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alt3rn1ty

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Online office? What's that?

You mean office online? That's obviously web based and has little to do with the OS.

Just wanted to let you know that the next big update hits today, so expect to watch spinning circles on blue background (or will it be red not?) for another one to two hour later this week. This is all :D

Anyway, if you are fine with win 10 as is now, i see little reason to be worried with the anniversary update. I think the upgrade to win 10 should have been much more risky in terms of drivers as the anniversary update will be, and i don't see any new concern for privacy issues, that weren't already present in the original release. Cortana will get updated settings coming with her new features, but that was to be expected. Personally i'm looking forward to these features the most.

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I dont know if it has happened yet or not but within the last couple of weeks there was a really old exploit discovered ( affects all windows since windows 95 up to Win 10 ) with regards to printer drivers, and the OS needs to be patched as soon as possible.

 

Any device out there pretending to be a printer which hooks up with your machine, can instruct your machine to download its "printer drivers" and install them to make the printer work ( this can be on the web aswell as LAN ) .. These are drivers getting installed automatically at the kernel level prompted by remote instructions to your computer, and nothing will stop it happening for the convenience of making printers just work :)

 

Apparently the solution is not really a fix, but just presents the user with a dialogue box ( where before it did not ) to let the user know its about to happen if you dont say no.

 

------------

 

I havent seen anything called Online Office either, I have those "Get product" icons in the start menu All Apps, one is for Get Office, I wish there was one which said "Get stuffed" and turned them all off. LibreOffice does all my families office related documents / projects for school etc, there isnt anything it cant handle that Office can, and works better in a lot of ways imho. It also does not need java installed like the older OpenOffice project used to, and I believe a lot of the old programmers from OpenOffice project now work on LibreOffice instead.

 

We also like Thunderbird a lot for mail, it can handle Pop or web mail, and can still be used for GMail too ( needs a little tweaking )

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Yeah it's under Get Started: Click Office.

 

Office Online apps:

If you want to work on Office docs in your web browser with nothing to install, check out Office Online—free-to-use versions of your favorite Office apps. Sign in with your Microsoft account, and start using online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, to name a few. Documents are stored online in OneDrive, where you can share them with other people, collaborate in real time, and continue work between your PC, Mac, tablet, or phone.

 

Perfectly happy with Apache. :)

 

Edit: (3 days later)... Surprise Surprise, Free upgrade still works!?

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  • 2 weeks later...

If you have Win 10 installed - Watch out for the Aniversary update

 

Going forward you are going to need it, and its only a matter of time before it gets pushed automatically ( if it hasnt already )

 

 

First if it hasnt - Grab the downloadable installer so you can decide when it installs

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/12387/windows-10-update-history

 

 

The anniversary update is Windows version 1607, and its going to necessitate some new driver installations too to make them compatible ( again )

Your mileage may vary, but in my case NVidia at least needs a Win 10 Anniversary update .. Notice on NVidias driver downloads there are OS options for Win 10 32 and 64, but now there are also Win 10 32 and 64 for Anivversary version of Win 10 specifically ( as if its a new OS )

http://www.geforce.com/Drivers

 

After updating to Anniversary, it immediately became obvious that the older most up to date drivers for NVidia ( Win 10 64 in my case ) .. were not working and definitely needed the update.

 

On my MSI laptop machine there are a few custom apps designed for this range of laptops, it has for instance a Realtek Sound driver setup, but also layered on top of that is a Nahimic driver, which takes advantage of the sub-woofer .. After update to Anniversary that driver also needed an update to get working correctly again.

There was also another app ... Long story short ..

 

.. Watch for crap going belly up after the update, and check if your machine support has updated drivers specifically for this new Win 10 PITA

 

 

Also watch out for all those privacy related settings at your first logon being pushed to be by default all on again

 

And afterwards, recheck all your privacy settings for even more settings which they have turned back on again, even though its supposed to keep all your files and settings the way you had them before the update happened, MS are still being pushy about defaults and blatantly ignoring what you wish not to have on in some cases.

 

I hate this.

All I want is a good platform to play decent games on.

Then MS is all in your face with updates

Which in turn force drivers to need updates

And tries to pimp your privacy settings in their favour

And then you can get your games working again and resetup all the optimised settings .. Wonderful, so long as the game does not need an up date to work correctly with all the chain of updates your machine just went through ..

.. Arse.

