For any one who upgraded to Windows 10, READ THIS!!!!

[AdvHomeServer]

I have lots of Linux experience and a fair amount of OSX experience. No, Linux can't come close, ESPECIALLY in an enterprise space, but even in a consumer space, it really can't.

Also, no, I am not a huge fan on the privacy intrusion that is Windows 10. However, for some things (like my tablet), Linux and OSX just flat out aren't an option.

We'll see. It's amazing how even suggesting the intention to explore alternatives sets off the negativity. If it works, it works. If it doesn't then Win 7 and Win 8 will be supported for a long time to come. Win 10 is a non starter with me unless I have absolutely no other choice. All the intrusiveness is just another avenue for spectacular malware intrusiveness. OpenCandy is regarded as a potentially unwanted program and it is less offensive than Windows 10.

BTW, Android is a linux variant. Apple's operating system evolved from BSD. Your router is a linux computer. I just read an article that said linux owns the large server market, commanding a larger percentage of large installed servers than Windows. Agree Win Server is more simple to manage than linux, although the MS emphasis on powershell and server core negates that somewhat. Glad you like Widows on your phone. You're the one. (Just joking. I almost considered buying one a couple of years ago. Just got an S6. Nice. My old S3 is a media device now ... works great with Chromecast. Recently binge watched Game of Thrones with it off Hbo Go via Chromecast. Flawless.)

Companies do what's best for them. None are going to hire trainers and give paid time to employees to learn Windows or linux unless they have no choice. If they need to, they'll choose the one that has the best cost / benefit. None of them care what you or I think.

A few months ago, I thought antivirus on the router was the next big thing. Oddly, nobody here could / would offer specifics concerning most of my questions. Just emotion and canned superficial answers. No replies with much detail. After spending months researching and installing my own home-brew router I discovered the ins and outs of it. False positives make antivirus and more on the router a less likely alternative for home users. I guess when your business is selling or installing them, you don't talk about the pesky details when they don't help sell the product.

Now I wonder about thin client computing for the home mainframe (I mean home cloud server.) I remember dial in was easy on the old AS/400 a couple of decades ago. SSH is easy in character mode. The big question now concerns remote desktop without the need for one dedicated PC behind each remote desktop image. If it works, using Android and Apple phones for experience with alternative operating systems makes it a short hop to the home cloud server.

Also L&LD, VMs are pretty common now in business. They save a lot of electricity and hardware cost. Look it up. VMWare is the big name. Hyper-V is up and coming, but will probably remain in 2nd place at best.

 

[L&LD]

AdvHomeServer,

I don't see negativity here? And if I was the unintentional cause of that thought, I apologize. I am enjoying the exchange of information on this topic, which I know or don't know a lot about (on and off in cycles over the years).

I have been using VMWare and other managers for years (again, on and off) and know the benefits. But the downsides too. A single piece of hardware can take out many, many services. Yes, that is why you make the VM's portable, but the cost is not really less if all anticipated emergencies are properly taken care of. Again, the key to these processes is having a dedicated or in house support staff that can respond as needed. Most of my customers do not have such luxuries and since multiple physical machines are needed anyways for backup, they might as well be put to use.

 

[stevech]

There are support, marketing and technical reasons that Linux has just 1.3% of the installed base. I suppose a survey of back-office servers
One survey I read showed Microsoft slowly sliding from 76% to 73% in the last 15 years.
Gainer was Android.
Tiny gain in recent years by Apple.

 

[RMerlin]

Agree Win Server is more simple to manage than linux, although the MS emphasis on powershell and server core negates that somewhat.

Personally, I have a much easier time managing a Postfix or even a Sendmail server than I have managing Exchange. Same with managing Apache versus IIS. There's a simplicity in dealing with flatfile config files versus a GUI with so many different pages that it takes forever to locate a particular setting. Try increasing the maximum allowed email size under Exchange for instance. You have to change that value in three different UI location (and no idea what the Powershell cmdlets to do this would be). With Postfix, I edit or add one single line to master.cf, then issue a service restart command.

