Share your thoughts on the new Windows 10

[WizardHawk]

Have a question: Should I go ahead and download Windows 10 or should I stick with 8.1 and download Classic Shell to mod it to look and feel like Windows 7?

Given those two options, DL 10 would be my advice. There are a few things people have complained about with 10 such as forced updates and having to turn off some privacy settings that probably shouldn't have been enabled without your express knowledge to begin with, the overall system is one of the more stable releases MS has put out in the last decade or so and has enough security upgrades over 7 and 8 to be worth it if for no other reason than that.

10 can be made to feel far more like 7 than 8 without having to install any sort of 3rd party apps that might not help your system stay stable.

 

[night]

Has anyone had a large portion of their hard drive eaten up out of nowhere? I swear I had about 400 gigs free before I updated but now I'm down to a few hundred megabytes. When I run the disk cleanup it says the previous version of Windows was only 14 or so gigs (where did the rest go?). The only things I've downloaded are Word and Excel files within the past few months on my laptop and there is no way I could have added that many files to claim that much space.

 

[KansasSooner]

I swear I had about 400 gigs free before I updated but now I'm down to a few hundred megabytes.

Haven't seen that happen in a long time when malware used to do that kind of stuff. Here are two things I'd recommend.

1. Get WizTree to look at where all the space is being used. Antibody Software - Home It's free.
2. Get Wise Disk Cleaner and run it. Free Wise Solutions For Your PC - Free Wise Care 365, Free Registry Cleaner, Free Disk Cleaner, Free Data Recovery and Free Uninstaller

 

[KansasSooner]

Have a question: Should I go ahead and download Windows 10 or should I stick with 8.1 and download Classic Shell to mod it to look and feel like Windows 7?

I've heard of people encountering problems with the live tiles/apps after installing Classic Shell so like @WizardHawk stated it is quite easy to make 10 look more like 7. Plus there are a lot features to the new Windows 10 menu...

 

[night]

Haven't seen that happen in a long time when malware used to do that kind of stuff. Here are two things I'd recommend.

1. Get WizTree to look at where all the space is being used. Antibody Software - Home It's free.
2. Get Wise Disk Cleaner and run it. Free Wise Solutions For Your PC - Free Wise Care 365, Free Registry Cleaner, Free Disk Cleaner, Free Data Recovery and Free Uninstaller

It turns out Norton 360 had 446 gigs of backup files. I wonder how in the hell that happened.

 

[KansasSooner]

It turns out Norton 360 had 446 gigs of backup files. I wonder how in the hell that happened.

Haven't a clue. Just a guess here as you said it happened after the Windows 10 update is that Norton 360 was either making backup files as the update was happening due to the fact it didn't recognize the update as being legitimate or it did it immediately after the update finished for the same reason. A good rule of thumb is to always turn off Norton, or any AV program, before doing Windows 10 upgrades. Also check for any compatibility issues the current version may have with Windows 10 and see if a new version is available.

 

[WizardHawk]

I haven't done a windows 10 update yet that didn't require anti virus to at least be reinstalled, but have found some McAfee and Norton products to cause some issues during upgrades. Pretty good idea in general to at least disable, if not uninstall them. Particularly McAfee. Why some of my clients still use them I don't know, but just kill them before update and install fresh after and it's fine.

 

[night]

Haven't a clue. Just a guess here as you said it happened after the Windows 10 update is that Norton 360 was either making backup files as the update was happening due to the fact it didn't recognize the update as being legitimate or it did it immediately after the update finished for the same reason. A good rule of thumb is to always turn off Norton, or any AV program, before doing Windows 10 upgrades. Also check for any compatibility issues the current version may have with Windows 10 and see if a new version is available.

It must have backed up everything 10x+ because there wasn't much to back up in the first place. Pretty strange but at least it was pretty easy to fix.

 

[WizardHawk]

It must have backed up everything 10x+ because there wasn't much to back up in the first place. Pretty strange but at least it was pretty easy to fix.

Norton has a run away quarantine issue that I've ran across more than once. It could have been triggered from the upgrade, but not necessarily. There is lots of talk about it online. If you find yourself in that situation again just look it up. We did have one machine that actually had that problem 3 times before I convinced them to dump Norton and go with Kaspersky.

That issue can literally fill your entire drive and ask for more. It's a known glitch that has been around off and on for several years.

 

[night]

Norton has a run away quarantine issue that I've ran across more than once. It could have been triggered from the upgrade, but not necessarily. There is lots of talk about it online. If you find yourself in that situation again just look it up. We did have one machine that actually had that problem 3 times before I convinced them to dump Norton and go with Kaspersky.

That issue can literally fill your entire drive and ask for more. It's a known glitch that has been around off and on for several years.

When I went to download those apps KansasSooner recommended it said I had 0 bytes left in my hard drive and I ended up deleting some songs just to make room. I should be okay going forward because I turned off the backup function on Norton. After getting all of my hard drive back and defragmenting the hard drive it should be running a lot better.

