So I got the ‘Window 10 is ready to be installed’ pop-up today. On a gaming PC I did register a while back, when that wee ‘windowy’ taskbar icon appeared. For compatibility I had kept that PC on Windows 7 Ultimate.
Anyone hit the button yet and what doesn’t work? Just blink into your webcam if you are in danger and we’ll send help.
Should I wait for Windows 9 or have Microsoft switched to base 9 numbering? Are all the HOTAS drivers etc all ok. So many questions!
Anyhoo, I didn’t try many games or peripherals with the tech preview thing, so if anyone wants to share their experiences then speak up.
I have had no problems so far with most of the PC’s I deal with … knock on wood. On my gaming PC my Thrustmaster HOTAS works, DCS works, IL2 1946 works and Arma3 works. Overall, I suspect that if it worked in Windows 7 or above (refuse to mention the ‘2’ versions in the middle there), it will likely work in Windows 10.
Microsoft seems to have done good work preventing backward compatibility problems.
2 caveats: My 4 year old Lenovo W530 likes Windows 10 but doesn’t want to do any updates successfully and my parents PC, based on the ASUS Z87-A motherboard, is having issues upgrading as well. So there is that. Both will take preview build 10130 but will not successfully upgrade.
If you have a valid Windows 7 or 8 install (not XP) then the update is free.
You have to update your existing install first, and then you can fresh install after. What is essentially happening here is that once you update ‘in-place’ then your PC is licensed for Windows 10 and that when you next clean install on that hardware the ‘activation thing’ that Microsoft stores online will recognize your PC and license you. It is more like getting one of those OEM ‘just for this PC’ type of license keys, rather than a full license you can install on a PC anywhere. Put another way, you don’t get a new product key, just an activation online that Microsoft recognizes (I think by motherboard, as the info is written into the BIOS).
Windows Media Centre is gone, so if you use it then just be aware. I’ve moved over to Plex at home a while ago, but still something nice to know.
The ‘upgrade for free’ offer is good for a year I think, so there is no rush. The general sensible thing to do is what for all the launch issues to be rolled up into a service pack.
For DRM that uses hardware/OS checks (like DCS) I guess the safest thing to do would be to deactivate first, although from what I remember it uses a counter of various bits (CPU, motherboard etc) and the change in OS might not trigger the general ‘this is a new PC’ rules. I’d think @SiThSpAwN would know for sure as he’s probably been asked 4e24 times already
I went through those, and got momentarily confused so wanted to see if this helps out. For each DCS module use this .exe in each mod/bin directory (general path in screenshot):
Actually, I hate clicking things. Here’s the text of a .cmd file I created in my base DCSWorld installation folder. There might be a cleverer way to deactivate them all but I don’t know it yet. It deactivates all the modules (that I own, I might have missed one or two, please let me know?).
So what you do is create a ‘dcs-deactivate.cmd’ file with notepad in your default DCS installation directory, copy this text into it, and get a command prompt and run.
My casualty report on the gaming PC with winX was pretty light so far:
Power management seems kinda broken, in that the screen-saver now doesn’t come on and the sleep mode woke up some time in the night. I did a quick admin cmd prompt of powercfg.exe /energy and the created report moaned about a bluetooth thing I didn’t know I had even plugged in. Slightly annoying.
An old Canon MFC4150 on our network doesn’t want to talk. I could try the x64 8.1 driver for it, but I refuse to engage with the windows+printers=sadness firefight math until I’ve had a beer or two.
I haven’t found any games that didn’t work. The DCS Mig21 now keeps activating (down to 5 now!) every single time I start it, but my working solution for now is to ignore it and not start it.
I had a couple of blue screens of death (with a nicer font now) and brought the overclock down a bit from 4.5 to 4.3 as I can’t be bothered to see if I need to bump vCore or not. I guess it’s more sensitive than Win7 for that, plus maybe more ‘I am indexing every photo you have on the PC!!’ going on too. I also suspect one of my SSD’s is poorly and did the diskcheck thing on it, so maybe that too.
Update took about 30 minutes, and if I see any more blue screens I’ll probably just reinstall all fresh rather than update in place.
Other than that, perf seems about the same but generally nothing really to get excited about.
So I accidentally upgraded yesterday w/o deactivating my licenses (don’t ask, I clicked the wrong button when I wanted to quickly shut down my PC…). They’re still all valid but I will do a fresh win 10 reinstall when I have time in the next weeks and I will of course deactivate them all before doing that.
No Win 10 ‘casualties’ so far, everything works fine (printer, games, drivers). The OS seems a bit quicker than Win 7, overall I like the new look.
HOTAS WH, TrackIR 5 Saitek Pro Rudder Pedals work just fine, no overall framerate improvements in DCS but I noticed that the random frame drops I had in some situations seem to be gone.
As a follow-up to this, and in-case it helps others via Google, I managed to narrow this down and discovered that my Saitek RHINO X-55 HOTAS was causing the issue of stopping the screen saver from coming on. They didn’t cause an issue on Windows 7x64 or 8.1 but 10 seems more sensitive to wiggling devices providing an interruption to power management.
Until Saitek do a new driver (or hell freezes over, and I’ve got money on that first) the easiest thing to do is just disable the device mgr entries under HID when not using them. As that involved clicking (again) I wrote a script that disabled/enabled using DevManView here:
if its still under warranty, maybe you should consider sending it back for RMA? I never had it so bad that it effected the screensaver, so maybe yours is that much worse… for another reason mine is RMA, they are sending me a new stick because the X & Y access died on it suddenly one day… least open a ticket, see what they say?
I might RMA, not sure. It worked ok in Windows 7 and 8.1 in that it certainly didn’t interfere with a screensaver/powermgt, so I might wait to see if the HID profiles for what counts as activity is updated for Win10 or not. The HID change was introduced pretty late in the 10 builds, so it might not even be intentional.
