter shutting down third party apps (which looks like they may be reversing again), using the official ones has pretty much become a necessity.

The Win10 Twitter app is alright, but it needs some updates real soon:

• Refresh takes a click, to drag down or auto refresh options.
• Once in a while it will simply cut of the feed and a reload will be required.
• On a tablet, there’s a lot of whitespace, another column or two could be useful.
• Images are strangely cut off at the top and bottom.
• On a tablet, when you view a picture there’s no back button in the app you have to use the back button on the taskbar.
• The new retweet format takes you to the web browser instead of opening in Twitter.

Final Thoughts

Windows 10 is a good upgrade, but like every new OS, there is room for improvement.

There’s no reason NOT to upgrade and I’d recommended it for everyone.

[sc:windows-category ]Last week I talked about Windows 10 in relation to use on a tablet, this week it’s going to be all about the desktop!

This is part two of three in my Windows 10 review:

1. Windows 10: Part 1 – Tablet Mode
2. Windows 10: Part 2 – Desktop Mode
3. Windows 10: Part 3 – Applications

One issue I had with my desktop/laptop upgrades wasn’t directly Windows related, when I installed Windows 8.1, I installed the Enterprise version of Windows.  At the time this was a reasonable strategy as I was starting to setup DirectAccess which was only available in Enterprise.  However I never ended up going with DirectAccess so I don’t require Enterprise edition any more, which works out well as the “free” upgrade to Windows 10 isn’t available for Enterprise edition.

That meant I had to do a clean Windows 8.1 Pro install before upgrading to Windows 10 Pro.  Luckily I don’t keep anything on my local machines so other than a few application configuration exports, it was easy to simply wipe the system and re-install.

It would be nice to be able to “upgrade” from 8.1 Enterprise to 8.1/10 Pro, but that’s not possible.  The other feature that would have been nice would have been to be able to do a direct install of 10 using the 8.1 Pro key, but I can’t really say I’m surprised these options aren’t available.

Anyway, after getting 10 installed, things were ready to go.

I’m going to mention briefly the installation defaults that Microsoft has chosen, there’s been quite a bit written on the net about the privacy settings in Win10, which is true, but I find the settings to be basically the same as Win8.1.  Perhaps it’s just that not as many people install 8.1, but really, when you install 10, just like 8.1, you should not accept the defaults.

Also, once you get Windows up and running, you should go to the search bar and select the options (the gear at the top left of the search window) and turn off the “Search online and include web results”.

Many of the things that make the tablet experience less than what it was in Win8.1, make the desktop experience so much better in Win10.

It’s everything people liked about Win7 expanded to include many of the features that people liked in Win8.1.

There are lots of little things that just make sense, like the tray area, when you select the “more” area, you can just drag and drop icons in and out instead of having to walk through a list of apps and select how they are displayed.

There are lots of personalization options for the desktop and I’ve made changes to a few:

• I’ve set the taskbar to be a solid colour instead of transparent, I’m glad MS made this an option, transparency doesn’t do anything for me.
• My desktop background is mostly black and white, Windows choose an accent colour that didn’t make the title bars pop out (grey) so I changed that as well.

Beyond that, my setup is pretty standard.

The other big change is the Action Center, which is perhaps the one annoyance I have.  The AC itself is fine, but the tray icon is often “white”, indicating there’s a new notification, but when you open the AC there’s nothing there.

This is of course because the application has cleared the notification itself.  For example a new e-mail, which I read in Outlook clears the notification from the AC but not the icon.

The other big issue I have with the AC, is only kind of an AC issue.  Windows 10 REALLY likes to notify you if you have turned off SmartScreen, or several other system messages.  Turning these notifications off isn’t obvious and the AC doesn’t help very much, they only give the option to re-enable SmartScreen.

Digging down a bit does eventually turn up the old control panel applet that let’s you turn off these messages.

One issue I’m still trying to fix is related to the fact that my systems belong to a domain.  When I lock my workstation, a flat blue lock screen comes up instead of my selected lock screen wallpaper.  I suspect it’s related to the group policy I have setup and the Win10 GP templates haven’t been released yet so I may have to wait until Microsoft releases the templates to resolve it.

