I've been on the "insider preview" for a few weeks now, and I must say that I think Windows 10 is an absolutely amazing OS. Definitely the best Windows I've ever used. Also the best desktop OS I've ever used, but I hope you'll believe me about the "best Windows" even if you can't imagine why a developer would possible want to run something other than $YOUR_FAVOURITE_UNIX.
If Windows 10 is as well-received as I expect it will, this might really impact Microsoft's position on phones as well. A core feature of Windows 10 is an app store that doesn't suck, with apps that can easily be used on devices that don't resemble tablets. Windows 8 really had this wrong, and 10 fixes it. I think the Windows 10 store might actually get used.
I've seen a glimpse of that future with the mobile app of Dutch weather site "Buienradar". They made a new Windows Phone app which totally rocks, to replace an old extremely crappy one. I didn't understand why they invested in an app ecosystem that is so clearly on the way down, until I found the exact same app in the Windows 10 store - just larger and with more info on the same screen. But it's very obviously the same codebase. My guess is they actually wanted to make a Windows desktop app, but adding phone support was such a minor extra investment (because of MS's "Universal app" thing) that they did it, despite the abysmal market size of Windows Phone in the Netherlands.
My experience has been the opposite. To me Windows 10 is the continuation of the 8/8.1 trainwreck, with the ridiculous Metro skins, a broken start menu, the half-assed fragmentation of the UIs into Metro/non-Metro, ham-handed app store/online services integrations, and various new features that do not work. I'll be going back to Windows 7, in which at least the UI works. And really, the only thing keeping me attached to the ecosystem is the PC games.
I liked Metro on Windows 8, despite it's rough edges. Just needed to get used to it, that's all. I could get to any part of the OS in a few key presses. If it's a tile on the desktop itself, arrow keys, enter, done. If not, win-key + type first few letters, arrow keys, enter, done.
I cannot understand how people like the tiny start button and menus and right-clicks and multi-level navigation in the old Windows UI. I used to overcome that by simply having shortcuts to the applications I used most on the desktop. Metro with its large tiles for those same applications was a much better fit for that.
That tiny start buttons and menus are not that tiny, if you have a monitor in front of you. They are tiny only if your real dpi and the dpi that the apps expect do not match. And on the contrary, the controls became huge, wasting ton of space in the Metro/Modern versions.
Metro tiles are OK for simple apps, but you are not going to make CAD or NLE with that. For these apps, you need those tiny controls, ability to cram lot of them into small space and ability to adjust the design to the target intent. Metro tiles won't help you with that.
I love Windows 7, but do you honestly think the Windows 7 start menu is not broken? I believe we just got used to it over time.
In Windows 7, I can either have an unstructured list of "pinned" programs, or I can manually categorize the real ("All programs") start menu.
Option 1 doesn't scale beyond ~15 items (I have 22 pinned programs and it's a mess), and option 2 breaks whenever a program updates itself and puts new links into the top level. Also, option 2 is not an option at all for 99,9% of users, so it's quite obvious why MS wouldn't optimize for that use case.
The single thing that I like the most about Windows 8.1 machines is how I can group programs on the start page. Now that it isn't fullscreen any more with Windows 10, I am pretty much looking forward to it.
My biggest problem with Windows 7 and especially the start menu was that certain folders were first class citizens and other were not. I could never quite figure out how to instruct someone to get to their user folder or understand why downloads were not a library.
Oh yeah, those libraries are a PITA. I disabled them entirely (using some registry hack I guess). It's easy to forget about those little pain points once you have worked around them.
In my experience muscle memory is just as easy to pick up with typing the name of an app than clicking - apps I use all the time I can open by typing their name without thinking about what the name is, apps I don't use all the time I find myself opening the metro start screen and wondering which will happen first, remembering the name to type or spotting it in my tiles.
You're right. Though at least on Windows 7, typing to search apps in the start menu was a miserable experience that takes dozens of seconds to find the application you're looking for. I hope they have improved it in 10.
I had this discussion several times when Windows 8 first came out. As much as I didn't really like the Start Page, it didn't affect me that much as I search for everything. I've been doing that so long that actually using the mouse to find an application (not on the desktop or taskbar) feels awkward.
Can't you just put Steam in the equivalent of the startup folder?
I've not used Win10 but all I do with Win7 is act as a bootloader for Steam. I don't really anticipate ever doing anything else with it, either. I assume there is something analogous to the old startup folder.
I mostly seem to spend my time running modded minecraft (FTB) on linux anyway.
It'll start as "better on DirectX 12," there'll be a Crysisesque "DirectX 12 only" game that is the prettiest thing anyone has ever seen, everyone will move and the holdouts can keep playing old games off Steam and GOG if they don't like it.
That was the plan with DX10 and we have seen, how that one went.
The thing is, the majority of gamers will update based on the available cash, and so gamedevs will be targeting the expected hw base at the time of release.
So it really depends, whether you except the gamers to go on spending spree (nvidia and intel would certainly love that), or not.
Except gamers will upgrade because of the performance implications of the DirectX 12 API. With an incentive like that, no one will care about the few holdouts that refuse to upgrade because they're uncomfortable with a few UI changes that don't affect what you can actually get done.
You mean like when Microsoft tried to force adoption of Windows Vista by not bringing DirectX 10 to XP, and in response developers stuck with DirectX 9 for years?
A huge portion of the gaming market (China and large parts of Asia) is still using Windows XP. D3D9 renderers aren't going anywhere.
No, DX9 renderers aren't going anywhere, but they're being abstracted away and all the shiny new code is being written for DX11 and DX12. So all of the fancy high end features will be on newer systems only, with the others having less and less support. I know because this is what I'm doing at work at this time.
I would add to that list that it is a mixed bag of various versions of UI. When you go to the control panel you are welcomed by some big grey square. In sub menus you will find some windows 7 style white control panels. And if you keep digging deeper the old grey non-resizable dialog box are never far.
The only consistency with the other versions of windows is that the hierarchy in the settings is all changed again to make sure it will take everyone time to find its way.
One thing I noticed from the tech preview I tried the other month was that whilst the press excitedly noticed new "settings" apps in parallel with the control panel and proudly announced new technologies, there is still decades of old cruft lying around. I know they have much work to do but it still feels like an operating system of many parts, all glued together.
Some issues I noticed in the preview I tried:
1. The underlying system hasn't changed (still life in COM land with the joys/distresses of the registry and cryptic UUID keys where half of the configuration is secretly stored)
2. The icons in MMC don't match anything else on the system (even the icons in Control Panel are not consistent - are they flat or should they have depth? Should they have no perspective or should they be set at a jaunty angle?)
3. Even the icons in Explorer don't match each other (my user directory doesn't match any of the icons beneath it)
4. The new Settings window is not resizable even though it is 50% white space
5. Control Panel is still there despite this new Settings window (duplication!)
6. Explorer permits you to show menus but they're actually just the tabs on a frustrating ribbon bar
7. Notebook theme issues that were introduced in Windows XP still persist (Explorer's Folder Options window has a white tab and border for the General page but the General page itself is grey; when you switch to the View and Search pages in this very same notebook those pages are white without a hint of grey; this General page is written without knowledge of theming..? plus none of the controls line up!)
8. There is still no consistent Open Dialog (Notepad uses a different Open dialog to MMC, for example; the MMC one is from about 1995, I was surprised there wasn't a briefcase on it!)
9. There appears to be no HIG for menu placement in relation to toolbars (is the menu ABOVE the toolbar or below it?; control panel menu is below the toolbar, Explorer is above, Settings app doesn't even have one), should true menubars be allowed (like in Notepad) or should they just be placeholders for ribbons (like in Explorer)?
It's all just a big ball of different GUI styles and fashions from 25+ years of fashions, windowing toolkits (yes, you can find the MFC40 and 42 DLLs in the Windows directories in this, and yes .NET is there too, but the ancient Windows API will still work fine too, plus Win32!), user-interface guidelines from different decades and generally a mess.
I will wait to see how people rate it before installing.
EDIT: I notice downvotes but no responses?? I thought my points were valid - the mishmash of libraries from decades and decades with artwork from those decades makes for a convoluted jumbled experience. You wouldn't feel comfortable in a car that had a klaxon for the horn, a handbrake outside and a gear system with no synchromesh but that sported a brand new LCD illuminated dashboard - it would feel a mishmash and a mess. This is precisely what this feels like, and something I thought they would like to jettison or at least tidy up.
Backwards compatibility is a STRONG point of windows, not a drawback.
Remember that this is something used by business users. Technologies like COM are without equal in the field (native automation of every major software for example).
