My Employer (and I) have found numerous bugs in win10! My personal opinion for whatever its worth is stick with 7 as long as you can. At work we are testing audio drivers and about 7-8-9th time you plug in a device. Win10 just forgets and can't find the driver or doesn't know what to do and hangs up. We have at least a dozen machines that have all started the "File Explorer- Hang", you open file explorer and it just sits there for hours "loading". The machines all ran fine at first but then at some point, something gets corrupted and it will start the "hang" we have found a workaround, by opening a second instance of file explorer, the first will still be hung but the 2nd loads right up. I personally don't like the win 8 look? But I do love that you can right click on the start button and get to the control panel, printers etc! that is a nice feature. We have also found that some older programs will not run under win10 even if you try compatibility mode, and some that you can get to run will exhibit problems.

SO...your mileage may vary. For now Win7 still seems to be the best version of windows MS has come up with yet!


Dave Meyers

-----Original Message-----
From: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Tom Fine
Sent: Sunday, November 29, 2015 9:14 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Wibdows 10?

One man's experience with Windows 10 ...

I took Corey Bailey's advice and bought a Western Digital SATA drive ($59 for 1TB), used WD's free version of that German drive-cloning software that Corey recommended, and swapped the drive into my
2014 Lenovo desktop PC that had been running Windows 7. I then took Microsoft up on its free upgrade offer. The upgrade took a couple of hours, but resulted in no fatal problems. Windows 10 seems to work fine with the following audio programs installed on that computer:

-- Soundforge 11
-- all of the Soundforge plugins by Sony, Izotope and others
-- Izotope RX5
-- Foobar2000 latest stable version
-- Tag&Rename latest version

I also confirmed that Windows 10 is not hostile (ie causes no problems) for Office 2003, including Publisher 2003, all installed on that machine. Quark Xpress 2015 also works fine in Windows 10, as does Quark's batch-conversion utility.

AllwaySync software works fine, but Windows 10 did change some directory structures, so I had to adjust a couple of backup profiles.

The overall look and feel of Windows 10 is quite nice. I like the squared-off look, as opposed to the "gumdrop" Apple look that Microsoft had copied to varying extents. The Start menu, however, is Windows 8-like. There is a free program called Classic Shell:
http://www.classicshell.net/
which will fix this and any other look and feel issues most users might have. I went semi-medievel on with Classic Shell and returned much of the look and feel, especially folders and file lists within folders, back to Windows XP, which I still think was the most user-friendly Windows (although 64-bit Windows 7 or Windows 10 is lightening-fast on a modern computer, which is a huge workflow plus).

Per Corey's good advice, I kept the old Windows 7 master drive, in case I run into something very incompatible with Windows 10. But, now 2 weeks in, I have not found such an issue. Windows 10 look and feel is similar enough to Windows 7 that the 2 platforms can coexist just fine, in my experience. It's not like Windows 8, where they tried to reinvent the wheel. Even though W10 worked out fine for me, I think Corey's advice is good, especially for desktop computers (which usually present an easy job for drive-cloning software and use very standard innards). You never know if something you're running, either hardware, peripheral device or software, just won't work with W10 until you install it and use it.

Now if only there was some varient of Magic Shell for the horrid new versions of Office, so I could have a user interface like I had mastered over 20 years of drop-down menus and control-key shortcuts. Tiles are for floors, not for efficient software!

-- Tom Fine

----- Original Message -----
From: "John Haley" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, November 29, 2015 9:51 AM
Subject: [ARSCLIST] Wibdows 10?


>I noticed in the separate string about "laptop upgrade" (really about
> external small DAC's), that you, Richard Hess, said you have upgraded most
> of your computers to Windows 10.  I have been hesitating to do that myself,
> simply because things are working now the way they are, using various other
> Windows versions (except XP, which has now unfortunately left the building
> for me, along with some great programs that I lost).  I don't want to
> invite trouble, and as we all know, Microsoft is not really our friend.
> And I have read somewhere online that Windows 10 has had a bug involving
> hi-def audio files.
>
> But if you are using Windows 10 for audio work, Richard, and all is going
> well, maybe I will do the free upgrades to Windows 10 on all my computers.
> Microsoft sure wants me to, with all the constant nagging upgrade
> messages.  That in itself is almost a reason not to.
>
> How has your experience been with Windows 10?  Any problems?
>
> And others on the list?  Liking it?  Not liking it?
>
> Thanks,
> John Haley
>
>