superangrypenguin

I missed this originally. You do realize it's the end of mainstream support for Windows 7 by now right?

WillCAD

Gak! My test machine is choking on this thing.

It seems to install just fine, but after initial installation it spontaneously reboots, then goes into an infinite loop, rebooting itself as soon as I enter my password to log in. I'm thinking it's either a video or network issue. I can boot it into Safe mode, but with the new UI I can't figure out what changes to make in order to prevent the spontaneous reboots.

The test machine is an older desktop, originally XP, with no updated drivers for newer OS. It ran fine with Win7, but it's just not accepting 10 yet. I still have to fiddle with it some more.

HDQDD

Because I want Google to know every keystroke I make when I surf the web! They should definitely be able to make money off all my personal data!

Firefox works great on win 10. But what do I know, I'm running it on a Mac with a 32" 4k display which looks fantastic.

nkedel

I'm 99% sure the issue is somethting in the profile, and so make sure you check "delete browsing data" when you uninstall; I doubt my "clean every trace manually" steps were really needed.

Unless you absolutely need the existing browser cache and history in that copy of Chrome, it's 100% fixable.

I've also yet to hear about Chrome breaking on a clean install as opposed to upgrade.

While I like Windows 10, you could always just downgrade it to Windows 7. It may take a little work to figure out how to do that, but it's better than having a laptop you won't use.

There are a couple of different corporate licensing schemes; EA is just one of them.

Canary runs on its own profile directory, and I'm fairly certain that's what fixes the problem on upgrades NOT any kind of new code change. If you like to live on the bleeding edge, this might be a good option, but otherwise I'd try clearing out the profile for the regular Chrome install first.

Beta channel is their beta product; Dev channel is their "alpha" -- canary is like nightly builds. I can't recommend it, and I say that as someone who runs "dev"

If it was a clean install, it's probably the video driver; network driver crashing shouldn't cause a reboot like that. You seem to be saying it was a clean install of 10, but if it was an upgrade from 7, it might be existing installed software -- if you can tolerate the loss of your software installs, running a "reset" might fix

Easier to rule out the network driver though, since you have to have a video driver and for the network you can just disable or uninstall the driver. Device manager works the same, and can be found the same way as in XP and 7 once you can find "This PC" and get properties, or find the traditional desktop Windows control panels (the Windows-X menu is helpful there.)

Firefox may be a tiny bit slower, but I am very happy with it (actually, with the 64-bit betas, as the 32-bit versions tend to die under my use when I have too many windows open.)

I still use Chrome for google-specific extensions, and to have a 2nd browser I can open pages which malfunction under my incredible locked-down-for-privacy configuration of Firefox.

For those concerned with Google monitoring Chrome, you don't need to use the sign-in/sync feature, and you can run the open-source Chromium builds... for that matter, there are a number of "privacy enhanced" browsers based on the open-source Chromium which go a step further than that (ditto a couple based on Firefox) although I don't have any idea if they're any good.

david55

Has anyone noticed a drain on the battery using 10 over 8.1.?

I have.

I use to marvel and how much time I got on my Samsung Ativa with 8.1. I could easily go 8+ hours with a single charge....now I am noticing a shorter window of use by a few hours.

Is that possible?

WillCAD

Yup, it was the video driver. After booting into Safe mode and disabling the network adapter, I still got spontaneous reboots. But after re-enabling the network and disabling the video adapter, the reboots stopped. Of course, the machine is running with a generic video driver now, but it's not a graphics machine, so the generic video is just fine.

It was a completely clean install. Fortunately, I hadn't gotten to the point of installing any other software yet, except Firefox, because I have just found out about the ridiculous activation requirements - MS will not allow a 10 upgrade to activate from a clean install. It must be installed OVER a previous qualifying Windows, then activated, and after you've done that, you can do a clean install. But since I already did a clean install, I'm going to have to do three more installs to get it activated - install Win7 and activate, install Win10 over it and activate, then do a clean install of Win10.

Why the hell didn't they just make it possible to enter the product key from the previous version to activate it?! They've done that in the past on some of their products, and given how much data they now keep on their servers about everyone who uses any of their software, it should be entirely possible to track those product keys and know which have and have not been upgraded. Hell, a product key per license for life should be an easy paradigm for MS to adopt, but they're still insisting on making us jump through these hoops.

