Bladeforce wrote:

I think you'll find the more widely used standard that is better for everyone is OpenGL

In theory. Reality is rather different however. Hopefully Vulkan will fix at least the major platform fragmentation issues.

Finally I upgrade my daughter's 8.1 Pro PC to Windows 10. It was an acceptably non-hassle update, only needed to update the NVidia drivers after the install manually. Other than that, everything works, and performancewise, I don't see much difference between the 8.1 and 10.

It's a lite PC in both hardware (AMD Phenom II X6 with 8 GB RAM, a 120GB SSD, Asus 710GT GPU) and software (MS Office 2010, ACDsee Pro 6, some games) so I was not expecting much problems anyway.

I don't have any intentions to upgrade my main rig or HTPC (both Windows 7 32bit machines), though. I'm quite happy with what they are at the moment.

Fair warning to Windows 7 users: Check your six!

New Windows 7/8/8.1 updates spy on you just like Windows 10 - Microsoft is pushing KB3075249 and KB3080149 updates for Windows 7/8/8.1 users which can spy on you

That's the same kind of thing already in Windows 7 - it's just adding the metrics for error reporting to UAC dialogs.

If you are truly paranoid, you'd stop using Windows altogether. This is just an excuse not to upgrade. (Mine is bugs and UI regressions from 8.1, so....)

TELVM wrote:

Fair warning to Windows 7 users: Check your six!

(Link removed from quote)

The web of lies has gone from hilarious to depressing.

The first "evil" update, KB3075249, has this in the description on the KB page:

"This update adds telemetry points to the User Account Control (UAC) feature to collect information on elevations that come from low integrity levels."

So firstly, if you don't use UAC, it doesn't affect you. Second, this reads like it's so you can access more verbose logging of what process asked for elevation, and what action it was trying to do.

Lastly, even if it were for collecting data to return, if you're not enrolled into any of the error feedback related programs (which can all be disabled during Windows setup, or through the Control Panel later), then it has nowhere to send any data.

The second "evil" update, KB3080149, has this as the very first line in its description on the KB page:

"The diagnostics tracking service collects diagnostics about functional issues on Windows systems that participate in the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP)."

The CEIP can always be disabled, and you're asked during Windows setup if you'd like to participate. This is a very specific update, pertaining to a very specific function.

The article's author "Vijay" has taken a fair whack of creative licence to get from these two insignificant updates to "HOLY SHIT IT MAKES WIN7 INTO WIN10 YOU GUIES LOLOL".

These half-truths and paranoia are liquid gold for asshole clickbait bloggers, useless scaremongering for everybody else. You pasting this link here serves no purpose other than to improve techworm.net's SEO standings, improving the value of their ad impressions.

Another angle of the in-progress sabotaging of Windows 7 to herd the cattle into the abomination.

Anandtech: Intel Skylake Z170 Motherboards

"... One big shock will be for Windows 7 users. By default, the Z170 chipset and BIOS will not support full USB 2.0 Enhanced Hos […]
Show full quote

"... One big shock will be for Windows 7 users. By default, the Z170 chipset and BIOS will not support full USB 2.0 Enhanced Host Controller (EHCI) mode. This means that for a number of circumstances, USB devices will not work unless an XHCI environment in play.

In our testing, this means that in order to install Windows 7 you need to do the following:

· Navigate to BIOS
· Enable ‘Windows 7 Installation’ or ‘EHCI mode’, Save and Exit.
· Have your Windows 7 image on an optical disk. USB sticks will not work!
· Install the OS as normal via the optical media. Install OS drivers/USB 3.0 drivers.
· Disable the BIOS option.

This is done for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it helps reduce the size of the BIOS for more customization (). It also aids moving users to AHCI capable operating system installations. For everyone else, it is a bit of a headache. As far as we can tell, almost all motherboard manufacturers (at least the Tier-1s) will have this option in the BIOS to enable Windows 7 installation ..."

WCCF Tech: Intel and Microsoft joining hands in making a Windows 7 unfriendly ecosystem - Skylake Removes Support for USB based Windows 7 Installation

TELVM wrote:

Another angle of the in-progress sabotaging of Windows 7 to herd the cattle into the abomination.

