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alt3rn1ty

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You have to install in a special order? I have never heard of that before. I see your point though, I bet you that's what happened in my case, Windows installing or otherwise messing with the drivers. I'm not expecting ASUS to be on the ball though so that's mainly why I rolled back for now.

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8 minutes ago, Deathbydestiny said:

You have to install in a special order? I have never heard of that before.

Yep .. Dont select an OS but just read the white text underneath the OS selection button here https://www.msi.com/Laptop/support/GS70-2QE-Stealth-Pro-5.html#down-driver

"Please follow below sequence to install driver. 1. Chipset, 2. Intel VGA, 3. nVidia VGA, 4. Audio, 5. LAN, 6. Card Reader 7. WLAN, 8. BT, 9. Touchpad, 10. ME, 11. Radio Switch, 12. Others"

I was told by an engineer once that drivers are best installed in the same order as the manufacturer has done, usually though you dont see the vendor giving the recommended procedure, I reckon most dont care once its sold, or if they do probably assume customers will not adhere to the recommendation.

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Got the creators update on four or the six machines i maintain for the family so far.

I've basically made the same experiences as alt3rnity. The update went all smooth save a few drivers.

The two machines that came with the anniversary update upgraded with only very minor issues (one doesn't show the remaining battery time anymore next to the battery percentage; the other, which has no precision touchpad, seems to have a slightly less smooth two-finger scrolling now).

For the others that come from the win 8.1 era, I'm also struggling with losing features from realtek and synaptic drivers. The one laptop that was originally win 7 lost most of it's software like the one for laptop function keys (that was already back during the initial upgrade). In most these cases I did try to install the old drivers again but some of them would not work properly anymore.  I'm fine using them with reduced functionality and basic windows drivers (or rather, I said 'fuck it' and stopped fiddling with crappy drivers and carried on).

It seems windows 10 and the OEMs are getting better at this. In some cases features have actually returned in recent months or bugs from drivers have been fixed with automatic driver updates initiated by windows 10. The Machines built with Win10 do upgrade very well so far. But I'll keep a lookout in the future for which manufacturer's parts and drivers are well maintained or programmed well enough to not break during upgrades.

So far I can recommend getting laptops with precision touchpads (not a manufacturer, but a specification for touchpads made my Microsoft) and Intel wireless chips (definitely avoid killer and Qualcomm if you can).

Sadly there aren't many options for sound and Realtek seems to be lacking a bit in regards to future-proof drivers.

 

But as a whole, this was a really nice and smooth upgrade. It didn't change all to much, but the additions (and some of the app updates the last three months) are nice quality of life upgrades.

 

P.S. I use the portable version of ccleaner, so this can't even be uninstalled on my rigs ;). and I heavily advice against using it for a few months after a win upgrade. The win upgrades leave a windows.old folder behind for when  you need to roll back. this folder should be deleted after 30 days. After the anniversary update and the subsequent cleaning, the folder and a few kb of files remained. I used Ccleaner and it's function to clean that folder, which completely bricked by device and I had to set it back to mint conditions (after three failed boot attempts, windows will boot into a restore option, where only this most drastic of measures would help me in my case. still I was kind of impressed it at least managed to get itself back in shape). the bug with the remaining files on windows.old was later fixed by a windows update, after which the folder was deleted by itself.

Long story short, ccleaner bricked my device because a function that worked on the November update would brick a computer running the anniversary update.

 

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18 hours ago, Gruftlord said:

~ and I heavily advice against using it for a few months after a win upgrade. The win upgrades leave a windows.old folder behind for when you need to roll back. this folder should be deleted after 30 days. After the anniversary update and the subsequent cleaning, the folder and a few kb of files remained. I used Ccleaner and it's function to clean that folder, which completely bricked by device and I had to set it back to mint conditions (after three failed boot attempts, windows will boot into a restore option, where only this most drastic of measures would help me in my case. still I was kind of impressed it at least managed to get itself back in shape). the bug with the remaining files on windows.old was later fixed by a windows update, after which the folder was deleted by itself.

Long story short, ccleaner bricked my device because a function that worked on the November update would brick a computer running the anniversary update.