Powershell makes things worse, by requiring a cheat sheet to do anything that you aren't doing on a daily basis for you to memorize. It's great for automation or repetitive tasks, but for changing rarely-accessed settings, it can be a real chore.

 

[htismaqe]

Using professional productivity programs inside a VM is lunacy. These programs require real hardware and real expensive hardware to run optimally. They'll boot up inside a VM, but they will not be as fast and those few points difference are important to business owners who need any advantage possible against their competitors.

I have customers with tens of thousands of employees that run not only productivity programs but core business software, CRM/ERP applications, UC&C, and payroll on VMs each and every day.

 

[htismaqe]

The user experience is important and all users like the options Windows offers with how programs, data files and shortcuts can be run, arranged or viewed. OS/x is far more restricting to the point of being comical, compared to any other OS. Uninstalling programs is superior in OS/x but it is not a day to day thing either for most systems. Once setup, they are just used as is and the last few years of Windows OSes have been more and more self healing and stable for me and my customers too.

You're confusing contentment with comfort. The vast majority of Windows users will tell you they have to have that stuff solely because it is what they are familiar with. The Windows user experience is SOLELY the result of having a complete stranglehold on the market (sometimes using anticompetitive and illegal tactics, mind you) and users not having a viable option for something else.

And one customer stated it best when he briefly contemplating moving to the apple platform (he's a graphic designer). Paraphrasing him, he said 'to move my current main system to a roughly equivalent Mac Pro desktop and re-buy the programs I already have along with a compatible printer, it will cost me over $40K'.

Honestly, that's one of the biggest gulfs between your thinking and mine and it's not one we're going to overcome - perspective. My customer are making million (and sometimes billion) dollar decisions. $40K is literally pocket change. My customers have far more liquid assets and some of them have access to vast amounts of capital. They'll spend $20M if it means being able to make $80M back over 10 years.

That was a few years ago and the last time (almost a three years ago) we spoke about that possibility for him he still hadn't jumped but instead, had come to the conclusion that he never would. When pressed for the 'why', he stated that he had used a Mac Pro setup similar to what he spec'd and it froze, it was slow (the hardware was below what he was running and with no chance of an upgrade on the mac) and the software did not offer anything newer than his Windows based setup already was capable of.

I hate to call out your customer but he obviously didn't know what he was doing. Sorry but there's no other way around it. I run Windows, Linux, and OS X all on the exact same hardware. Windows is never the better performer.

 

[sfx2000]

Visio and Project are good examples of strictly Windows professional software too. Even if there are alternatives, try getting your collaborators to learn something new. Worse is if they are at a different company.

Omniplan - MS Project
Omnigraffle - MS Visio

These are the only two apps that I have that are a bit vertical from what you might mention are "professional apps" - and these products from OmniGroup, in many ways, are better than the Microsoft products.

The rest - either Mac or *nix - which isn't a problem with a Mac...

Matlab - which I use a lot, is cross platform, but works much better on the Mac...

 

[sfx2000]

And one customer stated it best when he briefly contemplating moving to the apple platform (he's a graphic designer). Paraphrasing him, he said 'to move my current main system to a roughly equivalent Mac Pro desktop and re-buy the programs I already have along with a compatible printer, it will cost me over $40K'.

I truly doubt this - it's actually more expensive to do graphics design workflows in the Windows environment than it is to be the the Macintosh space.

A compatible printer - come on, seriously, if that's the best you can do... anything Windows in that space, it's going to work with Mac's, and in the Graphics Design arena, they're going to do a better job - seriously...

But I'm not recommending that your customer change platforms - he has a workflow that works...

I just question the ideas of the person advising him - not a personal attack... but I do question your logic - open your mind that there are great tools out there across many platforms.

 

[sfx2000]

I'm not a cultist either. I am a realist.

You are a cultist - Hello Microsoft...

 

[L&LD]

I have customers with tens of thousands of employees that run not only productivity programs but core business software, CRM/ERP applications, UC&C, and payroll on VMs each and every day.

