[Mark]

Pic a number and stand in line behind the UFO abductees.

[Tea Monster]

Look up project echelon. Not so tin foil hat.

[Forge]

Probably.

Right now I'm fighting with Windows 10 to get back my video card.

It determined that it knows what's best for me and my computer, forcefully disabled Nvidia, and installed its own display adapter. Now it won't let me install the latest Nvidia drivers & take back control of my own hardware.

[Robman]

StrikerMan780, on 22 August 2015 - 11:51 PM, said:

(Scans through the thread again, taking note of the overall theme.)

Did I walk into a tinfoil hat-wearing convention?

In the future, you'll look to the "tinfoils" for guidance.

[Forge]

Fighting with windows 10 to get back my video card resulted in the black screen of death - had to do a complete clean system restore to even get the OS accessible.

Had to cut it off from accessing outside resources so I could install my own video driver and keep it from being updated and taken back by micro$oft.

Just so much fun having to go back and shut off all the spyware again.

[Duke of Hazzard]

Forge, on 23 August 2015 - 04:35 PM, said:

Probably.

Right now I'm fighting with Windows 10 to get back my video card.

It determined that it knows what's best for me and my computer, forcefully disabled Nvidia, and installed its own display adapter. Now it won't let me install the latest Nvidia drivers & take back control of my own hardware.

I lost the Start Menu and the search bar and had to do a lengthy system restore...

Though honestly, your problem sounds even more ludicrous.

[The Albino Ape]

Forge, on 23 August 2015 - 04:35 PM, said:

Probably.

Right now I'm fighting with Windows 10 to get back my video card.

It determined that it knows what's best for me and my computer, forcefully disabled Nvidia, and installed its own display adapter. Now it won't let me install the latest Nvidia drivers & take back control of my own hardware.

Glad I kept Windows 7.

[The Commander]

Nothing wrong with Windows 10.

[Mark]

^ After all of the previous issues posted Commander's post could almost be considered trolling.

[Person of Color]

The Commander, on 30 August 2015 - 04:58 AM, said:

Nothing wrong with Windows 10.

New Zealand is part of the "five eyes" program. You're linked up to the NSA as much as I am.

[ReaperMan]

I'm thinking about switching from Windows 7 to 10. What do you guys think?

[Forge]

ReaperMan, on 30 August 2015 - 09:55 PM, said:

I'm thinking about switching from Windows 7 to 10. What do you guys think?

Go ahead.

Back up everything on a separate / external hard drive

kill all the spy-ware and take semi-control windows updates (can't pick and choose as it's all or nothing, but you can permanently delay updates and see what it is before you download and install it)

http://www.majorgeek..._10_spying.html
http://www.blackvipe...configurations/
https://www.bing.com...personalization
http://www.askvg.com...nstall-problem/
http://windows.micro...wi-fi-sense-faq
http://www.tomshardw...ce-drivers.html
https://choice.micro...m/en-gb/opt-out

[Duke of Hazzard]

Forge, on 31 August 2015 - 05:40 AM, said:

http://www.majorgeek..._10_spying.html

Didn't kill all the Metro apps here. Which is very annoying. Other stuff worked, though.

Forge, on 31 August 2015 - 05:40 AM, said:

http://www.tomshardw...ce-drivers.html

I haven't had a problem with it, but that's because I'm keeping the Nvidia drivers up to date with GeForce Experience.

[Person of Color]

I'm going to try converting my desktop to Windows Server 2008 R1 this week. It's basically Vista Server and it converts over to a workstation just fine. It has support until 2020 and isn't affected by the NSA/Windows updates. The newer NT 6.x systems are affected. Pretty weird considering how little actually changed between Vista SP2 and Windows 7. Vista SP2 is actually a very competent OS.

Other advantages to this setup:

WDDM 1.0 - WDDM 1.1 drivers are backwards compatible to the older standard. All Vista display drivers are just 7 drivers. No WDDM 1.0 drivers have been written in YEARS, the last ones I can think of were the Radeon X1xxx series cards. So it should have indefinite graphics driver support. Worst case scenario you just load the drivers through device manager, which will still give you the control panel, so who cares?

Pure Vista underneath - better driver support than Server 2008 R2, nearly on par with Windows 7.

Slim as fuck - I wouldn't be surprised if this is actually faster than 7 for day to day use, but there's a good chance it won't be on Intel systems...see below.

