Windows 10

In Other News: Windows Update Still Sucks

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It’s a good thing I spend about 97% of my time under Linux, plus also run a neutered Win 10 Pro install. This recent update sounds like a special level of fuck to those who were unfortunate enough to have it forced through an update.

The latest offender was “Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. – SCSIAdapter – 9.3.0.221”, a Windows-recommended driver for AMD users. The problem? The driver was stopping some users’ PCs from booting, and the patch has since been pulled from the Windows Update list.

But the real problem here, as noted by Windows Latest, is that Windows Insider users had already flagged the driver as being dodgy. It was bad enough that users had to resort to some command line kung fu to nuke the update, which is a whole nightmare that nobody should have to go through.

Of course, this only affects owners of systems that run AMD motherboards. If I ran a typical Windows 10 install where it updated to the latest of everything this would have knocked me offline. This is why I spend most of my time under Linux. I can update at a time convenient for me to make sure I have enough time to fix shit if things happen to go awry. 😛

Red Dead Redemption 2 Runs Better Under Linux?

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I stumbled across this in my RSS feed the other day, and as someone who traverses between Windows and Linux frequently I was quite happy to read about this. Apparently if you own an AMD GPU then congratulations, you’ll have better performance under Linux rather than Windows .

The fact there is no native Linux client for RDR2 and there is a considerable amount of performance compared to Windows is both hilarious and impressive at the same time. May we see more results as above.

Microsoft is doing things that I can’t complain about

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I really need to stop sleeping when weird shit happens. I awoke yesterday to find Microsoft actually making somewhat of an attempt to make themselves look good on PC for once… where to start? The first thing I read yesterday was the announcement for the Halo Master Chief Collection coming to PC, and you can purchase it on Steam!

For the first time ever, The Master Chief’s story comes to PC. Featuring Halo: Reach along with Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary, Halo 2: Anniversary, Halo 3, the Halo 3: ODST Campaign and Halo 4, this is the definitive Halo experience.

Shorter Microsoft: Here’s the deal, we don’t talk about the first Halo release for Vista, and you can get our game collection outside of our shitty store. :zorak:

This came as a bit of a shocker considering Microsoft wanting to push their store onto people, and placing it on Steam also gives people like me a chance to see if it will handle under Proton. :trollface:

Of course that was shocking enough on it’s own, but Microsoft cranks it to 11 when news of DirectX12 coming to Windows 7 via World of Warcraft.

Blizzard added DirectX 12 support for their award-winning World of Warcraft game on Windows 10 in late 2018. This release received a warm welcome from gamers: thanks to DirectX 12 features such as multi-threading, WoW gamers experienced substantial framerate improvement. After seeing such performance wins for their gamers running DirectX 12 on Windows 10, Blizzard wanted to bring wins to their gamers who remain on Windows 7, where DirectX 12 was not available.

On the surface this seems like really extraordinary news, however if you take the time to think about it DirectX12 never really took off quite like how Microsoft wanted it to. When AMD open sourced their Mantle API (now Vulkan) that left Microsoft a little dead in the water as that looked much more attractive to developers. especially when developing on more than one platform. Plus with more people having little reasoning to switch to Windows 10 to take advantage of DX12 apart from maybe a handful of titles that properly utilize it. It is interesting they would do this so close to Windows 7’s end of life cycle… or is this a sign of them continuing to support it? I might have to turn my dualboot system into a triple. :trollface: My only hope is that if they do go back to Windows 7 they don’t do to it what they did with their newer OS’s/

Then to top it all off Microsoft actually did something to make Windows 10… somewhat better?

