Category: Windows

[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!

 

[sc:windows-category ] So Windows 10 is out and so I figured it was time to upgrade my Surface 3.

Of course, this won’t be the only system I’m upgrading so instead of doing the online upgrade (and hence incurring the extra data usage of downloading Windows 10 probably half a dozen times), I instead pulled down the ISO’s.

Downloading the ISO’s isn’t quite as easy as you might think, you first go to their download page but there are not direct links to the ISO files there.  Instead you download their “Download Tool” which takes you through getting the ISO’s or creating a USB stick.

You then have to select what version of Windows 10 you want, Home or Pro as well as 32 or 64 bit.

You can select a combined 32/64 bit media, but there’s no way to select “all of the above” and create a single Home/Pro/32/64 install media.

Home the ISO was down, I copied it to my Surface 3 and mounted it.

Running the setup was easy enough, it let le know the Media Center would be removed and then started to do the install.

Which promptly failed with a cryptic “Something happened” message box letting me know installation had failed.

Doing a quick search online didn’t really turn anything up at first, but after a bit more digging I found an off-hand comment about setup failing if being run from a mounted ISO image.

I did a quick copy of the setup files from the ISO to a local folder and re-ran the setup.  This time Windows proceeded on to do the actual install.

There were a few other little gotcha’s along the way, but nothing major:

• After the final reboot, the Surface was stuck at full screen brightness and the slider didn’t do anything.  A simple reboot resolved this.
• Mail needed all my passwords again and wouldn’t connect to my Exchange account no matter how many times I re-entered the password.  Deleting and re-adding my account worked fine.

Other than that, there were lots of app updates to do.

I played with Windows 10 as a Technical Preview in a virtual machine, but something I didn’t notice in that environment was the change to the virtual keyboard.

Previously one of the options was a split keyboard with the number pad in the middle, but this is not longer available.  I’m not sure how I feel about this yet, but it is kind of a strange omission.

Anyways, I’ll be using Windows 10 full-timel on the Surface so I’ll do a more in-depth review in a couple of weeks.