Disadvantages:

Intel sucks cock. Their driver support is a mess and I just know I'm going to have to force in the Management Engine driver and the AHCI support. I doubt it will even be possible to get the Rapid Storage Technology driver running, I'll have to use the generic "floppy" WinPE install driver from Intel like I did with the Windows 10 beta. I noticed a decrease in disk I/O without running benchmarks that time, but that old 128GB Crucial M4 is used for Linux now so my shiny new 256GB M200 should cope FAR better.

SO. MANY. PATCHES. I can't find a version of vLite or Se7en RT Lite that can actually slipstream updates into the ISO, and Windows Updates Downloader lacks a DL list for this and the Vista lists are six years out of date.

More out of box configuration - a bunch of settings and registry entries have to be changed but that's par for the course when converting Windows Server OSes to workstation setups.

[Person of Color]

Here's a tool that will automatically de-NSA your Windows 7 system, and block the updates from coming back - Microsoft has been trying to take it down everywhere. They are in bed with the government for sure...

I've tried this on four machines including my own. The Windows 8.1 system didn't work but both 7 x86 and x64 do. It can take up to a half hour at most. Reboot when it tells you to.

http://www.hakspek.c...emetry-updates/

[Duke of Hazzard]

Person of Color, on 01 September 2015 - 09:09 PM, said:

Here's a tool that will automatically de-NSA your Windows 7 system, and block the updates from coming back - Microsoft has been trying to take it down everywhere. They are in bed with the government for sure...

I've tried this on four machines including my own. The Windows 8.1 system didn't work but both 7 x86 and x64 do. It can take up to a half hour at most. Reboot when it tells you to.

http://www.hakspek.c...emetry-updates/

First things first, I just want a surefire way to kill the Metro apps. Sadly Forge's suggestion didn't work, though it did modify the hosts file to block the spy servers.

You can do it manually, and it's pretty easy, but I'm a lazy bum who vastly prefers an automated alternative. I guess I'll just look around.

I probably wouldn't delete the shop, though, because the shop is one of the biggest reasons to use Windows 8 and beyond in the first place.

Windows itself is great, but sadly, besides the spy crap, it's also the Model T of OSes. "You can have it with every internet browser, as long as it's IE/Edge". Ubuntu comes with Firefox but you can easily delete it if you want...

[Forge]

This tool's a bit better than the first one I listed.

Quite a lot more privacy features to control and can remove apps:

http://www.winprivacy.de/download/

[Duke of Hazzard]

Forge, on 02 September 2015 - 12:01 PM, said:

This tool's a bit better than the first one I listed.

Quite a lot more privacy features to control and can remove apps:

http://www.winprivacy.de/download/

Deutsche Technologie! Danke.

[Forge]

fucking windows 10

Every time I shut off and turned on, or just restarted the computer, Windows 10 would disable my Nvidia display adapter in favor of its own Microsoft Basic Display Driver.

I tried the whole clean install, used DDU in safe mode, hand scrubbed the system for Nvidia files and registry entries, disabled microsoft updates to hardware and specifically the Nvidia card.
All to no avail.

It's like the system would load both drivers at boot and then "choose" its own crappy basic display driver every fucking time. If I went to the device manager and uninstalled the disabled Nvidia device (without removing the drivers) and rebooted - then it would choose the Nvidia display adapter. That was the only way to get the Nvidia drivers to work - (through hardware detection at boot).

If I went through the device manager to remove the Basic Display driver (and its files) - Windows 10 would not do it - it would go through the motions and perform the action, but it was not actually removing the drivers.

Danger - make sure your card works before doing this - unless you like looking at a black screen

The only way to get my Nvidia to not disable during boot was to physically go to c:\Windows\System32\Drivers and rename the BasicDisplay.sys file.

[AgentScotty]

During the Windows 10 preview, one of the preview versions installed my Nvidia adapter as Microsoft Basic Display Adapter.

I tried downloading and installing the driver from Nvidia, but the installer couldn't find any Nvidia hardware.

I rightclicked the Basic Display Adapter in Device Manager, selected "Update driver software", it downloaded a Nvidia driver from Microsoft, and the adapter now showed up properly as a Nvidia adapter.

After that I was able to download and install drivers straight from Nvidia, or install GeForce Experience.

Luckily I didn't have this problem with the RTM version of Windows 10, but I have an older chipset.

