My precioussssssss...

I just went out and bought a new laptop today, an ASUS GL752VW. Of course, it's for practical reasons. My aging eyes need the large screen (yeah, that's the ticket). Also, it's a business expense. For writing. Yes.

Now I'm in the cleaning-off-the-preinstalled-crap portion of the program. The good news is that it's not nearly as bad as what Acer puts on.

AW Admin said:

Consider buying a second display for it; decent displays are getting startlingly affordable, and two screens can be a super writing environment.

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Already there. But amusingly (at least to me), the laptop screen has a higher resolution than my current second screen. There may be an upgrade coming...

As for Windows 10, I made sure to create the local account, then activated the administrator account and converted my user account to standard. The setup asks a bunch of questions about what you'd like kept local. I think Microsoft may have listened to complaints. I turned everything off.

I've been deleting crap like crazy (both the manufacturer and Microsoft put cruft on, these days), and I'm almost ready to start transferring files.

It's early days, but so far Win10 doesn't appear to be a total abomination.

MJLowry said:

My old laptop fried a few weeks ago. Got a nice new latop and ajdusting to Win 10, but now a start up file on my wife's desktop is corrupted and we can't get a copy of Win 7 to fix it... we have all of our Let's Play files and the entirety of my old laptop files on it. I can't win these last few weeks.

Click to expand...

If worst comes to worst, you get an external USB drive caddy, pull your HD out of the laptop and mount it as a D: or E: drive, then copy over all your files.

I can't believe how much crap I've accumulated over the years. I've been transferring files since yesterday.

The saga continues. Windows 10 itself doesn't actually completely suck, but Microsoft's continual attempts to insert themselves into the transaction are getting tiring. Just now I started re-installing my Office 2013 onto the new laptop, and I got a screen that says:

ENTER THE EMAIL ADDRESS ASSOCIATED WITH YOUR OFFICE SUBSCRIPTION
Or enter an activation key



Really, who do they think they're fooling?

Well, it's been a week of working with Windows 10, and it's kind of a good news/bad news thing. There are definitely improvements, such as the virtual desktops system. Very cool, and I'll be making heavy use of that.

But I think they're outweighed by the stupidities. For starters, Microsoft Edge has to go. This is my second time typing up this post because Edge lost the first attempt. It doesn't handle the forum editor properly, either.
Second, the whole Start menu is a complete abortion. What idiot in marketing actually thought that removing functionality could be sold as an improvement?

"Now, with Windows 10, there's no more Favorites menu to distract you! Now, you no longer have to worry about the pesky convenience of being able to pin WORD to the start menu and pick Word documents directly from the Icon! And weren't you just so sick of being able to select your documents, videos, pictures, and downloads folders directly from your personal folder? Well, we've listened to your complaints and gotten rid of all that! Now, you too will be assimilated, er, learn to do it the Microsoft way!"

I just want to slap someone.

Update: Turns out WORD does let you pick recently used files when it's pinned to the start menu. They're in the right-click menu. And the "user directories" shortcut is in the menu. I still haven't found any substitute for favorites, though, short of firing up the browser and using the favorites menu pulldown.

I do like the multi-finger capability of the mousepad. For instance, where a single-finger tap is equivalent to a left-click, a two-finger tap is equivalent to a right-click. a three-finger drag randomly either gets you cortana or the virtual desktop manager. But since I've turned off cortana, that's no longer a problem. Two fingers also allows you to scroll the active window by just dragging.

On the minus side, for some reason IE reports itself as an older version, even though it's the latest. So some sites give me the "you're using an obsolete browser" lecture.

Okay, so it's been a couple of weeks now, and I figure an update is in order.

Right now, the only remaining issue that continues to irk me is the lack of a 'favorites' link on the start menu. I theorize (in the admitted absence of any actual data) that Microsoft wants you to start up your browser first (which defaults to their supplied landing page) then choose faves from there. The old way, of picking a fave directly, allowed you to bypass the landing page. That's my theory, anyway. The other is that the decision was made by a moron. Your choice.

But, other than that, it's working quite well. I know other people have complained about lock-ups and so forth. I haven't had any, but that may have something to do with the amount of effort different brands put into making sure their drivers are bullet-proof. Again, just my theory.

I continue to think that the start menu is the weakest part of Windows 10. They made design changes that, in my view anyway, took a good system and made it less good. If they'd included a "windows 7 emulation" mode, I betcha it would be the most-used Win10 option on the planet. The fact that they didn't probably says something.

But there are lots of things to like. The multi-finger gesturing system with the touchpad, as I mentioned above, is a great improvement. The screensaver slideshow is awesome, and the desktop background-changer as well. I find the lock/unlock screen handling an improvement over Win7, although not really revolutionary.

For the rest, it really just looks a lot like Win7. As with every single Windows release since 3.1, they move stuff around, both on and off the control panel, so you have to re-learn where some admin functions are located. Like I said, though, nothing new.

There are a couple of utilities that I think I'm going to appreciate, like the Phone Companion. But for the most part, most of the extraneous shit that comes with the new system can just be deleted. Again, though, that's not really Win10's fault. That crap's been around since XP.

ETA: The virtual desktop system is a HUGE bonus. Definitely worth the price of admission.

My overall vote is a thumbs-up. I don't think it's an improvement like Win7 was over XP, but it's also not Vista or Win8.

Okay, one more update--probably my last. I've now been using Win10 on my new box and Win7 on my old one for about a month. Now that I'm getting used to it, I'm really starting to like the big start menu canvas that you can drop icons onto. I've discovered (I think I mentioned this earlier, but I'm really using it now) that you can right-click on apps like word and IE and pick recently-used docs/urls. You can also pin favorite ones to the right-click menu.

The Virtual Desktop and Snap utilities are definitely de bomb. Worth the price of admission right there.

I continue to mourn the absence of a favorites menu. Microsoft did a recent update that allows you to add some of the formerly missing options like My Pictures, My Sound Files, etc to the start menu. But still no favorites.

Edge continues to suck, and IE acts a little funny on Win10. There's a message that keeps coming up, "This page is accessing information that is not under its control. This poses a security risk. Do you want to continue?" It has something to do with ads and cross-domain accesses. The suggestions I've found so far in google don't fix it. Accessing the same sites with my Win7 box doesn't produce this. I wonder if Microsoft deliberately introduced this to make IE less palatable on Win10?

Oh, BTW, the latest Win7 update (Mid Sept) broke favorites on my old box. Every selection from the faves menu gives me a "this file may be unsafe" message. There's a fix on the web that works, but really, Microsoft, WTF?

I have to take the word of internet experts that Win10, with my settings, doesn't broadcast my shoe size to the world. But then, really, I had the same problem with Win7 and XP. It's just that Microsoft tried so overtly with 10, and everyone's up in arms.

Anyway, all in all, I'm fine with 10. Sooner or later, someone will bring out a faves add-on, or I'll just write something myself and drop it in the start menu. The real objection to 10, I think, is the objection to any windows upgrade or new PC--the amount of work required to bring it around to where you like it.

ETA: the problem with that message in IE 11 turned out to be that the zone settings were set up wrong in tools->options->security. So now, out of an abundance of caution, I have to do a full scan on my new pc.