Occasionally, startup failures can occur due to hardware issues, file corruption, or incompatible 3rd party software.
If Windows detects that your machine cannot start up successfully, it will try to diagnose and resolve failures due to disk issues, system file corruption, invalid registry keys, or other such causes. If all these steps are unsuccessful and your machine is still unable to start up properly, Windows will determine if the startup issue was introduced after recent driver or quality updates were installed. If so, these updates may be uninstalled automatically to get the device back to a workable state. This is only done as a last resort.
This is only available via the Windows Insider updates, but it’s about friggin time they got to work on a update safeguard. In fact all of the items I discussed above should have been rolled out a long time ago. Anyone that is at least half tech savvy could look at all of this and see this was all possible. We have been on pretty much the same kernel since Windows Vista, porting DX12 to Windows 7 should have been just as fine as adding it to Windows 10, and making Halo games console exclusive was always a boneheaded move on Microsoft’s behalf. You already have people using your OS, why not give them a game to play on it that YOUR own company made if they have the hardware to back it up? Not all of us want to buy a console to play exclusives… unless it’s a $10 PS3 or something. :trollface:

Down the digital rabbit hole of issues

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My weekend started out peaceful… I treated myself to an omelette and some toast, made up some green tea and worked on some recent Left 4 Dead footage. Wow… Normally when I edit video footage I have to do a lot of trimming. Like trimming down two and a half hours of Serious Sam footage into two minutes… with our most recent game of Left 4 Dead though? It’s an hour and thirty minutes in length and so far I have about 15 minutes worth of footage with more territory to cover. I believe this could be its own miniseries.

After awhile I finally decided to give myself a break and head into Windows… Just when I thought I made it clear out of Windows Update hell I came across an issue with my microphone. It was recognized by Windows but not a single program acknowledged its existence. After some web searching I found out that if you blanket disable all apps from having access to your mic it’ll completely cut you off (despite that little message on the right telling you that it won’t block the mic from Windows). After fixing that problem I launched Steam and discovered that Shadow Of The Tomb Raider needed an update. Then I changed my mind and settled on Quantum Break instead… that’s when I ran into another problem. After playing for a few minutes my monitors would go black. This happened again at the exact same point in the game. Tomb Raider finished updating and I launched it, same problem. I updated my drivers to the latest ones (because somehow during Windows Update Microsoft oh so kindly installed an older one) and the problem still persists even on the latest beta drivers. I tried Skyrim and that seemed to remain stable, but DOOM 2016 choked just like Quantum Break and Tomb Raider.

That was last night. Today/tonight I ran more diagnostics; turns out it actually wasn’t Windows 10 in this particular case, because upon further testing I could replicate the same issue under Linux. I’ve tried clean installs of Windows and a couple other tricks but merit the same result. The only other thing that’s been done recently is a bios update. I’ll save that for tomorrow, I’ve been bashing my head against this long enough…

I’ll nibble on some clouds and I’ll lay my weary head to rest.

October is the time for scary stuff, like Windows Updates

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Me watching everyone else install the new Windows 10 updates.

It’s a good thing I have Windows configured to not update immediately to the latest update (and an even better thing that I’ve been maining on Mint); this bug sounds a little pants shitting.

Several early adopters of the Windows 10 1809 update have reported vanishing file problems on Reddit, Twitter and Microsoft’s Community forum.

One poor Windows 10 1809 user, Robert Ziko, claims to have lost 220GB of data after updating.

Bunches of people at a couple tech sites that I read have been saying “This is why you should make backups” and yeah, backups are a good thing to do, but you shouldn’t have to live in fear looking over your shoulder in fear of the grim clippy. Hell, in most cases people don’t know how to configure their systems and will be updated unwillingly, not even giving them a chance to perform a proper backup. Most of the time I can’t trust these people with an HDMI cable, why would I expect them to know how to properly configure Windows 10 to not fuck you over?

Fortunately I have Windows 10 Pro, you can set that up to put off major updates by one year. Plus I’ve been making it a habit to only use Windows for things I either haven’t tested under Linux or haven’t been able to setup properly. Feels good to finally reach that point, it was long overdue.

Adobe narrows their OS scope

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This is one of the reasons why I don’t like subscription model software:

We want to give you advance notice that upcoming versions of the Adobe video and audio tools will require Windows 10 (version 1709, or higher) or macOS 10.12 (or higher) to run. This applies to the next major releases of Adobe Media Encoder, After Effects, Audition, Character Animator, Prelude, and Premiere Pro.

Performance and stability are top priorities for all of our users. Running our apps on current versions of the Mac and Windows operating systems helps provide an optimal experience with our tools.

