Windows 9 is now Windows 10

Martin Phillp
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I'm still using Win 7 on my six year old PC, did install the free upgrade twice, but returned to 7 as this machine simply isn't up to the job of handling 10.

However, I will switch to 10 when I buy a new PC in a few weeks time.
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woah
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I've had 10 from the launch and find it absolutely fine - performance is better than on 7 and the UI is vastly better than 8/8.1. I'm not so keen on the way it forces updates on you (especially when it breaks older hardware) or the default settings on sending feedback to MS - that at least can be changed.
cwathen
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I moved my main system over to 10 about 3 months after launch, secondary devices were moved almost immediately. I haven't really looked back.

But as I have argued at length myself, the attitude towards updates on it will be a huge issue with roll out to business. Most recently in this thread I've documented an issue I had with a client's machines suddenly having a forced build update rolled out which interrupted trading. But ultimately the system was brought back up again quickly and they are now fine. A far bigger concern with forced updates is that of deprecated features.

The recently released build has deprecated homegroups. Personally I've never used them, but there will be people (even if they are a minority) who have got entire networks based around authenticating through a homegroup. This feature was in Windows 10 for almost 3 years, now it's suddenly gone. The client I support does it's internal backups using the built in Backup & Restore feature. Which for some reason in Windows 10 has always been branded 'Backup & Restore (Windows 7)' as if to imply that it's some sort of old way of doing things even though there has never been a proper replacement (please don't tell me that 'file history' constitutes the same functionality). This is another feature plump for deprecation. One day I could find a build update takes that feature out and then they've got no internal backups. I'm now in the process of auditing their dependencies on built in Windows features and trying to move them to third party solutions because they are more likely to work long term as I can't guarantee that anything in the operating system now will still be in it next year - this is a ridiculous situation to be in.

Incidentally, on a completely different matter, is anyone else starting to get really irked with Microsoft's obsession with pushing Edge. The anti-trust lawsuit of the 90's was based around nothing more than Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player being bundled with WIndows. And I've nothing against them bundling a web browser (or two as they currently do, since Edge and IE both come with WIndows 10). But 20 years on we now have an operating system where it seems impossible to totally avoid Edge. Even with a different default browser set you constantly come up against things which activate it. Their current tactics to try and force you into using their flopped new browser is far worse than anything they did to push IE.
Philip
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I had read about Microsoft pushing Edge and OneDrive through advertising in Windows 10, but I hadn't realised how low Microsoft's desktop browser share was now. IE+Edge combined it's 11% with Chrome at 65%… and that's on desktop only!
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Dr Lobster*
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Philip wrote: Thu 05 Apr, 2018 15.50 I’m wondering if anyone here is still using Windows 7 (at home, not forced to at work) as we had a few people here saying they’d even still be using XP after support ended.
At work I am responsible for the IT across two sites, with a couple of thousand devices on each.

I can tell you, moving to another OS is a mammoth task and is in some cases, impossible to move everything over.

Historically, Microsoft had a reputation for the quality of their software, if any of you have worked with till systems, catering systems, online payment systems etc etc, you'll know that some of those things are just awful, hacked together brittle crap - we have a system, for instance, that has to be managed using Firefox 12 with an ancient version of Java, we have another where the web backend uses an ancient, long discontinued version of Java - the main product itself is still developed, so why they can't move their development over to the new runtime can only be because one of the middleware component vendors has gone out of business and they're stuck on that version.

The other thing, for those of you that do this sort of thing, is that Microsoft has made it much less efficient to build disk images for Windows 10, and it's now easier to use their own MDT solution.

I've always built a base generic image using Windows 7 Enterprise, installed Office, Adobe Reader - all the basics, got rid of all the nags, tidied the start menu, sorted all the stupid file association questions in Office, etc, set up the icons on the desktop and sent up the image, deploying the other things, like Chrome via GPO - now, with Windows 10, you can't just copy the profile folder over to the default one and it all works, so we've had to completely overhaul the machine build process.... which does take a long time to get right.

We have a few machines running Windows 10 for testing, lots of group policies are needed to turn off all the crapware (can just about automatically get rid of all the crapware that comes even on the Windows 10 Enterprise sku) and make the experience as close to a home PC as possible - i'm nearly ready to deploy the first batch of Win10 devices shortly.