The only negative points you mention are icons and the pure existence of things you obviously don't and can't use. It's all in all a very silly paragraph you wrote.
Backwards compatibility is a STRONG point of windows, but the GP is right that it doesn't make for a nice, consistent user experience.
The file picker is one of the worst offenders, as the applications that you use the most have a tendency to use the worst version available, and it's impossible to pass your settings from one version of the dialog to others. There are versions of the folder picker that don't even let you paste a path copied from your current open Explorer window.
(Why is it that, in the 21st century, NONE of the major desktop vendors has thought of putting the list of currently open folders in the Save dialog window? Not the "recent" folders, not the "frequent" folders, but the actual folders I'm working with, RIGHT NOW?)
I understand backwards compatibility being a benefit, but why keep introducing new frameworks and ways of doing things if the old ones never get truly deprecated or cleaned up? Why highlight all the wonderful new Metro features and Universal apps if Win32/AFX/MFC/COM/COM+/DCOM/.NET/.NET not compatible with that other .NET/Silverlight/Metro never gets tidied up or moved on? It just leads to more bloat.
They've made a clean break with IE, why not do the same with Windows APIs one day? I like being able to run my ancient Win32 app and Windows API app as much as the next guy but there comes a point when they should tidy up, surely? Else why move to the new frameworks and APIs if I can still just write something in the ancient frameworks, replete with security issues?? Why bother moving to .Net?
If you love COM as much as I don't, try writing an MMC plugin in the C++ MMC API 2.0 (not the .net 3.0) one and see how well you get on with the joy of undecipherable COM messages and debugging.
I never said it was easy. It's enterprise features that HAVE to have a long lifetime.
But COM is simple interface dispatching (it is actually much easier to implement COM in C/C++ because you have actual control over the interfaces and marshaling) in the end with syntax that is a bit dated i agree. It is not rocket science by far...
I'll jump in. I understand why the person you're replying to doesn't want to go into it, because the things that count seem small. The task manager, carried over from Win 8, is great. They took the window management updates in Windows 8 to the next level - now I can quickly snap not just left and right, but I can quickly snap to quadrants, which, on vertical monitors, is so minor but so helpful. There were some file management tricks it did that I can't specifically recall, but I thought 'Oh, that's new.'
I don't think there are any updates to the task bar from Windows 8, but the Windows 8 task bar is definitely my window manager of preference. I run uBar on my MBP, but on Win 8, being able to quickly preview windows in a group, close individual windows, drag up to create a new window... I miss that at work.
They've made a lot of progress updating the icons. There's still crufty Win95 ones in there if you dig deep enough, but the overall look is as unified as it's ever been.
I'm still astonished at how bad fullscreen and multi-display support is on OS X, compared to Windows. I don't know that 10 brings anything new to the table there compared to 8, but 8 greatly simplified things like hooking up a projector, or setting a screen to mirror. In fact, a lot of the things I really like about modern Windows involve WinKey shortcuts - Win+P in this particular case.
I just noticed that I can't have my network preferences open at the same time as my display preferences in OS X. Not a showstopper obviously, just really weird to me. Wonders never cease...
Nichey point: They've made notable improvements to their MIDI stack.
Prefer not. Most of it is a mix of taste (I like touch) and "stuff I'm used to" (I'm used to Windows). Whenever people discuss OS features on HN it becomes some sort of flamewarish "your taste sucks" fets. It's like vim vs emacs vs IntelliJ.
I would only deploy and run my code in Linux, but with VirtualBox I get all the benefits of Windows for applications (my favorite editor, mail client, Excel, mp3 player, IM client, a hundred other things) and a local Linux VM that works the same as my production environment. It's the best of both worlds. And no compromises like Cygwin (ugh) or the frustrating almost-but-not-quite Unix nature of OSX.
Woa, mail client. I've always hated the lack of good mail clients on Windows, may I ask which client you think is so good that you're willing to start VirtualBox for it? Thanks :-)
I meant I use VirtualBox only for my development environment and everything else is on the host OS.
Honestly nothing has been better than Outlook if the mail is hosted on an Exchange server. These days I use Outlook 2013 with an Outlook365 backend (their hosted service, it's what my employer uses, outside of my control) and it's not great but I don't like web-based clients and I don't know of a better desktop client.
Note that the upgrade will remove your Windows built-in DVD player. The right to play DVDs must be paid for every computer. You paid it when you bought the Windows 7 or 8 that you'll maybe upgrade to 10. Now the upgrade to Windows 10 takes that feature away from you.
They apparently (the twitter message isn't actually the company statement) plan to return it "sometime in the future" and "if it might be free or if it will cost" is TBA:
The Media Player capabilities, if you have them in your Windows edition, will be for ever deleted. Just so.
Moreover, note that the upgrade can reduce the functionality of your notebook: Microsoft made the deal with the hardware producers about integrating hidden partitions to allow the recovery from the hard disk, but the upgrade process will just make sure that the Windows runs, not that your recovery from the hard disk functionality, managed by each hardware vendor independently (based on the recommendations from Microsoft) would be preserved.
I don't use the recovery mechanism, but I do use backup. When the recovery partitions aren't right, the built in backup (which was kept from Windows 7) doesn't work on Windows 8.1.
The same story happened with the transition from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 (I have such a notebook).
Anybody knows if the "Windows 7" style full disk backup survived in Windows 10?
"For a limited time (the “eligible period”), on systems upgraded to Windows 10 from one of these older versions of Windows (a “qualified system”), a DVD playback app (“windows DVD player”) will be installed."
And I've actually paid for the Media Pack upgrade. It goes away now for sure:
Me too. I'm constantly surprised by the amount of Stockholm Syndrome reminding behavior in the tech world. I'm not sure if this behavior is more common in this world or I see it more because that's the bubble I'm living in. Watching people bending backwards to rationalize their irrational decisions never ceases to confuse me.
> (...) any decision other than what you would have made is "irrational."
Of course! How would rationality be independent of one's values? When I'm choosing, I choose what I choose because I think the other options are, even if very slightly, worse than the one I'm choosing. If I know the full context, options and the decision made from another individual and that decision isn't the one I would make, I would call it irrational and that would be my opinion. That situation could mean that we don't share the same values/beliefs or have different information.
My curiosity stated in my comment was genuine as one would expect higher information equality and similar values/beliefs among the people in the same community compared to a random set of people. However, my experience is different. Even when new information becomes available, I see people bending their values to keep their previous decisions "rational" and interestingly this, if you ask me, is more common in the tech world.
> (...) jerks like you (...)
I think that was uncalled for, but then, I guess you have strong beliefs in this area. Have a nice day.
I don't think it's uncalled for that someone who would judge others and call them "irrational" for something like their smartphone choice be called out as a jerk.
I didn't call anyone being irrational and definitely didn't have anyone's smartphone decision in my mind (I had, instead, people arguing for their favorite programming language in mind, to be honest). Also, I think you are more judging than I am.
At this point, I can't take what you are saying as anything more than random attacks, sorry.
Except that's exactly what we were talking about here: Saying that people are "irrational" for not buying the same thing the poster did, in this case, Apple products. And I believe that if you care that much about what other people are using to the point where you would have to question their rationality, then you're a class-A jerk.
> The amount straw grasping I've seen when people try to justify their purchases leaves me unable to tell anymore
The Mac mention in the grand-(...)-parent is just an example there. Surprise: I own a Mac.
> Except that's exactly what we were talking about here: Saying that people are "irrational" for not buying the same thing the poster did, in this case, Apple products.
It seems to me that you are the only one talking about people being irrational or not. People can't be irrational. Decisions can and only with different knowledge and/or values.
> I believe that if you care that much about what other people are using to the point where you would have to question their rationality, then you're a class-A jerk.
Class-A attack towards a straw man! :) Your potential issues with a stereotype have nothing to do with what I said. Good luck in your crusade, though.
But not the DVD playback, which has to be licensed additionally. Being the person who also legally bought the DVDs (all of them are DRMd nowadays) it really hurts:
To which I already replied in the same thread - use VLC which decodes CSS on the fly, unless you live in a country that doesn't believe in your freedom to play legally purchased content and prohibits doing that(United States of America).
Of course, it would be nice if Windows 10 just included that and saved everyone the trouble.
Why can't I just play my media (which I paid for) on my hardware (which I paid for) in "normal" software (which... I thought I paid for). Instead I have to have the Xbox brand shoved in my face at every opportunity?
