Com-Central.net

Any thoughts on this new OS? Pros? Cons? Too early to tell? Thinking of installing and curious as I really have not heard much about this one.

I plan on making the jump within a few days and will report out on any issues I run into. From all indications my FSX activities shouldn't be impacted, although I am partially transitioning to FSX Steam Edition which is said to be Win10 compatible. Will letcha know!

WTF, was there even a Win 9?!

I like my 7.

Short story (as I heard it) - Windows 9 got skipped because of Windows 95 and Windows 98, there was fear of some sloppy 3rd-party developers having apps that would identify themselves incorrectly as Windows 9 instead of 95 or 98 and thus cause compatibility issues.

I like 7 a lot too.... on the bright side, at least we skipped Windows 8! Sadly Windows 7 will be going end of life soon too.

On the downside, I completed my upgrade to Windows 10 about an hour ago and my first impression is that it's a blend of Windows 8 and 7.

On the upside, FSX still works, so far at least.

Oh, yuck.

Gents, my advice is, do yourself a favor and do not upgrade unless you have to - or unless you find out there's something it offers that you just have to have.

It's not as bad as Windows 8 but good god, there's like a TON of marketing crap built in. It even inserted new desktop backgrounds into my chosen preferences. This is taking a really long time to make it just liveable.

Oh God what have I done to my beautiful new flight simming rig that I just built a few months ago.....

Sorry guys, I've been occupied and hadn't thought to input on this.
Windows 10 is a definite MISS for the moment.
There's a year (July 2016) before you lose the option to upgrade for free.
In which case you should leave this for at least three months.
It's very buggy and they are skipping a lot of driver compatibility, even for recent releases.
Printer issues are the worst but there's also some new software incompatibility too.

This is free because M$ have realised they need to catch up with Apple and Android on a lot of mobile OS software.
I reckon there is a big 'wake-up' call coming for M$ here.
People are upgrading to it, but having a lot of issues and uninstalling again.
A lot of us are not even downloading, despite the attractive price, because of M$'s traditional "new release" issues.
It will be embarrassing for M$ if the community won't even accept a FREE upgrade, and they will be looking to rush fixes out.

Once that's done and the thing's actually useable, then you might want to consider going for it.

====

Matter of interest;
The reason so much software is released with all these bugs is because of software houses quality control practices:-
There is a point at which they will stop testing in-house, regardless of how buggy the product is.
There is a financial and goodwill cost to the manufacturer and they estimate that, at a certain predetermined point, it becomes more expensive to keep the product in-house than release it to the unsuspecting public.
Even if it doesn't work.
They expect complaints from the client and simply use them to fix the product 'in-situ'.
They really, really, don't care.
(That's not just M$ either, though they started it).

My standing advice would be to NEVER take on any brand new M$ release.
Wait six months until everyone else has tried it and complained enough for M$ to have straightened out the bugs.
Check the software forums to see when the noise has died down.

P.S.
If you have installed it, it is possible to uninstall it as well via the 'System Restore' function (provided you create a 'System Restore' before installation.

Thanks Shades.

Since I'm soon coming up on my 30-day limit to roll back, I did so today, and without issue. Basically I kicked the process off, got some gloomy-gus warnings about how "This will take a while and you may have to reinstall some things", and answered a brief poll about why I was uninstalling. Funny how they like making the upgrade sound so easy and exciting, but the rollback is prefaced with despair.

Then I went out on the front porch and enjoyed the sunshinewhile it rolled back. When I came in later (less time than the upgrade took) and woke up the PC, I was greeted with my wonderful Windows 7 login page with my user accounts and all settings intact, so far as I can tell.

It was like coming home from a long business trip to find that the fridge was full of beer and the couch cushions were just as comfortable as you remember them being.

My Windows 10 horror story:
One thing it did, that I really didn't like, was to delete some of the little games that came with Windows 7 - namely Solitaire and Mah-Jong. I have people in my house (an elder mother-in-law) that play those daily. If an 84-year old woman wants to play games while she's waiting for the laundry to be done, so be it... even if it's on my simming machine.

So she was a little lost when she found out they weren't there anymore.

So I looked into it the next day and found the new Solitaire game and made a shortcut to it for her... but there was no Mah-Jong, which she loves. EXCEPT there was a free version on Microsoft's "App" store (guess they're trying to be like Apple and Google when it comes to that) that could be downloaded.

