Windows 10 is nice but has little problems here and there. Brightness control doesn't work, and waking up from sleep takes forever. Guess I'll stick to using Linux.
The brightness thing would be a driver from your laptop's maker. Check their website. Waking up from sleep I dunno. Mine is immediate. Hybrid sleep is enabled (but that slows down going to sleep a bit).
The drivers are up-to-date. Might have to wait for newer ones to be released. Seems like a lot of other people are having the same issue. Sometimes, waking from sleep is instantaneous; other times, I get to stare at a blank screen for a minute or two before anything appears. I don't use hybrid sleep because the Linux bootloader doesn't know how to handle it.
What I mean is I can't adjust the brightness manually with the function keys. Maybe it's because I have Windows set to adjust the brightness automatically... but I don't feel like rebooting to find out.
That sounds like a problem I and many others had with Win 8, which should be gone in 10. You have to delve deep into the device manager to disable a brightness override. I have to google it and go through trial and error several times each time it resets, which happens a lot, because I can never remember the right one of all the similarly named switches in different places.
If you're disabling adaptive brightness, you go to: Settings > System > Power & Sleep > Additional Power Settings > Find your plan (usually it's balanced), and click on "Change Plan Settings" > Change Advanced Power Settings Then scroll down to Display > Enable Adaptive Brightness > And make sure it's turned to "Off".
Indeed. Right now there are ways around it, but it won't be long before the updates are considered "critical" and will install automatically. Keeping them from activating will require more methods until they finally just install them as part of a larger service pack, and you'll have no choice.
Why would I want to upgrade to v10? The v7 and v8 that I have on my various laptops are working fine. New releases of OS's are notoriously buggy.
Recently my laptop battery has been getting a beating. When it sleeps or hibernates the battery still drains. This happened almost overnight. However if I fully shutdown the computer and take it out it stays 100% charged. Could this be a Win 10 fault?
How did it behave before win10? It could be scheduled maintenance tasks are waking up the machine and going about their business. Check this setting to turn it off:
Windows 7, not much reason. Windows 8? because windows 8. Windows 10 is to win8 what win7 was to Vista. They fixed it. And it's free for now, it won't always be.
the spyware, if this linked article is what the fuss is about, I don't really consider to be spyware. Any statistics MS keeps have to be opted into by clicking "help improve user experience" when asked. Personally I like my user settings (down to desktop art) to be copied between machines using my microsoft live account. And Cortana remembers my habits no matter what I log in on. Ok not really, she's still an idiot, but things like my work location are copied from my winfone magically. She also spies on the neighbors for me.
They're moving to a opt out model, and doing it via hotfixes to introduce it to 7 and 8. Basically they're extending data tracking, which was to be expected as Win 10 is partially an experiment in making Windows a freemium product for the consumer. The auto-including to CEIP is likely to be the start, so the bigger the fuss kicked up now, the less they'll try and get away with down the line.
Can you provide a link to support your statement for the opt-out model? They are changing telemetry for those that have opted-in to the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP). The EU would require the opt-in model for all data gathering (unlike the US which is perfectly ok with opt-out).
Here we go. There are a few other out there too, but, by and large, MS are defaulting everything to the user being opted-in. Which is neither nice nor likely to engender trust. As you can see the CEIP is the thin edge of the wedge, and they're rolling the policy down to 7 and 8 users too. Even in the EU there's the an opt-out model, how the EU responds to this land grab we'll see. MS's big problem is that people are realizing they don't need a windows box, and the alternatives all come with free operating systems, with the cloud providing cross-OS syncing, placing MS at a distinct disadvantage, so they need to make core Windows free to the consumer, but still have revenue streams from their consumer OS. So they're taking two steps, first is quenching their Google envy and sucking up data, and the second is freemium features (so ad-enabled Solitaire is free, ad-free costs a monthly/annual subscription fee.) I'm curious to see how all this ends up though. A smarter MS would either have modularized Windows properly (and so allow multiple UI's to hook into to separate mobile and desktop), or bought up Blackberry instead of Nokia and hived off it's consumer divisions whilst focussing on a nimbler, smaller commercial unit with a warchest and a half to ensure the Google barbarians couldn't get through the gate.