 

 

Everythings working well now, but what a friggin mess it caused, I have been playing and loving No Mans Sky recently, its a bit of a buggy release, but nowhere near as buggy as Bethesda games and it comes from a small Indie company who are putting in a lot of effort to respond to updating it and solving everyones problems, Beth could learn a thing or two from these newbies : Anyway another update which is coming soon will need the newest NVidia graphics drivers .. Which needed Win 10 Anniversary etc etc, and thus ensued the pulling out of hair  :imp:

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Latest nvidia driver with NMS opimizations is available for all versions of windows.

Funny enough, my win 10 automatically updated the nvidia driver days before the AU. No issues with them after the AU.

The thing with the drivers for the less important stuff i can confirm. It installs the latest drivers again, like it did with the original update. For some odd reason, some manufacturers however sent microsoft updated drivers that outright break stuff that was already on the market. I hope that changes in the future with computers built for win 10 and manufacturers sending in drivers that don't break old stuff. If the GPU manufacturers can do it, I don' see why others can't.

For me it's intel rapid storage technology on one laptop and the webcam driver on another that need reinstallation. Always need to grab the old one from the laptop manufacturer after the updates (three times so far, though I have them stored on an external drive now.).

Realtek is also notorious in that regard, though I must admit I just kept the standard driver there. I'd need to check if my old toshiba's subwoofer is still working though.

Oh yeah, and none of the touchpad drivers support the new win 10 gestures. Hard to blame that one on the OS I figure.

Positively I can report that bluetooth and sound on one laptop are actually improved by the standard drivers. So, there is that, too.

Privacy settings remained unchanged, but then again I didn't have much disabled to begin with. The apps I did keep from accessing certain data, the ad ID and the telemetry level however did stay where I put them.

I also gave Cortana a try after the update. Holy shit, that software is amazing, seriously. Sure, less usefull when sitting on the PC, but when gaming with a controller or driving in a car, that thing is crazy. E.g. It completely lets you control your music and send messages you dictate. The text recognition is so good, it played an album from my HD that i asked it for. It's an album from a friend of mine, so there was only the name of the band and album in written form to go by, no database search or anything where you could find their music online.

Yeah, in the end, Win 10 does require some adaption, and it seems to be that the experience is less smooth for some older devices than others, which is a pitty. I had my rage phase with win 10 in October, when I needed to reset one system 3 times until I learned how to handle that diva. Since then a needed to follow that pattern (not the three resets, but what i did after the third) I developed back then for each upgrade, but it has worked each time so far.

I suggest if you can't get over that rage phase, you'd start looking into Linux and Wine/VMs or buy a brand new preconfigured one that comes with win 10 drivers, otherwise I suppose you might not get happy with your computer again.

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I see all of these kinds of reports everywhere and all it does is make me glad I resisted and stayed with Windows 7.

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Telemetry collection is the same between win 7, 8, 8.1 and 10 since the latest updates. And you will no longer be able to disable individual updates on any win >= 7 from October on. MS is moving to combined and differential updates for all it's supported OSs now, and they will backroll older updates into these collections, too

Simply put: If you don't trust the maker of your OS, don't use it. Canonical collects telemetry data, too btw with a standard Ubuntu install (not sure about derivatives).

Afaik, freeBSD, Fedora, Arch and Debian are what you'd be looking for.

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Never heard any of what you just said, and you'd think news like that would spread like wildfire so.....

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That first one is old news and those particular updates have long since been covered by such things as Spybot Anti-Beacon. Which is still functioning properly on my system since installing it 6 months ago.

 

That second one doesn't mention much of anything about telemetry/spyware. Just rollups. Now that Windows 10 has gone pay at least they stopped nagging about upgrading.

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You might have missed the point where they said that older individual updates will also slowly be introduced into the combined patches.

"Over time, Windows will also proactively add patches to the Monthly Rollup that have been released in the past. Our goal is eventually to include all of the patches we have shipped in the past since the last baseline, so that the Monthly Rollup becomes fully cumulative and you need only to install the latest single rollup to be up to date."

It is not clear how far back they will backintroduce, but i'd bet at least to the telemetry stuff. By mid 2017 there will not be a single reason left to not either be on win 10; embracing our new overlords, or going Linux.

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Time will tell I guess, but right now there is no compelling reason to upgrade, and hasn't been since Windows 10 was introduced last year.

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  • 1 month later...

