Windows 10 upgrade notification

[tenohfive]

Completely agree with Don. Windows 10 is a brilliant OS. I was slow to adopt and distrustful of Microsoft after 8 and 8.1 but they actually got it right this time.

[dmsims]

tenohfive said:

Completely agree with Don. Windows 10 is a brilliant OS.

I would not call a half finsihed mish mash of old and new bits brilliant

Just look at the mess they created with Settings, network etc - half old, half new

[snuffy]

Don said:

But, trust me, Windows 10 is a great release too. Corrects the crap of 8 and 8.1. 8 was unusable. 8.1 tweaked that to make it better. Windows 10 sorted out the UI so that it actually feels like an upgrade to Win 7.

I'd agree with that.

dmsims said:

I would not call a half finsihed mish mash of old and new bits brilliant

Just look at the mess they created with Settings, network etc - half old, half new

And I'd also agree with that.

[Mr Happy]

It may correct the crap that was 8/8.1, but it still doesn't beat 7 for sheer usability and stability.

Also, 10 is free for a reason - and that isn't to undo the mistakes of past OSes in a wholly altruistic style. It's free because it monetises you - the end user. MS haven't gone to the FOSS style on everyone yet...

[MissChief]

So after the attempt to update to W10 last year borked both my sons laptop and my desktop half way through boot, AFTER the W10 splash screen, 'cannot find boot device!' I've resolved to stay away from it. Has it got any better? Can I download and install over the top of W7? I'd rather not format my SSD again. It was a right PITA getting everything downloaded again, 40GB Fibre or not.

[tenohfive]

dmsims said:

I would not call a half finsihed mish mash of old and new bits brilliant

You might not, I would. As a casual user it suits my needs perfectly. I generally agree with the half old/half new comment, but it's not often that I find myself digging through the settings trying to find something (and I didn't have any more difficulty networking two PC's on 10 than on 7.) I can see how it would bother those that have to delve more, but I don't.

As a semi-tech savvy home user I like how it looks, how it works and how slick it is in the process. So a minor niggle doesn't detract from that for me.

[weyland yutani]

A few questions to the more knowledgeable?

You can clean install windows 10 to a new drive without having to upgrade from your Windows 7 install first right?

There are no Win10 drivers listed on the manufacturers website for my motherboard, but there are Windows 8 drivers, will these work? Can windows find all the neccessary hardware drivers automatically via windows update?

I'l be using a ssd for the first time, is setting AHCI to enabled before OS install all thats required?

Thanks.

[grumbledoak]

weyland yutani said:

<Questions>

Yes you can now clean install using your Win7 key.

I believe the Win8 drivers do generally work, but most people - myself included - find that Windows just installs the correct ones itself and off we go.

I didn't have to do anything for my SSD, certainly not the palava you can find listed if you look at the tinkerers' sites. I think it's another thing spotted by the install.

[tenohfive]

grumbledoak said:

Yes you can now clean install using your Win7 key.

I believe the Win8 drivers do generally work, but most people - myself included - find that Windows just installs the correct ones itself and off we go.

I didn't have to do anything for my SSD, certainly not the palava you can find listed if you look at the tinkerers' sites. I think it's another thing spotted by the install.

^Wot he said.

I upgraded from 7 to 10 whilst installing an SSD at the same time, went looking for AHCI but couldn't find it and 10 seemed to work it all out. Didn't have to install any drivers either.

[IainT]

Mr Happy said:

It may correct the crap that was 8/8.1, but it still doesn't beat 7 for sheer usability and stability.

On my PC it performs better than 7 did. That is after making sure my BIOS was up to date - I'd been running a very old one and the update process was a bit of a pain having to go via an intermediate version as they changed BIOS structure. Now I'm on the latest release any niggles I had have gone and power on to login screen is about 10 seconds. Intermittent USB failing on start was resolved too.

I'd recommend anyone who tried 10 and had issues to make sure their BIOS is up to date first.

[TonyRPH]

The fast boot times are down to the fact that Windows 10 doesn't actually shut the machine down - it uses 'hybrid boot' / 'hybrid shutdown', which is why it appears to be so fast to boot.

It simply saves a snapshot of the running machine to a file at shutdown.

This is actually different to hibernate mode as well.

My point is that all the comparisons being made to Windows 7 / 8 / 8.1 are not comparing apples with apples.

Try a full shutdown using "shutdown /s /f /t 0" and then see how quick it isn't to boot...

This hybrid boot could also prevent a security risk in the future,as no doubt somebody will find an exploit to load the saved image on another PC.

[Munter]

Win10 Positive: The "System" process no longer enters a loop on the first boot of any calendar day like it did on Win7. (Ok that's probably st dell driver that got updated...but it's a win)

Win10 Negative: What feels like 1 in 3 boots, Win10 will display a blue screen with a circle of dots, and will display that forever leaving you thinking it's still booting. While actually, doing ctrl-alt-del, will bring up the login page...

[tenohfive]

TonyRPH said:

The fast boot times are down to the fact that Windows 10 doesn't actually shut the machine down - it uses 'hybrid boot' / 'hybrid shutdown', which is why it appears to be so fast to boot.

It simply saves a snapshot of the running machine to a file at shutdown.

This is actually different to hibernate mode as well.

My point is that all the comparisons being made to Windows 7 / 8 / 8.1 are not comparing apples with apples.

Try a full shutdown using "shutdown /s /f /t 0" and then see how quick it isn't to boot...

This hybrid boot could also prevent a security risk in the future,as no doubt somebody will find an exploit to load the saved image on another PC.

