Be Excellent To Each Other

Amazingly I get to input into this thread
Just bought three Lenovo i7 lappys with Windows10 installed, which is better than XP I guess.
It all seems very lovely for now......

Recently I've tried connecting to a network share on my Win10 desktop from a couple of Android devices over my wifi and can't do it. This has worked before with the same app (ES File Explorer) so it's certainly been possible in the past and I'm willing to blame Windows 10 at the moment. I can see the machine from the Android devices but when I try to log in it just fails. With Windows 10 I'm logged in with my Microsoft acount rather than a straight local machine account and I suspect this is what's causing the problem, though I've nothing to back that up per se. Can someone else try this and see if they can get it working? I've made sure to share the folder in Windows and I've tried a few different ways of connecting from Android to no avail.

The same thing happened to me with my Windows phone and windows 10 PC. I wish I could tell you how I fixed it but in the end, I had a new phone and that solved the problem.

Is your live account an actual local account on the Windows machine? I don't know how that shit works

I'm not clear on if it's never worked in Windows 10 at all, or it did work but now it doesn't. (Was it Windows 7 when it last worked?)

I was just going to comment and say it works fine for me, but then I remembered that my file server is still on windows 7.

So this post is pointless.

Thinking about it, I don't think it matters that you're logged in with your Windows account. Is the Android app the latest one? I know there's a new version of it on the Lumia but you can still get the old one from the store AND it's higher in the rankings annoyingly.

Also, have you tried turning Windows defender off and trying it? See if that's the problem.

Basically, yeah; so I sign into Windows with that login and it appears in the Accounts control panel in Windows.



Aye, Windows 7 was the last time it worked.



Yeah, the app's up to date.



I don't think I've got that turned on at all as I use Avast for anti-virus but I'll check tonight.

I want to rebuild my home PC, going to go for Windows 10.

I need to upgrade my graphics card, what is a good budget one that will support 2 screen?

These PCs look pretty good:

http://www.banggood.com/Cenovo-Mini-PC- ... 44525.html

"This time we are more than thin"

"2GB RAM, 32GB ROM"???

"rose golden exquisite and amazing"

"It can run in both directions unblockedly and all things are possible"

"One "machine" can hold all"

"a real artifact"

I think it's this that's sold me on it though:

"small as the sparrow is, it possesses all its internal organs"

I've often thought that they should make PCs with all the internal organs of a sparrow.

Pre-ordered.

Mate, you're not going to get one that doesn't support 2 screens these days.

As for budget, what number are you thinking? £30, £300?

cool

About £100 at the most.

Quick google gives me this

http://www.amazon.co.uk/MSI-R7-360-Grap ... ascsubtag=[site%7Cthauk[cat%7C[art%7C[pid%7CB00ZPOE2IC[tid%7C14598519491166565[bbc%7CLEPRIX

Nerdier men than me can debate its merits.

GeForce GTX 750Ti, start at around £90 and have a reasonable amount of gaming poke. They also tend to run near-silently.

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/msi-gefo ... 48-ms.html

Depends if you're interesting in using it for gaming. If so, then the 750Ti is a good purchase. Otherwise just get a GT610 for £20.

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/pc-compo ... rce-gt-610

Hmm. Given the shittiness of the rest of the spec of my machine (4GB of RAM and a Q8200 CPU) how pointless would it be for me to stick one of those in my machine? I'm still not quite ready to do a full upgrade but adding a bit more oomph for under £100 is an attractive idea.

ETA: I've currently got an HD7770 card in there.

cheers...

I've had the GTX 650 for a few years and it's served me well. I'll not be spending any more money on minor upgrades. My next change will be *expensive*

Not sure you'll notice much of a difference TBH, the 750Ti isn't massively more powerful than the 7700 to start with and you may will be limited by the rest of the spec anyway - not worth chucking nearly £100 at IMO.

Fair enough, ta.

Although I'm a bit surprised to hear there's little difference between the two. The 7700 cost me £100 in 2012; so spending the same amount of money on a card in 2016 doesn't bring much performance difference? Surely something's wrong there?

dear god, just accept it before the stats and graphs!!!

Although it's more powerful, you'll probably be running at the same resolution, so you'll have to get into FSAA and other bells and whistles.

I continue to look very closely at the Surface Book before getting scared by the price tag. £1600 for the one I'd want (and that's the second cheapest!) Gngh.

Wow, that's in the MacBook range.

Well you have to remember that the 750Ti launched just over two years ago, and was the debut of Nvidia's brand new Maxwell architecture, which they're still using now. (All the way up to the £500 980Ti.)

The 750Ti is more powerful than the 7770, it needs no extra power connector, and it generates less heat and noise - so it's an improvement in every way. (The specific point here is that it's probably not enough of a improvement to justify spending £100 on the switch.)

