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I've been running into odd Windows 10 activation scenarios in the past few weeks. I only have a passing understanding of Windows 10 activation, but I have certain expectations of what will work and wont work. At one point I manually upgraded a few thousand machines for work, and once that ended I made pretty liberal use of the Accessibility upgrade for various machines personal and not. My understanding was if it activates the license is permanently modified and you're golden forever. I haven't seen any evidence against this so far but now I'm questioning that. Two weeks ago I bought a new motherboard and CPU for my personal PC. I installed a fresh Windows 10 Pro copy of windows via their ISO. I was intending to get a $30 key from a shady reseller, though one I've used before with no issue, but after just a day Windows activated itself. I thought perhaps Microsoft was using something other than the motherboard to register licenses (?? I just doubt this so much), but didn't look into it further. I have a mining machine that uses an old OEM B85 $20 Acer motherboard. I had been using Windows 10 eval for months because I assumed I'd have to buy a license for it. Recently I accidentally installed the retail ISO instead of the eval ISO. It said it wasn't activated, but I ignored it and would reinstall once it started cutting the network and all that. But in just a day, it activated. Its still activated. Now I was curious and I tested installing Windows 10 via USB on two known non-upgraded optiplex 990's. They both worked. Then I upgraded our janitors Windows 8.1 laptop and again after a day it activated. I guess my question here is am I just being dumb and am unaware of how this actually works? Because I'm skeptical to say the least.
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Feb 22, 2018 18:00
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| # ¿ Apr 23, 2024 13:03 |
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bobfather posted:You're so wrong. I loaded up a VM with fully-patched Windows 7 Pro a few weeks ago, and it was SHOCKING how much faster, more responsive, and more feature complete it was compared to Windows 10. In my opinion, looked nicer too in comparison to the stock dark Windows 10. I know im just jumping head first into the pool here so I apologize if Im short on details, but in my experience anytime Windows 10 feels or is apparently slower (I mean basic UI stuff, booting, speed that dialog boxes open, UAC delay, etc) it can be resolved by reinstalling windows fresh from the boot menu and not from within Windows. I dont know why this happens, but I see it all the time. It doesn't seem model or hardware specific. The weird "slowness" can also affect machines that were deployed over the network in various ways. Windows 10 working properly is at the very least equal to Windows 7 in responsiveness, and in many cases slightly better. When its working improperly it can feel like total rear end. This is an issue that has yet never been resolved since Microsoft allowed free upgrades, and in fact I dont think Ive ever seen it mentioned outside of where I work. I just had 24 machines behave that way yesterday forcing me to build a solid image manually and use that as a seed which of course is a massive waste of time. Sometimes it works just fine though, thats the Windows(tm) way. Assuming you haven't been through all that already but youre not happy by how Windows 10 feels especially if you can compare it to Windows 7 in a vm, manually installing from a boot drive or ISO has fixed this general issue every time for me. YMMV of course and I know how it sounds (DID YOU UNPLUG IT AND PLUG IT BACK IN? DID YOU CLEAR COOKIES??) but I am very sure it at least solves the issue with similar characteristics that I see. As far as features I do not like changes to some dialogs, but ultimately I've been able to access everything via the run menu or windows+X edit: I only glanced through the Windows update discussion above, but there are basic scripts out there that block Windows 10 updates completely unless you purposefully re-enable it. Occasionally Microsoft has pushed the odd update that circumvents the standard "do not install" selection. Now these updates are generally important, but for many business scenarios this is not acceptable. As a rule I do not deploy any Windows 10 machines that are capable of updating themselves unless specifically requested 1gnoirents fucked around with this message at 20:19 on Feb 22, 2018 |
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Feb 22, 2018 20:11
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I installed XP on a VM to use some obscure software (Microsoft gives away basically all versions of XP for free now) and it was actually more painful than I would have guessed. The internet basically does not function through any browser I could get my hands on. I was pretty surprised by that tbh
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Feb 23, 2018 16:42
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It was an issue with modern websites, even common ones would fail to load critical areas. I assumed it was just a lack of support for standards. I believe I tried Firefox but I definitely tried legacy Chrome and IE. It wasn't super critical so I didn't work on it much but I was very surprised at how bad it had gotten. Just a few years ago you could reasonably assume Grandma could still use the internet on her e-machine
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Feb 23, 2018 17:44
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Dylan16807 posted:I looked into Chrome a bit, it looks like the "support for XP" that ended two years ago was only partial, with TLS being severely out of date and broken. And IE on XP never even supported SNI. Out of curiosity I threw up a XP vm and indeed Firefox does work! I stand corrected, I must not have tried Firefox. IE barely works, and I remember Chrome explicitly not working or being supported. It is funny to try to click Windows Update in XP, it leads to an error page and a couple of bad links. Now what I'll do with this information I dont know. At least I got paid for it lol.
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Feb 23, 2018 21:42
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Volguus posted:I have a winxp VM and chrome works perfectly fine. Sure, is version 49 and yells at me that it is no longer supported and probably will make the VM blow up if i try to go on the interwebs with it, but it ... works. Wtf, I tried and it works too. Well thats what I get for commenting on something based on a singular passing experience. I guess its notable I had to get the ISO from a different source, maybe the one I was using originally was bunk or some really old build without basic drivers. Although I very very clearly remember Chrome specifically giving me serious error messages that nothing would be expected to work - which was true. Anyways.. now I know even more about Windows XP browser compatibility lol.
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Feb 23, 2018 23:43
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dissss posted:Windows has just gotten slower in the UI though? I discussed this a bit earlier, but if you are experiencing noticeable UI delays in 10 vs 7 it can be fixed with a USB/DVD reinstall. Windows 10 UI is exactly as snappy as 7 if its working right. Ive never figured out what is causing it, it impacts mr directly at work quite often. Its nothing I can guarantee but Ive had to do this a lot. The only common charactetistic ive noticed is the UI lag is persistent for almost every task.
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Feb 26, 2018 18:17
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| # ¿ Apr 23, 2024 13:03 |
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Lol install wrong is a good way to put it. Its the dumbest Windows 10 problem. Most other gripes were fixed early on, imo. The main problem is most users just wouldnt know its happening without direct comparisons
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Feb 26, 2018 20:51
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