I also have a couple of Windows XP boxes lurking around - they are not used as workhorse PCs, mostly there due to legacy requirements..
cwathen
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Philip wrote: Fri 06 Apr, 2018 13.39 I hadn't realised how low Microsoft's desktop browser share was now. IE+Edge combined it's 11% with Chrome at 65%… and that's on desktop only!
TBH it's their own fault.

It's been de rigueur to hate Internet Explorer pretty much ever since it existed. That did nothing to stop it's phenomenal growth. Whilst I'm sure people will queue up with examples of obscure tests showing it failing standards compliance and/or coders moaning about how they had to code workarounds in it, the reality is that on the ground IE was a perfectly competent browser. I used it as my main browser for 15 years and never really felt anything was wrong with it.

And of course most corporate Windows images did/do continue to plough on with IE11 as the browser of choice.

Even if IE wasn't as in with the geeks as Chrome or Firefox, it was nevertheless one of the 3 main browsers in use and there was value in the brand. Which they threw away with Edge.

Even if there was a technical argument for performing a ground-up replacement free of legacy code, marketing failed to do their job on this one. IE users (and corporate IT departments designing standard images) didn't want a new browser called Edge, they wanted a new version of IE. If they had developed exactly the same product but called it IE12 instead of Edge, I am convinced it would have much greater market share.

The other issue in the downfall of IE, far predating Edge, is that Microsoft deemed updating IE to newer versions to constitute a feature update of the operating system rather than an important security update, and thus under their support lifecycle policy it would only be updated to new versions whilst an OS was in 'mainstream' rather than 'extended' support. Thus WIndows XP never saw an update past IE8 (introduced in 2009) whilst pretty much every other browser continued to see new versions on XP up to and often much after the end of support date. The policy which led to this happening might well have made sense in 2001 when it was written, but a decade on the web had changed dramatically and an up to date web browser was far more essential than might have been envisaged previously. Given XP's popularity, a lot of the decline of IE's market share can be attributed to XP users ditching it for Chrome/Firefox when IE8 became too old to be fit for purpose. Then when they came to move off of XP, they were far more likely to stick with what they had migrated to than go back to a Microsoft web browser. If IE9/10/11 were rolled out to XP (all of which were released during XP's support lifetime), this needn't have happened.
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Nick Harvey
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Hope we're all ready for this Tuesday, when we have the ulimate delight of sitting around for hours, while everything runs incredibly slowly, as Version 1803, or the Spring Creators Update, or Redstone 4, downloads without asking permission, clogging up our bandwidth.

At least it now asks permission to do the actual install, so you can plan when to sit around for another few hours, as your machine is taken totally out of service, while the dots go round, and round, and round, and round.
thegeek
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Philip wrote: Thu 05 Apr, 2018 15.50 I’m wondering if anyone here is still using Windows 7 (at home, not forced to at work)
Sort of. I had a need to run a (work) Windows-only app on my personal Mac, so was granted use of the Win 7 Pro volume licensing key. So I've been running it in VirtualBox, which is a fairly painful experience all round. I wondered the other day why I didn't just stick it in Boot Camp, so deleted the VirtualBox image to make room for a partition, only to find that I'd clearly forgotten that my 2015 MacBook doesn't let you install Win7 that way.
Martin Phillp
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1803 is now due for release this Monday. When I purchased my PC on Wednesday, I was asked to upgrade to 1803, which I thought went through, but after checking, I'm still on the Fall Creators Update.
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Nick Harvey
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1803 seems to have settled down nicely here, except for accessing folders on other machines on the local network.

Sometimes you can, sometimes you can't. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to it.

Before anyone says 'homegroups', I've never used them; I always use advanced sharing.

Also, sometimes the other machines will show up when you click on Network, sometimes they won't. Similarly, if you click on a machine in Networks, sometimes you'll get to it, sometimes it'll error out.

The same happens with Windows/R and \\MACHINENAME. Often, a machine not showing in Networks WILL be accessible via Windows/R.

Any ideas, anyone? I'm Googled out here!
cwathen
Posts: 1309
Joined: Fri 15 Aug, 2003 17.28

Homegroups are supposed to be gone from this build I think anyway, never used them either.

A couple of things to try. Firstly, make sure that network discovery isn't turned off.

And secondly, try connecting to the share using the IP address rather than the hostname. Windows has long suffered from random issues connecting to SMB shares, using the IP address usually works around it (although if you do this and are using DHCP you will probably want to manually set the IP address on the machine you're connecting to).
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