Considering moving to Windows 10 from Windows 7 - better for ED?

Another IT guy here. Win 10 had some serious when it first came out, including security concerns as to what was being reported back to M$. Those have pretty much been sorted or can be disabled now, and it's otherwise a very smooth OS. The bottom line is that M$ will eventually stop supporting Win 7, and they've said that Win 10 will be the last windows platform they do, with just an endless stream of updates to it. Sooner or later you're going to have to bite the bullet if you want to stay current & secure.


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Exactly

Issues with having to use Netsh and the cmd line to fix stuff. Most IT workers who've been doing it since NT 4 and Win95 should know these things, admittedly we all have to look some of then up because we've "forgotten". The new os's have given us so much.

That said during the initial Windows 10 rollout we did have to block it on our managed domains and roll back a far few users who just click on anything that comes up on screen telling them to do stuff.

Mostly that was due to previous releases of Windows making a pigs ear of the upgrade or migration when in a domain environment. That and them being sent out too early without proper testing, M$ assume you'll just bin all the old pc's and buy new ones with the latest OS on board.

In the real world the hardly ever happens.
Most IT professionals don't want or need that hassle and like to wait till all the driver and system cockups have been ironed out. This is why so few corps used Vista, it never really lost its initial stigma due to the balls up it was in the domain environment. That said tamed it did OK.
 
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I work in the IT industry and as such am able to access all the upto date gear, and some that's so upto date it's not been released yet. That said I have 2 machines on Windows 10 and all the others run 7,8 or Linux. Anything older than that I run as a hyper v or VMware machine.

Just to give you an idea of my computer OS nerdy news, I also run OS X on my Mac which is by no means current, and an Amiga on OS 4, I have a hyper v of everything that MS have made as an archive museum, old install discs from eBay are your friend there, and the crap we throw out at work.

My newest machine built specifically to play ED runs on 10. I did install it with 7 when I first built it and did some bench testing. I then installed 8, and did the same. Finally I installed 10. It runs faster on 10, boots in about 10 seconds, compared to 7 which takes nearly 30 seconds. There are a lot of technical differences under the hood so to speak in 10 but generally it's much less resource hungry.

There is a few things you need to turn off like the annoying feature where it can serve out your windows updates to your local network and other pc's on the internet, this feature eats bandwidth and it saves gigs of space on your hd, if you have an ssd that's important.

Why should I serve out updates to people I don't know on the Internet, just to save M$ bandwidth.

I also turned of Cortana, I don't use Siri on my IPhone, and never used the google voice search on phone or PCs so am not going to need it. Plus paranoia mode, it's set to listen to you if you have a mic on the pc, ready for questions, I don't like that. There's a bunch of stuff that can be disabled, much the same as in Windows 8 and 7 had some M$ snooping built in, agreed 10 has more.


Just for fun I installed it on one of my old PCs that came with 7 and due to the architecture was not able to properly run 7 after all it's updates. Windows 10 runs fine on it, it's useable again. So shows its able to teach an old dog new tricks.

It's not for everyone agreed but my experience with users is after a while they grow to like it, even the old crew who hated Windows xp when it came out. I remember deploying XP people hated it, the same people didn't want their XP stations to go when we sent out 7 to them years later, one even asked if he could keep it to take home. He was blown away when I showed him XP mode in 7 :)

One thing to note some of the old PCs drivers are still being updated in 10 where a system running 7 or 8 says there isn't an update.


My advise to anyone thinking about using 10, who's worried about the changes. Install one of the free Virtual machine platforms on your computer and install 10 onto it, you can try before you buy without a key, try it out to see if you like it.

As discussed here there are ways to get 10 free still, some of the manufacturer based Windows 7 and 8 keys are pre authorised for updates to 10 so you may not need to. Get a Windows key finder to check your key installed and compare it to the sticker on the machine. If they are different you'll likely have a corporate install which may be already authorised, the likes of Dell, HP and Fujitsu to name a few do this. The sticker key is there to licence the individual machine, and for reinstalls without the factory restore discs.


