Windows 10

Just a FYI: Free upgrade still possible via the program for customers who use assistive technologies.
Windows 10 upgrade for assistive technology users
Did a Windows 8 pro to 10 pro upgrade yesterday, no problems whatsoever. It's due to the recent upgrade that enables the assistive stuff in windows 10 so the rere's can use it too (which you don't have to enable, obviously).

Win-win, if you missed the free upgrade - here it is again.

If you run a corporate network DON'T update your PC's to 1607 yet. We tested on a few and everything looked great until MS released some cumulative updates for 1607 and the PC's went to download them. For some reason they not only ignored our WSUS settings and went direct to MS to download, but they fail to download them and get stuck in an endless retry loop which effectively DDOS's your own internet connection. Monday morning we came in to a pegged internet connection which was traced to the 1607 PC's endlessly trying to download these cumulative updates at the rate of 15gb an hour, even though the updates are only 200mb in total size. Reports of similar problems all over the TechNet forum, with some having to block MS update servers at the firewall, and others throttling BITS traffic through the firewall. Total disaster.

Frenzied Wombat said:

If you run a corporate network DON'T update your PC's to 1607 yet. We tested on a few and everything looked great until MS released some cumulative updates for 1607 and the PC's went to download them. For some reason they not only ignored our WSUS settings and went direct to MS to download, but they fail to download them and get stuck in an endless retry loop which effectively DDOS's your own internet connection. Monday morning we came in to a pegged internet connection which was traced to the 1607 PC's endlessly trying to download these cumulative updates at the rate of 15gb an hour, even though the updates are only 200mb in total size. Reports of similar problems all over the TechNet forum, with some having to block MS update servers at the firewall, and others throttling BITS traffic through the firewall. Total disaster.

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Yep, I am waiting at least a month for this update.

Alkorin said:

Got a good laugh out of that. Thanks.

Why wouldn't you guys use LTSB? Ring updates are way too buggy.

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The "servicing branches" only apply to "Windows update for Business" which is just another way of saying "standard MS Windows Update with a delay option for new patches". You have no ability to approve/deny specific patches, which imho makes it unsuitable for anything but the smallest business. It also forces each PC to update directly from MS, which is a nice way to kill your internet bandwidth.

We use WSUS and have a test group for new patches. In this case we didn't even approve these new updates for 1607, the 1607 upgraded PC's ignored their WSUS settings and went straight to MS to get them...

Alkorin said:

I'm clearly missing something here. I'll have to look into it further, I guess. We are (apparently) running the LTSB version here and we are by no means a small business (over 100K PCs). I'm curious as to how/why this is happening if all it is is a deferral option for sets of new patches, so, thanks for that insight.

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I'd be interested in knowing how you have that configured. I'm assuming you use WSUS or SCCM to deploy MS patches, and neither of these mechanisms support the "servicing branch" options. I suppose you could emulate the LTSB functionality by not approving specific patches until they reach a certain age, but the LTSB mechanism itself is solely a function of "Windows update for Business" that can only use MS servers to download updates. There is a "peer distribution" option for the MS Update for Business to address the internet overload issue for larger networks, but it was just introduced in 1607 and isn't yet working properly.

Gears of War 4 requires Win10, so there's that.

It's also just plain better than 7 in basically every way.

Denamian said:

I can completely understand people not wanting to upgrade from 7, as it's still perfectly fine.

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This. Updated from 7 to 10 awhile back and my network drivers hadn't been updated yet and I'd continually lose internet connection after just a few minutes until restart, so I had to revert. Updated again awhile later and no issues. Wife went to update her computer and it completely fucked over her machine, had to do a total reformat. This recent big update that was pushed out 2-3 weeks ago caused my computer to freeze at random times and for random lengths. Thankfully windows pushed out another update either later that week or the following week and I haven't had the problem since. So if you're happy with 7, 10 isn't without it's problems.

Intrinsic said:

Just do the upgrade. It isn't the devil, it isn't Vista, it is a thing and you should just do it.

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The only bad part with Vista was heavy system requirements, 10 is actually poor UX and anti-user behaviour by Microsoft.

ronne said:

Gears of War 4 requires Win10, so there's that.

It's also just plain better than 7 in basically every way.

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Personally I would describe Windows 10 as worse than Windows 7 in almost every way.

I run the latest versions of everything always and never have any problems ever.

I am having a few issues at home since the anniversary update. but I am not sure its a software problem

Frenzied Wombat said:

If you run a corporate network DON'T update your PC's to 1607 yet. We tested on a few and everything looked great until MS released some cumulative updates for 1607 and the PC's went to download them. For some reason they not only ignored our WSUS settings and went direct to MS to download, but they fail to download them and get stuck in an endless retry loop which effectively DDOS's your own internet connection. Monday morning we came in to a pegged internet connection which was traced to the 1607 PC's endlessly trying to download these cumulative updates at the rate of 15gb an hour, even though the updates are only 200mb in total size. Reports of similar problems all over the TechNet forum, with some having to block MS update servers at the firewall, and others throttling BITS traffic through the firewall. Total disaster.

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Its because they are flagging them as different updates not "windows updates" so they sneak by WSUS and you have to disable via GPO "Automatic Updates" etc. MS wants you to be using SCCM - esp for win10 environments - you gain a lot more control. We had a lot of issues with 16XX updates getting sneaked passed - our SCCM is 2012R2 SP1 and it only can "fully" manage up to w10 15XX - if anything gets past that the management is not fully there - this weekend we are updating SCCM to CB15 then to 16 in order to gain full management of Windows 10 devices

Xadion said:

Its because they are flagging them as different updates not "windows updates" so they sneak by WSUS and you have to disable via GPO "Automatic Updates" etc. MS wants you to be using SCCM - esp for win10 environments - you gain a lot more control. We had a lot of issues with 16XX updates getting sneaked passed - our SCCM is 2012R2 SP1 and it only can "fully" manage up to w10 15XX - if anything gets past that the management is not fully there - this weekend we are updating SCCM to CB15 then to 16 in order to gain full management of Windows 10 devices

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Nah, we have a case with MS Premier about this shit and I've gotten the full skinny on this coding abortion from the product manager of WSUS since my last post. Basically what happened is that Microsoft built a bittorent client into Windows 10 to "optimize" the download of updates-- it's called "delivery optimization", and if enabled your PC will share chunks of downloaded updates with other Windows 10 machines on the internet. Literally Bittorent behavior. Unfortunately some idiot decided this was a good feature to include in Windows 10 Enterprise as well, because ya know network admins just *love* computers randomly connecting to 50 other computers on the internet at undefined times to emulate an internal DDOS attack on your firewall. Anyways, what basically happened is that something was introduced in 1607 so that no matter what you have "delivery optimization" set to (disabled, LAN only, wide open) it still goes out to the internet to get updates, and ignores WSUS. We had 10 computers just decide one day to download new nic drivers (we don't even approve drivers in WSUS) from the internet, and they were the wrong drivers so all 10 PC's went offline. That's when we decided to use our precious Premier hours to open a case with them, as the case we opened up via SA was going nowhere with India.