Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Blaugust Day 11: Impressions of Windows 10

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A quick note: I have not tried to play games on Windows 10 yet. If you are concerned about 10 and compatibility, I would suggest holding off until you’re sure your games and programs you need are all compatible first.

Being computer geeks since we were 12 (not sure really, but that’s a good guess), my brother and I tend to keep our old computers and parts around when we can. What we don’t use, we tend to cannabalise to fix family computers. When I saw we could freely upgrade to Windows 10, I pulled out my older computer that runs Windows 7 and decided to try it out. It is a 6-7 year old computer with a dual processor and was originally running XP. I updated it to have 7, increased the ram and got a new video card that’s about 2 years old now. Suffice to say, it holds it own still and running 10 now. I’m writing this post on it. If everything turns out great, I’ll update my main computer.

I know I'm a gaming blog with a focus on MMOs (I try to focus anyways), but with Blaugust running, sometimes you have to post what inspiration (or dice rolls) and give your thoughts on game related-ish stuff.

Initial Impressions

My initial impressions on 10 are surprisingly good. I went in thinking that it would confuse the heck out of me by trying to change stuff around. Well, it did change stuff around, but I had little issue finding what I needed. Some things to point out is that control panel is now settings and the Windows 8 tiles are in fact a small part of the start button. The UI is pleasant to use, but I would say someone with very little computer skills or afraid of them will have difficulty again if they are used to an older Windows.

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Hey, Cortana

This is the key feature I wanted to play with; Cortana. I have a webcam with microphone setup and Cortana tends to understand me most of the time. If you’re unfamiliar with how I sound, you can check out some of my recent Youtube videos. That should give you an idea of how I sound to know what Cortana is up against.

I asked her to tell me a joke, and I kind of giggled at it. I asked for her to set a reminder to tell me to get a drink of water, and without any trouble, she set up the reminder and I got hit 10 minutes later. No issues.

She can’t do everything, though. Simple stuff like setting reminders, or doing a bing search for you (I wonder if that is integrated or if I can switch to google), or giving you the weather. She did have some trouble understanding me when I started to fall into my slurring issues, but she’s a voice recognition program, not a miracle worker.

Special Notes

Some special notes I’d like to point out. It downloaded some “apps” (this is the new word for program) that I found either meh, or didn’t want. Candy Crush I uninstalled, Xbox I left for now to see if I might use it. I like the Calendar and Mail since I can link all my hotmail and gmail accounts to it. I really like the notifications panel. It gives me a quick notice popup and then goes there for me to see what I missed. I have Twitter setup on here now and it also goes through that notifications panel, which I thought was really neat.

Games

As the notice at the top says, I haven’t tried out any game compatibilities yet. From what I heard, there were some games that have issues so I’m going to test that out eventually. Most of those issue are actually on the video card drivers, so I’ll need to make sure they are up-to-date. I also still need to check out some programs I use like Photoshop, Premiere and Audacity.

Have any of you switched to 10 yet? What are your thoughts? For those who haven’t and are curious about something specific, give me a quick message, or tweet and I’ll check it out for you.

You can find more about Blaugust at the 2015 Blaugust Initiative Page.

8 comments:

  1. I really want to switch to 10 but I'm trying to sort out a graphic card glitch (intermittent kernel driver crash :( ) and off on holiday soon - so I will wait a couple of weeks... also worried about games... particularly older ones like oblivion.. (maybe needlessly ;))

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    1. Yeah, the couple of weeks is probably a good buffer to have to see if your graphics card has any updates.
      I also have some old games I want to make sure works too. I'll add Oblivion to my list and come out with an updated post of all the games I've tried that worked and didn't.

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  2. will keep an eye out for that :)

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  3. Like you, I updated to Windows 10 on my laptop instead of my gaming machine. It looks and feels similar to Windows 8, which was on the laptop before, just without all the annoying mobile stuff to it. I also haven't tried out games on it, but for basic stuff, it seems to be running okay.

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    1. Yup, definitely seems ok for basic stuff. Going to give it a bit of time for any funny stuff to show up before installing it on my main machine.

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  4. I have enjoyed it so far. After the initial setup, it has stayed out of my way almost completely. I appreciate it.

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    1. I haven't played with it long enough. I hope it feels that way for me too.

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  5. Windows 10 has been good so far. Only troubles I have had are a little sluggishness here and there and Cortana wouldn't work the first day, other than that I have been using it as if it were Windows 7, until I have time to explore it more.

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