Kevin's Watch

My wife got a new computer with Windows 8 last year, and we ended up upgrading to 10. I definitely like it more than 8, but I don't use it very much. I hate that they push several of their own thingies, but when you get it configured to your liking, it works pretty good. But we do seem to be having trouble with a new printer.

Well, 8 definitely sucked harder than any windows has sucked before, with the sole exception of Vista.

I see a woman has successfully sued MS for $10,000 for deceptively forcing an upgrade on her. And they've changed the upgrade options now to enable you to decline it permanently.

--A

Avatar wrote:Well, 8 definitely sucked harder than any windows has sucked before, with the sole exception of Vista.

--A

I dunno...I had Windows ME...

Y'know, I never had any problems with ME funnily enough. Always worked just fine for me.

--A

For me, it was a pretty frequent crash machine. By the time I switched to XP, it would crash about once every 3-4 hours. I thought it might be memory or something hardware related, but when I used XP, it never crashed. Or at least rarely.

I really hate this new updating scheme that Win10 uses. In earlier versions of Windows, it would download updates in the background and then prompt you to restart to install them - you could delay it if you wanted, which is nice when you happen to be actually working (since these are work PCs after all)

Win 10 pops up a notice that says it's restarting in 15 minutes to install updates. Your only option is to restart now or wait for the 15 minutes to count down when it will restart for you. Really? No option to delay it? Wouldn't be quite so bad if it didn't take 10-15 minutes to install most updates (some take longer)

I was under the impression that this was my own personal computer. Why am I not allowed to govern when an update is applied? Maybe I'm in the middle of something critical and don't want to restart just now... ugh, it's infuriating!

I have upgraded 4 computers total to Win 10 now. 2 identical laptops and 2 identical desktops. 1 laptop and 1 desktop both have constant out-of-memory errors and crashes when locking the screen for more than a few minutes. The other two work flawlessly. I am at a loss on what to do to fix the first two. Nothing I've Googled helps. It's beyond frustrating

Sticking to 7 for as long as humanly possible.

--A

I like Windows 10. Had no problems updating from 7, but agree Cortana is a nuisance. I'm still trying to find things, after 3 months, but have managed to put things I use often on the screen with the square boxes so that I can find them more easily. Sorry, don't know the technical terms. My little Acer that I take to the Archives has 8 and having got used to that I didn't find that much difference with 10. Did take me ages to realise though that what I call programs is now "apps"!

Yeah, functionally and visually, 10 is a lot like 8.

I just wish I felt in control of my computer now. Ever since upgrading, I feel like I'm a stranger using someone else's computer. I've been using computers since the first IBM PCs came out - I kinda know what I'm doing. Just let me do it

Got my first computer, Speccy with the squashy keys, in 1985 I think, but I still don't understand how it all works!

I can't even turn the television on! Two zapper thingies and neither seem to want to do anything - I want to watch the tennis!!! Whatever happened to on/off switches??

LOL, I had to buy a univeral remote for our nice new flatscreen because someone lost the one that came with the TV. So I can feel your pain.

My first computer I ever owned was an Atari 400. Hooked up to the TV, had 16K ram (upgrade-able to 64K WOOT!) Stored everything on a cassette tape, so even the smallest programs took forever to load/save and they normally didn't save correctly. Oh, those were the days

Mine was a 086 IBM clone, 640kb RAM, green screen, 2 floppy drives and DOS 2.3. (No hard drive.)

--A

We had my father in law's old b/w portable TV hitched up to the speccy. Later went on to the 128? with the hard keys and I had a microdrive and of course a tape recorder. After that, Amstrad.

Got the back room telly working in the end. Hubby came home, turned the front room one off at the plugs for a few minutes and the Virgin box came on so I was able to watch the rest of the tennis in a comfy chair.

I'm attempting to upgrade my computer this month. Bought a motherboard, processor, and memory; will need to get a graphics card sometime soon before the prices start rising (suppliers are raising them, apparently about 10%, because of the weak pound).

So I expect putting this together will totally fail and I'll be forced to buy a fresh copy of Windows instead of moving my old one over. Which means Windows 10, because the only other one you can get now is 8.1. So, I hope Windows 10 is good.

Why wouldn't you be able to move it over?

I'm doing an upgrade soon myself...waiting for my tax rebate which should drop this month.

Going from an i3 to an i7, 8GB RAM to 16GB, and a 1GB graphics card to a 2GB one.

Fallout 4, here I come.

That said, I'm pretty surprised at how well my machine is running The Witcher 3...technically I'm below the minimum requirements (minimum processor is supposed to be i5), but it's running pretty smoothly albeit on sorta medium settings.

That leads me to wonder if Fallout 4 would be the same, since I meet the specs except for the i5 requirement.

Gonna upgrade anyway...been 5 years since I built this machine.

--A

Because I'm switching to a different model MB with a different chipset, and also because my copy of Windows is an OEM one which isn't supposed to move to different hardware.

I've got an option I think might work, which is to buy an OEM product key for Windows 7 for about ~10-20 pounds, and reactivate my install with the new key. But that's essentially just punting the problem down the road to the next time I upgrade.

Hmmm, far as I know, you should be able to do it anyway, but you would probably have to re-activate the Windows. Happened to me in the past when I changed too much hardware. Won't hurt to try anyway.

--A

I had to reinstall windows, but for some reason it just activated without any trouble on the new hardware. So I don't absolutely need to change right now, but I still have to decide before the end of the month whether to take the free upgrade.

Anyone have experience with Office 2016? I'm downloading a copy right now, no idea what it's like. I would've tried to just keep my old 2010 from the other hard drive, but it's easier to just spend #10 for the latest one through my employer's licence deal (anyone with a valid company email can buy a copy of Office for cheap).

Nice solution to the GBP sign issue, Murrin.

I have an Office 365 subscription, which gets me the most recent software by default. Office 2016 seems fine. Nothing too quirky so far. Although I only really use Word and One Note, so take that for what it's worth.