Windows 7

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:

More work on the craptop.

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It looks like I won’t be having to install win 7 64 bit on that laptop. I ran Windows update all last night while attempting to sleep and everything updated perfectly. I only had to manually update the encryption/decryption PCI device, which I had to download from Lenovo since I couldn’t find it on Toshitba’s website. Focused mainly on software when I got home today, tomorrow I’ll do some final tuning up and install additional security measures. They should be happy with the results. 🙂

Microsoft surprised me with an unexpected update

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So I pretty much spent most of my day today relaxing on the couch playing some FPS games, streaming from my desktop. Well, after I decided I was done I wandered back to my desk to find that my system is ready to install Windows Updates! Which is really bizarre because I have Windows Update set like this:

UpdateSet

Yet I was seeing this:

Updated

I was really worried that Microsoft somehow forced Windows Updates to activate in some sort of recent update that I installed a week ago. However upon checking specifics on the update itself it was for one item… KB2999226 From September 15th of last year… For the C Runtime? WTF Microsoft?

I restarted my system and everything was fine. I immediately looked in services and checked Windows Update, nothing. They were disabled, set to off as per usual. So I’m not sure what to think. Did an update not install last time? Or did a program I use detect that C Runtime was out of date, hence triggering the update? Did it really connect up to Microsoft to grab that one update for whatever reason? Either way this beyond any form of strange I’ve ever seen… I’m definitely glad it wasn’t Windows 10 being shoved on the system. I have all kinds of custom settings and software that would have been severely compromised.

FRAPS and my R9 290 might need to get a divorce (plus some PAX drivers).

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Despite the reinstall I managed to get more black screens of death yesterday. I was ready to RMA my card in, but then I decided that since it was a fresh install of Windows 7 and I had only so many things installed I could do a process of elimination. What was one of the last programs that I installed? FRAPS.

I uninstalled FRAPS and left the computer on all night without any crashes. I’m even on the winter drivers for AMD which are more sensitive to crashing and nothing has happened. Could it have been FRAPS running in the background causing me grief the whole time?

It wouldn’t surprise me actually. I’ve been back to their website a few times to see if they’ve pushed any updates. Their last update was back on February 26th… 2013.

I find that odd considering in the past they pushed out updates more frequently. In a years time there have been a lot of new video card releases and driver updates, plus games update a lot which require outside companies to fine tune their software in order for it to work with the latest bleeding edge tech. I remember an issue I had with filming any newly updated Source game, and I had to update my copy of FRAPS in order to start filming again. But now, since it looks like the beepa team has fallen off of the face of the earth pretty much, I’ll have to look into something like liteCam.

Update

It seems another possibility for crashes might be the latest PAX audio drivers. Removing FRAPS stopped the lockup’s but continued to fall in and out of black screening and fractals. So far it’s much more stable on an older set.