Windows 10: I know what I'm doing

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Windows 10: I know what I'm doing

RightClickSaveAs: Mar 1, 2001; Tiny animals under glass... Smaller than sand...

ThermoPhysical posted:

Anyone know of a good app that can let you read Word files (besides..you know...Word)? The normal Word app sucks at letting me enlarge text on my screen and whatnot.

I'm partial to OpenOffice's Writer, it's what I've used for years: http://www.openoffice.org/download/index.html It's open source software and doesn't feel as polished as Official Word, but handles every word document I've thrown at it just fine, and is very customizable.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2015 05:59

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 08:33

RightClickSaveAs: Mar 1, 2001; Tiny animals under glass... Smaller than sand...

Aleksei Vasiliev posted:

Does anybody know how to install security updates in Win7 without upgrading to Win10? Even with the "Upgrade to Windows 10 Pro" optional update unchecked, installing updates displays "Downloading Windows 10". I can't currently manage an OS upgrade but the security updates out today are kind of critical.

In the Windows 10 update screen, right click on these two updates (KB3021917 and KB3035583) and click "Hide"

e: actually you'll have to uninstall those two updates first, as you probably already have them installed. Go to "View Update History" then click on the "To remove and update, view Installed Updates" link on the top of the screen, which will get you to ANOTHER screen where you can select updates to uninstall. Uninstall the two listed in the screenshot above.

May need to go under "Optional Updates" and hide the "Upgrade to Windows 10" update as well. Now you can go on your merry Windows 7 way, and it should give you just the regular security updates.

RightClickSaveAs fucked around with this message at 06:09 on Aug 12, 2015

# ¿ Aug 12, 2015 06:04

RightClickSaveAs: Mar 1, 2001; Tiny animals under glass... Smaller than sand...

Sir Unimaginative posted:

Apache OpenOffice is hardly touched anymore since The Fork; you're almost certainly better off with LibreOffice.

Also anyone who uses LibreOffice: 5.0.0 introduced stable Win64 support, though you'll have to go down the Fresh download page for it.

Oh thanks, I had no idea that had happened. I've just had the same version installed for a long time, maybe LibreOffice will fix some of the minor but weird issues that have popped up.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2015 14:28

RightClickSaveAs: Mar 1, 2001; Tiny animals under glass... Smaller than sand...

macnbc posted:

Apparently not. I haven't tried it myself but I've read about people upgrading using only local accounts (no MS account) and it still activating properly, even after clean install.

I upgraded my laptop to W10, activated, then wiped and did a clean install and didn't have any issues, all with no MS account involved at any point.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2015 04:10

RightClickSaveAs: Mar 1, 2001; Tiny animals under glass... Smaller than sand...

Try uninstalling these updates:

RightClickSaveAs posted:

In the Windows 10 update screen, right click on these two updates (KB3021917 and KB3035583) and click "Hide"

e: actually you'll have to uninstall those two updates first, as you probably already have them installed. Go to "View Update History" then click on the "To remove and update, view Installed Updates" link on the top of the screen, which will get you to ANOTHER screen where you can select updates to uninstall. Uninstall the two listed in the screenshot above.

May need to go under "Optional Updates" and hide the "Upgrade to Windows 10" update as well. Now you can go on your merry Windows 7 way, and it should give you just the regular security updates.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2015 15:04

RightClickSaveAs: Mar 1, 2001; Tiny animals under glass... Smaller than sand...

There's no pressing reason to get W10 right now either, I'd just wait until you upgrade your hardware. And that will give more time for the kinks to get worked out. I've heard October-ish thrown around as Microsoft's planned date for getting a bunch of performance optimization stuff pushed out: http://www.neowin.net/news/windows-threshold-wave-2-will-focus-primarily-on-optimization

# ¿ Aug 15, 2015 16:36

RightClickSaveAs: Mar 1, 2001; Tiny animals under glass... Smaller than sand...

Rahu posted:

I'm also getting this with most, but not all, things i install. They are in the start menu but search just can't find anything

The Start Menu search really seems like it needs a lot of work, hopefully it's being improved. I installed the Netflix app straight from the Windows store, verified that it had a big icon sitting right there in the list and was even a live tile, but hitting Start and typing Netflix brought up the web search only for a couple days. It finally Fixed Itself somehow just yesterday, there were some updates installed then so I don't know if that had anything to do with it or not.