I don't find it very different from having the "Windows" brand shoved in my face with Windows Media Player, Windows Media Center, Windows Internet Explorer (formerly) etc. or the "Microsoft" brand shoved in my face with Microsoft Office, Microsoft Internet Explorer (formerly)... the OS is made by Microsoft, I expect to see mentions to Microsoft's properties and trademarks.
It would be like that if you were running these apps on an Xbox. But when you are running a PC, it doesn't make sense to brand them with Xbox branding unless they are services specifically related to the Xbox (e.g., Xbox Live account management or something). Otherwise it sounds like a weak attempt at cross-branding.
> Instead I have to have the Xbox brand shoved in my face at every opportunity?
I know this isn't your point, but you might be happy to learn that Xbox Music and Xbox Video have been renamed in Windows 10 to "Groove Music" and "Video", respectively. According to Microsoft, most users thought "I don't have an Xbox, why would I want to use Xbox Music?" — so they rebranded those apps.
Nobody is forcing you to upgrade. If you bought Windows 7 and have it on disc you can keep using it, even without installing any updates, ever! Then you can continue enjoying IE7, Windows Media Player, Windows Media Centre - all of which you paid for. But if you want to upgrade to a new version which doesn't have those "features" - then it's your choice. It's not mandatory, nobody is shoving anything in your face.
VLC plays DVDs just fine for free, by decoding CSS on the fly. One might argue that that "The right to play DVDs must be paid for every computer" but I have never signed such agreement with anyone, ever. If I legally bought a DVD then I can legally watch it - maybe in US people would argue that decryption of a legally bought DVD is "hacking" but fortunately I don't live in that beautiful country.
> I have never signed such agreement with anyone, ever
Until Windows 8, Microsoft did this for you behind the scenes. From Windows 8 onwards, Microsoft stopped doing it; you could either pay them to do it again, or OEMs would do it for you.
With 10, Microsoft just won't do it. I expect OEMs will still do it on new devices, but upgrades are anybody's guess.
For a limited time (the “eligible period”), on systems upgraded to Windows 10 from one of these older versions of Windows (a “qualified system”), a DVD playback app (“windows DVD player”) will be installed.
They aren't stealing anything from you, and they're not causing it to be "for ever deleted."
I just checked with my Windows 7 Ultimate machine I upgraded this morning and sure enough, I have a Windows DVD Player there. Like many users, I have no DVD drive and no DVDs, so I can't confirm it works.
Also, Windows 8 didn't come with a DVD license, you had to buy it separately as part of the "Pro Pack" or "Media Center Pack." The base editions of Windows 7 (below Home Premium) also didn't include one.
Honest question - who cares? Someone actually used the built-in media player? Step 1 for me on any new desktop/workstation install (regardless of OS) is to install VLC.
I have to believe the number of people who actually use that can be counted in the tenths of a percent of their user base.
Among people I know, I can think of a few who rent DVDs from Redbox and watch them on their laptops (we're out in the country, so the internet isn't fast enough for streaming video). They're not technically adept enough to know that they would need something like VLC after this update.
I would care if tbe Xbox one, which will soon be on Windows 10, stopped playing DVDs. But I don't think this would be the case, there is probably a specific player for it.
You can use VLC. After your comment, I wasn't sure why that was the case. Apparently:
> Neither French law nor European conventions recognize software as patentable (see French section below). Therefore, software patents licenses do not apply on VideoLAN software.
Well, there are 2 legal parts that apply here:
- DRM
- software patents.
Software patents for DVDs are almost all over (it's a 20 year old technology). And in Europe, we don't have valid software patents.
On the DRM part, libdvdcss is not DeCSS, it's either finding the right key or brute-forcing to find the right key. In order to play a DVD, you need to "open" the DRM, else you cannot have playback.
In the case of VLC+libdvdcss-bundle, it's usually fine in (sane) juridictions because it's a player, not violating the copyrights holders. On some other, it's illegal.
> And in Europe, we don't have valid software patents.
That is categorically untrue, and you should stop telling people that. In Europe, software is not patent-eligible "as such", but it is if it solves a technical problem.
The only thing that eliminates is "business method" patents, which are just a subset of what people generally refer to as "software patents".
The underlying motivation of the encryption on DVD's goes beyond preventing piracy. It's about making sure you cannot skip past the ads at the start of the movie. They needed a mechanism to require all DVD players to respect the flags on a DVD that say "this cannot be skipped", and did that by pushing it into the 1996 WIPO treaty that you must have anti-circumvention laws that prohibit people from breaking the encryption on copyrighted materials without the permission of the rights holder. Only licensed players are decrypting with permission. VLC is not a licensed player, so VLC often runs afoul of such laws.
Just because the patents expire doesn't make the anti-circumvention laws go away. Those laws only stop applying once the copyright on the DVD expires, in a century or so.
Well, those anti-circumvention laws, for example in Germany, only apply in some cases. For example, as soon as software is included on the CD, too, breaking the DRM becomes legal.
But see also this (on the same page) if you're using VLC in the US:
"libdvdcss
libdvdcss is a library that can find and guess keys from a DVD in order to decrypt it.
This method is authorized by a French law decision CE 10e et 9e soussect., 16 juillet 2008, n° 301843 on interoperability.
NB: In the USA, you should check out the US Copyright Office decision that allows circumvention in some cases."
That is actually illegal in Finland because it's illegal to circumvent the copy protection. Technically you need a licensed player. A few people have turned themselves in for watching a DVD on Linux and they received a token fine.
It's hard to find working links for old stuff (this was in ~2007), but...
The law made "organized discussion" about breaking copy protection illegal so they also created a website with the title "organized discussion" and displayed code for breaking the protection and someone also paid 5 cents for it after which they turned themselves in :)
Apparently the lower courts acquitted them but that was reversed and the supreme court didn't take the case. So the end result is that it's illegal but they didn't receive any penalties. Apparently the European court of human rights didn't accept the case either.
It's not about what "can" be done, you can also install the pirated software too, the thing is, by buying legally Windows 7 or Windows 8 Media Pack or Ultimate I have really paid the DVD playback functionality to Microsoft as well as the other features I've mentioned.
Also read about the legality aspects of the Microsoft's DVD solutions up to now and of the open-source DVD players:
Yes but you do not have to upgrade to Windows 10 and they made it pretty clear they removed these softwares (it warned me when they proposed the update). This is unfortunate but I don't think Microsoft has been evil here.
Everyone has to stop using that as an excuse. It doesn't even make sense & it's myopic. Obsolescence is built into Windows. If you want to continue being safe using Windows you NEED to upgrade. You can choose not to upgrade, but it's at your detriment.
If it was 2020 you might have a point, since that's when they'll end-of-life Windows 7. But it is 2015, you can use Windows 7 with Media Center and your DVD codec for the next five years.
Honestly I get the strong sense we wouldn't even be having this discussion if Windows 10 was NOT free i.e. if it costs $100. Since then people would simply not feel compelled to upgrade, instead it is free for a limited period, so people feel compelled and are now complaining about being "forced" to.
The reality is you can use Windows 7 until 2020. Just go ahead and do that then.
Sure it is a choice. You absolutely need the DVD player...don't upgrade now. Maybe by the time you need it, the functionality will be restored. Regardless, it is a choice you can make. Don't be entitled.
The pricing is exactly the same, nor was the rationale ever to provide an edition for people who don't need a DVD player. You can still download and install those components freely after installing the OS.
The rationale for it was an anti-competition lawsuit brought by the EU.
The pricing may be the same, you may even be able to download the components, but the difference exists and there is choice to select something without.
They may have been forced to do it, but you are paying for a product WITH media player, same price or not.
It's not only that Microsoft removes the features, they also don't tell you clearly they'll remove them but they put almost "malware-like" request on your system for which you already paid to them to "just upgrade it's safe."
Note that the upgrade will remove your Windows built-in DVD player.
Windows 8.1 had no built in DVD player. Nor did Windows 7 Starter or Basic. Further, I suspect it's a feature that the vast majority of people have never used, exactly why Microsoft decided that they wouldn't subsidize the licensing for no reason. This is a very 2002 discussion.
Not that your point isn't valid -- at least for those users who ever actually tried playing a video DVD, and who had a supporting version of Windows -- it's just pretty odd that such a comment sits at the very top of an enormous technology event.
The Tesla doesn't come with a holder for my buggy whip.
As a user I have issues with Windows removing a built-in DVD player. I'm one of those dinosaurs who still watches his DVDs from his laptop. It was news to me and I appreciate that it was at the top.
But that's just the thing. They didn't remove it. I have literally never been able to play DVDs in Windows without installing third party codecs or programs.
> it's just pretty odd that such a comment sits at the very top of an enormous technology event.
