Windows 10

[Spectere]

So, who upgraded?

I installed it on three systems so far. The success rate is much lower than I would have liked.

The first system was my work laptop. The upgrade process was a failure, giving me 626769959964688385[/tweet]]an amazingly descriptive account of everything that had gone wrong and granting me the ability to properly troubleshoot the issue. However, I was clearly unable to comprehend its incredibly detailed message and, after dicking around with it for far too long, resorted to reinstalling Windows 8.1 and upgrading from a fresh install.

The second system was my personal laptop. Nothing to really say about this one, everything went through without a hitch. Success!

The third system was my gaming tower. The automated upgrade failed because Windows Update is fucking terrible, and even after I unbroke that it would download the data and hang when it actually tried to install it. I was able to get Windows 10 loaded on this system by manually downloading the upgrade from Microsoft's web site and letting it run.

I could almost expect the first system to fail because it's the most complex one from a software installation perspective (but, frankly, that's no excuse for it to fail the way that it did...it looks like it died while it was trying to build the WinPE image), but there really isn't a whole lot of cruft on my gaming rig at all. Hopefully Windows Update on Windows 10 sucks a bit less than previous versions (though judging from the preview releases that doesn't seem to be the case at all).

Edit: The third system exhibited some major driver issues. While that system might be the simplest one from a software perspective, it's a bit more compex on the hardware side (it's the system with dual GTX 980s). Regardless, I've had Windows install, then kick out the NVIDIA drivers. When I tried to reinstall the NVIDIA driver package it failed, so I tried uninstalling the NVIDIA drivers. Windows apparently didn't like that and continuously reinstalled them, causing a ton of problems in the process.

Yeah, hope you guys never ever have to troubleshoot bad driver installs with Windows 10. It simply refuses to let you control your own computer.

Edit²: Everything seems to work on computer #3 now. Whew. Still keeping my fingers crossed that I don't run into some unexpected "surprises" next time I boot 'er up.

Edit³: So Windows 10 opted to install OEM software onto my laptop without my permission or without even informing me. Whichever dipshit designer at Microsoft decided that was a good idea shouldn't be in that position. If I wanted that shit on my system I would have bloody installed it. And let's face it, most people do not have the technical knowledge or comfort level to install an OS on their own. People who do have that level of expertise don't want shit that they didn't install randomly appearing on their system. Fuck.

[Bobbias]

I upgraded. It went fine, although I DID get some weird stuff happening that caused me to restart once.

I'm not sure what happened, but at one point even though nothing was eating my CPU/GPU and I don't THINK anything was thrashing my ram, context menus suddenly took forever to render (you'd get the outline signifying it was going to render, then nothing), popup windows wouldn't render correctly, everything was suddenly laggy, skype didn't want to render anything I was typing until I waited like 20 seconds after finishing typing, etc. That was weird as hell.

But after rebooting everything has been fine.

[Spectere]

Yeah, that is pretty weird. I'm thinking you were probably running into video driver oddities. That seems to be the biggest hang-up by far, and that's where most of my annoyances came from on system #3.

[Bobbias]

Possibly.

Although I ran into skype freezing up a bit again earlier today, though without any visual oddities this time (and without causing other parts of windows to lag out). I'm using Skype 6 still, but I've got a huge skype group chat that I keep open all the time which doesn't help things.

[Spectere]

Yeah, I'm still using Skype 6 as well.

I tried Skype 7 out on my iMac after its HDD got replaced and its UI made me want to vomit. I don't think it actually follows UI guidelines for any of the operating systems it runs on (including Windows).

I'm kinda thinking your issue is most likely the huge group chat. In my experience, Skype doesn't handle large amounts of data particularly well.

[Spectere]

I was able to get 10 installed on my crappy tablet on my second try. I actually find that Windows 10 works better as a tablet OS than 8.1 did for the most part. I was a bit surprised by this, thinking that the desktop focus would actually harm tablet usability, but as it turns out their move toward having more Universal apps (not to mention having a dedicated tablet mode) made it so that tablet users don't have to constantly jump into the desktop view like they used to.