Jan posted earlier in this thread about how the start menu uses a database, it would seem the thing is just not updating reliably:

Jan posted:

The Start Menu is managed using a service, with a database and poo poo. That database has been notoriously lovely for me, with fun issues like permanently becoming unable to detect start menu changes, even after a reboot.

The database is located in %LOCALAPPDATA%\TileDataLayer\Database. The services using that database are "Tile Data model server" and "State Repository Service". They're constantly using the database, so there's no way to delete or rename it while it's in use. You can seemingly stop the services using services.msc, but they start right back up (within a second) and then refuse to be stopped again. They can be killed by using the task manager, look for appmodel under Windows processes. But, again, they'll start right back up.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2015 19:56

RightClickSaveAs: Mar 1, 2001; Tiny animals under glass... Smaller than sand...

Is there anything that can be done about an app that just flat out says "This won't work in Windows 10?" My aging laptop has a touchpad driver that let me disable it using the function key, and the automatically installed Windows driver doesn't have that functionality.

I wanted to try it just to see, what's the worst that could happen if I install it?

# ¿ Aug 17, 2015 02:51

RightClickSaveAs: Mar 1, 2001; Tiny animals under glass... Smaller than sand...

The upgrade experience for me was really painless, accidentally upgraded to W10 on my desktop while trying to play around with the upgrade app then rolled back to 7, then upgraded my laptop before doing a clean install and it seemed smooth. Try it out first, and if you have no problems I'd say leave it. If you do want to clean install, might want to check first and make sure the upgrade install has successfully activated though and save yourself potential hassle.

The Get W10 upgrade app is a giant pain if you want to try to have any control over the process, I mean I understand why they did it that way and the idea is to make it automated as possible for users, but there should at least be a way to hold off the upgrade as long as you want after its downloaded. I know the correct solution to that is just make bootable install media from the website, but I was curious about the automated upgrade process.

# ¿ Aug 20, 2015 19:44

RightClickSaveAs: Mar 1, 2001; Tiny animals under glass... Smaller than sand...

Butt Reactor posted:

Um why is facebook being unreadable? It's been like this since I installed it (and reinstalled a few times) on a new laptop I bought a couple weeks ago. On a related note, why is some stuff blurry? For example some text in Edge shows up slightly fuzzy and some pop-up windows from various apps exhibit the same thing. Can't get a screenshot of the text issues, but here's facebook: (red lines to protect the innocent)

For reference, screen is set to 1920*1080 on a 15.6" laptop

I can't make out much from that picture, but did you play around with ClearType settigns? Is that even not on by default ever? Wouldn't hurt to check either way: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/make-text-easier-read-cleartype#1TC=windows-7

That page says Windows 7 but I think you still access it the same way in W10, I don't have my laptop handy to check it out.

# ¿ Sep 10, 2015 14:40

RightClickSaveAs: Mar 1, 2001; Tiny animals under glass... Smaller than sand...

d0s posted:

Having a weird problem and I don't really know if this is firefox related or win10 related, but here goes: I like to run firefox stretched to the top and bottom of the screen (when you adjust the height and it "clicks" and expands up and down, filling the screen vertically) but narrow on the sides, like it was fullscreen on a 4:3 monitor. Whenever I watch an html5 video fullscreen it knocks me out of that for some reason and changes the window size when I come out of fullscreen. I don't remember this happening on win7 so I'm assuming it's a 10 thing, anyone know what's going on?

I'm going to guess it's an HTML5 video player thing, because I just tried that out of curiosity in W7 on both Firefox and IE and they both knocked the window size back to whatever the non-maximized size was. It may be a more general Aero Snap thing, because after playing around with it for a while, it only does that if you have windows snapped to either the top/bottom or sides of the screen.

e: and it doesn't seem to do it with Flash video players, after I scoured the internet to find a video that still uses Flash

RightClickSaveAs fucked around with this message at 23:07 on Sep 12, 2015

# ¿ Sep 12, 2015 22:58

RightClickSaveAs: Mar 1, 2001; Tiny animals under glass... Smaller than sand...

LampkinsMateSteve posted:

I'm thinking of going for the upgrade, and maybe doing a clean install as well.

My motherboard does not have a Windows 10 drivers section. What do I actually need from this: https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P8P67_PRO/HelpDesk_Download/

And would the Win8.1 drivers work?

