OK...I need to send you the tinfoil hat then....;p

Nah, best you hang on to it... you wouldn't want 'that OS' reading your mind, now would ya?

Besides, I already have a variety of tin foil hats of varying thicknesses and sizes... for various kinds of intrusion.  One is about 15 layers thick to stop government  probing my thoughts.  

Then I have one that's 12 layers thick.  That one's to keep out alien mind probes when they're about, but is painted a dull black... so the beam isn't reflected off various surfaces and in through the..... yeah!   Let's just say a reflected mind beam is far worse than an alien anal probe.

Okay, so it's not exactly the kind of hardware I had in mind, but it's a start.

Well, it's been a busy weekend so I haven't had a chance to get back onto Terry's recalcitrant machine....with a new go at resolving the driver issue...and disabling the update service for it.

I'll do that tomorrow ...and if that's fine then I'll delve deeper into compatibilities that might still be iffy compared to Win 7 which is a heck of a lot older.

As I said, this install is half a dozen years old...and comes with more unwanted dross [now] than I can remember pointing a stick at...

But it's the ultimate mule for my prime machine all the same...;)

The current OSX has less market share in the PC environment than Windows 8 does.  Microsoft isn't losing market share to Apple, they're losing new markets to Apple.  They're a footnote in the smart phone market, and getting creamed in tablets even after Surface.

What they're losing market share to in desktop computing is Windows 7, even 8.1 has a bigger market than Apple does in it's entirety.  Windows 7 is the plurality still, and combined with XP, the second most popular OS, "old" operating systems account for well over two thirds of the market.

Business PC's are similarly Microsoft dominated, and similarly aged.

Well, that's what I meant.... that to compete in those phone and tablet markets, MS had to create it's own walled garden with a cross platform OS that could sync and share more easily, similarly to how iPad and iPhone does.

Well....I now have the correct NVidia driver installed...so that solves 'most' of the problems...

Edge is still a dog...and doesn't show/have Favourites when importing from IE.

IE is crashing again...[thought I'd solved that one]... so back to researching I go....;p

I replaced Terry's 'old' 32" TV used as a monitor at 1360x768 with a newer 32" TV - same res ... but text has a white halo which suggests a contrast issue....or simply poorer quality Teev.

Her eyesight means the ideal solution is a low res TV at native res rather than a similar sized monitor 'pushed' to a lower res from it's default.  Bottom line is 'stuff' needs to be big...;)

Yep...as psychoak mentioned....Edge is rubbish.

I have a feeling Chrome will be my weapon of choice on 10.....

Windows 10 FULL REBOOT time on the i7 920 = 21 seconds.

That's with Fences, Object Dock, Start 10, etc.  It's a normal BIOS, not UEFI.

That's a good startup time, especially on an older PC with a Legacy BIOS.  I have an older setup with a Legacy BIOS that hopefully will boot in a similar time.  It has an AMD Phenom 1150T @ 3.2ghz and 32gb of RAM.  I haven't quite finished putting it together as yet [some parts are still packed away somewhere], but there's no hurry as I have other operable machines and have no urgent need.

With regard to low boot times, my little 2-in-1 just booted in 16 seconds.  Usually it took up to 20 or so, but I disabled a few more startup non-essentials to reduce times a little more.  Before investigating more thoroughly I didn't realise just how many updaters and 'phone home'  things started with Windows.... like 2 for Adobe, 3 or 4 for HP and a couple for Intel.   I guess that's the issue with buying propriety machines... non-essential bloatware.

As for Stardock apps, I only have Start8 and Fences running at startup - being that WB and IP are more integrated into the shell - and others I start manually as/when required.

When XP came out, it was a marked improvement over 98SE, not to mention ME.  It was based on the highly advanced NT platform, which was far more stable under load than the consumer kernel previous home user iterations were based on.  It wasn't limited to 1 GB of ram, or FAT32 and 137 GB hard drives.  It sold great, and became the dominant OS inside two years as hardware outstripped the capabilities of 98.  When Windows 7 came out, it was a marked improvement over XP, with far greater utility in a multi-core 64-bit environment that XP simply doesn't function in, it replaced it as the dominant OS inside two years as hardware outstripped the capabilities of XP entirely.  Vista sold like shit, it was far more advanced, but hardware wasn't, so all it came with was poor overhead.  8 sold like shit too, for different reasons, a horrid gui instead of poor performance, but the lack of advancement was the same, and 7 still isn't failing to deliver on modern hardware.

They're essentially looking at a market purely driven by packaged sales, and performance gamers, anyone that puts their own together has absolutely no reason to buy a new OS unless they're playing DX12 games on it.