Those applications do not need direct access to hardware like a gpu, for example. I didn't say VM's are not useful, just they have their place just like any other tool we have at our disposal.

You're confusing contentment with comfort. The vast majority of Windows users will tell you they have to have that stuff solely because it is what they are familiar with. The Windows user experience is SOLELY the result of having a complete stranglehold on the market (sometimes using anticompetitive and illegal tactics, mind you) and users not having a viable option for something else.



Honestly, that's one of the biggest gulfs between your thinking and mine and it's not one we're going to overcome - perspective. My customer are making million (and sometimes billion) dollar decisions. $40K is literally pocket change. My customers have far more liquid assets and some of them have access to vast amounts of capital. They'll spend $20M if it means being able to make $80M back over 10 years.



I hate to call out your customer but he obviously didn't know what he was doing. Sorry but there's no other way around it. I run Windows, Linux, and OS X all on the exact same hardware. Windows is never the better performer.

Yes, I agree your perspective is making you miss my point(s). For one, more than double the cost to do the same workload and on lesser hardware. Or experiencing freezing of the os, which in his very same workflow in Windows was rock solid (yes, on his specific system).

I do not doubt that scaling is different and works better at your (high) end, with seemingly unlimited budgets and support options available.

But to state that my customer didn't know what he was doing shows how little you understand his specific end user processes or how little you understand how certain software capabilities have shifted more towards Windows even though they might have originated on mac's.

And it certainly does not show how much better Linux or OS/x is vs. Windows.

Last but not least, it used to be true that Apple computers were inherently better for photo and video editing. This might have been the case ~10 years ago back in the days of the Powerbook and whatnot, however nowadays there are plenty of PC machines out there with photo and video editing capabilities that match or totally surpass a Mac.

http://www.slrlounge.com/mac-vs-pc-photographers-perspective/

The quote and link above supports what I wrote and the conclusions of my customer back then.

The OS and productivity programs that users work with on a daily basis are what is ultimately important to those users, not what drives big corporation's back-end systems.

Why PCs are better than Macs: The verdict
That's as good a place as any to stop: go for a Mac if you have money to burn, aren't a serious gamer, and value a controlled experience over freedom of choice. Go for Windows for variety, value and the option to customise. Basically, get a Windows PC.

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/new-prod...acs-mac-vs-windows-pc--which-is-best-3493092/

(Nothing relevant to quote.)

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/opinion/apple/5-reasons-why-a-mac-is-better-than-a-pc-115151/

The second link above is laughable, but that is what a quick google search for both sides of this opinion from the same site came back with.

This post is just trying to support my previous claims that Windows can be the better option. And again, having those options is great for us all.

 

[L&LD]

Omniplan - MS Project
Omnigraffle - MS Visio

These are the only two apps that I have that are a bit vertical from what you might mention are "professional apps" - and these products from OmniGroup, in many ways, are better than the Microsoft products.

The rest - either Mac or *nix - which isn't a problem with a Mac...

Matlab - which I use a lot, is cross platform, but works much better on the Mac...

Thanks for those links, I'll have to remember to read them in greater detail.

I'll have to take your word that they're better in certain ways, but the most important criteria for big projects is being able to share files like this. What other programs can read their files?

https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=0

https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10&qpcustomd=1


The market share numbers in the link above make OS/x and iOS effectively hidden form most users.

I also shudder to think of using either of these on a mobile platform for the large scale projects this type of software should be used for.

I truly doubt this - it's actually more expensive to do graphics design workflows in the Windows environment than it is to be the the Macintosh space.

A compatible printer - come on, seriously, if that's the best you can do... anything Windows in that space, it's going to work with Mac's, and in the Graphics Design arena, they're going to do a better job - seriously...

But I'm not recommending that your customer change platforms - he has a workflow that works...

I just question the ideas of the person advising him - not a personal attack... but I do question your logic - open your mind that there are great tools out there across many platforms.