Maybe people who have deployed W10 on more systems could provide more info, but W10 should automatically pull whatever chipset drivers you need and install them automatically, no fuss and no extra steps. I have a pretty old laptop and didn't need to install any vendor drivers (which is great because the vendor drivers haven't been updated in years).

# ¿ Sep 13, 2015 19:17

RightClickSaveAs: Mar 1, 2001; Tiny animals under glass... Smaller than sand...

Ambaire posted:

Alright, I got my new computer and installed Windows 8.1. It's asking me to download a few hundred MB of updates, which one do I NOT want so I don't get background windows 10 downloads or nagged to upgrade. I've been hearing some horror stories, and I don't want to 'accidentally' upgrade to 10 for another few months.

Should just need to uncheck KB3035583: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3035583

Make sure to click "Hide" so it doesn't keep bugging you about it.

# ¿ Sep 19, 2015 02:31

RightClickSaveAs: Mar 1, 2001; Tiny animals under glass... Smaller than sand...

Riso posted:

I believe the new term is Service Release.

Is Threshold 2 still a thing? Last I heard they were planning on October for that, and it was going to be mostly fixes and optimizations.

Fake edit: actually the name may have changed already and the date is more like November http://m.windowscentral.com/first-major-windows-10-feature-update-reportedly-delayed-november

# ¿ Sep 20, 2015 17:24

RightClickSaveAs: Mar 1, 2001; Tiny animals under glass... Smaller than sand...

Fun Times! posted:

I've been out of the loop: Is it a good time to upgrade from 8.1 to 10 yet, or is it still buggy? My PC life is mostly games, youtube, porn, forums, and school.

You can also try it out for a couple weeks and then roll back if you don't like it, it gives you the option to do that for 30 days. That process was fairly painless for me on 7, and only took a couple minutes and a reboot, the only thing that happened was my libraries relating to folders on my second drive broke, which was not a big deal. e: Oh and all the Task Scheduler tasks broke for some reason, I just wiped them all out because I didn't feel like trying to look into the problem.

RightClickSaveAs fucked around with this message at 14:50 on Sep 25, 2015

# ¿ Sep 25, 2015 14:48

RightClickSaveAs: Mar 1, 2001; Tiny animals under glass... Smaller than sand...

Skarsnik posted:

Its just that those of us with no problems don't come post to post about it much

I haven't had major problems, other than no up to date touchpad driver being available so I lose some functionality there, but the thing that's keeping me on 7 for my main PC is I don't like the direction they're taking with updates. There's no real control over them in Home editions, which drives me crazy, and they're also refusing to give patch notes telling you what the updates actually do, which is confusing. Doesn't look like they have any plans to change their mind on either front, so it's something everyone's going to have to live with I guess. I need more time to ease into that weird new world though.

Also I don't like the W10 Start menu in its current state. 7's start menu is pretty much perfect.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2015 06:02

RightClickSaveAs: Mar 1, 2001; Tiny animals under glass... Smaller than sand...

Skarsnik posted:

During the first month where there were so many updates requiring restarts coming through, it was annoying to be fair

Now its settled down I think i'm down to around 1 restart a week looking at the install history. It also seems to have figured out well when I'm not using the computer, so I've not noticed the restarts at all

I can understand the dislike for it, but then if it means less unpatched PCs owned by idiots out there then I'm willing to deal with it

The vague patch notes (in relation to security anyway) is getting fairly industry wide these days unfortunately, is it any different on 7/8 now?

I definitely see why they're doing it, and it's generally a good thing to force security updates on people who otherwise would let their PCs go unpatched for months or years, but there should be an advanced option for us control freak types to dig into and change. Bury it somewhere people won't just turn it off by accident.

It's not just the security patch notes that aren't getting documented, but the general tweaks and patches on W10 don't have any information, all by design. And it was found recently through some leaked release notes that showed they're still writing them, just not choosing to publish them: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/09/leaks-show-that-microsoft-writes-release-notes-so-why-cant-it-publish-them/

Compare that to one of the latest W7 patches: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2515325 which still tells you exactly what it does.
super late edit: Actually that's not one of the latest patches, I just formatted and reinstalled W7 a few weeks ago, and all the updates were installed on the same day. I'll check the next time a patch drops, but I'm pretty sure they're still documenting them for W7.

