Windows 10 , Have you?

Regarding AVI file playback; just don't use MS's garbage applications. VLC, as posted above, iTunes, etc are the way to go.

Some tile type associations reverted to MS products for me, including AVI. On the ones i encountered it had no problem displaying them, but i set the default program back to vlc anyway.

You should understand that AVI is a container format and doesn't really specify the encoding of the video (or audio) within. So it is very well possible that the MS product plays some avi files just fine while refusing other ones. VLC plays every common video codec available so i use that too - especially since it has a nice interface and all the options i could want.

Ha! I can finally participate!

It took me about a year to save up some cash, I needed a new laptop since the old 8 year old machine was basically falling apart at the seams (metaphorically, of course).

I got this unique opportunity and snagged an Aspire V15 Nitro at lower price.

Seeing it's a DX12 compatible hardware and all, I grabbed W10 and activated it using Dreamspark program as a student.

Well I have to say, I had my prejudices since I saw how bad they f*cked up both Win8 and Office 2013 software (at least regarding the visual aspects), but having used it for 4 days now, I have to say Windows 10 kinda "grows on you".

The new Start menu is fantastic (and by New, I mean I'm coming directly from Win7 here). Customize your tile sets and groups and it's the crossroads to everywhere instantly.

However there were a few issues but they're easy to resolve,

First there's the DPI scaling problem - I have a 15" FullHD screen so to prevent things being too tiny, there was a 125% zoom enabled, but it made about half the programs appear blurry and awful. Thankfully, you can find a small batch script on the net, set it as a task that runs at boot. It basically prevents the "new" zooming method and returns the Win7 style actual DPI scaling method. Everything's looking beautiful since then.

I have shitty internet connections everywhere and constant-on Automatic Windows Updates are getting extremely annoying when I'm trying to do work. (You can't turn off Updates through normal means).

I resorted to simply disabling the entire service governing them. I'll turn them on every once in a while when I'm not internet-dependant so it can download it's junk.

I'm also seeing very weird network performance issues, we tried for hours today to setup a normal Borderlands 2 party, and for some reason I kept dropping out, disconnecting and cutting out of calls. Whenever I alt-tab out of the game, internet works OK, I can watch HD videos on youtube etc etc. Alt-tab in the game, everything's dead. I monitored my wifi traffic and it acts as if it's instantly limiting itself to something like 80 Kbps system-wide whenever I'm in the game. Anybody else having problems like that? :/

But other than that, I like it. Everything else works flawlessly, it's amazingly responsive and ultra fast (well could be the laptop upgrade also, but still).

So there we go. If anybody has any tips regarding the net traffic problem outlined above, let me know.

The update thing is really annoying - i haven't seen it on 10 yet, but i have on 8.1 and actually disabled automatic updates. On 7 it displayed a notice for a while and you could just delay it for 24 hours.

When i first got on win 8.1 for a work machine it just rebooted on me when getting a cup of coffee, leaving me to find a screen saying "installing update 5 of ###" which could take a pretty long time in some instances.

Keeping systems up to date is important, but making the process so disruptive people disable it because it will randomly grab a good part out of a work day is clearly counterproductive.

my surface pro 4 is using windows 10 pro. This makes 3 pc's that I am now using with windows 10

Well I managed to uninstall the update, and according to the sys info, my build is pre update, but it still doesn't feel "right" , but it is behaving itself, for now.

It's odd why it would be different. Afaik the windows 10 installer actually makes a backup of your boot drive, and restoring that should be bit-perfect if you do.

One thing i did notice updating a 7 system to 10 is that it installed some updates for the existing 7 installation prior to starting the migration to 10. I'm not sure if these were 'regular' updates to win 7 or something special to prepare for the transition to 10, but they took unusually long to install.

The odd thing is that it installed these windows 7 updates after downloading the whole 10 update (3 gb or so i think), and actually downloaded the win 10 files again after installing them. Might just be fluke on my end, might be something real.

Benm said:

Some tile type associations reverted to MS products for me, including AVI. On the ones i encountered it had no problem displaying them, but i set the default program back to vlc anyway.

You should understand that AVI is a container format and doesn't really specify the encoding of the video (or audio) within. So it is very well possible that the MS product plays some avi files just fine while refusing other ones. VLC plays every common video codec available so i use that too - especially since it has a nice interface and all the options i could want.