What you call "an enormous technology event" I call a disaster, showing perfect "we don't care for the current users" attitude, even after the public demonstrated what it thinks about the "improvements" in Windows 8. The commenters here rightly point that the returned Start menu is even worse than it was during the tech preview. And I have actually paid for my copies of Ultimate and Pro with Media Center versions and I actually need the features I note are now quietly removed. It's your right that you don't need them, but I do need them and the people who consider installing 10 should know about it too.
Don't upgrade. You paid $0 for Windows 10, had absolutely no expectations about it when you apparently bought Windows 7, and now it's a "disaster" because an unused feature was openly and clearly removed. Give me a break.
This sort of "take a shit on everything" attitude is one of the worst facets of HN, and your comments in particular exemplify them. Don't upgrade. Move on.
VLC, in my experience, plays 90%+ of DVDs perfectly (actually better, since now everything is skippable and you get significantly more rendering options than any other player).
The few DVDs which malfunction are typically published by Disney in the last few years and contain DRM specifically designed to break unlicensed players. VLC have been very active in fixing these issues, and have in many cases.
But if people plan on using VLC just be aware that the rare DVD won't work well or at all. Still the best DVD playing software I've used, including paid software.
Really though, he does seem like a marketing puppet...
Because I question the importance of DVD playing ability relative to an enormous, free release? Give me a break.
I suppose this mean that you and acqq must work for Apple or Google or some other competitor that is trying to undermine Microsoft. By your logic, that is just as, if not more, rational.
Yep, Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Back up and Restore (Windows 7)
Exact same old craptastic System Image backup stuff. Still can't only backup my C drive, got to include my TB's of bulk data on non-system drives too, grr.
The target drive on Windows 7 and 8 has to be at least the size of the previous one, which includes even the partitions which aren't copied. It seems nothing changed on 10 regarding that.
No, like I said, it's exactly the same. If it decides it's a system drive, you can't unselect it, and it's very easy to make something a "system drive" when it's really entirely non-critical (a drive with some games on it, for example).
I at least found the one tiny non-critical service I had installed from my downloads drive - a PS3 controller driver. Ironically having removed that, the drive in question is now impossible to include in a backup. WTF.
It's all very frustrating when you just want to make an image of a single drive.
I work on the Start menu. It's just a UWP XAML app with Models and ViewModels written in C++/Cx, as are most of the new Shell features and built-in apps--although some of the newer ones, like Maps and Xbox, are in XAML/C#/.Net Native. Even the UI frame of Edge is in XAML, and the new Office UWP apps are too. I encourage everyone here to give UWP apps a shot; we dogfooded the dev platform to ensure it was stable and fast, and XAML really is a pleasure to use. It's come a long way since WPF.
I'd be curious as to your reaction to Ars Technica's review, in which they complained about what they perceived as a "debilitating" Start Menu issue: "This database is (inexplicably) maintained by a system service running as the super-privileged SYSTEM identity. And at the time of writing, this database has the oh-so convenient feature of being limited to around 500 entries. [...] The All apps view didn't show all my programs. This would be tolerable if that's all that happened [...] Except that searching breaks, too. For search-to-start apps, Windows appears to use the same database. [...] if you reduce the number of apps to below 500 or so, it doesn't fix anything. There's no easy way to make it re-read all the short cuts."
I have observed the same issue over the past few months. It's a dealbreaker of a problem: instead of running the application you asked for, more often than not you are directed to the application's website.
I've been able to avoid this problem by replacing the start menu with Classic Start Menu, but that comes with its own set of issues (lag, funky focus interactions, and inability to launch some metro apps). So far, this is the only issue that has me thinking about downgrading.
I'm a Microsoft fan and I love Windows, but this is the worst Windows yet in my opinion because they removed features and useful screens just to replace them with bland UWP style screens that don't have half as much functionality.
- Start menu keyboard acceleration is poor. I used to be able to hit the Windows key and then just hit ENTER to run the first app on the Start screen. Now, you have to hit tab or use an arrow key before you can do anything.
- The Start screen/menu/whatever doesn't let you operate in bulk anymore. WTF? Now I have to click three times as much to disable live tiles for a bunch of apps.
- Why can I not middle-click task-bar items to close the app yet? This seems like an obvious feature since that's how you close tabs on a tabbed window. 7+ Taskbar Tweaker fixed this glaring omission in Windows 8, but it's not on 10 yet. (I don't combine taskbar items. I know you can click the preview window after waiting a second for it to show up, but that's too slow.)
- They removed titlebar colors from all Windows so now you can't even tell which window is active or where the titlebar can be dragged. (This is an anti-pattern obviously copied from OS X, but the reason that I don't use OS X is because I don't like most of Apple's design decisions either.)
- I can't stand all of the thick borders and focus lines in the Metro/UWP style apps. At least in Windows 8, I could avoid them most of the time but there are even more of these screens in Windows 10. Win32 apps are so much better looking than this.
In short, I'm uninstalling this and going back to Windows 8.1 Pro, which I actually liked because it was easy to avoid Metro.
>Why can I not middle-click task-bar items to close the app yet? This seems like an obvious feature since that's how you close tabs on a tabbed window.
Because middle-click on taskbar button opens new window/instance of application.
That is strange. It works for me both with conventional (just checked FireFox 39, Opera 12, Visual Studio 2015, Notepad) and WinRT (Calculator) applications.
It turns out that I had all Settings or Control Panel type windows open when I tried that last time. Those windows don't have a new-window function.
So, I think if we need a reason to change the functionality of middle-click on a taskbar-item, that's it. Every window should have a close-window function and there would be no confusion over what middle-click means.
(Then again, I guess the designer was probably trying to protect non-power users when they decided that. A close-window function is obviously a destructive act. But power-users are such a powerful group, so I think they need to cater to use a bit more by giving us the gosh-darn options that we want!)
EDIT: Also, I take it back. I'll keep it on this machine for now and see what happens...
Considering Windows 10's new development methodology, you guys can continue to update the Start Menu. So I have two questions/concerns:
- Do you have a strategy to allow users to modify the Start Menu directly (e.g. akin to a bookmark manager tool). As far as I can tell right click no longer works, so renaming a folder, creating a folder, moving icons, or similar is impossible. The only way to accomplish this now is you just need to know where the Start Menu's content is located on disk and go do it using File Explorer. Also the Startup folder is hidden.
- Why when I hit "All Apps" does it only use up 1/3 of the space for the app list? Why not have it expand out to a multi-column widget? Being able to see my pinned apps after I hit "All Apps" isn't useful.
1. Stay tuned. We've received a lot of feedback on that. We do look at the Windows Feedback app reports; it's all automated, so once something gets upvoted enough it gets routed to the feature team.
2. I'm personally working on all apps list improvements. I don't know if I can share details yet until we push stuff out to Insiders.
Thanks for the info. It is welcome to hear that the Start Menu will continue to evolve based on user feedback. Windows 10 is certainly launching in a strong place regardless.
I'm glad to see that Microsoft is no longer recommending one toolkit to third-party developers (WPF, WinRT) while using another one for Windows itself (DirectUI). With everyone using the same toolkit now, we should expect to see more consistency, especially in areas like accessibility that don't get as much attention.
Edit: I wonder how long it will be until DirectUI is completely gone from the shell, or if that will ever happen.
Russian version shipped with the word "Создать" (literally "Create") as the translation for the "New" mark in the list of all applications, despite many heavily upvoted posts in the feedback app.
Triage being the keyword, right? There is no promise it will be implemented just because users want it, or am I wrong and triage means something else for you?
Localization is handled by dedicated teams. People are constantly combing through the bug tracker and we have internal tools that assist in making sure bugs get routed to the right owners.
I did, and while UWP seems still a bit immature it sure is nice. Unfortunately I have a couple of existing and pretty huge WPF apps and it does not seem you can 'port' that to UWP in some way (except like rewriting all UI code - or am I missing something?) so I don't think I'm gonna switch anytime soon and I'm probably not alone?
Yea unfortunately the new XAML isn't 100% compatible with the old XAML. Things like DataTriggers no longer exist; everything is Visual State Manager. On the plus side, though, UWP XAML perf is significantly better than WPF XAML.
WPF is still supported however, and recently got improvements in .Net 4.6. There are plans to allow WPF apps (and other Win32-based apps) to be published on the Windows Store, so you might not have to worry about porting, as long as you're happy just targeting PC users.
"Universal Windows Platform". Lets you target every Windows 10 device with a single app, from Raspberry Pi 2 to phone to PC's to Xbox One.