RightClickSaveAs fucked around with this message at 05:22 on Oct 2, 2015

# ¿ Oct 1, 2015 15:01

RightClickSaveAs: Mar 1, 2001; Tiny animals under glass... Smaller than sand...

redeyes posted:

Ah, well sure. 10 is pretty nimble! If only the start menu wasn't donkey balls.

When (if) they get the start menu to a consistently usable state and give Home edition users some actual control over the update process (haha never going to happen

) I'll switch from Windows 7 on my main system.

Got W10 on my ancient laptop though and it runs quite well. It helps that the laptop has an SSD, but it really does seem snappier than the W7 SSD install.

# ¿ Oct 25, 2015 21:03

RightClickSaveAs: Mar 1, 2001; Tiny animals under glass... Smaller than sand...

slidebite posted:

Is there word yet on an official or unofficial tool to stop automatic downloads and installs of ~whatever~ MS wants you to have? That's probably the biggest single reason why I haven't updated any of my boxes/laptops yet.

You can also disable the Windows update service, but then of course you won't get any updates whatsoever.

That's been my workaround so far on W10, enable the service periodically, let it download any updates, restart, and turn it back off again. I can pretend I'm using a normal, sane method of updating once again, with only a couple extra steps.

# ¿ Dec 25, 2015 03:32

RightClickSaveAs: Mar 1, 2001; Tiny animals under glass... Smaller than sand...

slidebite posted:

If you disable updates will it just give you everything when you turn it back on or can you pick and choose? I do install 99% of what MS wants me to install but there is still that 1% in the past I don't want.

Still just gives you everything Microsoft pushes on you, sadly.

# ¿ Dec 25, 2015 15:33

RightClickSaveAs: Mar 1, 2001; Tiny animals under glass... Smaller than sand...

Jamesman posted:

I've been postponing upgrading to Windows 10. I downloaded it and have just been ignoring and closing the "Upgrade today!" messages until I feel comfortable with making the switch.

Now the loving thing is trying to force me. Got window that popped up now that said my system would upgrade and restart within the hour if I didn't reschedule or cancel to install, which is very upsetting for me since I leave my computer on and unattended on most days.

Windows 10 go away.

Yeah, it locks you into upgrading once you download, and after a point doesn't let you just push off the process indefinitely. It's pretty lovely, and they don't exactly make that catch clear.

If you just want to give up on it for now, try this; I haven't seen the entire upgrade process since it was first available, so someone please correct me if I'm wrong or there are more steps required when you're at the point where it's prompting you to restart and upgrade:

Kill the GWX.exe process, if it's running.
Delete or move the $WINDOWS.~BT folder in your root directory, this is where all the update files for W10 are stashed.

Then go into Windows updates and find the following KB updates to uninstall and hide, although there may be more at this point since Microsoft keeps pushing the drat things out under different names:
KB3035583 - Get W10 App
KB3021917 - "This update performs diagnostics in Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) in order to determine whether performance issues may be encountered when the latest Windows operating system is installed. Telemetry is sent back to Microsoft for those computers that participate in the Windows Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP). This update will help Microsoft and its partners deliver better system performance for customers who are seeking to install the latest Windows operating system."
KB2952664 - "This update helps Microsoft make improvements to the current operating system in order to ease the upgrade experience to the latest version of Windows."
KB3123862 - "The update adds capabilities to some computers that lets users easily learn about Windows 10 or start an upgrade to Windows 10. Before you install this update, see the Prerequisites section. For more information about Windows 10, see Windows 10."
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3123862

# ¿ Mar 10, 2016 05:52

RightClickSaveAs: Mar 1, 2001; Tiny animals under glass... Smaller than sand...

Speaking of W10 OEM keys, did anyone try one of the $14-15 W10 Pro OEM key deals that have been popping up on Slickdeals? This is the latest: http://slickdeals.net/f/8834375-windows-10-professional-oem-key-14-00-key-only
Seems like it could be a cheap way to do a Home/Regular to Pro upgrade.

