Windows 10: Windows 10 When Quits

I believe we've discussed this before. Vista's problems were not so much that it was buggy, although it certainly had some bugs at release, which were cleaned up very quickly in hotfixes and SP1. If it had just been that, they would have been quickly forgotten and everyone would have been fine with it.

No, Vista was a sort of perfect storm of many factors that had very little to do with the OS's quality. Some of the problems were design decisions, such as making UAC deliberately very "chatty" in order to force ISV's to fix their buggy apps (the idea was to make apps that required admin privileges so annoying that customers would put pressure on the vendors to fix them, and this worked really well, but at the cost of a huge bad reputation for Vista.

Another problem was that Vista had not been intended for low-end netbook sales, but Marketing insisted on pushing it at that market, largely because Intel forced them to. This lead to unsatisfied users because they were running Vista on under-spec'd machines.

The fact is, all products ship with known bugs. If they waited to ship until the product was bug-free, it would never ship. And Vista's release date had slipped many times, so it's not really fair to say that they wouldn't slip.. they did. Finally, they had to get something out, even if it wasn't perfect.

Another problem was the same problem Windows 8 had, in that it was deliberately sabotaged by the "Technorati". The bloggers, and sysadmins, and techies down the street found it trendy to rip on Vista (and Windows 8), sometimes even for reasons that they had no problem accepting in Linux or MacOS (such as running as a normal user and having to elevate, yet for some unknown reason they absolutely HAD to run as a privileged user all the time in Windows).

And thus, we see what SHOULD have been the case with Vista, had it not fallen prey to all the other issues.

Windows ME and 98 are totally different beasts. ME was never even supposed to exist, and was a stopgap because Windows 2000 wasn't consumer ready. So yeah, it was rushed out and was a pile of garbage.. because MS needed a release that worked on modern hardware for OEM's.

Windows 8 was actually a relatively stable release, it was just unpopular. It was also deliberately a transitional OS, as the Windows Runtime (ie WinRT or Modern infrastructure) was immature and still in development. Of course, all non-trivial software has bugs, and complex software like modern OS's have lots of bugs. The issue is whether those bugs are commonplace and affect a large percentage of the users.

Windows 10 is a more mature Windows 8, that's for sure. But Microsoft has to go through cycles where they introduce technologies and have to refine them... Clippy anyone? How about those automatic hiding menus in Windows 2000?

 

I'm afraid W10 is going to be a completely different ballgame, unlike anything else up til now. "Unifying" OS and all that jazz. Modified release cadence, different way of delivering updates and upgrades etc. Can't see any connection to 95 - 98 - ME or even 2000 - XP.
ME, I liked a lot but as only a stop-gap measure it didn't hang around long enough. Vista, I missed almost entirely save for a bit of a late try just to see how it works and what's all the commotion about it. Manged to get it working on surprisingly lo end HW and not too bad either. I already got Win7 at that time so unless you count my curiosity, it was pointless to me.

 

Hi there

The ONE thing that could be of interest to make W7 users migrate to W10 is the STORAGE SPACES feature incorporated from all releases of Windows 8 onwards.

With people having loads of HDD's around these days the crazy scheme of Drive C, D, E etc is becoming no longer fit for purpose (if it ever were in the first place).

Storage spaces allow you to aggregate numbers of HDD's (dynamically too) to "Storage Spaces" or Pools and unlike conventional RAID the HDD's can be of DIFFERENT sizes too. Great for large multi-media libraries for example --you could have say a 1.2TB Movie / Audio library spread out over 4 X 500 GB HDD's. The OS handles all the physical layouts so you just access your library in the normal way with File explorer. You can also use part of the space like RAID for data integrity -- but unlike RAID volumes can be of different sizes.

Note - you can also use EXTERNAL HDD's too for storage spaces - so those nice 2 TB external USB drives can be aggregated to say 2 X 2 TB (4 TB storage space). This makes a nice area plus part for recovery for those fast USB 3 drives.

I'm surprised hardly anything has been mentioned about this incredibly useful addition.

Cheers
jimbo

 

What about loss or change of any disks in that array ?

 

What about loss or change of any disks in that array ? Hi there
you can define a % to be used as a "safety area".

if an HDD in the array starts failing the data can usually get recovered and you can dynamically remove an HDD and replace it.

My experience with modern HDD's is that they don't fail very often and provided you take backups regularly you shouldn't have any problems.

The consensus seems to be reserve about 20% for "recovery". Note that data is spread evenly across the array so recovery isn't a mega problem usually. Of course one can always have a "Catastrophic Failure" but if your backup system is robust then you should be OK.

Cheers
jimbo

 

Tnx, Jibmo, I was just asking as a matter of interest because of my case where I have a bunch of external HDDs mostly with backups on them and 3 HDDs inside the case. They are all of different sizes and couple are IDE, so it would not be too practical for me.

 

I once setup a mirror drive, thinking I wouldn't need to do backups... (this was a long time ago). Well, one day my power supply literally exploded. I heard a huge bang. Anyways, the power surge fried both drives (and the motherboard) so lesson was learned the hard way. There is no replacement for good physically seperate backups.

 

You can do that now in Windows 7: Spanned, striped and mirrored volumes. What is the difference?

 

Storage Spaces is not RAID. Raid has many limitations, such as requiring that disks be the same size, and they are more difficult to expand. You have to add the disk to the array, extend the array, then extend the volume in Windows. Storage Spaces works by "over committing" the volume in the first place, and you can add drives of any size and it will automatically figure out how to best use them. No resizing of the volume, and it just works.

 

It supplies the same functionality, though better features. It appears to be it slices up hard drive space in slabs of 256MB and uses those for units of string or eredundancy.

While it appears to be much more attractive than standard raid, it would not be something that would get me off of Windows 7 by itself, since I can get the performance and redundancy already either through Intel RST or Windows (I use RST software raid myself).

I will have to try it out in place of my 2TB backup raid0 array sometime.

 

What's the difference in consumer preview versus tech preview. I know you have to remove tech preview. Do you have to remove consumer preview too. I want to try it, but I'm afraid i'll screw up things when i try to remove it.

 

The consumer preview should have more features than the TP and hopefully it should be more stable and a lot less bugs. And I hope it has the new browser, Spartan, for us to test. And you don't have to remove the TP. You can perform an upgrade to the CR. In addition MS will provide a ISO of the CR some time after the update release.

HTH and welcome to the forum.
Jeff

 

I thought I read that tech preview had to be uninstalled april 15. Are you saying I could go ahead with tech preview now, then upgrade to consumer preview end on month, then upgrade to the final product when fully released. I am really wanting to start using w10 asap and stay with it. But I don't want to jump in too soon and regret. Advice?????

 

I would wait for the consumer release to come out and make use of the ISO to install it. Not sure when it will come out but it should be a lot less buggy than any of the TP builds and it should have more features, the daubed it awesome so we'll see.

You can always set up a VM and run a TP in that and when the CR comes out just delete the VM and dual boot the CR. There are many options but it's up to you and what you would want to do. I'm sure more opinions will follow.

Jeff

 

The consumer preview is just a more mature version, with (hopefully) less bugs, and more features.

You will eventually have to remove it, unless you upgrade to the final version, which MS has said they will offer an upgrade path... still, I would start over from scratch as that is the best option.