A Blog about Coding

Tag: windows 10

  • Upgrading Windows 7 to Windows 10 – Take 2

    Upgrading Windows 7 to Windows 10 – Take 2

    My Windows 10 Upgrade History

    On Nov 1, 2015, I tried to upgrade my laptop to Windows 10. This was a bad experience, when it had upgraded I didn’t have a start menu or an App Store, so I reverted back. See this link to the original article about my Windows 10 upgrade experience.

    I wasn’t very happy at the end of it, and had my usual rant about about Microsoft and software in general, in that you should have confidence in your own software design, screen layouts and ubiquitous language, and certainly not focus on your competitors to the detriment of your own product. Apart from this ongoing gripe with Microsoft, they have come a long day since the days of .NET 1.1 and datasets, and I like their products, Windows 10 apart, a lot. Maybe the Gu should take control of Windows10 and bang a few heads together who knows?

    Giving Windows 10 Another Try?

    Anyway I felt it was important to give it another try, for two main reasons:

    1. As a screen space junkie, I wanted the multiple screens on Windows 10, even though my laptop is high res. anyway, and on my desktops I have two 4k screens.
    2. Although I don’t tend to go for latest versions too soon, as a developer its important to know about the latest technology especially if its going to affect you or your clients at some point.

    So I decided to give it another try. I got the same laptop, which hasn’t really been used since then, ran Windows Update and tried again. This time around I did the same things, but it took a lot longer to upgrade (was it because I had installed SQL/Server 2014 and Visual Studio 2015 on it… maybe…).

    But importantly this time around it was smooth. Everything worked as expected and apart from a few settings which I feel are good for developers, its all working fine without problems of any sort.

    Using the Windows key and then tab, or Windows and CTRL and left or right arrow, or Windows and D – all are used for different things on the multi screen features of Windows 10.

    A nice bonus that I didn’t know about in advance was that you can now use two fingers on the mouse to scroll, although not as smooth as on my Macbook Air, it works (so Windows can now do multi-touch – I assumed that was something that Steve Jobs had patented early on in his second stint at Apple – interesting).

    I’m not really a Windows geek, my head is too full of developer thinking and C# to worry too much about the operating system, I would have been happy with Windows 7 with multi screen, but so far so good anyway.

    What I have Done Since the Upgrade

    This is what I have done to the installation since the upgrade:

    • Turned off User Account Control. Not sure if this is the same as in Windows 7 but I’ll keep an eye on that when using Visual Studio.
    • Checked my settings in Control Panel to check that Show Hidden Files and Hide Extensions for Known types are set as I like – the Windows 10 installation did not change these.
    • Checked Windows Update and made it as lazy as possible, that is under Settings->Advanced Options
    • Disabled Windows Defender real time scanning in the group policy editor. Developers, who don’t use email on a machine, don’t need all this stuff turned on.
    • Disabled automatic drive optimisation (defrag) because my laptop uses dual Samsung SSD’s and its not recommended to optimise SSD’s. It did recognise these as SSD’s but doesn’t do anything it just says “Optimisation not available” so rather than have it run pointlessly, as I have no hard drives, just SSD’s, I disabled the weekly optimisation step because I don’t ever want my PC to waste processor clock cycles on doing stuff that it shouldn’t. Anything that makes Visual Studio compiles not instantly fast, even on the large projects I work on, is BAD.
    Screen print of Windows Update Settings on Windows 10
    Windows Update Settings on Windows 10
    Screen print of Windows 10 Group Policy Editor for Windows Defender
    Windows 10 Group Policy Editor for Windows Defender

    The benefit of using Group Policy Editor for Windows Defender is that it stays off. Windows 10 will re-enable it if you turn it off by going into Windows Defender – very annoying!

    Windows Defender Group Policy Settings are under Computer Configuration->Administrative Templates->Windows Components->Windows Defender. I have modified three settings:

    Turn off real-time protection Enabled.