The website in this case looks slightly dodgy: http://opiumpulses.com/store/1259/windows-10-professional

I'm personally going to give W10 another year or so, at that point it should be almost ready for release! Thinking about picking up a key now though and just holding on to it in case they do something dumb with the pricing.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2016 15:13

RightClickSaveAs: Mar 1, 2001; Tiny animals under glass... Smaller than sand...

edit: found a registry key that does it, MS doesn't want you to do it through GPO anymore I guess??
Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer\
add a REG_DWORD: "DisableSearchBoxSuggestions" , set to 1

Anyone dug into how to kill searching the web from the start menu for good? I just got 20H2 recently and looks like the old tricks don't seem to work. On 1903 I had a registry key value from the internet, but the path doesn't seem like it's in the same place anymore.

I spent about an hour digging into it and trawling different internet forums, but most of the settings don't seem to apply now.

This is what I did so far in Group Policy and it's still not dead :mad:

Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Search

Allow Cloud Search: Disabled
Allow Cortana: Disabled
Do not allow web search: Enabled
Don't search the web or display web results in Search: Enabled

Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Cloud Content

Turn off cloud optimized content

User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Cloud Content

Turn off all Windows spotlight features

User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Start Menu and Taskbar

Do not search the internet

edit going to keep trying stuff and if I find something I'll edit it in here, updating with all the settings so it's easily searchable

RightClickSaveAs fucked around with this message at 23:17 on Jun 5, 2021

# ¿ Jun 5, 2021 21:30

RightClickSaveAs: Mar 1, 2001; Tiny animals under glass... Smaller than sand...

astral posted:

You seem to be missing (or did not include a screenshot with it) "Do not Search Internet" from \Start Menu and Taskbar, under user configuration.

I thought I had too but double checking I did set that to Enabled. Christ Microsoft how many different places can you put these settings

# ¿ Jun 5, 2021 21:46

RightClickSaveAs: Mar 1, 2001; Tiny animals under glass... Smaller than sand...

Found a registry key you can add that does it, really stupid that you apparently can't just do it through GPO. So glad I don't manage AD for work anymore, this is blood pressure increasing stuff.

Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer
add REG_DWORD "DisableSearchBoxSuggestions" with a value of 1

RightClickSaveAs fucked around with this message at 23:21 on Jun 5, 2021

# ¿ Jun 5, 2021 23:18

RightClickSaveAs: Mar 1, 2001; Tiny animals under glass... Smaller than sand...

Flipperwaldt posted:

Thanks, that curiously also does nothing for me. Never mind though, RightClickSaveAs has got something that works for them it seems and I was just playing along at home for sport.

Oh wow I just have no idea any more. Which version are you on? I know there was a different registry key I used for 1903 in a location that doesn't seem to exist in 20H2 anymore, so they seem to be constantly changing those.

# ¿ Jun 6, 2021 04:37

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 08:33

RightClickSaveAs: Mar 1, 2001; Tiny animals under glass... Smaller than sand...

Fruits of the sea posted:

The "see web results" will show up in the left column even with everything turned off - it only pops up when the search indexer can't find anything that exactly matches the search query. The results in the right column indicate that automatic web search is still on though.

In any case the search indexer doesn't always give reliable results - I have some apps that it can never find. I'd recommend using a third party app like Search Everything if you need to look up stuff a lot.

"See web results" or anything suggesting web search shouldn't show up at all if you have everything disabled from my experience. I've managed to do that before but the hoops you have to jump through are always different with every update, it's really dumb. With that reg key it looks like it's finally it the way I wanted it:

Klyith posted:

I was wrong about that registry bit above, MS changes this poo poo every year and I forget to delete the previous year's .reg file. The current one is this:
code:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer]
"DisableSearchBoxSuggestions"=dword:00000001
However, the best way to completely fix this crap now is to just uninstall Cortana, assuming you don't use Cortana for anything.

Powershell, Get-AppxPackage *Microsoft.549981C3F5F10* | Remove-AppxPackage

Zero interference or side-effects with normal windows search & indexer, so if you always want normal local results it'll be just as good (or bad) as before. Cortana doesn't do any extra indexing, it just connects to bing and does the digital assistant stuff.

Yeah that's the key I just found. Ridiculous they make you go through this dance with apparently each update, just rubbing it in how little in control you are of their OS as a service, even with their Pro and higher editions.

Ohh thanks for reminding me of removing Windows components with PS, I haven't done that yet. Although that AppxPackage doesn't exist on my computer, I may have removed it but now I can't remember, Cortana is definitely gone even though the web search was still around??

# ¿ Jun 6, 2021 17:26

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Windows 10: I know what I'm doing