[Forge]

I wasn't so lucky. It let me install the Nvidia software without a hitch, but it refused to load it and recognize the card as an Nvidia after every system restart. Windows 10 kept disabling it and defaulting to Microsoft Basic Display Adapter (which claimed it had the most up to date driver installed for it already).

The problem I was having with the Microsoft Basic Display Adapter was that it kept locking the screen resolution - fine for doing normal stuff. But if I tried to use a program or game that didn't match the locked in resolution it would not launch.

[Person of Color]

Unfortunately, the Windows Server 2008 experiment isn't going as well as planned. It's a damn fine OS but it's almost 100% compatible. Office 2013 won't install, although I don't know why a portable version wouldn't work, so I will try that next. I tried to install a driver for the Xbox One controller despite not owning one and I had to modify the .msi with Orca. I'm beginning to doubt the software and (to a MUCH lesser extent) hardware support for this system although updates are in the clear.

All in all though, for some people it could still be a great option. I'm going to keep playing with it but be advised although this is a VERY nice OS for day to day use (Fuck me is it fast!), you're going to have workarounds here and there. I mean, you're looking at maybe less than 1% of software not working so if you mainly play games and shit this would probably be the ticket right now. So while not a perfect solution, it's a very good one.

That said there is A LOT of out of the box configuration.

I will say though, if you set the Window color to teal it's the prettiest Windows OS I've seen. There's still a few UI features from 7 I miss but man, does it look great if you change it to teal. Otherwise it's a clashing mess.

[Duke of Hazzard]

Forge, on 06 September 2015 - 08:51 AM, said:

I wasn't so lucky. It let me install the Nvidia software without a hitch, but it refused to load it and recognize the card as an Nvidia after every system restart. Windows 10 kept disabling it and defaulting to Microsoft Basic Display Adapter (which claimed it had the most up to date driver installed for it already).

The problem I was having with the Microsoft Basic Display Adapter was that it kept locking the screen resolution - fine for doing normal stuff. But if I tried to use a program or game that didn't match the locked in resolution it would not launch.

Weird thing. I have three machines with Nvidia GPUs and they all work just fine.

I suspect your tinkering may have something to do with it.

[Forge]

It was doing the same thing on a clean Windows 10 install prior to any 'tinkering'.

The very first thing I installed was the Nvidia driver prior to anything else and any changes to the system. The system either doesn't like my card (GTX 650 Ti) or doesn't like the Nvidia kernel.

[Mark]

Response 1. I use Nvidia Admiral instead of kernel.

Response 2. I hate those kernels because they get stuck in my teeth.

Sorry, its just how I am.

[Paul B]

Unfortunately, I don't have anything positive to say about the direction of Microsoft or Windows 10 for that matter. I've been in the business 15 years professionally with Microsoft and this last release of windows sucks. It is buggy out of the box with no estimated time of repair and Microsoft treats their business customers as beta testers and their professional support is aweful. (Routed to Philippines then over to India). Don't get me wrong I love chatting long distance with Filipinos, as my wife is Filipino. But how they can publicly release an OS without testing its features such as VPN split tunneling on MS VPN PPTP connections is just frustrating. I hate when they introduce a new system but remove and break features that use to work just fine before. Their current work around is to script a power shell command to adjust the necessary setting. Moving forward I have chosen that if I have to script anything it will be with Linux. So i've finally made the switch to Linux Mint and Ubuntu server with no problems so far. Next on the list install Eduke =)

[Jeff]

Here's a program from O&O to help with privacy, Windows updates and other issues. Good name for it too.

[Duke of Hazzard]

I used a privacy tool but it unfortunately killed my searchbar. Wouldn't even search local files. Since system restore didn't work, and the closer I got to today the more internet banking bloatware my system had, I was forced to wipe the system clean and start from zero.

[Jeff]

I use ClassicShell to replace the Windows 10 start menu & search bar with the Windows 7 one which has a search bar.

This program does create a restore point before it changes anything. So if you mess up, you can turn it back on to the default setting before using it.

[Fox]

Person of Color, on 06 September 2015 - 03:58 PM, said:

Office 2013 won't install, although I don't know why a portable version wouldn't work, so I will try that next.

Presumably it's to force people to purchase a new version of Office. And you thought Microsoft was not going to make you open your wallet to install Windows 10, huh?