OK so I downloaded it. But to download it, I had to login with my Microsoft Live account. Well, hell, I have one but it's for my son's X-Box account, really, which hasn't been used in some time. So I dug up the login, downloaded and installed the game, and we ate dinner. I rebooted the PC before going to eat dinner.

When I came back after dinner, I found that the regular user login account for my family was GONE (my admin account was intact) and had been replaced with a totally different name! And, had a password that I didn't know. So suddenly I can't login to the regular account...I thought I'd been hacked by somebody! I have an Admin account passworded for just myself for system updates and installing stuff, and that worked fine, so all was not lost.

Then my Son sees it and says that's the name he used on his XBox multiplayer games. Huh? So I used the password for the Microsoft Live account and it worked. Apparently, the activity of my logging in to the Microsoft Store to download some free content, using the name and password that was linked to an XBox Live account, caused Windows 10 to link my flight simming PC with my Son's XBox account and change the login names to match. Just because both are based on the same email address.

I dug into the details of how the accounts can be set up and was able to rename the normal login account to a similar (but not same) name to what it was before and got rid of the password, to get things back to normal. But I definitely did not appreciate Microsoft taking matters into their own hands and deciding how my system accounts should be managed.

And overall, they're trying to make Windows 10 look very tablet- or smartphone like, which might look OK on a table or smartphone, but to me, on a normal monitor, the new window and menu designs suck hind tit big-time in terms of readability and overall appearance.

Oh yeah...those Solitaire and Mah-Jong games for Windows 10? They ask that you login with your Microsoft Live account so you can track your achievements and crap like that (really? for frikkin' Solitaire?). Which the elder mother-in-law doesn't understand. Every day we'd find her sitting on front of the PC, having typed in her normal, full name where it's asking for her account name, and she was stuck at the password prompt. You can bypass that by just closing the dialogue box that's asking for it, since it's optional, but she doesn't get that since it's not OBVIOUS. She's 84 years old and doing well if she remembers our names these days. She just wants to click on cards and keep her mind somewhat active. But this platform is a terrible choice for that now. The usability of stuff in general just seems to suck badly because so much of it is mapped to online accounts or other cloud-based gimcrackery that wants to get in your face so it can "help" with your "user experience".

Bleahhh......

Oh, before I close this out, I will report that everything I have Flight-Sim related worked fine in Windows 10. So, not all bad news at least. *

FSX Boxed Edition,

FSX Steam Edition (which I might just migrate over to totally here in the next week or two since it seems to perform and look better than old FSX)

FS9 aka FS2004 Century Of Flight.

* Actually I didn't test Rise Of Flight or Cliffs of Dover since I haven't flown them in a very long time, but since they're newer content I'd be surprised if there were issues. Since both are supported by Steam I'm sure they'll be fine.

Thanks for the update Stoopy.
Since my earlier I have been reading that a lot of gamers are enjoying it and say it's better than 7.
I still find this hard to understand but assume they must be the young.
They always enjoy 'change', primarily because it confuses the heck out of everybody who's over twelve.

Anyway, I still haven't installed it on my machines but will do so on my laptop (which I only use for my business).

Interestingly, I just read something on the BBC which said that 1.5 billion users globally have Windows installed.
Of those just 75 million have installed 10 (doesn't include those who have then gone ahead and uninstalled it),
M$ is claiming that 10 is already a success because of those 75 million users.
As half of the 1.5 billion still uses the XP version (even though M$ no longer supports it), I wonder how they interpret that.
I wonder is M$ stopped to think about that for a moment, what valuable lesson they might be able to learn from it.

- Shades

Thanks for the update Stoopy.
Since my earlier I have been reading that a lot of gamers are enjoying it and say it's better than 7.
I still find this hard to understand but assume they must be the young.
They always enjoy 'change', primarily because it confuses the heck out of everybody who's over twelve.

Well, to be fair, I didn't have any stability issues whatsoever. It was rock solid and even had a display improvement in the FSX menus when DX10 was enabled.

I know that when I do have to go back to it, which is an inevitability, what to expect now though.

This may be of assistance when you do.
home.bt.com/tech-gadge...4000314532

I think it might be a while before I go for this on either of my systems the more I hear about it.
I see an 'SP1' in the works before then.
I'm even considering holding off until after the intro deadline until enough people are saying it's stable.
No biggie as I don't game anymore, but I do run a business from my old (current) system and have an even greater need for it to be reliable.