As an aside, the current GTX960M is a 750Ti by another name, and that's pitched as Nvidia's mid-high end mobile GPU .

You're saying more gfx horsepower would mean more graphical shinies; I'm not sure in what universe that doesn't represent a performance difference? Anyway, it contradicts Hearthly explicitly saying there wouldn't be much of a power differential, which I still think is weird given the four year time difference.

What he said.

Another massive win* for Win10/UWP.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digit ... m-break-pc

* Sub please check.

The future of PC gaming!

I'm not convinced that's a Win10 problem or a PC problem - it's a Remedy problem.

I mean, when the game doesn't have a way to quit to desktop (because the XBone menu didn't need such an option) you know that not much care has been put into it.

Anyone interested in my XFX ATI 7870 graphics card?

Not in the Windows 10 thread, no.

D'oh, thought I was in PC hardware.

They explicitly state that UWP is the root cause of many of the issues though.

I think it is certainly (at least in part) a Microsoft problem.

Just three months ago MS were marketing it as Xbox One only, with no mention of a PC version. Perhaps the port did not have a lot of time to cook. Remedy's previous PC releases have been totally solid, although MS didn't have a hand in Max Payne or Alan Wake PC. They have always been a studio that has had a strong PC focus, even if they did do one game that was a timed Xbox exclusive. They're also a fairly small studio that has had very little staff turnover, it's doubtful to me that they'd suddenly forget how to do a good port.

Remedy certainly seem to imply that a combination of UWP, DX12 and MS as a publisher are the source of all the issues in this FAQ, one of the only things Remedy have said in response to the poor reception of the port.

Of course Remedy are somewhat to blame for signing the publishing rights to the PC version over to Microsoft, given Microsoft's track record with PC gaming.

I thought no UWP apps had an option to quit to desktop though.

We are deploying at work, I have it all ready on an "Early Adopter" Image.

Have a meeting next week where I will find out just how they plan to get lots of people to test their apps on Windows 10 and give a shit

Windows 10 seems to be fine * It's only installed on one computer in the house and I still have no intention of doing any upgrades on the Windows 7 machines we have (as that's where the issues tend to arise), but as a fresh install on a modern machine it's peachy enough.

I like the way the old Windows 7 menus/settings are generally only a click or two away behind the more simple Windows 10 menus, and one definite improvement is the new built-in backup, massively better than the old Windows Backup system.

It's similar enough that Hearthly Jnr is comfortable with it, I had to show her where a few things are but she's adapted with no problem.

I don't find it's quicker to boot up than the similarly specified PC Mrs Hearthly has but is running Windows 7 (both boot up from cold in a few seconds), and they seem to behave/perform very similarly overall too, just running different operating systems.

So yeah, overall, perfectly usable - although I wouldn't say 'better', just a 'bit different'.


* Windows 10 has established a foothold in our house as I bought a mini-ATX PC for Hearthly Jnr. (Her laptop was struggling with WoW and Minecraft, and whilst it refused to die the fans in the poor thing were properly howling, so I decided to retire it gracefully before it blew up.)

I was going to get a replacement laptop for her but a mate was selling a nearly-new PC he'd bought for his wife that had been effectively unused for four months, complete with a lovely 24 inch screen, high quality Razer keyboard and mouse, and headset, for £600 - so I went for that instead.

It's decent hardware, 256GB SSD, midrange i5, 16GB RAM, 2GB 750Ti (which is almost identical to the 960M I would have got in a laptop for her). The mini-ITX form factor is really small and the PC is almost completely silent, even under load. Very impressive little box of tricks.

If anyone still thinks PCs are big and/or noisy, seriously, check out the new mini-ITX builds, they're full-fat PCs in tiny little cases that hardly make a sound. (You can get a GTX970 in a half-length form-factor, so you don't need to sacrifice anything.)

Yeah 10 doesn't boot any quicker than 7. It's probably the same as 8, maybe a little slower.

I spent the best part of a week on Mrs JC's PC and tbh I actually preferred 8.1 If they ever release DX12 for 8.1 (doubt it, esp as they've used their excuse card by making 10 free) I would go back to 8.1. Especially as it's my lovely Alienware UEFI version so has lovely boot and shutdown screens and so on

Re: Quantum Break



I read that you quit to desktop by waving your mouse in the top right corner of the screen and a red X will appear like closing a window or a crappy Win 8 app. Still crap though. I'm waiting for a friend to give me his free PC key as he ordered the XBO version so I can have a looky look at it.

EDIT: Actually I'll probably need to log into the Windows Store and I wonder if that's tied to his XBO so I'll need his XBO log in deets. No idea, soon find out though.

Hmmm after initially being impressed by the Windows 10 File History style backup, I've finally had to give it up and go back to the Windows 7 backup. (Mrs Hearthly and Hearthly Jnr are on Windows 10 now.)

