roncli.com blog

If you've at all been keeping up with the news, you've undoubtedly read that Windows 10 is a godsend, a vast improvement over previous versions of Windows, and that you should upgrade to the latest version and you'll have absolutely no regrets.

One thing that Windows 8 had over Windows 10, however, is that it worked.

Don't get me wrong, Microsoft got a lot of things in Windows 10 right. They took the god awful start screen in Windows 8 and managed to blend it with the typical Windows 7 start menu in an appealing way. They added an action center for your notifications. They even made speech recognition a thing with Cortana, which is a pretty decent addition even if I'm not going to use it much.

But there is SO MUCH wrong with Windows 10 right now that I say that casual users should not bother upgrading until they fix the major issues. Keep in mind that I spent much of yesterday upgrading all my drivers and software in an effort to eliminate these issues, to no avail.

Perhaps the biggest issue I have with Windows 10 is items missing in the start menu and from Cortana's search. Sure, Voicemeeter may not be a common application. Skype is. No matter how I install Skype, through the "Get Skype" application they added in Windows 10, or through Chocolatey, Skype simply does not appear on my start menu at all. Even if I find Skype.exe and make a shortcut to it and throw it in c:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs, I still end up without access to it unless I pin it to my taskbar. What the hell, Microsoft? Having items in the start menu has been a basic Windows feature for TWENTY YEARS. You couldn't get that right?

Now, I think this might be due to the fact that Windows 10 hasn't finished indexing my computer (it was about 40% done last night when I went to bed), but still, you shouldn't have to index the start menu. If it's there, let me use it! Ugh.

Another pretty noticeable issue is the fact that sometimes you can't right click on a tile in the taskbar. If you try it, you might get a context menu, or it might do nothing. Annoying when you're trying to close windows. The workaround for me was to hover over the tile to bring up the preview, right click THAT, and close the application that way. Or you can Alt+F4, but I have so much running at any one time that often right clicking the taskbar is simpler.

A huge problem for me is the case of the disappearing USB display. I run a three monitor setup, with two standard 1080p monitors side-by-side and a DoubleSight 1024x600 touchscreen below the main display. It's wonderful when it works, and had no problems in Windows 8.1. And to be fair, it works most of the time in Windows 10... up until the point that I run Crypt of the NecroDancer full screen. And even then the screen will continue to work while the game is running. The moment I alt-tab out of the game, the display freezes up, EXCEPT for the mouse. Then I'll go back into the game and the display will be fine. When I quit the game, though, that's when the display freezes up for good, and is entirely useless.

The worst part about this is that it so far seems to only happen with Crypt of the NecroDancer. Not Descent. Not Portal. Not World of Warcraft. Not other full screen games. It's something Crypt is doing when it's full screen that is killing that display. I thought it might be drivers, but I have the latest Windows 10 drivers for both the DoubleSight display and my AMD card. This is seriously messed up.

The list of annoyances continues:

Occasionally when you hit the Windows key, you can't type to search, and remains this way until you reboot. (Workaround is to use the Win+S combination to search via Cortana, which is the same thing, really).
The location finder is way off. I live in southeast Houston, and it shows my location up around The Woodlands. Within a 14 mile radius, of course. Oh, The Woodlands is 50 miles away.
You have to be an absolute power user to figure out how to get separate images as backgrounds on different monitors and NOT have Windows try to do a slideshow of those images. Basically, highlight the icons you want as your 3 background images and left click Set as Background Image. Then go into c:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Themes and delete the slideshow.ini file. If your images are not on the desired screens, flip the numbers on the filenames in this directory and REBOOT after changing them to see the updates.
The action center will refuse to open sometimes, and behave that way until you reboot. See a theme here?
Some live tiles don't work. The calendar application used to display today's date, now it just display's the application's icon.
PC Meter for my 8GadgetPack gadgets is not being detected by those gadgets, resulting in some of them not displaying information, such as CPU or GPU temperatures.