Well, that was the printer he had at that time and what he was told by salesmen.

Look at my post above to see that graphic design is not cheaper on a mac.

I was not advising him to switch or not. Actually his design buddies were bugging him of using a PC. Most of them switched too, to a PC eventually.

There is no doubt that great tools exist on many platforms. The rhetorical question though was to have the most useful tools under one OS for the least cost.

You are a cultist - Hello Microsoft...

No, a cultist cannot consider options.

Considering options for my customers and myself is what I do every day.

'Hello MS' will only continue if the cost / benefit ratio keeps coming back positive.

 

[stevech]

My ex-employer, among others, migrated most employees to back-office VMs and virtual desktops and all that. Why? Security.

If the company who sells security services and expertise itself got hacked, or the news media claims it did, big financial impact.

So the tiny few (like me) that could not use a virtual desktop, got well vetted exceptions and restrictions about being inside the firewall, etc.

There should be more of this.

The idiot US Gov. does NOT practice what it preaches (and requires of its contractors). This goes from breaches in many agencies to the fools who turned a blind eye to Hillary's non-use of the State Dept.'s $B secure systems with no internet connectivity. Same for other agencies handling SCI information. Had I done that, I'd not be writing this; I'd be in prison.

 

[sfx2000]

My ex-employer, among others, migrated most employees to back-office VMs and virtual desktops and all that. Why? Security.

If the company who sells security services and expertise itself got hacked, or the news media claims it did, big financial impact.

So the tiny few (like me) that could not use a virtual desktop, got well vetted exceptions and restrictions about being inside the firewall, etc.

There should be more of this.

Amen... RDS and VM's help out quite a bit... and tight policy management via Active Directory (and/or OpenDirectory, which can affiliate with AD).

 

[sfx2000]

But to state that my customer didn't know what he was doing shows how little you understand his specific end user processes or how little you understand how certain software capabilities have shifted more towards Windows even though they might have originated on mac's.

You make a really good point here - at the end of the day, it's the user and how they work which is most important - and they probably don't care (or know) the underlying platform strengths and weaknesses (real or perceived). They just want to get work done - if they're a Windows shop, then perhaps unwise to push them over to an alternate platform, because they already have a working solution in place - same goes the other way...

A lot of the tasks in the business space could easily be done with a Chromebox - but there will always be a need for developers to have platforms focused towards the production environment - whether it's Windows, Linux, or Mac...

For me, they're all tools - some more focused than others - I can do much of my work on Windows, but it's more effort than working with a Mac - I've got VM's for Linux (Debian and RHEL) and Windows 7 Enterprise. The Win7 VM is a standard corporate productivity image (Office primarily) and it's managed by our IT group.

BTW - those OmniGroup apps I mentioned earlier - file compatible with their MS counterparts on the desktop.

As an aside - many of our IT guys - they're running on Macs primarily - we're a big VMWare shop and they support both *nix and Win platforms - over on the Engineering platforms, we're primarily RHEL on our production servers, and we run a mix of Windows PC's and Mac's (employee's choice), but everyone will get VMWare Workstations/Fusion installed, and the productivity apps run inside it.

 

[stevech]

mix of PCs and Macs... for many years, my ex-employers (3) went from mixed to Microsoft-only to reduce IT support costs which, with security costs, were enormous. They also had a short-list of approved PCs and laptops - to supposedly reduce capital but more so support costs.

 

[thiggins]

Guys, this thread has been off topic for some time. If you'd like to start a general geezer rant thread about Microsoft or other topics, I'd be happy to start one for you. Otherwise, keep further posts on the topic of Wi-Fi Sense.

 

[azazel1024]

My ex-employer, among others, migrated most employees to back-office VMs and virtual desktops and all that. Why? Security.

If the company who sells security services and expertise itself got hacked, or the news media claims it did, big financial impact.

So the tiny few (like me) that could not use a virtual desktop, got well vetted exceptions and restrictions about being inside the firewall, etc.

There should be more of this.