Apps are written in C++/C#/VB with XAML markup or JavaScript/HTML/CSS. Also FYI, it takes a minimal amount of work to repackage an existing web app as a UWP.
Why stick with XML? Why not use HTML for UI frames?
The startmenu could have a more "responsive design", allowing one to resize it any size would be easy (not just a few predefined sizes that are supported in Win10). HTML would suite itself for the UI of Edge too, similar to Chrome, Firefox (Android), FirefoxOS, WebOS.
XAML is far easier for app layout than HTML/CSS. It's very easy to do responsive design. We do have a full screen layout for those that want it, and it's what you get in Tablet Mode.
I meant resizing the startmenu with the mouse by grabbing the border and moving the mouse.
It's not that kind of "responsive design" we know from HTML. The startmenu only snaps to at least three sizes (vertical) and doing so with little UX feedback animation. It could be done better even with XAML (and it would be trivial with CSS3), but it was probably a design choice - it's something for Raymond Chen to write about in ten years.
(And changing back from tablet-mode startmenu to desktop-mode startmenu is a bit hidden in the icon next to the clock and takes some time to locate the setting.)
XAML is much better at solving the UI issue on the desktop. Notably, it allows you to use binding logic to ensure your data model for your application doesn't carry all the weight of the UI logic (such as coloring, resizing, en/dis-abling controls, and etc). So, your XAML contains all the logic that deals with UI and your data model (view-model) contains all the values to be displayed (and possibly some of the business logic tied to those values).
Good! We definitely need a new UI framework that will be abandoned in a few years. Why can't MS improve one of the existing ones like WPF or WinRT (what happened to that anyway?)?
Sounds like you’re working in the belly of the beast. If you don't mind me asking what's up with the 'tile' concept that's pasted all over windows UI. I get the fact it makes a cool looking demo, but the usability is terrible.
Can you expand on why you say the usability is terrible? I understand people didn't like the Win8 start menu, since it was only accessible in full screen and would hide your desktop entirely, however I never heard any one give a reason why they would think tiles in general are terrible.
I personally love the concept. I spent some time on Windows Phone too and the live tiles were the best thing about the OS. Also, you can unpin all of them on windows 10 and resize the start menu to only keep the app list (but I have no idea would anyone would do that).
> I understand people didn't like the Win8 start menu, since it was only accessible in full screen and would hide your desktop entirely, however I never heard any one give a reason why they would think tiles in general are terrible.
Tiles increase the space taken up by each item, which increases the likelihood of needing to scroll or page menu items, which is okay UX on mobile (though moreso on phones than tablets, IMO), but pretty bad on desktop (extra bad if it is side scrolling.)
OTOH, Tiles are a great UX for quick at-a-glance access to information and access to frequently used apps; sort of a dashboard interface. Its actually not a bad thing to have such a configurable dashboard, it just serves a completely different need than the pre-Win8 Start Menu, and doesn't make a good substitute for it. There's probably a good UX design possible for providing desktop and dashboard interfaces on the same device, I just don't think Microsoft has nailed that yet.
They take up a lot more screen space. Netflix is a clear example of this problem, sure showing pictures is nice, but scrolling 3 pages to the right just to look at a list is annoying.
The 'real' advantage is displaying status information, but most applications like calculator / Photoshop / Skyrim don't have status information. Further many things like weather might seem like the current status are useful, but knowing the current temperature outside or a what the stock price was 15 minutes ago is generally fairly useless and wastes screen space.
Consider, the screen shots showing the current user's name. Unless I forgot my name I can't think why displaying it is helpful.
PS: Don't get me wrong having a sperate 'tile' menue that's differnt from the start menue like a personal home page might be useful. But, I suspect it would rarely be opened by most people.
So make them smaller, or remove the tiles you don't use often. Did they remove those options in 10?
>but most applications like calculator / Photoshop / Skyrim don't have status information.
So don't put them on your start page
>scrolling 3 pages to the right just to look at a list is annoying.
From what I've read, this isn't the intended use case. The idea is to set up the start page like, as you put it, a personal home page. That's what it's for. The all apps screen is the one with everything on it (extant 512 app limit bug notwithstanding).
>current temperature outside or a what the stock price was 15 minutes ago is generally fairly useless and wastes screen space.
>Unless I forgot my name I can't think why displaying it is helpful.
In any case it's no worse that the old start menus that did exactly the same thing.
Between icons on the desktop, pinned programs on the taskbar, pinned programs on the start page, the all programs page, and typing to search all programs when on the start page, you'd think everyone would be able to work out a balance that fits their usage pattern.
So make them ... Forcing me to curate a list is a usability failure. I can pin things just fine, what I need is a reasonable default to find programs I have not used in 6 months.
So don't put them on your start page. The point is fast access, anything getting in the way of that is a huge failure.
isn't the intended use case. Several MS videos show people scrolling though tiles on their phone so it is expected behavior. Even though paging allows for much faster access to large lists.
I've found a lot of people are using "the usability is terrible" to mean, "It's different and I don't like it." Do you have an empirical evidence to suggest the usability being good or bad, or better or worse than before?
Looking at the deprecated features that won't make it to Windows 10 I see:
> Solitaire, Minesweeper, and Hearts Games that come pre-installed on Windows 7 will be removed as part of installing the Windows 10 upgrade. Microsoft has released our version of Solitaire and Minesweeper called the “Microsoft Solitaire Collection” and “Microsoft Minesweeper.”
Does anyone else find it kind of sad that they killed off the old solitaire and minesweeper games? Part of what made Windows great was its incredible focus on backwards compatibility and it was always fun to load up solitaire, minesweeper, etc. in all their classic win 32 glory just like they ran in Windows 95.
The new games are weird microtransaction/subscription-based things that I'm sure marketing folks are extremely proud of but seem to have killed a bit of the soul of Windows. If nothing else the old games should have stayed in to show people that yes it's still your old Windows and apps written years ago will mostly just work.
I really don't care about this, why should we expect MS to support their 20 years old software? Back in '95 internet was not that common so it was nice to have such time wasters built into the OS.
On the other hand, including Minecraft would be a really interesting decision.
Solitaire and Minesweeper were actually there to help users get used to using a mouse (Minesweeper was about click and Solitaire was about drag-and-drop). They became dedicated time-wasters later, but they did actually serve a purpose at one time.
Because for years Microsoft built up a reputation for supporting old software and old APIs. Read Raymond Chen's Old New Thing blog for some anecdotes about the amazing lengths they would go internally to keep old software working. Like with the classic game Sim City they realized its code was buggy and using uninitialized memory, so the Windows team wrote a special case to detect when Sim City runs and emulate an older compatible memory allocator. It's not really clear if MS today cares about supporting software like they used to.
I recently got a Windows Phone and installed the 10 preview - I was pretty amazed to see ads and "powerups" in Minesweeper! It is indeed sad that they've gone and ruined it.
They would have been in competition with NES, Master System, SNES, and Genesis games for that record. After that, Minesweeper and Solitaire probably don't come close.
I just noticed that the old EXEs -- sol.exe and winmine.exe -- are not bundled with Windows 7 (Win7 has Solitaire.exe and MineSweeper.exe). I wonder if copying the EXEs over to Win10 will work.
I don't know about just copying the executable, but I just copied the entire folder that contains MineSweeper.dll, Minesweeper.exe, and an XML license file over to a VM and was able to run the game from there. The folder is located under C:\Windows\winsxs\ - Just search for the exe and you'll find it.
Yeah. I like it better than the "old" Solitaire, but it can make my tablet crawl (is a Yoga2 Pro core i7). Turning off thermal management in the bios seems to have fixed a lot of the weird speed related issues I got in Win8/10 though.
Anyone here know much about Windows licensing? This seems like a good opportunity to ask.
I never run Windows on bare metal. I only run Windows on virtual machines on my Mac desktop and Mac laptop; only for personal use; and only on the rare occasion when I need to run the odd Windows-only application.
I would like to go legit this time around, but it's nigh-impossible to find any specific documentation from Microsoft which states, in plain, simple English, how I would go about getting the proper license to cover my use case. I find this hard to believe as it's 2015 and certainly there must be countless others who do the same as I (and at least a few of them here on HN).
The only official Microsoft document I can find about Windows licensing and virtual machines pertains specifically to business use, and appears to be focused on running Windows in a "Virtual Desktop Infrastructure" (VDI) environment, so I don't believe it applies to me. (I confess I did not read the entire document as it contains so much unfamiliar jargon that I have a hard time parsing it past page one.)