    Turn on behaviour monitoring Disabled  (Hello? I’m a developer, I know more about you than you will ever know about me you stupid machine! What do you think you going to learn by looking at my source code and executables, slowing me down and making my life miserable?)

    Monitor file and program activity on your computer. Disabled. I’ll do that myself thanks.

    The Microsoft Windows Team needs to add a big developer button to Windows 10 that dumbs down all this consumer crap and puts a Visual Studio 2015 icon on the desktop for devs. So maybe we should send the Gu round to the Windows 10 team to bang a few heads!

    Anyway, on the whole, so far so good. I’ll blog again if there is anything further to add about Windows 10 when using it as developer with Visual Studio 2015.

  • Upgrading Windows 7 to Windows 10

    Upgrading Windows 7 to Windows 10

    I have a Dell Precision laptop with 16Gb of RAM, dual Samsung SSDs in RAID configuration and a Core i7 processor.

    I tried it as my main development machine once with a Matrox DualHeadToGo fitted, but I now have a more powerful development machine with 32Gb of RAM (two actually – one for admin and emails, the other for pure development), I use the laptop for development on client site when this is needed.

    It runs Windows 7, Visual Studio 2013, SQL/Server 2014 and Oracle 11g and I am pretty happy with it. Its responsive and has quite an high res screen also, useful as all developers will know.

    I had a rush of blood to the head yesterday and decided to try the Windows 10 upgrade it kept nagging me about. After all, Windows 10 is an improvement on Windows 8.1 apparently, and I have installed 8.1 on one of my desktop development machines and have not been unhappy now they stopped reverting back to the new start menu with every interaction with the computer (still no “My Computer” though – you need more than one interaction to get to this).

    As developers, we always have to keep up with new developments, and I wanted to try the multiple desktops feature, so I accepted the upgrade to Windows 10 and followed on screen instructions. The upgrade process itself went along smoothly and within a couple of hours I had a Windows 10 laptop.

    I then tried to login. It wouldn’t recognize my Windows Live Id, despite this working on Windows 8.1 in my home office. So i used the local login I had used for Windows 7 before. I got an error message something like C:\Windows … SystemProfile\Desktop not available. The desktop was blank and the start menu was unresponsive. I googled around on my other machine and couldn’t find an answer. In the end I just rebooted and tried logging in again. The Windows Live ID still wouldn’t log in, but my desktop was restored in Windows 10 when I logged in as a local user.

    So first impressions was that it was slower and had used 16Gb of disk space, leaving me with 60Gb free. Also it said Cortana was unavailable in my region. Turning off Windows Defender real time checking restored the speed – as a developer I always know where I’ve been and don’t do stupid things like opening attachments from emails – I don’t even have email on my main dev machines – I depend on regular virus scans rather than trying to catch them in real time on my dev machines.

    I definitely wanted to update the start menu to use Google rather than Bing to search. I googled an article from HowToGeek to do this but didn’t get around to actually doing it as I got caught up in other issues.

    Left clicking the start menu only gave me two options and the “All options” at the bottom left. So I had to drag my most commonly used options to the start menu. I expected to see a lot more default options on this menu and thought I was missing out from some of the default Microsoft Windows 10 ones.

    I also found that Control Panel doesn’t now have all the options, there is an App called “Settings” that has more. When you go into Control Panel there is no link to Settings and vice versa.

    Right clicking the start menu is just as crap as Windows 8.1 – no My Computer option which is my personal beef. Just an hotch potch collection of things that have been thrown there that they think you might need.

    The thing that really gets me with new versions of Windows is that the user interface, all the options, should be consistent over time. If you are going to design software and then not only arbitrarily rename the options and move them around, this is not good. It might show a weakness and lack of thought in the original design but for me its more about smart asses who don’t have to use the software in the real world doing it because they can, and because nobody stops them. So we are where we are, if you are going to change it then at least do a good job once over and then progressively improve. There is no progressive improvement that I can see. Why the change from Control Panel to Settings? If you must, why keep both? If you must have settings, Control Panel should just be an alias, a shortcut to the new name. All the lost productivity, the re-training costs affecting millions of people just because some university grad at Microsoft with 2 years experience thinks he / she knows better than the rest of the world put together. Sorry, Windows 10 is still just an half assed attempt at an operating system, full of ill thought out and incomplete features. I should have the option to remove all these crappy half finished features until they are properly thought out and complete not get these stuffed down my throat every time!