The idiot US Gov. does NOT practice what it preaches (and requires of its contractors). This goes from breaches in many agencies to the fools who turned a blind eye to Hillary's non-use of the State Dept.'s $B secure systems with no internet connectivity. Same for other agencies handling SCI information. Had I done that, I'd not be writing this; I'd be in prison.

Yes, because you necessarily have a lot of choice when your boss, or your boss's boss or even further up TELLS you this is the way things are being done. Oh, sure, could be a whistle blower, but then you are possibly risking retaliation. Frankly when it comes to it, probably 98% of her emails (or more) were being sent to/from other political appointees within the hierarchy. It isn't like someone from the OIG's office was getting emails from her and they could go "hey...what does it say hillary(at)clinton.com instead of Hillary(at)state.gov???"

On Windows 10, I loaded it on my tablet because Windows 10 more or less seems lighter weight and there are maybe more perks than intrusiveness that I am willing to put up with. It'll be awhile before I load it on my laptop, server or desktop. They can all live with Windows 8.1. Though the constant pop-ups of "migrate to windows 10 for free now!!!" are getting REALLY bloody annoying.

On WifiSense, I agree that this should be more of a complete opt in, butttttt, it at least seems like MS is keeping it mostly secure. I think security on the whole needs to be done a lot better with a lot more thought to it in all spaces. So it is troubling to me that MS would open things up more, instead of clamping down more.

BTW I see a couple of people mention "well if I share my network with a friend with WifiSense then they could share it out to their friend and then I have security vulnerability". WifiSense does not work that way. First off, only someone with the direct keys to the kingdom can share it. IE if you got access through WifiSense, you can't share it out. Only if you have the actually password to the network can you provide access through WifiSense. Yes, this does mean that all of the people who had access to your network before can give out access now. That is a vulnerability. However, they'll also need to know where the heck your network even is (which I realize is possibly discoverable looking in logs since I'd bet Windows keeps a list of the networks it has access to through WifiSense and then probably some GIS work could discover the likely GPS coordinates of the network and then a little WAR driving).

It is starting to get in to "I really, really, really want to hack X specific person's network" for it to be a real vulnerability. Not the sort of thing your average exploit driver is going to be doing. It also requires knowing or "being friends" with someone who had access to the network through the network password and being able to be one of their contacts to then get access.

Reason #82 for having a Wifi Guest network that has network segregation setup and only ever giving out access to your wifi guest network.

 

[AdvHomeServer]

Guys, this thread has been off topic for some time. If you'd like to start a general geezer rant thread about Microsoft or other topics, I'd be happy to start one for you. Otherwise, keep further posts on the topic of Wi-Fi Sense.

Looks OK to me. All comments relate to WIN 10, its intrusiveness, one's acceptance or lack of acceptance thereof, and do you want to use it. It's not a simple debate because Windows is so entrenched in the user environment. To me, it's morphed into a potentially unwanted program. I've chosen to explore alternatives. It remains to be seen if that endeavor will be successful, but I choose not to be cattle.

 

[sfx2000]

On Windows 10, I loaded it on my tablet because Windows 10 more or less seems lighter weight and there are maybe more perks than intrusiveness that I am willing to put up with. It'll be awhile before I load it on my laptop, server or desktop. They can all live with Windows 8.1. Though the constant pop-ups of "migrate to windows 10 for free now!!!" are getting REALLY bloody annoying.

Trying to get the thread back on track...

How did it go with the Tablet moving from 8.1 to 10?

My little HP Stream - was a bit ugly, but generally it made it over - but it wasn't the same as something with more storage - 32GB is pretty tight with any modern OS when having productivity apps/browsers/etc, along with the OS...

My understanding with the 16GB low-end Win Tabs (with Bing!), basically it is almost a wipe and reload from scratch, and then a bit of a challenge getting Win10 to activate if the steps were not done correctly...

FWIW - on a small footprint device - a) always backup first, b) have a thumbdrive or SD Card spare handy, you'll need it, and c) run the setup app from within Win8/8.1 the first time, so that it will pickup the Windows Key...