 

[WizardHawk]

Just know that hard drive takeovers is kind of semi common with Norton products. It isn't just their AV or their backup. If you suddenly find your drive space going down fast it's probably something related to them. Most people just uninstall/reinstall their norton product to fix it. Fixes most of them except the quarantine issue. That one can take more steps to fix.

 

[KansasSooner]

That issue can literally fill your entire drive and ask for more. It's a known glitch that has been around off and on for several years.

Seems to me I recall another app that did the same thing, so I don't know if it is just something in Norton's products or a symptom of something wrong inside Windows that causes certain apps to start filling up the drive. Wish I could remember who the culprit was.

 

[KansasSooner]

defragmenting the hard drive it should be running a lot better.

Windows now defrags on its own so there is really no need to ever do a manual defrag unless you just want to waste a little time...

 

[night]

Windows now defrags on its own so there is really no need to ever do a manual defrag unless you just want to waste a little time...

I didn't know that.

 

[WizardHawk]

Seems to me I recall another app that did the same thing, so I don't know if it is just something in Norton's products or a symptom of something wrong inside Windows that causes certain apps to start filling up the drive. Wish I could remember who the culprit was.

We ran Symantec Endpoint Protection as a company when I first started there and they used a few other Norton/Symantec products. We had several of those kinds of problems. Actually the worst issue was BSOD's that would come up on random machines that required you to safe boot and disable SEP and entirely uninstall it to fix it.

I may sound like I'm anti Norton, but I'm not. I do think there are much better products out there, but also much much worse ones as well.

Interesting that you've seen that kind of issue in another product.

The joys of Windows based PC troubleshooting.

 

[KansasSooner]

Trying to change some custom settings made in Windows 7 (i.e. data folder locations) after upgrading to Windows 10 can trash the Windows 10 start menu and there is no way to repair it short of reinstalling Windows 10. What kind of crap is that Microsoft? First you give the option to do it in Windows 7, change how it works in Windows 10 and then fuck everything up if you try to modify the settings...

If Ubuntu wasn't so crappy with dual monitors I'd ditch Windows in a heartbeat.

 

[TP76]

If Ubuntu wasn't so crappy with dual monitors I'd ditch Windows in a heartbeat.

Dual Monitors works just fine in my setup with MATE on Slackware (just like Windows extended desktop) - maybe you may want to change your flavor of Ubuntu, or see if your can change your windows manager. I'm not sure what's involved, due to my unfamiliarity with Ubuntu or Debian based derivatives. They seem to have a different flavor of Ubuntu for each windows manager - ie. Kubuntu (KDE) Xubunto (XCFE) Ubuntu MATE etc... which seems foreign to me because I run all of them on my box.

Perhaps, if your adventurous you can install some different windows managers on your base setup and give them a whirl:

Switching window manager/desktop environments?

Looks pretty straight forward.

 

[KansasSooner]

Perhaps, if your adventurous you can install some different windows managers on your base setup and give them a whirl:

Switching window manager/desktop environments?

Looks pretty straight forward.

It's not that I'm not adventurous but Ubuntu (and its derivatives) are a pain to change even if you have /home on a separate partition because of the way Linux puts settings in config files. Some settings transfer, some cause major problems, especially drive IDs and mappings that Windows can change easily in disk management. I've tried MATE with Mint and another distro and was not thrilled with it. Linux really needs to put more control of drives and windows elements into their "control panel" instead of relying on obscure apps to it. Ubuntu is garbage with windows decorations nowadays, most third party add ons broke when they went to Unity and its just not worth the effort to try a lot of them out. Why they don't allow tweaking as easily as Windows is ridiculous.

On another note I read that Ubuntu is finally going to address the multiple display issue in the next LT release 16.04. Using the proprietary Nvidia driver program has always been a problem as the drivers are usually outdated by the time Ubuntu gets them and have always been rather flaky.

 

[TP76]

I really didn't care for Linux Mint's version of MATE either. Could slap a middle of the road ATI/AMD video card in there and see if that helps. AMD is much more linux friendly than Nvidia.

 

[KansasSooner]

Could slap a middle of the road ATI/AMD video card in there and see if that helps. AMD is much more linux friendly than Nvidia.

Which is strange as ATI used to give me fits on Windows, always having to uninstall the previous driver before installing the newest driver, at least Nvidia fixed that about 2005. And the only AMD PC I have running Linux is not as good as the Intel Linux machines. But I think it's a low end AMD processor where I don't put anything but full Pentiums in my PCs that I build, fuck those Celeron and other low end chips.

I might have an old ATI card somewhere but I don't think it is new enough to use these days, probably no wide screen support and the machine I would be changing the card out is AGP (it's kind of old, but it still runs fine). I'd have to open it up to see if there is even a PCIe 16x slot, or find the manual.