That's interesting but really but if it's gets the PC to boot faster, does it really matter what trickery is involved? Is there some sort of negative over a normal full shutdown with this system? Because if not faster boot times are faster boot times; you might not be able to use boot times as a measure of performance in future but ultimately if it means you spend less time waiting for your PC to boot that's a good thing, no?

[IainT]

TonyRPH said:

The fast boot times are down to the fact that Windows 10 doesn't actually shut the machine down

Actually the bulk of the speed change is the new vs old BIOS. Given I had W10 on the old BIOS and it was much slower, ~40 seconds, to get to logon. Only change was getting the BIOS upgraded.

[TonyRPH]

tenohfive said:

That's interesting but really but if it's gets the PC to boot faster, does it really matter what trickery is involved? Is there some sort of negative over a normal full shutdown with this system? Because if not faster boot times are faster boot times; you might not be able to use boot times as a measure of performance in future but ultimately if it means you spend less time waiting for your PC to boot that's a good thing, no?

It doesn't matter about the trickery.

I was highlighting that it's not fair to compare Windows 10 faster boot times with 7 / 8 etc. because the systems differ.

And also - if you compare like for like, e.g. startup from a 'cold' boot (proper shutdown) my experience to date is that Windows 10 is slower, especially on non SSD systems.

As for the other poster (IainT) citing faster boot times after a BIOS upgrade, if the older BIOS was *really* old then yes, I can see an improvement would easily be gained there, as AFAIK Windows 10 relies on 'modern' features in the UEFI BIOS to achieve faster boot times.

[IainT]

TonyRPH said:

As for the other poster (IainT) citing faster boot times after a BIOS upgrade, if the older BIOS was *really* old then yes, I can see an improvement would easily be gained there.

Yeah, it was old - before Asus moved from ROM to CAP. Mid-2012 from memory.

My main takeaway is for people considering an upgrade is to get onto the most recent BIOS if possible before upgrading - it will take incompatibility there out of the equation and hopefully make things smoother.

[glazbagun]

I don't quite get the fuss over boot times. How often do you turn on/off your PC in a day? I haven't timed it but, subjectively, my three year old core i3 laptop feels like it boots faster than my Android phone- starting that feels like forever!

[MarkRSi]

snuffy said:

dmsims said:

I would not call a half finsihed mish mash of old and new bits brilliant

Just look at the mess they created with Settings, network etc - half old, half new

And I'd also agree with that.

I think there's quite a lot overlap between the 'new' and 'old' settings/dialog screens though? TBH the 'new' ones will probably be be sufficient for 99.9% of users, while Windows veterans like myself prefer using the old dialogs so I appreciate Microsoft for not removing them

I mean look at the fuss when Microsoft switched over to the ribbon interface in Office - had they included options for both the Ribbon and old interfaces I bet there wouldn't have been as much teeth gnashing...


TBH though, I'd struggle to justify Windows 10 over 7 apart from the latter's support expiring in 2020. The faster boot times are negated by using the sleep/hibernate modes, and the frequency of updates which takes a while to apply increasing the boot times again...

[zippy3x]

TonyRPH said:

The fast boot times are down to the fact that Windows 10 doesn't actually shut the machine down - it uses 'hybrid boot' / 'hybrid shutdown', which is why it appears to be so fast to boot.

It simply saves a snapshot of the running machine to a file at shutdown.

This is actually different to hibernate mode as well.

My point is that all the comparisons being made to Windows 7 / 8 / 8.1 are not comparing apples with apples.

Try a full shutdown using "shutdown /s /f /t 0" and then see how quick it isn't to boot...

This hybrid boot could also prevent a security risk in the future,as no doubt somebody will find an exploit to load the saved image on another PC.

Sorry, but this is ridiculous. My desktop goes from Off (unplugged) to usable is 10 seconds + my password type time. That is boot time by anyone's definition. I don't give a fk if it's sleeping, hibernated or using the power of Satan, it "boots" far far quicker than 7.

In 2 years of running windows 8 (which also did this quick boot) and a year of 10, I've never once found the need to do your special full shutdown.

By your logic, If I buy a new car with a turbocharger, I can't tell anyone it's faster than the previous normally aspirated car, because it uses a slightly different way to create power. Utter nonsense.

As to the security risk, I'd like you to back that up with something more substantial than "no doubt somebody will find an exploit". As far as I can see, if your drive is encrypted then the image file will be encrypted, if it's not encrypted, then you can just read straight off the drive anyway.

[TonyRPH]

zippy3x said:

Sorry, but this is ridiculous. My desktop goes from Off (unplugged) to usable is 10 seconds + my password type time. That is boot time by anyone's definition. I don't give a fk if it's sleeping, hibernated or using the power of Satan, it "boots" far far quicker than 7.

In 2 years of running windows 8 (which also did this quick boot) and a year of 10, I've never once found the need to do your special full shutdown.

By your logic, If I buy a new car with a turbocharger, I can't tell anyone it's faster than the previous normally aspirated car, because it uses a slightly different way to create power. Utter nonsense.

As to the security risk, I'd like you to back that up with something more substantial than "no doubt somebody will find an exploit". As far as I can see, if your drive is encrypted then the image file will be encrypted, if it's not encrypted, then you can just read straight off the drive anyway.

You don't have to be sorry.

Even with a power off, the system state is still saved to a file (hence the fast boot from powered off state).

As I stated in my OP, it *will* boot faster than 7 *because* of the fast boot process.

As for exploits - how about this one that froze memory.

So actually, perhaps you should be sorry for spouting about stuff you apparently know little about.

Edited by TonyRPH on Tuesday 8th March 19:43