I have it on Dell Venue 8 Pro with 2GB RAM and it's pretty snappy. Except on such a small screen it's borderline usable with touch.

betanews.com/2015/08/14/windows-10-could-disable-pirated-games-and-unauthorized-hardware
Interesting, in that I recall a manufacturing saying they had the durability to be the 'lastman standing' with regards to PC hardware.
But I cant see the a list of 'authorised devices' starting for a good while yet.

Install touchmousepointer (free) and it allows you to use screen as a giant trackpad (like on a laptop). You get much more precise control over fiddly links

(use new beta version - you need to ebable option to keep it active in store mode (tablet mode in W10).

You can toggle it on or off.

So this is a good thing isn't it?

Haven't read that, but on a similar topic ....

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/articl...rturns-new-law

the only way the above can be enforced will be through the music industry forcing the software companies to incorporate features to disable the ripping/replaying ripped music, or supplying your details to the relevant authorities.

Got a rather long way to go before that might happen though

This sort of thing puts me off Windows 10 even more to be honest. Using it as a test is different to using it as my main machine.
I said before I had very little interest in updating from 8.1 to 10 and that interest is getting less to be honest.

Well, Opera 15+ also uses Webkit/Blink and so you could say it too is not a different browser from Chrome. But it's not just the rendering engine that makes a browser. It's overall features and usability too.

Maybe on initial release you could have argued that Opera 15 was "just a Chrome clone." But 15 releases later it's moved on a fair bit.

The upcoming Vivaldi browser is also based on Webkit/Blink and will be even more different from Chrome. It will be more like an enhanced Opera 12+, arguably what Opera 15+ should have been, judging by the complaints of long-time Opera users.

Oh, this kind of thing happens all the time. Many have little patience and expect things to "just work" without any effort or inquiry.

Yep, it just works, and nothing wrong with Cortana, hardly a gimmick, just a nice new feature.

Looking round the web 10 is getting good reviews overall

Thanks for the response!

That's the general public at large. The likes of us can make informed choices about such things, but the wider general public, rightly or wrongly, do expect things to "just work" without their own intervention (and if intervention is needed, they come running to "us" ). Microsoft has had to figure that as part of its strategy.

Technically, they do not have a monopoly but in practice most people define 90%+ share of some defined market segment as a monopoly. It's a bit of a quibble really. They're dominant enough to matter in that segment. Of course you could say that this segment is not as important as it used to be... It's more significant to businesses than to consumers now with the growth in alternative computing devices.




In their dreams. I would say they have approximately zero chance of dominating the mobile market. they would be happy to have a large enough share, say, 10-15%, to matter.

(In terms of mobile profits you could argue that Apple is the current monopolist. It has 90%+ of the profits.)


Junk that is not needed by you but that is needed by others. Bloat is subjective.

If you don't like MS then don't use it. OK, so there's some stuff you use that only works on windows. Well, you can also create your own operating system if you like or create your own Linux distro and make that product work or ask the vendor if they can make it work. No-one will put you in jail if you do.

Do you all remember (or maybe you will have to Google/Wiki) our WHOLE Worldwide culture is based on a handful of people.

First the invention of the transistor (Shockley and Bell Labs)(AlanTuring briefly) then IBM and Texas Instruments, Zilog processors, Clive Sinclair, Bill Gates and The two Apple Steves,

It's quite amazing.

(I'm sure I've missed out a few too)

And here are we are arguing, discussing bits and pieces that don't quite meet our expectations.

In fact very early on, Microsoft pretty much invited competitors to strangle them at birth. They told Lotus and WordPerfect to write for Windows. They were ignored. They told Apple to license the Mac OS. They were ignored. At the time these companies were bigger than MS I think. Certainly Lotus was pre-Windows. And Lotus and WordPerfect were the dominant business applications. Windows itself was pretty dreadful until Windows 3.1, by which time

1. MS had had some practice at writing GUI applications with Word and Excel for Mac.
2. MS created the Office bundle and "competitive upgrade" on Windows whereby anyone with a copy of 123 or WordPerfect could upgrade to the entire Office suite for less than the cost of a single Lotus 123 or WordPerfect for DOS.

By the time Lotus and WordPerfect got their acts together it was too late and Microsoft became much more ruthless from that time on.

However, despite MS's traditionally being ruthless against certain rivals the whole value proposition of Windows is to have as many vendors as possible write applications for it as easily as possible and maintaining as much backward compatibility as possible. If they shut that off then it decreases the value proposition of Windows. Of course, they would like everyone to move with the times but there's always a tension.

For example a couple of years or so ago they wanted to drop the ability to write new C++ applications targeting Windows XP. They had to backtrack on that and are still doing so because so many Visual C++ developers have too many clients with applications they need to maintain on XP. This would mean they could not upgrade their development boxes to the latest version of Visual C++ that was standards compliant. Microsoft quickly relented. Not doing so would have meant fewer sales of Visual Studio and a switch to competing tools.


I've not noticed any free ride. To be fair Windows is much more secure than it used to be. Nothing is 100% secure and the main difference these days between Windows and the rest - browsers, etc., is that, if they're open source, they are typically patched more quickly once vulnerabilities are known. The types of vulnerabilities observed in all these products are fairly similar. C buffer overruns, use-after-free and so on. It's about time they moved to more robust programming languages. But I guess a lot of it is just legacy code and thus far there has been no 100% replacement for C.

