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Windows 10 Free Upgrade Available in 190 Countries Today

blogs.windows.com

181–190 of 402 posts

Re: Windows 10 Free Upgrade Available in 190 Countries Today

#181
post #81

Looking at the deprecated features that won't make it to Windows 10 I see: > Solitaire, Minesweeper, and Hearts Games that come pre-installed on Windows 7 will be removed as part of installing the Windows 10 upgrade. Microsoft has released our version of Solitaire and Minesweeper called the “Microsoft Solitaire Collection” and “Microsoft Minesweeper.” Does anyone else find it kind of sad that they killed off the old…

Well, you can always play the Windows 95 versions:

http://win95.ajf.me/

(disclaimer: I made the site)

Re: Windows 10 Free Upgrade Available in 190 Countries Today

#182
post #163
post #58

Dear marketing people, please stop using "The best ever". If you make a new product it should be better than the previous version, it it's not, you did something very wrong.

Agreed. Apple does this all the time when presenting new products. Of course it's the best/lightest/fastest version of the product. Why would they release a new version that is worse than the previous?

I actually thought they do this because they really want to say "best phone ever" or "best OS yet", but resort to the product name so as not to sound too cocky. By saying "best windows ever" you give the impression that this product is better than competitors while still being technically correct.

Re: Windows 10 Free Upgrade Available in 190 Countries Today

#183
post #67
post #6

Note that the upgrade will remove your Windows built-in DVD player. The right to play DVDs must be paid for every computer. You paid it when you bought the Windows 7 or 8 that you'll maybe upgrade to 10. Now the upgrade to Windows 10 takes that feature away from you. They apparently (the twitter message isn't actually the company statement) plan to return it "sometime in the future" and "if it might be free or if it…

Yep, Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Back up and Restore (Windows 7) Exact same old craptastic System Image backup stuff. Still can't only backup my C drive, got to include my TB's of bulk data on non-system drives too, grr.

? On Windows 7, I can deselect non-system drives. Did that change on Windows 10?

Re: Windows 10 Free Upgrade Available in 190 Countries Today

#184

In case there are people wondering I am using Windows 10 Pro x64 and did the following - Downloaded ISO using the media creation tool at [1] then did an upgrade from 8.1 to 10 which complete just fine. I then booted from the USB drive I just made, did a diskpart clean on the only drive in the machine then did a clean install. When prompted for a product key I pressed skip then when asked again during the out-of-box e…

It may not be hardware hash-based. OEM Windows reads licensing info from the BIOS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS#SLIC

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Locked_Pre-installation

Re: Windows 10 Free Upgrade Available in 190 Countries Today

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> DVD Player doesn't work, better throw this laptop out and spend $1k on a new one. Oh well…

You should have read to the end. Clearly a joke.

The amount straw grasping I've seen when people try to justify their purchases leaves me unable to tell anymore.

Re: Windows 10 Free Upgrade Available in 190 Countries Today

#186
post #159

In case there are people wondering I am using Windows 10 Pro x64 and did the following - Downloaded ISO using the media creation tool at [1] then did an upgrade from 8.1 to 10 which complete just fine. I then booted from the USB drive I just made, did a diskpart clean on the only drive in the machine then did a clean install. When prompted for a product key I pressed skip then when asked again during the out-of-box e…

Any idea what would happen then if you skip the upgrade 7/8 -> 10 and start with clean install? You need a key anyway? The same key as for Windows 7?

The "key" works only when you updated from a Windows7/8 installation with that key to Windows 10 once. It apparently saves a hardware id on their activation server. After that you can cleanly install Windows 10 and skip the key entry and it'll activate based on that hardware id.

What could be done if you change the hardware ? If you had a retail key, then you'd probably need to install Windows 7/8 and upgrade to 10 again to repeat the hardware id registering process, but I didn't notice anywhere if this was tested.

Re: Windows 10 Free Upgrade Available in 190 Countries Today

#187
post #146
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(disclaimer: I wrote that page :) ) Well, there are 2 legal parts that apply here: - DRM - software patents. Software patents for DVDs are almost all over (it's a 20 year old technology). And in Europe, we don't have valid software patents. On the DRM part, libdvdcss is not DeCSS, it's either finding the right key or brute-forcing to find the right key. In order to play a DVD, you need to "open" the DRM, else you can…

The underlying motivation of the encryption on DVD's goes beyond preventing piracy. It's about making sure you cannot skip past the ads at the start of the movie. They needed a mechanism to require all DVD players to respect the flags on a DVD that say "this cannot be skipped", and did that by pushing it into the 1996 WIPO treaty that you must have anti-circumvention laws that prohibit people from breaking the encryp…

Well, those anti-circumvention laws, for example in Germany, only apply in some cases. For example, as soon as software is included on the CD, too, breaking the DRM becomes legal.

Re: Windows 10 Free Upgrade Available in 190 Countries Today

#188
post #2

Let's hope Windows 10 is a big hit with PC users. Consumers trade in those old XP boxes and hundreds of millions take the free upgrade. Then maybe within 24 months lots of old IE's will fade away. https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpr... Edge appears to be a much better browser: https://html5test.com/results/desktop.html

The upgrade is not free for XP users.

That's why I said trade in those XP boxes. New hardware has gotta seem nice for them by now.

Re: Windows 10 Free Upgrade Available in 190 Countries Today

#189
Does anybody else experience issues with Truecrypt 7.1a?

It displays

  X:\ is not accessible.
  Incorrect function.
and the Computer Manager displays the drive with the RAW type.

- Even though the filesystem is intact (tested on another Windows 8.1 computer) and

- chkdsk showing NO errors (yes that's right: it even shows the filesystem as being NTFS).

Aside from that my UI/UX experience with Windows 10 is great and I'm really happy. The above thing is a bummer though.

Re: Windows 10 Free Upgrade Available in 190 Countries Today

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't care about this, why should we expect MS to support their 20 years old software? Back in '95 internet was not that common so it was nice to have such time wasters built into the OS. On the other hand, including Minecraft would be a really interesting decision.

Because for years Microsoft built up a reputation for supporting old software and old APIs. Read Raymond Chen's Old New Thing blog for some anecdotes about the amazing lengths they would go internally to keep old software working. Like with the classic game Sim City they realized its code was buggy and using uninitialized memory, so the Windows team wrote a special case to detect when Sim City runs and emulate an old…

>> "Because for years Microsoft built up a reputation for supporting old software and old APIs."

That's a reputation they need to lose. It was important at one time but has been holding them back for years.

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