Windows 10

Malakriss said:

With the coming Win7 apocalypse in another 10 days what's the cheapest option to keep older Win7 Home towers still viable? These are recycled family rigs not used for any heavy lifting, so I was thinking of getting a couple cheap Win 8 Pro keys off ebay or something. At minimum I want them to be Pro + have at least 3 years to die of natural causes. Any better/cheap options?

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I just ran the Windows Media Creation tool on an old Win7 Home Premium OEM version and it upgraded to 10 and activated with a digital license.

I switched to Chromium based Edge from Chrome. It seems to be just a tad bit faster. You can load extensions from the Chrome store, so I'm not missing out on any of those. I guess in the grand scheme of things there really isn't difference between the two since both are based off of Chromium.

Finally took the plunge and built a new PC with with windows 10 home edition. I've been using 7 forever and have no experience with this new shit.

If anyone could give advice or post links to ways I can clean up the OS (get rid of/disabling the tracking BS, lists of other things I can get rid of) or if there are any must have programs i'd greatly appreciate it.

Merry Christmas, bros!

onno said:

Finally took the plunge and built a new PC with with windows 10 home edition. I've been using 7 forever and have no experience with this new shit.

If anyone could give advice or post links to ways I can clean up the OS (get rid of/disabling the tracking BS, lists of other things I can get rid of) or if there are any must have programs i'd greatly appreciate it.

Merry Christmas, bros!

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Start 10 has the Windows 7 style start menu. A must have IMO. I'm with Dom. All I use is O&O. Fiddling too much with the OS makes it psychotic.

onno said:

Finally took the plunge and built a new PC with with windows 10 home edition. I've been using 7 forever and have no experience with this new shit.

If anyone could give advice or post links to ways I can clean up the OS (get rid of/disabling the tracking BS, lists of other things I can get rid of) or if there are any must have programs i'd greatly appreciate it.

Merry Christmas, bros!

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Run this to disable nearly all the tracking bullshit, it also removes a bunch of useless crap unless you want it on your computer. If you're using windows defender you'll probably have to head into the ransomware section and disable the controlled access section (I did last time I ran this, otherwise it wouldn't run).

I'm very very late to this party. Oculus eventually forced my hand as they use some dodgy dns stuff that killed < 10 compat.

Anyway, I hate it, and have been fighting it nonstop since I installed it.

My main problem is that I use the active state of my OS as my "context". It's my memory. I wake up and look at my screens and everything comes back to me. This means that I cannot allow any bullshit restarting.

I do install updates, but I want to decide when to do it. I don't want them downloading in the background or even checking in the background. Beyond functionality it's the principle of the thing: This is my goddamn computer. An OS is built to serve me and do what the hell I say, not the other way around.

The goog on this topic is horribly polluted and filled with solutions that either don't work at all, or work till the next restart. It feels like there's been an ongoing war over time with people that want my way vs microsoft insisting that they own my machine and just allow me to use it now and then.

I'd settle for the "postpone" thing if I could specify a date a few thousand years in the future.

So the above finally boiled over last week and I rage nuked the partition, bought a dodgy win7 key at some shady site, and went back to the golden era of windows 7.

It was very rough; alot of googling to kick windows update into shape, get nvidia drivers to install etc. I'd also forgotten some of the old UI strangeness. Scroll wheels only work on the focused area, so you can't mouse out of an active game and scroll a webpage for instance. Also there's no clicking things on an inactive window. It takes a click to activate and then another to hit the thingy.

Then alot of stuff just wouldn't work. VSCode had an older version but I figured I'd just build it myself. It uses Node though, and node has this warning that it might behave oddly on 7 and it did. Stuff would just hang randomly and not complete and leave junk files hanging about.

I remember in the past when a new OS came along and something claimed not to work, you could just hex edit the installer and take out the OS check and it would work just fine. But they fundamentally changed alot of crap down in kernel32 etc. So I gave it a college try but gave up when I discovered my 6 dollar key was bogus (SURPRISE!).

So I'm back on 10. I found a script called SledgeHammer that is supposed to completely kill windows update. It seems to work but we'll see how long it survives.

I'm quite fond of kubuntu and I've started looking into doing development there. There's a directx / vulkan layer of some sort and I could cross compile and run with wine for the basic bits of windows forms I use. For games it is really just window creation, but my tools have alot of extra forms.

Blender already works well in linux, and my job uses linux as well so maybe I will only need win10 for VR and 10-only games. So far the only 10 only game I've run across is farm simulator's latest. Which was crap anyway.

josephmayoress said:

Do you know where I can buy Windows 11?

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Just get win 10 and do the Windows update that says upgrade to 11. I'm still using 10, and will continue doing so until 12 comes out.