Anyway, from what I can tell by gathering bits and pieces posted on various forums by Microsoft community reps or third-party Microsoft "solution providers," Microsoft expects me to buy a separate, full Windows license for each virtual machine I create, for each host machine I run it on (i.e., M * N licenses).
Can anybody here tell me whether that's correct? Because if that's correct, Microsoft can go fly a kite.
Microsoft expects me to buy a separate, full Windows license for each virtual machine I create, for each host machine I run it on.
Yes, that's what the license says.
In practice, what corporate VM users do is get MSDN licenses, which are assigned to the developer. I have one. It's basically a license to not worry about licensing: I can run as many copies of whatever I like, so long as it's "for testing and development purposes". I think there's a different volume licensing programme available if, god help you, you wanted to run a production datacentre on Windows.
Edit: this is obviously a big reason why Windows is never going anywhere in the cloud space outside of Azure.
Thanks. That's what I was afraid the answer would be.
The cheapest MSDN subscription (OS-only) is $699/yr. For that price I could buy about 6 copies of Windows 10 Home edition. Or 2 new laptops each with a Windows license included. Sheesh.
True, but I don't think anyone really buys an MSDN subscription just for installing a copy of Windows. I haven't looked into the actual licensing terms, but my MSDN subscription (not the cheapest version) only allows me to claim five license keys per Windows version through the UI. If you need six licenses just to make up the cost of the cheapest MSDN subscription, you're probably using your MSDN subscription incorrectly.
Generally if you have an MSDN subscription, you're using it for other products like Visual Studio, and the free copies of Windows are just for helping you get a development environment set up.
Use with Virtualization Technologies. Instead of using the software directly on the licensed
computer, you may install and use the software within only one virtual (or otherwise emulated)
hardware system on the licensed computer.
> Microsoft expects me to buy a separate, full Windows license for each virtual machine I create
That is indeed the case. Otherwise you can buy licenses meant for ISPs and cloud-hosting providers. Your "personal use of multiple VMs" is simply not contemplated. You could probably get by with a MSDN subscription, which gives you some leeway.
The 2012 Server Datacenter Edition is a mere ~6000 USD and allows to run unlimited VMs on up to two physical CPUs. Who ever claimed the licensing costs made a real difference between Microsoft and Linux?
They only require a license for VM's that run Windows. You can run as many non-windows VM's as you want on the free hyper-v server on as many procs as it will run on.
Oh, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. But you generally won't have to pay for a licence to run Linux or *bsd in a vm. I'd assume one would want/need to run Windows software on windows (reactos/wine aside).
http://www.itassetmanagement.net/2011/05/31/msdn-subscriptio... : there is a lot of fractal madness in this. "This applies to virtual machines as well – so if even one application on one virtual machine hosted on a physical server is used for production purposes, then ALL the virtual machines AND the physical host must be licensed as if they were production machines."
"Training is NOT considered a development activity, so all those being trained and the machines used for the training must be licensed appropriately." may be one of the reasons nobody ever gets any training in this business.
>only for personal use; and only on the rare occasion when I need to run the odd Windows-only application.
If you're using it rarely, why not use the trial version, and reset to a snapshot whenever you use it? You can save data on a separate virtual disk, and only reset the operating system disk.
There used to be VMs at https://dev.modern.ie/tools/vms/. I don't see Windows 10 there right now, not sure why, but I know I've downloaded from there before; maybe wait a few weeks or so.
Would that actually work? Wouldn't the trial version still notice that it was initialized more than 90 days ago? I don't want to initialize the OS whenever I use it.
It doesn't take that long to initialize, and you only need to do it every 90 days. If you get the pre-installed VM, it only takes a couple minutes from first boot to ready to use.
Besides, I think you can "rearm" and use for another 90 days or more.
That's what the license terms say for normal retail licenses of the consumer versions, yes. This is pretty understandable for machines run concurrently. If you have two VMs running 24/7 it makes sense to just consider them "machines" exactly as if they were physical.
The question is what happens if you have two VMs with identical hardware where you only ever have one active? Microsofts licensing probably doesn't consider this scenario, so I think it would be a matter of interpretation. In theory you could transfer the license back and forth between the VMs (assuming that stopping and unmounting the inactive VM disk counts as "removing the software" from that machine).
That's technically correct, but they could still shout at you when carrying out a review, because you cannot technically guarantee you're running only one at the time.
Is it really the customer's responsibility to technically guarantee that the licensing cannot be breached?
I can't technically guarantee that my system hasn't been duplicated (say, by the NSA), but that isn't my responsibility. I'm just not supposed to run two copies simultaneously.
For this particular use case (i.e. "rare occasion when I need to run the off Windows-only application") I use a 4GB Windows instance in AWS.
I only run it when I need it, in my case cost is negligible (in the $1/month range, Windows license inclided), launches a lot faster than VMware Fusion and best of all, my Mac is not slowed down considerably by VMWare Fusion VM image running.
> I only run Windows on virtual machines on my Mac desktop and Mac laptop; only for personal use; and only on the rare occasion when I need to run the odd Windows-only application.
Suggestions on VM software? I'm looking into getting my wife set up with Win10 on her Mac.
Unless you want to run games, VMware Fusion. Parallels is slightly faster for some use cases other than games, but they lost my business last year when they installed their Parallels Access software without asking me first and without giving users an easy way to uninstall it without also uninstalling Parallels. (Parallels Access is their remote access software, so it potentially opens your Mac up to remote exploits and requires a subscription after a three month trial to boot.)
I've been on the preview since the beginning, when I installed the supposedly "final" build (10240?) about a week ago it ran through a wizard that allowed me to disable this functionality.
Not creating and using a Microsoft Account would eliminate some of the privacy concerns, but not all of them. If you think it important to protect information, in general or about yourself, then you need to carefully study the privacy statement, services agreement, and associated materials. Plus the various settings that can be used to control the features that phone home. Then, if you do decide that the OS can be configured and used in a way that you are comfortable with, you proceed. Don't install the OS until you determine that and know how to make the configuration changes. Take your time, maybe read http://www.tenforums.com/ for awhile.
In case there are people wondering I am using Windows 10 Pro x64 and did the following -
Downloaded ISO using the media creation tool at [1] then did an upgrade from 8.1 to 10 which complete just fine. I then booted from the USB drive I just made, did a diskpart clean on the only drive in the machine then did a clean install.
When prompted for a product key I pressed skip then when asked again during the out-of-box experience I selected to do it later. I signed in with a local account. I connected to the internet and it activated without any questions. Yes it activated using NO product key.
It seems when you do the upgrade from a valid 7 or 8.1 install it stores the hardware hash they generate on MS servers so when you then do a clean install it generates the (same) hardware hash, sends it to MS activation servers and sees it is already validated so it just activates you again. Very nice not having to deal with horrible product keys!
Edit: And so far it has been great. Stable and fast over the last 5 hours of doing updates (fucking Office 2013 has like 2GB of updates after install!).
Are you sure? I have looked at the BIOS string and there is no product key. BIOS embedded product keys was something that happened with the Windows 8 release. Are you thinking of something else?
The "key" works only when you updated from a Windows7/8 installation with that key to Windows 10 once. It apparently saves a hardware id on their activation server. After that you can cleanly install Windows 10 and skip the key entry and it'll activate based on that hardware id.
What could be done if you change the hardware ? If you had a retail key, then you'd probably need to install Windows 7/8 and upgrade to 10 again to repeat the hardware id registering process, but I didn't notice anywhere if this was tested.
I have read online (but not verified myself) than using a Windows 7 or 8/8.1 key works. This might be true or it might be misinformation. The upgrade only took 10 minutes so I did it that way with the plan to always wipe and clean install after. I decided to just jump through the MS hoops of doing it 'their way' and it all seemed to work just fine.
According to Gabe Aul's tweet [1] it looks like they do associate the device id/hardware hash so there is no need for a product key when doing a clean install once upgraded.
OEM Windows 7 Home Premium (SLIC Cert)
OEM Windows 7 Home Premium (Sticker)
OEM Windows 8 Pro (Embedded in BIOS)
Retail Windows 8 Pro
None of them worked with a clean install, you have to manually upgrade your version of Windows, let the setup finish, and then you can do a clean install without introducing a key.
Some people have already confirmed that Windows takes a fingerprint of your hardware and saves it into their activation servers.
Honestly, I am concerned about the Retail Win8 key in case my motherboard breaks, but hopefully that won't happen in the next 5 years.
Did anyone with a dual boot configuration already try the upgrade? This article [1] suggests that, for once, you don't have to restore GRUB after the upgrade.