After checking and re-checking several times that it's not me fucking something up, it's now beyond doubt that it just randomly creates extra file history copies of files that haven't changed in any way whatsoever, or indeed even been accessed for months/years.

I noticed in particular that Mrs Hearthly's total backup size had grown to nearly 80GB from 46GB a few days ago, one Treesize later and I found folder after folder where it had created multiple copies of identical files for no reason. (Screenshot below shows where it's created duplicates of identical MP3s.)

A quick Google around suggests it's been fucked since MS introduced it in Windows 8 with no real solutions that I can see, (and many people describing the same behaviour), or at least, can be bothered to investigate when there's the perfectly serviceable and reliable Windows 7 backup behind the scenes in Windows 10 to use instead.

Upgraded Mrs Hearthly's PC to Windows 10 a couple of weeks ago, as Windows 7 has started to get a little bit 'mysteriously unreliable' when it comes to Windows Updates. (I've since resolved the Windows Update issues on other machines in the house, but thought I'd get Mrs Hearthly on Windows 10 as the 'safe haven' option, plus I also reckoned her machine would be the least likely to have issues, as it's a fairly new PC so all the hardware should be fine on Windows 10.)

Anyway, as with Hearthly Jnr's PC (which came with Windows 10), it works perfectly fine but once again whilst it's a bit different to Windows 7 I really wouldn't say it's any better - and it doesn't boot any quicker either, it isn't any faster in use, or anything like that. Maybe DX12 will give a boost to games in the future, but in the here and now its performance in games and benchmarks is identical to what Windows 7 turned in.

There's no way on earth I'm going to risk Win 10 on my own PC (old hardware, exotic sound card, appalling mish-mash of storage, etc), especially since my PC will have gone to the big ethical recycling centre in the sky long before Windows 7 goes out of support.

The way I see it is the best case scenario is your PC carries on working as it did before, but the OS looks a bit different. Worst case scenario is you have problems ranging from trivial to severe - so I honestly see no upside, especially if support past 2020 is a total non-issue for the machine in question. (Whereas I can envisage Mrs Hearthly and Hearthly Jnr's PCs still being in use past that date.)

Not sure if this has been covered yet.. If you are using Windows 7 or 8x and you update to 10 after 30 days Microsoft disable your old serial so you can only reinstall Windows 10.

Last week when one of my GPUs was loose and my PCIE SSD took a shit I desperately fumbled through my drawers (ooer) looking for the original 8.1 disc that was supplied with my Alienware. Any way I found it but when I tried to install Windows 8.1 it was asking me for a serial number. Hmm, strange, don't remember it doing that on day one (when I bought the machine it had no SSD in it so a reinstall was key). Any way, after a lot of digging around on Google I found out that on a Dell or Alienware the Windows key is hard fixed into the bios. You can't see it or view it in any way and as such you don't need it. So why the fuck was it asking for a serial number and not letting me install 8.1?

I'd had a few issues with 10 (I was stuck on a very early version that was a little buggy and obs no calculator !) and was quite happy to go back to 8.1. In the end out of sheer panic I downloaded a flat Windows 10 installer and guess what? straight on. No serial needed, nothing. Booted into Windows and quelle surprise ! Windows Activated.

Now I think that's pretty damn aggressive tbh. Not only that, but my lovely Alienware DVDs now make great fucking Frisbees. I asked about this on the Dell forum and they said that if I wanted to go back to 8.1 I would need a new motherboard pmsl. I mean in some ways it's good (because I was told before that every time I wanted to install 10 I would have to install 8.1 and then upgrade) but yeah, pretty mad stuff !

That seems like it should not be legal.

Why?

Are you sure that's true? After 30 days the rollback files are deleted from your hard drive to make space but I can't see any reference to the key that's stored in the BIOS being either removed or disabled by Microsoft.

Just a thought, but are you doing a clean install of 8.1 or 8, and which version did your PC come with!
If it had an 8 key in the BIOS and you use an 8.1 disk it I'll ask you for a key when you install as they aren't compatible at this point.
We have had this at work and we use any old 8.1 key to start the install, then once Windows has booted and it fails online activation, swap to the key that you can read from the BIOS and all is good.

I've only got one Alienware 8.1 install disc. It only came with one and I used it on the first day the machine arrived last summer. It never asked for a serial because you don't get one it's hard set into your BIOS . MS have now disabled the serial for 8.1 and it now only works with Win 10. Honestly, I'm 100% certain I even phoned Dell.

It doesn't do it with retail versions as IIRC you can install those on any PC but it basically locks itself to all OEM computers. If I change my motherboard I'm fucked basically.

It seems Microsoft are finally bowing to all the pressure Hearthly's been pouring on them and will be disabling the Win10 upgrade nagging after July 29th.

http://www.engadget.com/2016/05/08/wind ... disappear/