Considering how resource constrained this system is (1.33GHz quad core Atom, 1GB DDR3, 32GB eMMC Flash) I'm impressed with how much smoother things are in general. The OS uses less storage space and less RAM, boot times have been cut down quite a bit, and battery drain in sleep mode has been greatly reduced. Edge is a fast browser, but it really shines on this device. I've done a fair amount of browsing on this tablet so far and there hadn't even been a hint of lag. The only issue with Edge is that they neglected to add some of the touch-specific flourishes that IE11 had.

For the most part this thing now feels about as smooth as my iPad Air. Sure, it doesn't drive the ridiculous display that the Air does (or the battery life, for that matter), but considering the price difference I can't complain too much. This thing is leagues ahead of the iPad-priced Galaxy Tab S that I had the misfortune of buying last year (which cost 4.5x as much, might I add).

So yeah, favorable first impressions on this device! We'll see how it holds up.

[Bobbias]

Nice. One of the very few little niggles I've noticed so far is that for some reason win10 likes to snap the bottom edges of windows with some space for the drop shadow:

[Spectere]

Weird...it doesn't do that on my system (just tried it), regardless of whether I'm using small taskbar icons or not. Does it happen with all applications?

[Bobbias]

Hmm, yeah maybe it's just something weird about skype.

[Spectere]

There's a lot that's weird about Skype...lol. Considering how it flagrantly ignores UX guidelines left and right and ignores the standard OS controls in favor of its own, I wouldn't be surprised if it feeds the window manager incorrect data about its size.

The most galling part about all of that is that it's a bloody Microsoft product and it doesn't look or feel like a standard Windows application. You can only imagine what it's like trying to use it on iOS/Android (where it feels like a Windows Phone app...i.e. absolutely nothing like an iOS or Android app) or OS X (where it looks and feels like a touch-centric Metro app...on a desktop OS). Ugh.

[Bobbias]

Well I feel like part of that UI stuff stems from before it was a microsoft product. I can imagine how out of place it must feel on other systems.

EDIT: I just remembered a related thing to the skype edge snap thing. When I take screenshots with puush like this, it includes the same drop shadow area (also, that recovery lol):

[Spectere]

See, for Skype 6 I could have understood that, but they did a pretty thorough revamp of Skype 7's UI well after Microsoft bought it. They went on a Metro-ization rampage during that version.

I'm guessing that puush just doesn't support the Windows 10 drop shadows. I'm guessing that the drop shadow is probably considered to be part of the window and it doesn't properly compensate for it (like it most likely would in Vista/7).

And yeah, you can tell I've been playing way too much IIDX, because my initial thought about your recovery was like, "meh, so?" before I realized that you would have outright failed if you'd gotten a few more misses, haha.

[Bobbias]

Lol, yeah I was real close to death for a few seconds straight there. CB rushes are deadly. It doesn't look quite as long because the song is rather long though.

My guess about the drop shadows is that there's probably multiple ways to query the system about a window's size, and whichever one they're using gets the entire size of the window's graphical bounds rather than the proper bounds of the window itself. I'd bet that between win8 and win10 the way that particular api call works changed slightly, resulting in this behavior.

[Spectere]

Long songs are rough in general. What's worse is when the most difficult part is near the end (like the one in your screenshot, and Salieri Strikes Back).

Yeah, that's pretty much my guess with the drop shadows issue, too. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that Windows 8/8.1 didn't have drop shadows at all unless you install something like ShadowFX, so getting a RECT based on the graphical bounds would have worked fine in Win8. Assuming puush uses the same calls regardless of OS level, it's more likely that something changed between Vista/7 and 10's drop shadow implementations (or the developer just manually compensates for them, since they'd be the same size in most systems).

[Bobbias]

Ahh, good point about win8 not having them. It's such a minor detail that I actually kinda forgot that win8 didn't have them.

Salieri Strikes Back is so fun, but that ending is definitely a real difficulty spike.