This really surprises me. The SHA2 code-signing hotfix released for Windows 7 a few months back won't even install if you dual boot. I still haven't installed it.
Dear marketing people, please stop using "The best <thing only we make> ever". If you make a new product it should be better than the previous version, it it's not, you did something very wrong.
Agreed. Apple does this all the time when presenting new products. Of course it's the best/lightest/fastest version of the product. Why would they release a new version that is worse than the previous?
I actually thought they do this because they really want to say "best phone ever" or "best OS yet", but resort to the product name so as not to sound too cocky. By saying "best windows ever" you give the impression that this product is better than competitors while still being technically correct.
You might not have noticed but Microsoft has had a difficult time getting people to upgrade Windows. XP is good enough for many people. As much as you don't like it, hyperbole is part of marketing.
> Dear marketing people, please stop using "The best <thing only we make> ever".
Reminds me of a very old Garfield strip in which he is eating the 'new and improved' food, only to ponder why they were happy to sell him 'old and inferior' for so long...
Ballmer used to say the same thing about Windows 8. Apple says it about every iPhone, Samsung says it about every Galaxy S. It's become the go-to sentence for marketing in tech and to met it's ridiculous...
I agree they did mess up the UI, and did a bad job marketing it, but from a technical standpoint, W8 was the best version of Windows so far (when released), consistently.
Let's hope Windows 10 is a big hit with PC users. Consumers trade in those old XP boxes and hundreds of millions take the free upgrade. Then maybe within 24 months lots of old IE's will fade away.
1. The OOBE experience ran twice. It rebooted half way through the first one to apply updates and then I had to do it all again.
2. It lost the product key and won't activate even though this is a genuine copy from MSDN. I guess I have to wait for a key from MSDN later today. Not end of the world but a pain point. If it isn't activated, hardly anything works now.
3. However that's all pointless as it hangs solid after 3-5 minutes reliably. That's not enough time to even roll a single windows update in so I'm shafted.
This is a rock solid Lenovo X201 that has never had a single problem with any Windows release. It hasn't crashed once since I bought it new.
Not impressed. Spent an hour rolling it back.
I imagine, considering this was quality well tested hardware, that this is going to be nothing but hell for people. If even 1% of people have this experience, the media will blow big time and I'd hope that they do.
Edit: on my Sony VPC-J1 AOI machine that fails with "Windows 10 upgrade failed" after pissing around for an hour. At least that didn't hose the machine.
Meanwhile actually trying to buy the damn thing seems nearly impossible. MS rep on their store said that it might take couple of weeks until it becomes available for purchase. On US store you can order physical copy but download option is "coming soon". Just seems bit ridiculous...
Presumably you have to do an in-place upgrade if you use these? I can't see any mention of what key I am supposed to use (from the reservation tool) if I want to do a fresh install.
From what I understand you have to first do an in-place upgrade, which then gives you access to your license key (via Windows system info or something similar).
If you upgraded to Windows 10 on this PC by taking advantage of the free upgrade offer and successfully activated Windows 10 on this PC in the past, you won't have a Windows 10 product key, and you can skip the product key page by selecting the Skip button. Your PC will activate online automatically so long as the same edition of Windows 10 was successfully activated on this PC by using the free Windows 10 upgrade offer.
Which makes it sound like the version of Windows 10 you received as a free upgrade from Windows 7/8 will not work on any other machine than the one you first install on.
This ruling legitimized trading OEM Windows keys. You could go to your recycling center and get $5 fully legit Win 7/8 license. It will take another court case to overrule license tied to particular hardware gimmick.
> Which makes it sound like the version of Windows 10 you received as a free upgrade from Windows 7/8 will not work on any other machine than the one you first install on.
Any idea what defines a 'machine'? I gradually upgrade my PC. New video card here, new SSD there, sometimes new CPU (and possibly motherboard)
Somewhere else in the thread it was mentioned it used the bios to determine if it had been activated on the computer. So I would think a mobo replacement would mess with the activation
And what about when your machine started with a retail motherboard that doesn't have OEM Windows keys embedded in the firmware? What kind of signature does it use for the initial registration?
UPDATE [SOLVED]: searching for this problem I stumbled into this thread: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7045334?start=15&tstart.... . as I'm running windows 10 on a mac using bootcamp, it only took me to rename c:/windows/system32/drivers/AppleHFS.sys to something else, reboot and get truecrypt running as before. only side effect until now: I can't see the mac partition contents in windows.
same issue here. truecrypt was running well with windows 10 but then started showing this warning. i looked in the windows events logs but found no clues.
It is. A lot of these are not the default options, despite the pretense that they are. For one really simple example, "Do Not Track" is the enabled default, not the disabled example here.
I'm really sad about what have they done to start menu. The one Win10 Tech Preview started with was way better than the current one. It's less functional and still buggy (doesn't show up from time to time).
Call me cynical, but I have just made a bootable Linux USB stick with GUI in order to keep working if/when the corporate update roll-out kicks in and borks my work machine.
There's a whole bunch of stuff in that that's inaccurate/outdated, re Wifi Sharing (opt in, even for contacts).
Not to mention a bunch of stuff (Do Not Track) that is set by default that has been explicitly enabled (or disabled, depending on defaults) to look worse. You can argue about whether you should have an "opt-in" for some of these things at all, yes, but this image makes it look like many things are opt-out, when they are in fact opt-in.
Telemetry is the same diagnostics that OS X and even Linux Mint and other distributions do.
Nevermind my information (that's bad enough), what happens when I'm on a VPN and RDP into my work machine and working with other peoples' sensitive information?
Has anyone captured any traffic from these features to determine what extent they're sending keystrokes?
In my opinion - everybody already gave up their freedoms via Android and iOS, so (someone at) Microsoft feels like there won't be a problem with demanding the same on Windows.
Moves like this always draw ire from us power users, but with enough public outcry, we get what we want. Sometimes we get it through third party software. It's a game that's been played many times with many different companies because unfortunately, greed powers much of the world.
One can have all his freedom with Android, iOS and Windows <10 - it's just gets harder with every new version.
And there hopefully will be an public outcry and/or tools to remove the telemetry logging, cloud lock-in, etc from Win10 too. In the end an OS upgrade should have a benefit, in the worst case Win7 is supported until 2020.
Ridiculously how much things I need to turn off to have the same privacy than in Windows 7...
I don't get it, why don't they just make a slider after the installation where you could slide between Maximum Usability <-> Maximum Privacy and still have their "Additional Settings" where you could turn off everything one by one.
Also even after turning off everything I still need to stop OneDrive from working and other stuff that still isn't a good default, even for "home users" I wouldn't recommend sending too much data.
I'll be waiting until before a week or two before the one year free upgrade period is up before I subject any of my family to it. In the meantime, it's popcorn time.
Btw, Windows 10 now forces critical updates. You can find a registry tweak to disable this behaviour here:
I'm really excited for this release and especially excited about Cortana. If it works as advertised I'll be buying a windows phone. I'm ready for a device that i can just talk to with a normal voice and ask it stuff.
It works fairly well, in the manner of Siri. It copes with moderate Scottish accents, which is impressive. The downsides are that you have to have location services turned on (bad for battery) and, like Siri, everything you say is recorded and may be farmed out mechanical-turk style for analysis.
Could anyone explain the downvotes? I have a windows phone and I am really interested in the release of windows 10 for windows phones, especially with the hope of finally having a decent browser on my phone.
Are you sure about this? I have this kind of license (for Win 8.1) and in the "Win 10 upgrade window" it said that my machine can be upgraded. Although, I have not tried it, yet.
That only means that systems activated by pirated KMS servers will not get an update.
The real question is what happens with systems with pirated OEM certificates in motherboard firmware. IIRC this was the most reliable method of piracy for Windows 7.
The update only froze once for me (had to hard reset). No side effects from that. This was the smoothest windows update process I've ever had.
Had some trouble with Asus touchpad drivers, but after fixing that, everything is running well and nothing was lost. All previously installed software seems to be running fine.
> The update only froze once for me (had to hard reset). No side effects from that. This was the smoothest windows update process I've ever had.
Having to hard reset during an update due to a freeze doesn't exactly sound like a particularly smooth process. I guess your perspective depends on your experiences with previous updates.
My Asus touchpad was fine. Had to manually install updated Realtek sound drivers but apart from that also all good - done and dusted in about 25 minutes.
I have a legitimate Windows 7 license that I run on my MBP using VMWare Workstation .. is this ineligible for upgrade, does anyone know? I've left the VM running in the hopes I get the little taskbar notification to do a free upgrade to Windows 10, but its not happening .. I guess us VM Windows users are out of luck, then?
