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Windows 10

Skeptical Greg said:
The Task Manager is very robust in 10.. There is a panel that shows all processes with their CPU, Memory, Disk & Network usage...

You can sort on any function and bring the leaders to the top..
Click to expand...

Thanks, I thought I had read something like that but I wasn't sure it really addressed the problems that Vista had on this. Sounds good. I'm looking forward to trying it. I plan to get a new computer with Windows 10 later this year. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with my old computer. I'm going to set it up as a dedicated computer for my wife, but I was thinking I might like to update it to Windows 10 after I did that. My understanding is that I will need to pay money to accomplish that because there isn't a free upgrade path from Vista.

I would also like to upgrade the computer we use as an entertainment computer right now, but we use Windows Media Center as the primary way we watch television and we like it so we don't want to give that up. I've thought of getting a copy of Windows 8 with WMC so that if there is ever a problem with it that requires installing a new operating system I could do it. Alternatively I think I might investigate a disk cloning option so that I could restore from a DVD. I've looked at WMC alternatives and right now they all sound like science projects. We have a cable card in a SiliconDust tuner right now that is difficult to find support for other than with WMC.

Netflix just announced they aren't going to support WMC anymore. Not a big deal for us since it's pretty easy to get to netflix with a browser, still one more indication that what I thought was a great idea is going to fade away in time. Maybe times changed and the idea became obsolete or maybe this is just one more thing that Stever Balmer screwed up. If the system had been more stable and hadn't required occasional acts of geekness to keep running I think it might have been a very popular product. As it is there are about 6 million people in the world that use it the way we do and I didn't quite understand why that wasn't enough for MS to at least attempt to sell the product to somebody else. I'd pay a regular monthly fee if that would help keep it alive but I don't know how my fellow other 5,999,999 users would feel about that.
 
Skeptical Greg said:
The Task Manager is very robust in 10.. There is a panel that shows all processes with their CPU, Memory, Disk & Network usage...

You can sort on any function and bring the leaders to the top..
Click to expand...

In Vista & 7 most, maybe all, of this information is in the Resource Monitor application that you can start from Task Manager's Performance tab.
 
paulhutch said:
In Vista & 7 most, maybe all, of this information is in the Resource Monitor application that you can start from Task Manager's Performance tab.
Click to expand...


I think I've explored those features before, but never really took the time to make much use of them.


The Win 10 task manager seems to make those options a little more user friendly for me...
 
I had a couple of freeze-ups the first day or two. Otherwise, no problems at all.

My setup is this:

Asus Maximus Ranger VII
Core i7 4790K
ASUS R9 290X
Kingston HyperX Predator Beast 1866Mhz (8GB)
2x Samsung 840 Evo 250GB raid 0 - WD Green 3TB
 
paulhutch said:
In Vista & 7 most, maybe all, of this information is in the Resource Monitor application that you can start from Task Manager's Performance tab.
Click to expand...

I've spent a bit of time with this. The problem is that MS buries almost everything it does in the background in svchost.exe. And it does lots of stuff in the background of which I can only remember a tiny part. But off the top of my head:

1. Creating an index supposedly for faster search but I turned it off awhile ago and haven't noticed that searches without it take an inordinate amount of time.
2. Creating a restore point - This can go on for a long time after an install.
3. Preloading commonly used programs - This can result in a lot of disk accesses for quite awhile after boot up. I turned mine off
4. Virus detection activity- The MS anti-virus just bangs away through your hard disk for a very long time. I've turned mine off because of the hard disk thrashing.
5. Of course disk thrashing because of page faults
6. Disk defragging.

I think there is quite a bit more but I don't remember what they are right now. My point was that I don't want MS engaging in crypto schemes to hide background tasks and I hope that in Windows 10 figuring out what is going off in your computer is as simple as calling up the task manager and looking at the active processes that can easily be identified as to what they are.
 
grmcdorman said:
I tend to use alternative task managers:

All of them, of course, provide much more than the average bear user can deal with or understand. They seem to work well under Windows 10, too.
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I didn't see this before I wrote the post above. I had no idea that alternative task managers existed. Thanks.
 
davefoc said:
I didn't see this before I wrote the post above. I had no idea that alternative task managers existed. Thanks.
Click to expand...

You're welcome. I used to use Process Explorer a lot, but now tend to use Process Hacker. Haven't used System Explorer much.

All three (or at least two of them) have an option to replace the default Task Manager. I used to do that, but I now tend to keep to a cleaner install. Your mileage may vary, though, as it may be useful to have one of the other ones come up on Ctrl-Alt-Del or the right-click of the task bar.