 

My bold, FTFY : "I bricked my device switching on an advanced feature" - The CCleaner Advanced features which are switched off and ghosted by default for good reason. Yeah, dont use those until you know exactly what you are doing and when they can be used :)

My Windows.old folder is taking up 21gb space and annoying me a little, but I always leave it just in case.

000.png

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Sure, I have no one but myself to blame. But then again, it goes to show that win 10 is iterating fast and several software companies can't keep up.

With the current iteration of win 10, the settings app allows for automatic temp folder and trash bin cleaning and the apps and features subpage allows you to uninstall or repair any UWP app or x32 program.

Advanced cleaning features and the registry cleaner are highly risky now with windows' rapid iteration, so i no longer will recommend anyone use them (i used them extensively on win 7 and 8 without issues, alas no more).

The only function of Ccleaner I still consider somewhat useful is the function to check all autostart entries and scheduled tasks, and even those are less useful now that I keep a closer eye on not bloating my OS.

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IMO, CCleaner has always been dangerous. I had it shred a Windows 7 install once that couldn't be salvaged except by reformatting it fresh. Kill my system once, you don't get to come back to try again. So I don't think it's damage is limited to Windows 10 :P

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  • 2 weeks later...

https://twit.tv/shows/security-now/episodes/609?autostart=false

I haven't listened to it yet (on night shifts at the mo), but apparently you can remove an unecessary block on Win 7 / 8.1 updates

"This week Steve and Leo discuss how one of the NSA's Vault7 vulnerabilities has gotten loose, a clever hacker removes Microsoft deliberate (and apparently unnecessary) block on Win7/8.1 updates for newer processors, Microsoft refactors multifactor authentication, Google to add native ad-blocking to Chrome… and what exactly *are* abusive ads?, Mastercard to build a questionable fingerprint sensor into their cards, are Bose headphones spying on their listeners? 10 worrisome security holes discovered in Linksys routers, MIT cashes out half of its IPv4 space, and the return of two meaner BrickerBots. Then some Errata, a bit of Miscellany, and, time permitting, some "Closing the Loop" feedback from our podcast's terrific listeners."

-----------

Also O/T a bit but Steve Gibsons SQRL Login client is quite stable now and nearing completion for Windows, I think he just wants to make an installer for it (not really necessary).

Anyone who wants to try it out / beta test :

Dev build https://www.grc.com/dev/sqrl/ (current update version is 6325.11.exe at time of writing)

Run the client (from wherever you put the client, I just copied it from downloads into the root of my D: drive), when run it will register itself as an auto start Systray App - Once running, Right click its systray icon and choose Manage SQRL, you will then be able to setup a username and ID with an associated password (you only need to do this once, though you can have other IDs)

Now restart your machine, Squirrel should auto start and be running in your Systray, go to the Demo Page and click the square QR code ..

https://www.grc.com/sqrl/demo.htm

It will ask for your password and log you in.

If you accepted defaults for SQRL and the Quick login default of 4 characters, then next login will just ask you for those four first characters of your password.

 

From then on, (when all sites support it), whenever you go to a site, you dont need to type in username and password anymore, you just click the QR code, type your first four characters of the password and you are in .. The site knows nothing about you except that you are for example in my case "Alt3rn1ty", it does not store your password so cannot be hacked, and only shares a public key which also cannot be used again anywhere else ...

So the problem of having to redo passwords when a website gets hacked will become a thing of the past aswell.

This also means website admins will have less worry about hosting and hashing all users private information.

 

Besides the Dev builds of Steves Assembly language client linked above, there are also the following projects completed https://www.grc.com/sqrl/implementations.htm

 

Here's me logging in to the Demo page (using Win 10 Creators Update Game Bar to record Chromium (you will not be able to see me enter my password just after clicking the QR code because the interface for that is presented by the SQRL client not Chromium, so is not being recorded by the Game Bar recorder) ) ..

 

GRC's _ SQRL Secure Quick Reliable Login - Chromium 27_04_2017 13_18_05.mp4

(Just use VLC Media player to play it if you havent got anything which supports .mp4 files, VLC supports everything)

 

Edit : Forgot to link the GRC Discussions for SQRL https://www.grc.com/groups/sqrl

Edit 2 : Should you wish to get rid of the current beta client from your setup, just delete the copy you ran which registered itself (in my case I would just delete the copy I placed in the root of my D: drive) .. It will no longer run at windows startup. It will leave behind a registry entry for auto starts which will always fail because the exe has been deleted .. You could use CCleaner to clean such redundant registry entries .. If you dare ;) -- This is one of the reasons Steve is making an Installer / Uninstaller wrapper for the client when it goes live

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  • 1 month later...