EDIT: Scratch that. As luck would have it, just as I submitted to HN, I got the upgrade icon notification in my VM. Looks like I'll be upgrading my Windows 7 VM in VMWare on a MBP to Windows 10 soon .. leaving my comment in case it trips anyone else up: patience, I guess!
Any news on how to get a free 'reserved' copy? The Verge seems to suggest that you just have to wait, and it might take weeks, since Microsoft wants to do a gradual rollout...
An icon should be present on your Win7/8 task bar which lets you reserve a copy. It does seem to be a gradual rollout though, as mine still tells me it's not available yet.
Do you have to burn it to a USB/CD as the page suggests, or is does the tool give a way to upgrade in place without doing that?
Edit: can confirm crazysaem's experience. I did an in-place upgrade on a fully-patched 8.1 system and it worked flawlessly and relatively quickly (I kept my apps and settings). I'm not a heavy Windows user though.
You have the option to either create the USB/CD media or do an in-place upgrade. I did the in-place upgrade, which worked without problems for me. They also provide the option to either keep your apps and files or delete them. I chose to delete them, because I wanted a clean install.
Assuming you've clicked the Reserve-button in the little notification application that was rolled out via Windows Update, you'll just have to sit tight and wait.
Looking forward to 10, if only to get parents of XP. However the other issue I have with Windows is installation methods.
Owning an iMac without a DVD drive what exactly are my options for obtaining any version of Windows short of buying a DVD drive to copy an install DVD to USB for bootcamp?
Have they ever synchronised the OEM release with hardware releases? I always thought they released the boxed version and then a few months later it started appearing on PC's.
If you upgraded to Windows 10 on this PC by taking advantage of the free upgrade offer and successfully activated Windows 10 on this PC in the past, you won't have a Windows 10 product key, and you can skip the product key page by selecting the Skip button. Your PC will activate online automatically so long as the same edition of Windows 10 was successfully activated on this PC by using the free Windows 10 upgrade offer.
Which makes it sound like you don't, and can only upgrade or clean install on a single machine. I hope this is incorrect because I'm planning to upgrade my machine in 6 months.
"How to perform a clean installation of Windows ... you can skip the product key page by selecting the Skip button. Your PC will activate online automatically so long as the same edition of Windows 10 was successfully activated on this PC by using the free Windows 10 upgrade offer."
I'm burning an old-fashioned installation disk as I type this, using the tool mentioned in the link above. The tool can also create bootable USB sticks or ISO images.
Yeah, it's basically an OEM (single-device, non-transferable) license with remotely managed product keys.
Most legal Windows users only have OEM licenses anyway, so there won't be any difference for them. It sucks if you already own a full license.
But if you need to move to a different computer sometime in the next year or so, I guess you could first install Windows 7/8/8.1 using your full license, activate it, and then take advantage of the free upgrade to 10. That's basically what I did with my "student discount" license when Windows 7 came out. I had a full license of Vista, so I first moved it to a different computer and then upgraded it to 7.
I can't believe there is still no clear official statement on how the licensing works. From some sources[1] they seem to imply that retail licenses (Win7/8) turn into what is basically an OEM license, but then there are some sources that state the exact opposite[2][3].
I don't want to lose my retail Win8 license, as they say that it will be "consumed" by the upgrade (wth is that supposed to mean), so I'm going to sit and wait on this, maybe try to get an answer from their helpdesk.
They try so hard to make this easy for people, to make windows popular again, and they still fucked it up. I am disappointed.
"If you upgraded to Windows 10 on this PC by taking advantage of the free upgrade offer and successfully activated Windows 10 on this PC in the past, you won't have a Windows 10 product key, and you can skip the product key page by selecting the Skip button. Your PC will activate online automatically so long as the same edition of Windows 10 was successfully activated on this PC by using the free Windows 10 upgrade offer."
If you acquired the software as stand-alone software (and also if you upgraded from software you acquired as stand-alone software), you may transfer the software to another device that belongs to you. You may also transfer the software to a device owned by someone else if (i) you are the first licensed user of the software and (ii) the new user agrees to the terms of this agreement. You may use the backup copy we allow you to make or the media that the software came on to transfer the software. Every time you transfer the software to a new device, you must remove the software from the prior device. You may not transfer the software to share licenses between devices."
"After your computer has upgraded to Windows 10 it will have a new licence key. You'll need this if you want to perform a clean installation of Windows 10, as you can input your existing Windows 7 or 8 code into the installation routine. To get your key fire up the Magical Jelly Bean KeyFinder app and you'll see your Windows 10 key at the top of the list."
Reminder that Microsoft installed adware on Windows 7/8 machines to encourage users to upgrade to Windows 10. Even if you hid the update from Windows Update, they un-hid it and reinstalled at least once that I know of.
Don't reward this behavior by buying Windows 10. Or at least delay the purchase as long as possible.
Upgrade notification is now adware? are you serious? You don't even have to pay for the upgrade and you'll have a lot to gain from it and for us developers, it's a good thing aswell since it might reduce the number of old IEs/plateforms we have to support. I expected more from an HN user..
You also have to hide the update to prevent WU from reinstalling it for you, but actually not even that will permanently disable it.
This is because Microsoft will release "updates" to that package, with the totally unintended side effect of unhiding and reinstalling the update. So even if you uninstall it, and hide the update from WU, it will still find a way onto your system.
So yeah, like I said and despite the downvotes, it's fucking adware. Bordering on malware.
I consider it adware because there is no way to get the notification to go away. No obvious way, anyhow, and rather than search around for the "correct" way of doing it, I uninstalled the update and hid it in WU.
(Actually I did a brief search, and didn't find anything.)
So at this point, maybe you're right and it's not adware. I'd consider it borderline at least, but fine. Whatever.
However I got a second notification some weeks later, from the same package which I had already uninstalled and hidden remember, after it apparently reinstalled itself because MS released an 'update' to this package. So despite uninstalling it and following all the steps required to clearly communicate that no, I do not want this fucking thing on my PC, MS decided they'd push the update to my system anyway.
At this point it's no longer borderline. It is harassing behavior from something that is very obviously adware.
Is it a "notification" or a longterm limpet on the hull? I looked at a relative's W7 machine and there was a promotional application ("GWX" - Get Windows X?) running permanently with no apparent way to decline its offer or uninstall it.
They stop doing it when I tell them to knock it off, and they don't creep back in and do it again after a few months, either. The update responsible for the notification, even after I removed it and hid the update within WU, found its way back after MS released an 'update' to the package with the totally unintended, honest! side effect of unhiding the package and reinstalling it.
> They stop doing it when I tell them to knock it off
Oh, I wish what you said was true. It's funny because they didn't do that when I was on an older version of Ubuntu (11? 12? I forget). It just kept popping up and telling me to update no matter what I did. Stuff like this: http://askubuntu.com/q/218755
> Don't reward this behavior by buying Windows 10. Or at least delay the purchase as long as possible.
There's no buying if you've already got a valid Windows 7/8 license; it's a free upgrade. And as long as it's optional, I don't mind this instance of a notification for a very generous offer (at least generous in terms of regular Microsoft pricing).
So they pushed an alert to everyone to upgrade? If it were like on os x where you already have the software installed and that software gives an alert to upgrade would it have been fine? I don't see how giving users a heads up to update is considered adware. Maybe a slippery slope at worse.
It's no different than Windows Update telling you that there is a new update available, except that this time it's an update of the entire operating system to a new version. Calling it "adware" is a stretch of a largest magnitude.
It isn't AdWare...sheesh. It's a notification from a vendor you "trust" (I say trust because if you are using their OS, there is some measure of trust).
Living in a world where a lot of users enable global cyber-security threats by disabling their software update system, I would really love to reward this behaviour.
If Windows 10 is as well-received as I expect it will, this might really impact Microsoft's position on phones as well. A core feature of Windows 10 is an app store that doesn't suck, with apps that can easily be used on devices that don't resemble tablets. Windows 8 really had this wrong, and 10 fixes it. I think the Windows 10 store might actually get used.
I've seen a glimpse of that future with the mobile app of Dutch weather site "Buienradar". They made a new Windows Phone app which totally rocks, to replace an old extremely crappy one. I didn't understand why they invested in an app ecosystem that is so clearly on the way down, until I found the exact same app in the Windows 10 store - just larger and with more info on the same screen. But it's very obviously the same codebase. My guess is they actually wanted to make a Windows desktop app, but adding phone support was such a minor extra investment (because of MS's "Universal app" thing) that they did it, despite the abysmal market size of Windows Phone in the Netherlands.