Looks like they learnt from the Windows XP fiasco. We don't want people to stick to Windows 7 forever like they did to XP 😀

This just in: New standards emerge, old software doesn't support it.

More at 5.

So Intel didn't cling to old tech, the manufacturers went to the trouble of implementing options to help Windows 7 be installed in harware that is just too new and there is an evil scheme at play?

Also, I don't think it is impossible to slipstream xHCI drivers into a Windows 7 installation disk. Once you do that you might not even need that option.

The whole problem here is that we've had UEFI for many years, and Windows 7 didn't support it.
Windows 7 is horribly outdated. With Windows 8 we finally had proper UEFI support in the OS, so booting became a lot more modern and streamlined.
I don't find it strange that the latest hardware doesn't bother with that crappy old legacy BIOS stuff anymore. Why would you even want to run Windows 7 on the latest hardware anyway? (please think before you answer anything related to some irrelevant differences in the UI).

SquallStrife wrote:

This just in: New standards emerge, old software doesn't support it.

More at 5.

Except that isn't the case here. This is a case of an old standard (USB 2.0) not being supported by newer software (Windows 7) when that software always supported it before. This is a case of Microsoft deliberately breaking something that always worked up until now when there is no reason for it.

sliderider wrote:

Except that isn't the case here. This is a case of an old standard (USB 2.0) not being supported by newer software (Windows 7) when that software always supported it before. This is a case of Microsoft deliberately breaking something that always worked up until now when there is no reason for it.

I don't think that is the case at all.
What I understand is that the UEFI does not boot in legacy BIOS mode by default. The non-legacy way to boot is to let the OS initialize USB-devices etc. Windows 7 is not capable of this mode of booting. Windows 8 and higher are.
This has nothing to do with USB support once you have installed the OS and drivers, but simply makes it more difficult to install outdated OSes which can only run under legacy BIOS modes (as said, once the OS is installed, you can disable the BIOS option).
This is pretty much the same thing as Hackintosh systems: regular PCs have the same hardware as Macs, but not the same boot environment, so you need some special software before you can boot MacOS on a regular PC.

sliderider wrote:

Except that isn't the case here. This is a case of an old standard (USB 2.0) not being supported by newer software (Windows 7) when that software always supported it before. This is a case of Microsoft deliberately breaking something that always worked up until now when there is no reason for it.

This looks more like newer hardware not fully supporting an old standard (USB 2.0) and making Windows 7 go nuts as it expects full support.

sliderider wrote:

SquallStrife wrote:

This just in: New standards emerge, old software doesn't support it.

More at 5.

Except that isn't the case here. This is a case of an old standard (USB 2.0) not being supported by newer software (Windows 7) when that software always supported it before. This is a case of Microsoft deliberately breaking something that always worked up until now when there is no reason for it.

How did Microsoft manage to retrospectively change their installation media to not support USB 2.0?

As per above responses, nothing has been "deliberately broken" or "disabled" or "locked out" or any conspiracy nonsense like that.

Intel implemented a new USB controller for their new chipset, and FINALLY deprecated BIOS/MBR booting as the default option, and Windows 7 doesn't support that.

Storm in a teacup.

I'm running 3 Windows 10 installations now, including my work PC. My only complaint is that the "Windows key --> start typing to search" functionality, which I depend on 100% these days, doesn't find what I'm looking for as reliably as it did on Windows 7. Perhaps it'll improve over time as it gets to know me.

It's installed on ~75 million computers now apparently...

Yup, the search doesn't work like the Windows 7 search. I pretty much haven't been able to use search since Windows 7.

http://wccftech.com/windows-10-privacy/

I am going to again test out windows 10 x86 on my old laptop (dell core solo from 06). It looks like at the moment it is finishing up installing (it says getting ready). I think I tried it before on said laptop but it was painfully slow. We'll see here pretty soon

TELVM wrote:

wccftech.com/windows-10-privacy/

Right, because if enough blogs link to that one questionable Czech based source (who of course does very little to back up its allegations) the it's gotta be true.

Sigh.

I try to avoid UEFI installations like the plague. I have an Intel based motherboard and the XHCI implementation is cheesy. I had great issues trying to make my scanner work with USB ports.