This post is not going to be about Windows 10 .. But Windows 10 S

Has anyone heard of this and the plans reference browsers ?

Apparently Microsoft using the excuse of securing their OS wish to use their own web API for handling html and something else which pretty much limits what Browser you can use in windows thereafter, to just Edge, and you would only be able to use MS Bing as a search engine.

So in future you would not be able to use Chrome or Firefox for example.

If that is true, and MS really are going to lock down what software you can install in Win 10 S to such a degree, what about software like steam which uses Dynamic Link Libraries (I think .dll's are the other thing which will be severely hamstrung by these new security ideas), all the games which come with their own .dll's will become paid for useless software which no longer works ..

.. Even worse, other third party software which also needs to handle html in its own way = Thunderbird for email

My life is setup with 6 email accounts managed by Thunderbird, when the car MOT comes round, email ping, insurance, bills, first point of contact with me for my work and many companies etc.

 

Please tell me that one day MS are not going to do an auto update to Win 10, turning it into Win 10 S, and all of what we are accustomed to managing our lives with no longer works. If that is the case, I would be imagining scenarios of walking into Microsoft Offices in Fallout 4 Power Armour carrying a mini gun :).

But seriously, that would be a really bad move by MS, and probably cause a public outcry (not like they would bother their arse to listen anyway unless it caused a big enough impact on sales worldwide). Anyone heard anything similar ?

Hopefully I have heard this wrong. But if they forced our hand to make such a drastic change that really would be the end of windows for me. If they caused me to lose all my games, thats the only reason I endure MS windows. Linux would be flavour of the month thereafter, which is more secure than windows anyway and would allow the better browser and email client to still be installed plus GOG games and steam again.

 

Edit : I guess it helps if I do a search of the internet eh? :facepalm:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/03/windows-10-s-microsoft-faster-pc-comparison

According to that article its going to be a separate Win 10, hope that remians true ..

Quote

Which apps won’t Windows 10 S be able to run?
Any apps that are not currently available in the Windows Store will not be able to be installed or run. That includes Apple’s iTunes, Google’s Chrome browser and the full versions of Adobe’s Acrobat, Photoshop and the rest of the Creative Suite – or anything else that’s installed via the traditional Windows 7 or earlier way.

Can I play games on Windows 10 S?
Yes and no. You can play any game that can be installed from the Windows Store, which includes both mobile games and AAA games – mainly from Microsoft’s game studios – such as Forza Horizon 3 and Gears of War 4, plus Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare.

You will not be able install Valve’s Steam store, EA’s Origin, Blizzard’s Battlenet or any game distributed on disc or download from outside the Windows Store, however, which will severely limit the selection of games available for Windows 10 S.

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That sounds like something more suited to secure environments or corporate setups where it is not desired to let people install and use whatever they want. Average consumers would have no reason to use it, so they shouldn't be buying it either.

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It's their jab at ChromeOS and Chromebook.

The current Win 10 Pro version already has a setting to limit installs to apps from the store, which can be flipped by admins through windows' centralized tools (forgot the name), so in a sense, corporations already have the ability to use this security feature.

 

 

 

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Is that the Group Policy Ed?

...

Or perhaps someone in MS took umbrage when someone posted a link to MSDN or such in a Valve forum:

 

Quote

 

Notice:

You are leaving Steam.

http://microsoft/blah/blah is not an official Steam site.

Never enter your Steam password on an untrusted website. An official Steam site will display “Valve Corp.” in green with a padlock icon in your browser’s address bar, as shown below:

 

Microsoft untrusted? Never!

....

Yea, the Creators reset stuff alright. The worst was resetting various NVIDIA res modes. So want to return to the NVIDIA forums with another minge. :(

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  • 2 months later...

That link has some cool stuff in it, but as somebody that does TCP stack tuning at work (on non-Windows machines)  I strongly disagree with disabling the TCP auto-tuning feature. The maths for determining these values are well known, so the auto-tuning is just employing these calculations based on the latency of your connection and other metrics. 