Your internet browsing isn't worth nearly enough to make up the cost of a free OS, what they're doing is giving you one you don't need for free and probably wouldn't have bought anyway, so you'll buy your next machine with Windows 10 having gotten used to it.  It's the same reason they wont put DX12 onto the old operating systems, they need it to sell the new one because there is literally no point in upgrading from 7.  XP plateaued near 80% market share, 7, even with it's huge advantages, around 55%, and unless they can get people off of it without anywhere near the same reason to switch performance wise, 10 will do even worse.  XP obliterated every predecessor, and Microsoft would kill for that kind of success again, but their obstruction is their own damned product.

Oh dang and blast.....here I am agreeing totally with psychoak yet again.....

....something's seriously wrong with reality....;)

Edge does have favourites imported...only the text is blank in the list....and if you squint right and pass a cursor over it bits become visible....

....entertaining....;p

Edge, wasn't he a WWE wrestler?

Seriously, that's another pet hate of my sister... the fact that Edge is a POS 'browser' that crashes/freezes regularly; has few to no decent addons to block adds and popups, etc, and is a proper bitch to use because often it hangs and/or does not connect to requested addresses.

Thankfully, that's a problem I'll not have because FireFox is my browser of choice... everything just works and is easy to use.

Followed a squillion 'fixes' for a dud IE11 continuously crashing....no luck.  I am likely going to have to safe mode it and delete the dll in the crash logs....

Meanwhile Edge is 'beginning' to behave - at least I can see the favourites now...;p

Hehe, come the weekend I'll be able to set up my man cave with my 3 big rigs and other stuff.... at long last.  It has been a long and frustrating time, but I now have a house of my own to call home.  Who knows, maybe next year I can revisit the 2011v3 upgrade and really kick some arse.

In any event, I won't be having any IE or Edge problems.  I'm happy with Firefox and I'll stick with that.

The NVidia drivers really didn't want to install...got the Graphic driver...but the rest still didn't.

Used the cleanup but not in safemode....and the install worked...

Typical....;p

That resolved the issues with Edge...so things are looking up....

Titanium = 500...;)

Spoke too soon....WAS resolved....now it crashes instead....;p

See, told ya 10 was/is a pig.  They take a sow's ear [IE] and try to turn it into a silk purse [Edge].  Didn't work, did it.  What with a crap browser, advertising and snooping/phone home abilities, yeah, the whole walled garden thing, Win 10 has little to nothing going for it.  And all those millions grabbing the free lunch with both hands when there's no such thing as a free lunch.... makes me wonder what the world is coming to.

I think MS has put a hypnotic thingy in with the updates, and once installed it emits subliminal messages "Get Windows 10, Get Windows 10", and when subjects are sufficiently hyponotised the click the install Windows 10 button, all while completely oblivious to what's going on.  Thankfully, I'm not smart enough to be hypnotised... read a bit too thick, and thus remain unscathed/Win 10less.  In other words, see what trouble people can get into when they're smart!  Yup, they're hypnotisable and end up with crap installed on their computers.

Oh, and if anyone detects a hint of frivolity and tongue-in-cheek here, I'm as pleased as punch cos I took possession of the keys for the new house this morning.  It was the last bit of business to conclude prior to shifting everything in on Sunday morning.  Unfortunately, I couldn't get the power on 'til Monday morning [no biggie] so I'll be staying  here for the night to eat, shower, watch a bit of TV, etc.

If you're a gamer, 10 is an eventuality.  If you're using other new technologies with poor support in 7(which wont be getting improved because it cuts into their sale of the new OS) you have the same problem.  7 is end of life already, they wont be fixing things like flaky M.2 drives.  If you've already got 8, your OS is ass to begin with, so a free upgrade to ass isn't really a downside...

Oh, goodie...

A reboot 'fixed' the Edge crash....and it's back to showing black bits instead.

The 22 second boot became 64 second.....

Life's a box of chocolates.....

....some of it is pre-chewed....;p

.....and melted.

Nope, not upgrading to a piece of ass that spies and phones home with way too much personal information.... cos at the end of the day there's no such thing as a 'free lunch' unless you're a friggin' politician... and by the look of most of 'em, rotund as they are, they've had a LOT of free lunches.

Now upgrading to a piece of ass that can cook, sew, clean and attend to my whims and fancies, well I'll take some of that.

Seriously, Win 8.1 is far better than Win 7 for me.  I bypass all that Metro crap and go straight to the desktop, and from there it's like using 7 but snappier..

As for Win 10, I just don't like it and will stick with what I have until its no longer viable.... which is when I look at a platform change to something Linux.  Ubuntu, Mint and Robolinux all are all looking good in that respect.  When I get settled in the other house I'll set up my dedicated Linux machine and begin testing the various distros to see which would be the best/better replacement.

And look, grandma left her teeth in one of the chewy ones.

When I ran the installer, it put all that phoning home crap up as options and I disabled it right then and there.  It's not even something you have to hunt for to get rid of it was less effort than setting the clock.