Remove software related to the Windows 10 free upgrade offer

 

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3184143

 

● KB3184143

 

● About this update: This update removes the Get Windows 10 app and other software related to the Windows 10 free upgrade offer that expired on July 29, 2016. For a complete list of the software removed by this Windows Update, see the update replacement information.

 

● Four versions, for Win7 and 8.1 in both 32- and 64-bit flavors.

 

 

So if you used Never10 up until now, and use the above .. I think you can forget about Win 10 trying to invade your Win 7 machine thereafter

Though I would still keep a wary eye out for further attempts down the road, MS are now also pushing Windows updates more aggressively than they have done before.

 

 

KB3184143 *is* an "Optional" Update.

 

● So... NOT selected by default, but can be chosen

 

 

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A Note For Firefox users

 

This is a bit off topic, but if you have an SSD drive as your system drive, and you are using Firefox, Firefox may well be wearing down your SSD's life expectancy.

 

Everyone knows by now that an SSD is fast, and that any reads from the drive can be done for as long as you want.

 

But writes to the drive have to burn in, and slowly wear out the cells and reduce their life

 

 

Firefox .. by default .. Writes a dump of recovery data ( all open tabs and caches content )

 

Someone noticed recently the amount of writes and decided to use Resource Monitor to study what was going on, in his case Firefox was dumping 12 GB of data onto his SSD every 15 seconds

 

To stop that .. Well personally I have my SSD not as system drive, but as a games installation drive for GOG games ( not steam because that damned client and all its files updates just about every other day I run it sometimes, I guess they have to be very security concious as much as windows, if not more so, up until about a month or two ago the NSA were using Steam client as a back door into peoples machines, I submitted a support ticket for the same concern and Valve quickly squashed the ticket from being potentially searchable and answered me privately "Thank you, we are already addressing this issue" .. End of :) ( well, hopefully end of, maybe Steam has more zero days to be exploited still to be discovered by valve, they certainly wont be announcing such things publicly ) )

 

 

Anyway, there is a setting in Firefox

 

Go to settings and find its About Config ( I dont know exactly where that is these days, havent used Firefox for years now )

 

Do a search for

browser.sessionstore.interval

 

/ default 15000 (mS) - so every 15 seconds.

 

Increasing this will obviously mean less writes over time, and extend your SSD life expectancy, so

 

30000 = Every 30 seconds

60000 = Every minute

1800000 = every 30 minutes

3600000 = every hour

 

How close together do you want recovery data captured in case of crashes, windows shut downs / restarts invoked by aggressive Windows updates .. Versus preserving your SSD life expectancy.

 

And the more tabs you have open, the more data is captured on each sessionstore save

 

Of course if you have your SSD as your system drive, there will be far more writes to the drive that you need to try and cut down on. Firefox just seems to be excessively offending

 

Chrome probably does the same and users dont have any kind of control over it ( no About Config advanced settings for that browser )

 

Spinning platter HD's are still the best imho for OS partitions.

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SSDs these days last a lot longer than many people still tend to believe. Spinning platters these days are good for storing huge data collections and as a backup drive. I wouldn't want to limit myself using them as system drives any more, for fear of something as outdated as SSD aging.

While i too don't use firefox for the various areas it's lagging behind its competition in, if you do want to use it, and you have a storage platter in you rig, you could use the portable version of firefox and put just that one on the old HDD.

As far as i read on german tech sites, yes. Chrome does the same excessive writing. Though i guess 12GB per second sounds a bit crazy. I'd wager you would need to have a horrible browser workflow for thinking keeping that many tabs open is the best way of approaching what you want to do. I'd then suggest addressing these core problems rather than treating the ramifications of it.

Edit: Holy shit, that thing about steam O.O

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SSDs these days last a lot longer than many people still tend to believe. Spinning platters these days are good for storing huge data collections and as a backup drive. I wouldn't want to limit myself using them as system drives any more, for fear of something as outdated as SSD aging.

While i too don't use firefox for the various areas it's lagging behind its competition in, if you do want to use it, and you have a storage platter in you rig, you could use the portable version of firefox and put just that one on the old HDD.

As far as i read on german tech sites, yes. Chrome does the same excessive writing. Though i guess 12GB per second sounds a bit crazy. I'd wager you would need to have a horrible browser workflow for thinking keeping that many tabs open is the best way of approaching what you want to do. I'd then suggest addressing these core problems rather than treating the ramifications of it.