This is just an example of the beta-ness of Windows 10. Many of these issues would cause the average user so much frustration. Do yourself a favor and stay away for now, unless you are a power user, or have very basic PC needs. Hopefully Microsoft gets on the ball and fixes these soon. Without pushing a broken update.

Labels: Coding, Editorials, Software, Windows

Monday, October 15, 2007

Windows Activation Woes
Posted: 5:11:00 PM 0 comments

Last night I was up fairly late, and towards the end of the night had a lovely melody in my head. Actually, it was more like a concept song in a new style. I was really excited about getting the song down, I even had my keyboard on to play the melody out a bit.

So I log out of my gamer profile and log into my roncli profile. All of a sudden, I'm hit with "Your activation of Windows has expired!"

WTF?

Turns out that I forgot about the motherboard and video card change, and apparently switching profiles triggered Windows's activation mechanism, thinking it was now a pirated copy. One call to Microsoft's activation center fixed it, as I could not activate online. "Product key already in use!"

So after I'm off the phone with Microsoft, I sit down, ready to load up reason with a melody... Wait a second, I had a melody. Where'd it go? What'd I do with it?

ARGH. I had FORGOTTEN the stupid melody because I focused my attention too much on my computer not working. Talk about frustrating.

Labels: Life, Music, Windows

Thursday, June 28, 2007

What to do
Posted: 4:53:00 PM 0 comments

Successor right now is in a state of... well, I'm not sure what you'd call it.

Just recently, I wiped it clean of all the software that was on it, and decided to try to use it as a web server. Well, it's Windows XP Professional, and that didn't go over very well. That means that if I want to use it as a web server, I will need to upgrade it to Windows 2003. $700+. Ouch. I very quickly decided that I won't be doing that any time soon.

I looked into alternatives, but nothing looks good, so Successor currently sits around crunching BOINC, and occasionally is used as a second computer when I'm running a full screen game or something. I honestly have no idea what to do with it right now, so it just sits around, taking up space.

Until I can get up the money to throw Windows 2003 on there - and that is very low priority on the list of things to do... like, last - I guess it'll just sit around whirring away. I never thought I'd see the day where I had too many computers. I'm sure I'll think of something.

Labels: BOINC, Servers, Windows

Friday, March 16, 2007

Windows Stop Menu
Posted: 11:04:00 AM 0 comments

Saw this beauty on my work computer a couple days ago.

Labels: Silliness, Windows

Friday, July 07, 2006

One Week Later...
Posted: 2:07:00 AM 0 comments

Wow. That was annoying.

It took me the better part of the last week to get my system back into a usable condition with all of the software installed again. Some of the many things that went wrong:

- The hard disks have gone from UDMA mode to PIO mode. This means that any disk activity is slow, and probably was the main cause as to why this took so long. No amount of registry hacking or device uninstallation has fixed it.
- My Blackberry won't install the latest drivers from the Windows Update site. It says the drivers have been downloaded but when it goes to install them, it fails with no useful reason as to why. To resolve this, I had to download the Blackberry Desktop Manager from RIM's site.
- Creative's drivers took about 5 attempts to install. I literally spent all day Sunday on this. It was a complete disaster, every time they looked installed, something would cause them to stop functioning. They have been stable for a few days, thankfully.

I had to install more than 100 programs, but I took the opportunity to upgrade some key pieces of software, including a full Adobe suite, the latest MadTracker and Skale Tracker, the latest SoundForge (I had no idea Sony bought SoundForge), and a host of other upgrades.

I'm afraid I'm still going to be spending much of the weekend with Windows trying to get my hard drives back into UDMA mode - or buying new SATA's. Hopefully that won't mean another complete reinstall, I don't think I can take another one.

Labels: Life, Reinstall, Windows

Saturday, July 01, 2006

Reinstallation Fun
Posted: 12:48:00 AM 0 comments

I decided a while back that I was long overdue to reinstall Windows. Thusly, tonight I begin to take the plunge. Why not? A 4-day weekend, so in case anything goes wrong I will have lots of time to fix it.

See you on the flip side.

Labels: Life, Reinstall, Windows