    Lets just imagine for one second that I’m not a software developer, I’m an airline pilot going to work. I arrive in the cockpit of my Boeing 747 and see I’ve had a new upgrade while I’ve been away. All the instruments are in different positions, they have hidden part of the flight controls so I have to search to find them, and also given me a toolbag with a few things in it I might need. Approach Charts, parts of checklists all scribbled out and amended, a landing gear locking pin, a knife and fork for my lunch. Now I know I’m getting a bit carried away here, if this happened in the airline world the crew would go for training, and such changes as we are suffering here would get kicked out. They would refuse to accept them.

    On one of the Dot Net Rocks shows (I think – I listen to Dot Net Rocks and HanselMinutes), I think someone said that Microsoft got one release wrong (Vista) then one right (Windows 7), so Windows 10 was going to be a success. I certainly hope so, but it doesn’t not necessarily follow unless you address the underlying reasons why you made a bad release in the first place. This involves more than just looking at the features.

    Anyway, rant over. There were two things that were deal breakers for me and resulting in me going for a meal with the missus in disgust, but not before asking my laptop to revert to Windows 7 while I was out:

    1. The first problem was that Amazon Kindle wouldn’t work. There was a new version in the App Store. I uninstalled Kindle and tried to run the App Store. After 5 minutes, it came up with an error and then disappeared. I googled around for this and spent a couple of hours on it, but couldn’t find an answer. I couldn’t get App Store working.
    2. Windows Update – moved from Control Panel to Settings, also took an age checking for updates – in fact it never came back, I got bored of waiting after about 20 minutes. The other problem with Windows Update was that it doesn’t have the option to individually review updates apparently. Just a broad brush option to defer new versions for an unspecified period of time. I’m not happy with this because as a developer I would like to be very specific about versions of software I am running.

    I did manage to disable real time checking in Windows Defender – so that Visual Studio responds as it should, and also turn down User Account Control – again so Visual Studio runs as administrator correctly. But the two problems above and the fact that they only gave me a month before I lose the option to revert, sorry Microsoft, it just had to go. I even went as far as getting rid of the Windows 10 upgrade icon on my existing machines – you uninstall KB3035583 as outlined in How to Disable the Windows 10 notification icon. You can also grey out the Windows 10 update in Windows Update.

    The future? Well I don’t have unlimited time to mess about with these things. My head is full of things that developers think about, not system admins. I think the future is to try to disable my laptop from automatically upgrading to WIndows 10 (there has been some talk of it being forced on us next year) and possibly creating a VM to create a clean install and having a good play around with it before deciding to do anything as rash again. Hopefully Windows 10 will work on a clean install, its just then you have the cost of re-installing all your applications etc. I really wanted the upgrade to work so I could get to know it on an occasional use machine.

    I like Windows 7, because its simple. When are they going to bring out a Windows 10 Foundation or Windows 10 Essentials that just has the basic options that we want? A kind of Windows 7 with multiple desktops and lightning fast response? The Windows 8.1 machine I have is a bit like this now I have a desktop that doesn’t keep disappearing if I kind of ignore the rest of it. Everyone knows you shouldn’t focus on your competitors and lose track of where you are and what you stand for, which I think they were guilty of at some points in the past. I don’t even think they are doing that at present. Maybe the Windows developers will grow up and gain some experience and knowledge like whats happened in other parts of the company. For sure I hope this disease doesn’t spread to their .NET and Azure divisions because what has been happening there for the past eight years or so has been really, really good and long may that continue.

    Hope this information helps somebody.