You'll probably see a gain in some specific use-cases (e.g. downloading large files) but overall it could gimp your network connection. Basically all you're doing is optimizing your internet connection to run the internet speed test. :P

 

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Speaking of the Creator's Update,  includes some new anti-malware measures that completely stop Mod Organizer's VFS union-filesystem overlay from working at all.

I'm on the Slow Ring Insider's program and I received the latest Creator's Update build a week or so ago, and I confirmed it completely put the kibosh on MO. I had a test install of it managing a FONV install (I rarely play it and I wash my hands in bleach after using MO) but after the update it just completely stopped working and crashes on launch now.

fonv-mo-crash.png.06cff2cd418097fd04284d4967543210.png

To his credit, Tannin knew this would happen and that's why he's not using the UVFS technique in Vortex. I just don't think he knew it would happen at the OS level.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 months later...

Latest Features update to Win 10 x64 was smooth, although it took more time than I thought a few simple updates would do. The thing that surprised me most was how many drivers did not need re-installing or updating post windows updates, usually there is an NVidia driver gets kicked out of the system after the update reboots the machine, along with random other driver, and maybe random other thing (I have seen CCleaner get booted off the system entirely once, and it wasn't the version which hackers embedded a virus into) ..

.. I have a little driver which enables printing to a shared printer plugged into the wifi router, that got booted out, but after uninstalling it, and re-installing it, windows accepted it again and everything works as normal. No major drivers were affected at all.

Four machines updated, same experience, no major dramas.

I wouldn't like to bet on it, but I do believe Win 10 x64 is becoming quite a stable thing, and nearly as desirable as Win 7 used to be in its performance and generally just doing what you need it to and not being intrusive.

Or maybe I am being fed subliminal messages every day and brainwashed "windows ten is goooood, yeeees, go out in the world and spread the word like a good OS zombie"

 

The updates naming is confusing though, I believe I am on the Creators update, which had an update since, and now there are these Feature updates (two so far), are they Feature updates to Win 10 Features?, or is this like the "Features Update" (like a newly named overhaul update similar to the Creators update replacing pretty much all that went before .. The most recent one the whole update took a similar amount of time and multiple reboots as an overhaul of the OS usually does) ?

Also I believe the update from an older OS is now a bit more up front about offering the major privacy option switches, MS have publicly fessed up to being heavy handed in this regard recently in early Win 10 aggressive pushes, you no longer get steered so hard towards creating a Microsoft Account and associated email, and the aforementioned privacy options are in your face (default selected of course), as opposed to being hidden behind a small writing link with a slightly darker font Custom setup, so you can switch them off easier now they are more noticeable at the first reboot of the system after the upgrade.

Not sure how hard they push the OneDrive cloud setup these days though, I haven't experienced it going from old OS to win 10 personally with more recent updates, I just know they have never re-pushed it onto any of our machines since first installing win 10 and refusing such, they have respected my wishes not to have it enabled. Same deal with Cortana, the talking assistant thing that wants to get to know you and gather many aspects of meta data about you so that it can obey your every wish etc etc data gathering for MS .. It also remains disabled to date.

Overall I am still wary of MS, but getting more and more comfortable / impressed with Win 10.

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  • 2 weeks later...

:)

Here the 1709 update wasn't registered in the action centre. To "get it" I had to navigate to Settings/Windows Update where- bingo- something started to happen -oh no- it's chewing up all the bandwidth yet again.

Funny, as the settings have always been

Quote

We'll automatically download and install updates, except on metered connections ...

And in Advanced Options don't you love:

Quote

Note: Windows Update might update itself automatically first when checking for other updates.

With snail bandwidth, tried this to pause the update. Instead of the admin command, the same commands work in the admin Powershell box. Well, a bit. The first command,

Quote

net stop wuauserv

failed. Better bet going to Computer Management/Services and stopping it from there. Problem is that even though this was on manual, it somehow started about a minute later without my help. Now the Intelligent Transfer service stopped ok

Quote

net stop bits

But the 

Quote

net stop dosvc

produced:

Quote

The requested pause, continue, or stop is not valid for this service.

Nvm, it's only the optimiser. Now, having "paused" the update, the urgent tasks were completed, the BITS service was restarted along with the second restart of the WU service. Great. No activity on the line yet. What? Back in Settings/Windows Update, the message was the update could not continue as the device had been switched off. Oh no. But then the progress there appeared to recover to its former % of completion.