Lucky for me that I didn't have driver issues on the two machines I updated (HP Stream 11, and Asus X200CA), the Asus box was actually easier than the HP, as it's more a general laptop as compared to the Stream.

One thing I have noticed is Windows networking and Samba servers - go to the network neighborhood, and about half the time, my QNAP nas box might not be there, and if it is - clicking to open the server via the SMB hostname generally fails - can still do \\ipaddress and that works, and login is fine... so perhaps MS has tweaked their SMB/CIFS stack yet again...

 

[azazel1024]

My T100 has 64GB, so it wasn't bad. It did take a long time to upgrade since I didn't do a raw install (I might still do a fresh one eventually, but apparently you have to upgrade first, and then you can do a fresh install. Otherwise it gives you issues since your old key is still a Windows 8.1 key). I want to say it took about 2hrs to upgrade, where as I did do a fresh install of Win8.1 about a year ago and it took maybe 45 minutes then.

Maybe another 2hrs of total work doing a few other updates, disabling some stuff, figuring out how some other things worked. Biggest pain in my butt, and related to the tablet drivers, is that you had to uninstall them to load the Windows 10 drivers. Problem is, it resets the touch screen friction to zero. So if you lift your finger while in motion, even a little, it shoot right to the bottom of any scrolling screen. MS are pains in my butt by NOT exposing touch screen friction or inertia settings to the user. You have to do a registry edit to do this. Took me half the day to remember this and look it up again (as an updated version of the tablet drivers under Win8.1 had the same "must be uninstalled first" issue many moons ago). Really not sure why it isn't an exposable setting in Windows, but it isn't.

Otherwise works great. Granted, I killed my restore partition (but not the 700MB recovery partition) in the process too, but I went from about 18GiB free of 59GiB formatted to 28GiB free. So the actual install size is about 2GiB smaller, plus the 8GiB I gained from removing the install partition. Only 2GB of RAM and Windows does seem to idle about 100-150MB smaller on the desktop with nothing running after first boot. Only done a quick check in Kerbal Space Program, but idle after game launch went from something like 1.6GB used to 1.5GB, so it does look like Windows is running slightly leaner on memory footprint overall.

Boot time is roughly unchanged (give or take a second).

Networking in general seems fine. No positives or negatives. At least on my tablet. Then again, I almost never use network neighborhood. Just have my server as a mapped drive and haven't had any issues accessing it. I also did load the install on a thumb drive and then installed from that. always the best way to do things. I figure I'll wait at least 3-4 months before I do my laptop (my kids and wife use it a fair amount and the bits of change between 8.1 and 10 means a learning curve for them which I don't want to deal with). Desktop I'll probably wait until right before the 1 year upgrade period is over with. Frankly server will likely never get upgraded and/or I'll buy a license right around when Windows 8.1 support ends. Windows has made zero compelling arguments for me to upgrade my server. If the network stack is improved, I haven't heard of what any of the improvements really are. I am used to how the network and start page work with 8.1 and don't mind it, even in a desktop/server environment.

I do find a lot of the reversions/changes in Windows 10 really annoying from a touch perspective, as it is actually less user friendly if your primary interface is touch. Even if it isn't, things like changing screen brightness (other than 25, 50, 75 or 100%) take extra steps, you can't have audio volume on the quick launch bar (even though there is room) and some other things like that, that make zero sense. As a desktop operating system it is kind of better. I mostly like Edge browser, but the fact that they eliminated back and forward swiping is annoying and also that there is no pull up browser bar and tabs again makes it much less touch friendly. I used to think IE11 was a lot better than mobile Safari and Android mobile Chrome, but Edge is a big reversion making it no better than either rival (even if it is lighter weight).

Hopefully some of this is stuff that MS addresses down the road. If not eventually I'll be looking at third party tools to customize some of this stuff (like adding the brightness slider back instead of discrete steps on the quick tool bar, adding audio to the quick tool bar, etc).