ETA: One of the most useful features in these is the ability to say "Which process has this file open?". You can do a search on all or part of a path and filename; you can even close the file handle in the offending process. This, of course, is dangerous and may lead to all sorts of nasties, but if you know what you're doing it's useful as a last resort instead of "kill process".
 
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Skeptical Greg said:
I think I've explored those features before, but never really took the time to make much use of them.


The Win 10 task manager seems to make those options a little more user friendly for me...
Click to expand...

Absolutely, the newer Task Manager makes the most useful info much more accessible. In the old Resource Monitor you have to look through some tabs and expand sections to find the most useful info.
 
I updated my last home computer. It took slow reboot after slow reboot, and all that trouble to make Firefox my default browser again. I'll explore EDGE on my terms, not yours, Microsoft.

I had to re-establish all network shares at home, but having done that, they work OK so far.


I'm suspecting that Win10 (and Win8.x, for that matter) doesn't start any faster than Win7: It just shows you a log-on screen faster - which screen won't accept input until the necessary services start in the background.

I know that trick. I once programmed OSes.
 
John Jones said:
I'm suspecting that Win10 (and Win8.x, for that matter) doesn't start any faster than Win7: It just shows you a log-on screen faster - which screen won't accept input until the necessary services start in the background.
Click to expand...

One difference from 7 is that 10 hibernates the kernel on shutdown. This should make for a faster boot, and I recall that on occasion it did boot up for me surprisingly fast. However, I turned that off, since Linux wouldn't let me mount the hibernated partition, and the boot speed is still okay.

If you haven't ever noticed a good boot speed with 10, perhaps there's something interfering with the hibernation on your machine. It's hard to say, because I saw no consistency with it.
 
My two Win 7 machines updated within a day of each other. The Windows 8 one -- the one I really wanted to change, is still waiting.

I'd thought about doing the download myself but I saw something that said "If you haven't gotten the download yet, there are still issues with your particular machine that we want to fix first."

OK.

Then just today on one of the Win 10 boxes, my Adobe Premiere Elements doesn't work right due to an "incompatible driver". It was working before, and has the latest one. I can't find that an update for the driver was done that I can back out, either. I may have to try a reinstall but I'm in the middle of a few project and would hate to lose that progress.
 
Anyone else noticing a bug where when you try to shut down and an app stops that for whatever reason, that the start button stops working and you can't bring up the task manager?

Overall happy with the OS, but there definitely a few non-fatal bugs I've run across
 
davefoc said:
One of the annoying aspects of Vista is that it is very difficult to figure out what is causing disk accesses and what is causing network accesses. It looks like it should be simple because of the information supplied by the task manager. But Microsoft buries a lot of what they do in ways that can't be divined easily using the task manager. One of the reasons this is a big deal is that it is hard to tell when there is hard disk or network activity whether the activity is due to routine MS hidden crap or because some sort of malware is firing off.

The only real success I've had at discovering the reasons for disk activity is to turn off MS services that might be causing the disk activity until the disk activity is reduced. This is really annoying and I hope that Windows 10 is more open about what is really going on in the background than Vista.
Click to expand...

Hi,
Process Explorer by Sysinternals is useful

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb795533.aspx

I like autoruns as well
 
I was having a problem with my free Dell tablet displaying only in portrait mode.

I figured it out: This is a "feature", not a bug. When Win10 detects a tablet, it automagically defaults to a "modern" interface with a fixed portrait display mode. You have to right-click on the desktop, select "Display Settings", and change orientation to auto-rotate, or whatever your hardware supports

It's not a bad option, actually. I just think they picked the wrong default for tablets.
 
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Rat said:
Possibly good news, at least if the agent for business is also compatible.
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Indeed. And I'm happy to report all is still well after several more days. I haven't even bothered to do a reset or 'clean' install.

I don't envy you having to think about the implications of upgrading, and then possibly downgrading, more than one machine at a time.

✪ ✪ ✪ ✪ ✪​

For anyone else who uses VirtuaWin, and was thinking Win 10's built-in virtual desktops might offer a suitable 'native' replacement, sadly it doesn't.

1) Win 10's virtual desktops have no up/down axis, so navigation across 4 or more desktops is slower.

2) There's no ability (so far as I can tell) to have the same program open in all desktops. As a result, those of us who cut code for a living can't have our IDE open in the right-hand monitor across all virtual desktops, and (for example) a browser, FTP and KiTTY open in the left monitor on each respective desktop.

Fortunately VirtuaWin still works perfectly well in Win 10.
 
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