For my desktop system, the new auto installation and reboot of patches is very annoying.  My system runs all the time and so I often leave many applications open.  If Microsoft decides to release 10 patches in a month then I’ll get 10 reboots.  I’ve selected to schedule my patch installation instead of letting Windows do it to avoid this.

The final thought I’ll talk about is the HiDPI display support.  Win8.1 had relatively bad support for HiDPI displays (aka 4k and above monitors), Win10 is much improved.  Win10 looks fantastic on my Dell 4k monitor.

Overall Windows 10 appears to be a very good update to Windows 7 🙂

The last part of my Windows 10 review will be about Windows 10 applications.

[sc:windows-category ] So Windows 10 is finally out and I’ve upgraded all of my machines (it’s free after all).  I’ve been using it for a few weeks now so what’s the verdict?

That’s a complex question and I’m going to answer it over the course of three posts:

1. Windows 10: Part 1 – Tablet Mode
2. Windows 10: Part 2 – Desktop Mode
3. Windows 10: Part 3 – Applications

This is the first and will be focusing on the tablet experience.

First off, I have to say that I liked Windows 8.1 on my tablet (both the Dell Venue Pro 8 and the Surface 3).  Having said that, Windows 10 is not as good as 8.1 on the tablets.

I’m not saying Windows 10 is bad on tablets, just that 8.1 was a more focused product and the move towards merging the desktop and tablet experiences has come at the expense of some of the best parts of Windows 8.1 on tablets.

So first off, the good:

• Easily installed on the Surface 3, the Dell had a lot more trouble as it was low on disk space.  In the end I had to compress the drive to get enough free space to install Windows 10.
• All of the Modern Apps I had on Windows 8.1 function great on Windows 10.
• Microsoft Edge.

Ok, what’s the bad:

• Both tablets, when they first booted in to Windows 10 had their screen brightness set to 100% and it couldn’t be changed.  In both cases waiting for the video driver to update and then doing a hard shutdown resolved the issue.
• The Dell tablet was virtually unusable until the video driver was updated, chunky screen refreshes and general slowness.
• Neither went in to tablet mode by default.
• The virtual keyboard button is hidden by default, this should automatically be displayed when no keyboard is present.
• The virtual keyboard no longer has the “split with number pad in the middle” mode.
• The virtual keyboard no longer “pushes” modern apps up the display to make room for itself, meaning you sometimes can’t see what your typing without moving the keyboard up the screen, which is a pain in the butt.
• The virtual keyboard doesn’t always display at the right time, especially during the login screen.
• There’s no Modern IE any more, which is a shame as for tablets it is a much better interface.
• The charm bar is gone, so any app that relied on it for the search functionality is now crippled.
• The left swipe to bring up the task list no longer let’s you rotate through the running apps.  So if you want quickly switch between two apps a few times it now takes a swipe and a touch instead of just a swipe.
• The full screen start menu looks off somehow.  Not sure yet if I like it or not but it certainly looks empty in comparison to the Windows 8.1.
• There’s no longer a full screen application list.  In Windows 8.1 you could swipe down and get a full list of your apps, now you have a narrow vertical list in the start menu only.
• Edge doesn’t support pinning of sites to the task bar, or “pretty” live tile to the start menu (aka using the site icon or the extended properties Microsoft introduced back in Windows 8.1 for websites to update live tiles).
• Edge seems a little flaky still, crashing on some sites for no apparent reason onetime and working fine the next.

If Windows 8.1 didn’t exist, Windows 10 would be the best tablet experience by far, but since we’ve seen what a tablet can do, it’s hard to take a step back.

Of course most of these issues will likely get resolved in future updates, Edge in particular I expect to iterate quickly to add features.

Overall I can live with the change and don’t think it will have a major impact on my day to day use of my tablet, but the question remains, did the step back for tablets result in a big step forward for desktops?

Read next weeks post to find out!