I think they chunk the packages- so it's robust enough- but their servers still don't have the technology to establish BW control via RPC. Or maybe they do, but we're not seeing anything yet.

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If you haven't looked into it yet, have a look in Settings / Updates / Advanced Options / Delivery Optimization. I have it set to just "PCs on my local network". I really dont like the other idea of sharing update files with "PCs on my local network, and PCs on the Internet", I guess all parts are encrypted and Cyclic Redundancy Checked for tampering at the receiving end, I just still shy away from the idea, but it could be advantageous for someone with limited bandwidth in remote areas.

Maybe the message you got was a device it was grabbing updates from at the time which shut down ?, then it reverted to grabbing directly from MS which is where the percent caught up with what you had locally versus what needed to still download.

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Yeah, I don't like the idea of being essentially a P2P seed to feed other people MS's updates. I pay enough for their crap, they can run their own servers. PCs on my local network is fine, but sending to other people using MY paid-for bandwidth. NO.

Good point for you maybe lmstearn:

11 hours ago, alt3rn1ty said:

it could be advantageous for someone with limited bandwidth in remote areas.

 

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Thanks. The install failed- twice, but there might have been a corruption in the cache somewhere as one or previous installs had failed. MS don't really have a very efficient management of that area. The troubleshooter detected and fixed some issues but didn't help.

Ended up using the Update Assistant which worked out to be a far superior method.

Yeah :P MS want us all to become torrent servers. But in actual fact it might solve a lot of congestion issues and can actually be configured in detail, ghacks explain it beautifully, but the commenters are not happy with the idea.

TBQH, it depends what you do- if you spend a large portion of your time playing offline games, then why not? Even better is for MS to make some kind of arrangement with the ISPs so that users can be credited with extra bandwidth for their participation in the program. Unfortunately, that probably requires extra external monitoring on data out streams.

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The update assistant worked well for me too when I got a little too aggressive with file/folder ownership, then an update tried to roll in & failed.

Sorry to hear you're having problems with both Win10 AND your new tablet. Sheesh. At this point, my wife would have thrown it at me and said, "Just fix it!". :P

I actually like the idea of the world sharing their computing & bandwidth resources. Not limited to just Microsoft, but a myriad of projects. I'm all in for things like letting science institutions utilize my computing power to aid in their calculations, or even more evenly distributing load across the entire web. However, I'm not about to let a big company that charges and arm & a leg for their products use me to serve up their updates. Perhaps if they took a page out of the Linux community's book it'd be a different story. Plus, with ISPs/Cell Carriers limiting & charging for data, and throttling to a relative standstill when you go over, it's just not practical. If bandwidth were free, (and security precautions are in place), then I would be more than happy to share what I have with the world. Sadly, that's just not the reality yet. Kinda reminds me of communism (lower-case c) and socialism. They have a lot of merit, but selfishness & competing interests has prevented them from ever working right. (Lennon) Imagine all the people....

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Yeah, :P I'm them: small c catholic, small l liberal a bit too.

Definitely not an apparatchik lower or upper case! Is there such a thing as a lower case Marxist?

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Quote

agent of the apparatus

I like that..  LOL! I swear stearn, I've had to look up the definition of more words when chatting with you & tegeus over the last couple of weeks, than the last couple of years! :huh: That's okay, whatever doesn't kill me makes me smarter...or something like that.. :)

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

:P Whatever doesn't kill this poor old HDD makes it what? Certainly not bloat resistant.

Has anyone done a disk cleanup of previous Windows after the 1709 update? Here that amounted to well over 35 GB. 35GB!!!!! No wonder the system has been running somewhat sluggishly since the update.

This raises the hairy question of dedicated MS servers for backup & restore. Something like this but the prices! Makes no sense periodically shunting yottabytes of the same data through the internet- thus the focus would be on a better way to preserve the few user settings these updates actually respect. Thus for system restore, core files of a previous OS are retrieved from an internet server, local settings & files are retrieved from a local source.

This would work providing there is no major blunder in the shipped update so that everyone is not rushing to D/L the restore package:- our friend Murphy is forever waiting in the wings for that eventuality!

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