Sure it is. The new OS probably has a completely different set of services running than the old OS. You'll need to do adjust your power settings in Control Panel, and do some research on what services to turn off. Start with BlackViper.com; he hasn't published a power saver configuration for Win10 yet, but he probably will eventually. When I upgrade my own laptop I'll be in the same boat, so please come back and publish whatever you find!

YVR Cockroach

Not having any good experiences using a USB key drive.

1st machine is a laptop that came with Win 8 hence key is in the BIOS. Used the original drive (that I had to do a system repair on). Would not accept the product key in the BIOS so the Win 10 UG cannot be activated with the various limitations. Other than that, it seemed to work o.k.

2nd machine is an older laptop that came with Win 7 upgraded to Win 8 Pro (and then Win 8.1). Did a restore to the drive (was testing a preview version of Win 10 that crashed and would not repair) from the Win 8 backup on the key. The system was working when I started the UG. Started this UG with the option to fix the drive (took all night). Not auto reboots and came back to see a darkened screen with no drive light on. After noticing no drive activity for minutes, I did a hard reboot. Proceeded with the UG to Win 10 and had several darkened screens with no HD activity for minutes. After a hard reboot, the UG decided to revert to Win 8. Then it stalled. Did nothing with a darkened screen.

Tried the reboot so it got into a cycle (must be something to make it boot into a specific device) where it tried to boot to the DVD drive and then go back to the BIOS screen. Trying to interrupt at BIOS level didn't so anything (keyboard must be locked) so now the computer is disassembled with the BIOS battery out waiting for it to reset.

superangrypenguin

Probably because of piracy?

WillCAD

How does installing over the qualifying product instead of entering the qualifying product's old product key prevent piracy?

Entering the old PK is just an easier way to verify that you do indeed own a product that qualifies for the upgrade, than being forced to install the upgrade over the old product before you're allowed to do a clean install. Six of one, half a dozen of the other, as far as MS is concerned, but the one takes all of a minute to do and the other can suck away half a day of your life.

nkedel

If there is a manufacturer (or generic from NVidia/AMD/Intel) driver for that model for Windows 8/8.1, odds are it will work and may fix it. If there isn't one, there is a small chance the driver for Win7 will work.

There's probably no need to do a final clean install; the reset functionality is much faster, and pretty much the same thing. Also, if the upgraded copy of 7 or 8 was clean (nothing besides the base windows install) you might do fine even skipping that

Good question.

Only very slightly different from 8/8.1, AFAICT, which was only a little different from 7, other than the addition of all the app-store related stuff. The app-store related features (and the location features and stuff) were a potentially big battery drain increase since 7.

10 does substantially worse than 8.1 on one of the systems I use heavily and about the same or maybe slightly better on the other; I suspect it's a driver issue (the big one with bad battery life on 10 is a dual GPU (Optimus) config.

Also, uninstalling or disabling any of the Bing-ecosystem apps which may be getting updates; the other difference between the two systems is that I've done a lot more messing with those apps on the big one.

There's also a "battery use monitor" in settings, and it is showing Chrome as a culprit using a lot of battery.

They can still limit the number of activations, just as they can with new keys.

At least back to the 25-digit keys; the ones using the old 10-11 digit numeric keys won't ever be working.

(Hint: if you ever need to install something with one of those, the standard 10-digit demo key was 111-1111111 and the 11-digit one was 1112-1111111)

YVR Cockroach

Public Service Announcement. This upgrade, if unsuccessful, can be dangerous and could end up bricking your computer.

I am not the only one having trouble with an infinite looping of the BIOS at startup (it writes to your CMOS) and have noted the same problems as mine in quite a few forums. Haven't discovered a way to erase the CMOS on my laptop. If anyone has a service manual for an Acer Aspire 5560, I'd be most appreciative.

superangrypenguin

Source? It writes into the CMOS?

superangrypenguin

And if you did such a thing, I would not post about it on a public forum

YVR Cockroach

Apparently. Can't explain why my laptop (and those of others) gets stuck in the BIOS stage of boot-up trying to boot from a device (the ODD, it seems) and then no getting anywhere, shutting down and restarting. It appears to have overridden the boot order in BIOS. The computer was working fine before the UG. I even used a spare drive to perform the UG reasoning that the time to rebuild it would be all I had to lose.

Don't have a spare CD-R but I could try putting some boot media onto it (it isn't responding to the rescue DVD).

superangrypenguin

I asked for the source because it cannot write into the CMOS. And the CMOS...ill just stop here.

Is your machine UEFI or BIOS?