So basically if you’re on an older operating system and you still want to use Adobe CC Services you’ll have to pay a monthly fee for out of date software… Not that it matters to me. There are other pay and Open Source options that will do the trick in most cases, especially if you’re looking for encoders and video editors. This isn’t the early 90’s/mid 2000’s where Adobe was king, programs like Shotcut, Sony Vegas, and a few others are good substitutes. In fact I’ve been using Shotcut for over a year now, and only had to delve into Premiere Pro once to keyframe something (though I used CS6 instead of CC). All that I really use that’s adobe these days is Photoshop CS6, which will probably be my last version.

These are the websites that probe your virgin Windows 10 booty hole with gusto

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For transparency purposes Microsoft recently released a list of websites your fresh Windows 10 install connects to… should go without saying I have all of this shit turned off, and I’m not just saying that because I’m using Linux at the moment. :trollface:

But yeah, that’s quite the fucking list. The sad part is I know people that are perfectly content with everything Windows 10 wants to do… with their only complaint being that Microsoft’s assistant Cortana being named Cortana. :zorak: He dares call himself a fucking nerd too…

Feel the love for Linux

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What happens when you’re moving a bunch of files and Windows Update decides it’s waaaaay more important than what you’re doing at the moment? This guy kissed off Windows 10 and went straight to Linux.

I realize there are workarounds to all of these issues, and that most of Microsoft’s very intrusive privacy defaults can be disabled. But something just put me over the edge recently, and I craved an operating system that was lightweight, distraction-free, devoid of bloat and stayed out of my way.

If I were to wager a guess he’s running on a basic version of Windows 10, or if he’s running Windows 10 Professional he doesn’t have it configured accordingly. Despite that though he does have a valid point; Linux distros for the most part are pretty easy to setup compared to Windows. Many programs that we use under Windows can be used under Linux as well, and finding them can be pretty easy if you stick with simplistic debian flavored varieties if you’re not the type to tinker. There are even nice alternatives to Windows and Mac only programs such as Krita and Shotcut instead of Adobe’s Photoshop and Premiere.

Oh, and unlike Windows 10 you can update your OS at your leisure, in fact under Linux it’s best to not run updates instantly. Of course under Windows it’s a good idea to not run updates instantly, but… you know. :trollface: Both OS’s will of course have their pluses and minuses, but at this point Linux only seems to get better while Microsoft keeps finding newer and better ways to piss off their captive audience as a whole.

That said, I now have Mint 18.3 installed, for whenever I have that not so fresh Windows 10 feeling. :v:

Windows 10: Store Edition

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Remember when Microsoft made a version of Windows for some of their tablets that only ran their own store apps, and people were upset when they found out they couldn’t install their regular programs? Welcome to Windows 10 S, because clearly we need to have

Microsoft expects that the “majority of customers” will enjoy Windows 10 in its new S mode, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Windows wrote in a blog post Wednesday night.

The stunning endorsement of Windows 10’s S mode—which was formally confirmed as a mode of Windows 10 just about a day ago—was made by Joe Belfiore, who told me via Twitter that he expected the transition to take place in 2019. Belfiore’s blog post set an even more aggressive timetable, claiming that customers would be able to buy a PC with Windows 10 S mode at or near the time when the next feature update to Windows 10 drops. That update, known as Redstone 4, is expected to appear on PCs in early April

Of course you can opt out of S mode if need be, and the reasoning behind this mode is to improve performance… which I can see if you consider it won’t be able to run anything outside of the Windows Store. :v:

Windows 10 upgrade prevents guy from checking out of hotel

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Here we go again.

I don’t know what’s more stupid, the IT’s at the hotel disabling Windows Update so this doesn’t happen, or Microsoft for not thinking of all the doom and gloom people have to put up with when having to deal with their pushy OS.

“My hotel can’t check me out because their computer decided to just go for it & is currently in the middle of updating itself to Windows 10,” he said.

It’s pretty bad when Hotel California has fewer restrictions. I mean you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave. Maybe Microsoft got the idea from The Eagles, but like every other idea they’ve stolen they got it bassackwards.