Month: March 2015

Windows 10: Pushy!

Been running build 9926 on my PC for a while now.  I was in the “Fast” ring and was pushed build 10041 through Windows Update.  Rebooted and install would not progress past 8%.  It rolled back gracefully to 9926, then I changed the updating to the slow ring.  Of course, the SAME build gets pushed to me again.  ARGH!  This time it goes to 5%. Rollback.  The problem is of course you cannot turn off Windows Update in Windows 10 anymore (probably someone will figure out a way eventually…) and they kept pushing this same build out to me over and over again.  You can suppress the update for 8 hours, but then…BOOM, installing build 10041, fail and rollback again!

Finally, they offered an ISO version of 10041 and I was able to install that just fine…but this does scare me a bit.   I get that an update should not be deferred forever, but only 8 hours?  It should be days, weeks…not hours.

– Soli Deo Gloria

Windows 10: A Review

So by now you’ve heard the news that Windows 10 will be free for Windows 7 and 8 users for the first year.  I recently took the plunge and updated my work PC from Windows 8 to Windows 10.  The official release is probably about 8 months away, but so far I am liking Windows 10.  It fixes a lot of what is wrong with Windows 8, namely it brings back the start menu (thank you Microsoft), gets rid of the charms bar in the corners (thank you Microsoft) and allows Modern apps to be “windowed” on the desktop (thank you Microsoft).

However, all of this stuff should have been in Windows 8 already and yet again we have another Vista on our hands: that is Windows 8.  At least Microsoft saw the error of its ways and corrected the ship instead of sinking it.  Being able to upgrade your OS with Windows Update is totally cool and long overdue!

Pros:

The search bar in the task bar.  If you know what you are looking for, it’s a quick way to have it search the whole C drive and bring it up for you.  Win.

Notifications icon in the taskbar to get to common settings quickly.

Virtual desktops: yes!  One less thing for the Linux boys to rave about.

Cons:

Even though the start menu is back, I miss drilling through a logical folder structure to get to things.  I still find myself making a shortcut to C:ProgramDataMicrosoftWindowsStart Menu on the desktop to get the “old start menu” structure back.

Appears to be missing Windows Media Center…maybe this will come back in a later build?

Task Manager really needs to be replaced with Process Explorer or beefed up.  It’s essentially a hold over from Windows 8 showing little to no detail on running processes.

– Soli Deo Gloria