But I'm quite surprised you keep hanging about in this thread as you seem to have not a single positive point to make about Microsoft or Windows. At least noise747 does occasionally have something nice to say.

Why can't it get it? Hardware? If it's on Win 7 SP1 it should certainly qualify. In theory if your hardware runs 7 acceptably then it should run 10, or that's my understanding.

I use whatever I deem is the best product for the task at hand. I use all of the browsers mentioned. No one is better for all tasks than all others (imo). However, Firefox is my preferred browser, not because of "open web" or such but because I think it's the best overall. If MS eventually comes up with something I deem superior then I will switch to it.

Some are paranoid about spying. Not much I can do about that.

But the "without any effort or inquiry" bit. If they run to you that is effort and inquiry. I was referring to the ones who don't even do that, they just uninstall (though that in itself is a different kind of effort.).

Well, MS said one of my w7 laptops was ready ...... not my main laptop so I went ahead, seems to be OK .... but I later went to the Dell site and it's definitely not supported on 10.

MS say Win10 cannot go on my other w7 Dell laptop yet. As this is my main one, and it works faultlessly I shall wait anyway.

I am currently doing a clean reinstall of w7 on a 2007 HP hdx9000. Plenty of odd hardware on that for a good test of w10, it wasn't even supported fully on w7.

There are plenty of bad stories of rollbacks. I wouldn't force the issue. And most people are not going to take an image backup before upgrading.

Thanks for the tip, but I manage. But the thing is, they want this to be an OS across all devices, but just like W8.1 was great for touch devices and not so great with mouse, they just reversed that with W10 and touch looks neglected now.

Oh yes, I forgot that Opera have changed. Never got into Opera to be honest, I never liked the way it handled cookies.


How far back are we going? I remember Opera years back when it came out as a alternative to IE and I think Netscape at the time when it was kept going by adverts.,



I had a look at Vivaldi, they are doing to much to be honest, I still think a browser should be a browser,, if you want extras then use extensions. Even Chrome and Firefox are getting bloated these days, saying that Firefox have been bloated for years.

Cortana is a gimmick, it may be fine on mobile phones or tablets, but on a desktop it is not really usable and it sends all sort of crap to MS.


Windows 10 as a Os is ok, it is just the other crap that is added and no doubt a lot of the reviews are from sites that are stuck up Ms backside anyway. Money talks.

Windows 10 have some very annoying features, don't forget I was using it for a few months as a test, so at least I have tried it. If people do not like my opinion of it then that is just bad luck.

"not supported" could mean a lot of things - but it doesn't necessarily mean that it won't work. "not supported" could be as simple as "we haven't tried it and we aren't going to say yes just in case it causes a problem", not that they know it will be problematic

Dell and co. are not likely to put masses of effort into testing the latest OS on anything other than the hardware they currently sell. They have nothing to gain from getting every configuration of every machine they've sold in the past few years and testing it.

That said, given that most hardware is standardised and not specific to Dell or HP or whatever - if MS says it will work, it probably will work.

Suggest you try it anywsy. Everbody I know who installed it love it.

True, very true. The worrying things is because of their domination they can more or less pull the pug when they want.
Can you imagine if Ms decided to change the terms on using their software and if you do not like it then you do not use it? The whole world would come to a stand still

A mate of mine who runs a business, runs Linux, as he said he is not going to be dictated to by MS or apple for that matter. I thought he was mad when he first said about it, but he have been using linux for over five years and have no problem and after seeing the privacy issues with windows 10, maybe he is not the mad one after all.



While i am not a fan of MS and I do agree that MS is unlikely to dominate the mobile phone or tablet market, I do think it is good to have competition. I do not like domination in any sector, it is not good for us the consumers.

TBH, once my nexus goes belly up I am thinking of getting a standard phone again, all these smart phones, while they are fine for certain things, they do seem to want to know your life story. I do find it useful for looking at emails, but I have turned so much off on my Nexus like Location I do not think it is worth having.


Then would it not be a good idea there was a way to uninstall it, not just disable it? Look at some of the apps, even on Windows 8 that can not be uninstalled.

A Os should be a Os, something that have stopped happening a few years back now.
Look back to Windows 95 and what you got was 95 and that was about it, sure you got a few games and note pad, but in my version it did not even have a browser built in, I had to install that separately.

I know MS are not the only ones guilty of this, Apple is no better.


If I did not have to use Windows I would not, I am getting closer to not having to use it and just waiting for Kdenlive to get better, could be waiting a long time mind you.

Saying that I did edit and render a video last night using Kdenlive and it was fine, but that was a pretty simple video that did not need some of the features that Vegas have.
If I had the skills to create my own OS, do you think I would be working in a supermarket?

Linux does 90% of what I want to be honest, it is just the video editing part. since I need windows to do that I have to stick with it and also I paid a lot of money for Vegas, abandoning it now would be money wasted, so I will stick with windows 8.1 as Vegas seems to play up on 10 anyway.

Perhaps that's to allow business/enterprises to clamp down on what can (or cannot) be used in offices? But with BYOD becoming more popular in many environments its probably a setting that will remain optional for domain admins to enforce.