Click to expand...

It's funny because VLC is the first thing I went to get, I even have it on another machine, but my security software flagged it as dangerous, maybe I will just jump drive it from the old machine.


@ Ped: I make an image file every so often and also restore points, it's good to make a restore point and an image file before downloading something, you probably already do, just thought I'de mention it.

Quick note,

I originally busted a nerve trying to get start menu tiles nice and proper. Apparently there's an XML manifest you can create next to EXE that is shortcuted to the menu but it never worked right, but I found this:

Win10Tile - native, custom Windows 10 tiles … | Windows 10 Development and Hacking
(I understand there's a paid alternative in the app store but this is free)

Now I got my Start menu how I want it:


Just hunt down your app icons on google, pick the ones you want, save them somewhere. Assign them via MyTile (linked above) - it automatically converts and resizes the images. Hit save and view result.

Note: Changing the tile label from light to dark (or vice versa) requires a log out - log in, everything else works instantly.

Finally encountered a compatibility bug;

Wife's new PC has a Nvidia GTX 950 GPU, which has a BSOD issue on Win10 for almost all of the recent drivers. Luckily, the second to last driver release seems to be working fine, but other users of the this GPU report needing to go back as far as version 348 (current is 359 or so) to get stability on Win10, where as no issues are reported for Win7/8/8.1.

I killed off the November reminder update using GWX. The last thing I want is Windows trashing my main desktop.

On my laptop I've had to go through a bit of effort to rid myself of Microsoft's automatic updates. I'm still not sure if it's all gone or if it'll come back. It came to a head after I left the machine on overnight with some stuff open in order to come back the next morning. Lo' and behold that ass-hat OS restarted my machine automatically even though I specifically set "Let me choose when to install updates" -- or at least tried to, since they seem to grey out that box too. Some Group policies and other settings later and I'm still not sure if I've kill off the Windows Update menace.

No Microsoft, I'll TELL you when I'm ready to update. Don't wake my machine up at night to install your shit. Don't install your shit and reboot my machine without permission. Don't install your useless bloatware on my machine. And stop bothering me with your "'update' to Windows 10" notifications.

Until I've eradicated every malignancy Microsoft forced on this Windows 10 OS it's staying off my main desktop. It's not "free" if I'm a guinea pig for this beta OS and it doesn't work the way I want it to.

I didn't hunt through this whole thread to see if someone else has this problem but on my administrator user, the start button won't work, as well as corona, and a couple of buttons on the right of the task bar. I tried pretty much everything I could find on google, nothing seems to work other than use a different user and wait for Microsoft to come out with a fix for it. :/ My love for 10 is starting to go downhill.

Ricker said:

I didn't hunt through this whole thread to see if someone else has this problem but on my administrator user, the start button won't work, as well as corona, and a couple of buttons on the right of the task bar. I tried pretty much everything I could find on google, nothing seems to work other than use a different user and wait for Microsoft to come out with a fix for it. :/ My love for 10 is starting to go downhill.

Click to expand...

Sounds like a corrupted user setting. Have you tried logging on your admin account, making a new account, setting the new account to have full admin rights, and then testing the new account? That's the usual workaround. The "solution" is a full reinstall. IIRC it comes out from a corruption during installation (because that's when the admin account is made).

I may have to, it worked fine for a week or so after initial installation and setup. (bought new PC with win10)

For peoples disliking the automatic updates,

Hit Start, type "Services", run it,

In it, find:
"Windows Update" (should be the last entry with Windows prefix),

Double click, and set it to "Disabled" in the first drop down menu.

Save, restart PC.

Oh and another fix I'm using is a small start-up scheduled task executing a few registry hacks for DPI scaling.

Anybody having a high-res smaller monitor that requires custom scaling (like 1080p screen on 15" laptop)?

Another tip for mobile users, disable the search indexing service. The service scans all your files and makes a list to make searching faster. The caveat is that it uses a lot of system resources in the background, not a significant amount to desktop users, but it does reduce battery life for mobile users.

This will make one-note OCR and windows search stop working, but if you have your files organized it's not a problem.

I went from about 8-10h battery life to 10-12h after disabling it.


Plus over time search indexing slows down the computer. Try disabling it on an old/slow computer and it usually makes a noticeable difference.