Edit: Holy shit, that thing about steam

 

Unless you have a laptop where the manufacturers have tried to cut costs by installing an older tech SSD, and users are less likely to open the case.

 

15 seconds - FTFY :P

 

Yeah, though the thing that made me say "Holy shit" was the speed they squashed the ticket and sent me a response email

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  • 1 month later...
  • 1 month later...

I've got a slightly off topic addition .. But, well its relevant and useful :

 

 

Microsoft have an official site apparently for Plugins for its new browser Edge

 

I dont use Edge myself, but for those that do - Its getting its own version of U-Block Origin

 

MS feeling left behind ? :)

 

 

I would still prefer Chromes sandbox and the security of Chrome due its extensive pounding its had from the world and googles servers, and the fact that you can use the unbranded open source versions, I dont think MS will ever be able to compete and provide similar options.

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I've been using the addon in edge since the beta went public, and i can report for the few who also use edge, that it brings its optimized code over to the new browser. Loading times of web pages on low end atom tablets are a lot faster than with addblockplus before. Actually, with addblockplus on the tablet i'm currently using, it was faster to just load the fucking adds than use addblock.

 

Do you have a link to that official site with edge extensions alternity? Haven't found a comprehensive list myself yet :/

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To find an extension and add it to your browser:
Open Microsoft Edge and select More (...) > Extensions > Get extensions from the Store. (If you don't see Extensions on the menu, note that you must have the Windows 10 Anniversary Update before you can use extensions.)

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/instantanswers/77af9af7-5df2-6eed-6ddd-0b58c8580a9f/extensions-in-microsoft-edge

 

Not sure if it will be there yet though, its supposed to be beta at the moment so may not show up ( I heard about it on the Security Now podcast 590 )

 

 

Not surprised that it makes pages load faster :), it does the same on Chrome versus any addblock / plus / whatever plugins ..

 

Its the only plugin I use these days and using its settings, I no longer use a manually installed MVPS Hosts file, because UBlock Origin can be instructed to use it as part of its black lists and download / update it for you ..

3OtS1gp.png

 

.. The other advantage to this - Microsoft will not edit this particular installation of the Hosts file ( whereas the original is subject to some sneaky background manipulation by Microsoft Windows Defender ( all in the name of protecting that file from being used against you .. of course :rolleyes: )

 

Edit : Although beware UBlock Origin updates, they switch the selected lists back to default at the moment, so MVPS Hosts can get deselected by a plugin update.

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  • 3 months later...

Windows 10 Creators Update :

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/features

I used the downloadable Update Assistant to get it going a bit quicker than waiting for normal updates to bring it down ..

 

.. And I actually like this update.

Anyone with NVidia drivers - I didnt experience any glitches with this update affecting them (unlike previous major overhauls of the OS). I pre-empted the update and grabbed the newest drivers ready to install anyway after Win 10 updated, but really I could have carried on with the previous version.

Not so good on the Sound drivers though in my experience, they sounded awful afterwards, and I already had the newest drivers installed for those prior to the update - But after windows update, an uninstall and reinstall of sound drivers solved that problem.

Out of four different laptops in our house, that one sound driver problem on one machine was the only glitch we had, all the other machines had a very smooth transition to this update.

Oh one other little quirk - Two machines had CCleaner completely removed from being installed by windows. Downloaded the latest build and installed it again afterwards and it was fine .. So possibly on the two machine where it became uninstalled it could have been an older version which microsoft has determined to be potentially harmful in doing what it does, when applied to the newer OS - Or the cynical me thinks MS does not like having a tool installed which comprehensively wipes out a huge amount of history and tracking data. The newest version when re-installed though is working fine and not being blocked by windows from being installed.

 

Another plus, they now behave with the main privacy settings and present the switches up front as part of finalising the update and not hidden away as options you have to look for .. They are still all on by default no matter what you had previously set, so just needed to switch them all off again. You are also not railroaded into having a microsoft account anymore, it will just update your local user account as you would expect.

And there's a new Game Bar thing, press the windows key plus G during a game and the game bar pops up, click settings and check the box near the top to get windows to recognise that you are playing a game and it ought to cut down on background processes.

Not sure if it helps any, with my newest machine I dont have anything that stresses it enough to be able to tell any difference in performance, so its probably something that will help with future more demanding games.

 

After it has settled down, and updated a few more bits and pieces post installation, got my wifi linked printer recognised and setup again .. it feels a bit more reliable / stable than the previous Win 10 installations. And I think I now prefer this to Win 7.