Sorry, that article doesn't support your statement that MS are defaulting everything to the user being opted-in (which is a confusing way of saying they follow the opt-out model; opting-in requires informed consent"). I think the tailored ads while using solitare are as offensive as tailored ads in google searches, many of which are hard to distinguish from legitimate search hits. Both could be in violation of EU privacy directives. That's not to say I'm offended by the tailored ads; they make your advertising experience much more meaningful. Personally I use adblock plus and tend to avoid services that are paid for by advertising (but not google search, sigh). The scariest WIN10 feature is sharing your wifi (or any of those you frequent) password with everyone on your facebook account, hotmail/outlook account, etc.. But this is opt-in. Many will turn it on when prompted not realizing they are inviting squatters to their wifi and those other networks they have the credentials for. For example if my son runs win10 and chooses to use this, all his sketchy internet acquaintances can hop on my wifi. Of course they'd already have been invited into my house to be in range of my wifi, and are probably diddling my daughter as I type this but wifi access is what really counts. What other specific features concerning privacy must be opted-out in windows10? Here's more on "opt-in" within the EU.
I'd stay up and watch it. Maybe intruders are sneaking in to use your laptop whilst sleeping. Check the network device settings to see if wake on lan is enabled. This could be waking it up unnecessarily, but this isn't a new feature. Otherwise sleeping is a hardware function. I don't think the OS could alter this behavior outside of the events I've described. It could be the battery is aging and you've just started to notice.
Well, I didn't say everything, just that they had started down the line with it. For the CEIP, with Office it's on by default, or at least was. The article I linked to was to support that they had started down the line of an opt-out model. If you read through the Register article and the links contained within it, you can get a reasonable idea of the opt-out's It's not an especially brilliant bit of legislation, mainly as it was designed to tackle cookies and manages to be both narrow with regards to how the user is tracked ("Users should have the opportunity to refuse to have a cookie or similar device stored on their terminal equipment.") and wide in just what is bring used ("So-called spyware, web bugs, hidden identifiers and other similar devices") in a magnificent piece of arse-covering. From a technical and legal standpoint it can be argued that OS tracking is not a device that has entered the terminal, but is part of the terminal thus getting around the directive. I don't think that has been tested yet, however I suspect it will be in the coming years. It also doesn't cover checkboxes being pre-checked (a separate piece of legislation does that, however, iirc, that only has scope where the user is purchasing something, not installing something they have already bought a sit was targeted at the likes of cheap airline pre-checking boxes for extras), which is the issue. If your checkbox is pre-checked, it's an opt-out mechanism as the user has to explicitly opt-out rather than click a button to continue, leave it unchecked and that's opt-in.
yes, actually, you did: I agree with you to an extent; MS is designing their systems to encourage users to link their windows10 with a cloud account and also Office to send usage stats. It's subtle, but the tendency of users to accept anything under the onslaught of eula fine print agreements that we all agree to without reading will make the default user behavior agree to anything MS asks for. I created new accounts on a win10 machine to see how the privacy issues are dealt with under win10 and Office 2013. The windows10 (and windows 8) user account creation really wants you to link to a windows live account in the cloud. Win10 you had to tell it two or 3 times not to. Here's the first dialog, the link to ignore connecting and or creating an online account is obscure (it's the "the person I want to add doesn't have an email address" link). The privacy link takes you to MS's website with the full eula which is too long to read or understand: However, linking it to windows live account is very useful. It sets up your OneDrive to sync folders (that you have to specify) to share with your other computers similarly linked. It also copies default desktop layouts and graphics so you have a similar interface across devices. No I didn't read the eula either to know what evil things MS does with it. Running Office 13, any new user is asked to accept recommended settings. I bypassed this to be presented another privacy option: This is particularly obscure, and the default is to use the recommended settings. The "learn more" link takes you to MS's stultifying eula. Allowing it to proceed does enroll you in the customer experience improvement program (ceip) by default. Displaying the defaulted privacy settings in Office's (any app, I used Word) ubiquitous "Trust Center" shows the following two options applied among others: Saying "no thanks" to the "first things first" dialog that has no explicit mention of privacy results in privacy options without the two above selected:
Having said this, your life is an open book, at least here in the states. Any electronic transactions you take part in are shared with multiple entities who are watching your every move with the intent of selling you more stuff. Any issues you have resolved by the courts are completely open to public scrutiny. GM and other car manufacturers build in cell phone technology to uplink your driving habits. Your phone knows where you are and who you're with. I actually like MS's involvement in my computing life. More troubling is the public mail. Anyone can lift a piece of paper transiting the mails and totally fuck with you.
As some here know, I had to be coerced into transitioning from XP to 7 and, while I keep getting offers for 10, everyone I know who's upgraded hates the bloody thing. Can't get it to interface with their printer, that kind of thing. Pass.
I had some troubles at first, but they've settled down, and it's just like 7 with some touch up and tweaks.