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I did the same as you, I used the upgrade assistant to get it. In the end I had such horrible issues that I had to go back. First off I had trouble closing the lid of my laptop which resulted in a black screen when I opened it again. This required a hard reset each time. I figured this was something I could workaround though. Second issue was Nvidia's fault, the drivers they released that supported this update would not install on many of the newer branded ASUS laptops such as mine. Strike two :( Playing Skyrim was plagued by video memory issues due to this latter issue, Strike three :(

So for the first time ever I had to roll back a big update. Not a good experience and hope they fix all this when it becomes mainstream.

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The experience is probably going to be variable by the sound of it, my wifes laptop is a fairly new ASUS with NVidia graphics and had no problems at all on that machine.

I know that windows has a strict chain of upgrades from the BIOS up, which includes encryption so that each step of the loading sequence is checked for signatures and cannot have anything slipped in between at a low level ( malware prevention ), so any low level drivers I think have to be re-authorised in some cases after the whole OS update .. Hence why I had to uninstall and reinstall my vendor provided sound drivers. With the previous win 10 overhaul I also had to do the same with NVidia drivers, which was not the case this time around.

See if your laptop manufacturer has any driver updates specifically for your machine and this OS update compatability.

 

I wish Windows could tell you if it had to nobble anything at a low level and give you a warning to look into things. Sometimes I wonder if some of the more obscure drivers your machine comes with, get stomped on by windows upgrades, and then windows automagically installs a generic driver for that device as soon as it goes online .. Which then means you may not have the same tailored drivers your machine vendor provides. It all probably works fine, but loses some functionality that you are not aware of on a technical level.

My MSI laptop for example - Its series of drivers need to be installed in a specific order, so I numbered the archives in the order they are advised to be installed :

YOvPCAr.png

It also has a bunch of tailored apps for this machine, but the order is not so important :

BZqhWvc.png

Along comes windows upgrade,

kicks an unverified driver into the bin,

then immediately installs a generic driver after windows first boots up ..

Not only is this driver not tailored to the laptop like the vendor provided ones are, but it has also now been installed not in the recommended sequence of installations.

 

In my case with this Win 10 update, the Sound driver which went glitchy was a generic driver overwrite for RealTech, but this machine has a 2.1 surround setup with an under case sub-woofer speaker giving surprisingly good Bass, which is configured by part 2 of my Audio setup ( The Nahimic driver ), which is number 4 in the sequence of installations, just the audio realtech driver is not enough, and the Nahimic driver is specifically for the version of the realtech driver it comes with .. otherwise it does not work and makes awful scratchy noises.

Thing is I know from experience what had happened, most people dont realise this shit happens ( and I reckon most people probably do not go to their machines support site and go through getting the latest of each drivers and re-installing them all in the machine manufacturers recommended order again ) ..

.. So imho, Windows really ought to be warning people about anything it bins from the machines setup. Generic replacements break things occasionally.

 

In your machines case, you may have an app which supports special function keys which are unique to that laptop, and that app also took over being the driver for your lid closing and triggering software windows actions .. Probably needs an update and hopefully your machines vendor is on the ball, and hopefully still supporting updating your machines drivers and apps ( they drop support after a few years have passed .. So if windows buggers things up after that date, parts of your machine will no longer work correctly thereafter, which is a hugely annoying when you want to keep the machine going a few more years ), to me this is the biggest downside to laptops when you cant exchange internal modules like you can a full blown PC.

 

In my apps, the one that is named MSI SCM comes without any documentation, but actually provides a shortcut interface to switching off completely the machine Bluetooth device, Webcam in the lid, Wifi .. among other random features. I do appreciate being able to disable Bluetooth though when travelling so it is not broadcasting to anyone sniffing laptops at airports for example.

Edit: Ha, speaking of checking, I just had another check of all my drivers and apps and found I am a bit behind with a new BIOS firmware update, and a newer version of the Audio ( Realtek and Nahimic drivers ) which are newer than the ones I grabbed a few days ago, and specifically mention they are for the Win 10 x64 bit Creators Update.

FAQ
- [Release Note] Nahimic
- [Troubleshooting] Nahimic Troubleshooting Instructions and Q&A
Note 1.Please refer to the update instructions to update the latest audio driver and Nahimic.
2.Update Nahimic 2.3.14 or later version to support Windows 10 Creators Update / Redstone 2 (build 15063).

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