When it comes to change in the IT world I'm a bit of a stick in the mud, but now I'm on 10 I can't go back.

How the f-bomb do you turn off Cortana?

And the list of other bloat ware is pretty long.

And I hate the whole "opt out" business model.
Obviously we'll all end up on it, but while I can get a fresh license of 7 I'll park there.
 
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Every company tries to push updates. Ever got asked by Adobe if you'd like to update your reader? These updates are essential for a product, I've seen so many outdated computers and the related problems, it always hurts me when people want to live in the past ;)

The auto update functions are actually the best thing that could happen to users. If you don't know how to disable them you aren't supposed to decide about it, at least not if your machine is connected to the internet ;)

Disabling auto updates in Win 10 is an epic mission, and I have damn good reasons for wanting to. If I ever meet the people responsible for that choice, I will be sent to gaol for assault, but they will be unable to code for the rest of their lives, and I will rot in gaol satisfied, knowing my sacrifice was for the good of humanity.

Z...
 
Totally agree with the IT guys above. I'm a server admin plus I have various music hardware and software that is notoriously resistant to change. USB 3.0? Ext soundcard says no :D

Unlike many of my tech colleagues I'm not interested in upgrading just for the sake of having the latest thing, at least for personal stuff. I need to see a genuine benefit. Still running a Win 7 laptop for audio stuff. My Android phone is now a few sweets behind hehe.


That said, I couldn't say no to free and switched my old gaming desktop to Win 10. Overall performance is better, stability is better. Perfect? Hardly, but what is? After tweaking it to my liking I'm happy enough, and I wouldn't go back.

And you can take the resistance too far - would you still prefer XP over 7, for example? How about 98 / ME? ;) Yes there might still be reasons to do this, but I'm happy to leave them behind!
 
From windows 8 wikipedia page :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_8

in Video subsystem

....Other major features include preemptive multitasking with finer granularity (DMA buffer, primitive, triangle, pixel, or instruction-level),[128] reduced memory footprint, improved resource sharing, and improved timeout detection and recovery.......

MS put in windows 8's kernel some tweaks that makes it better at gaming even without dx 12 support. Same is on Windows 10.

When i upgraded computer on Win 8 from 7 , gaming was better even on old games.

For gaming don't stick with Windows 7
 
Disabling auto updates in Win 10 is an epic mission, and I have damn good reasons for wanting to. If I ever meet the people responsible for that choice, I will be sent to gaol for assault, but they will be unable to code for the rest of their lives, and I will rot in gaol satisfied, knowing my sacrifice was for the good of humanity.

Z...

Disabling auto updates takes two minutes. If people struggle with it they shouldn't have admin rights. In other words, if you can't disable them they are good for you.
 
Windows 7 works great for me for the time being, but it will likely be the last version of Windows I bother using on my home PCs. DirectX 12 is just another reason for me to not update to Windows 10. Vulkan is the way of the future – my future, at any rate.

As for this game, my graphics cards are getting a little long in the tooth now, but I still get around 145 PFS or so on world surfaces on ultra 1080p when not using VSync. I have my cards optimized for double precision compute performance though for crunching for scientific and humanitarian research in the background while I game.

...

Edit: Looks like it's gone up a bit since I last checked. Hovering around 170 FPS. Better drivers and/or game optimization, I guess. Funny thing, it looks like some stuff is tied into the frame rate, as system maps loaded a lot faster with VSync turned off and snap looking around the cockpit at the HUD panels was a lot snappier.

eZwHp4m.png
 
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Windows 10 is OK.

Caveat emptor: it is riddled with spyware. TURN OFF the Xbox stuff that the recent edition installed which will help performance.

When I ran my suite of gaming performance tests on my rig, W10 performed slightly worse compared to 7. But we are talking within 5%.

Ellie in VR oculus performed slightly worse but like I said within 5%.
 
It works good for me and ED. Boots, sleeps and shuts down super-duper fast.

MS has fully moved past Win7, so if you stick with that don't expect updates. Win8 is next on the chopping block- though a few years from now.

MS are adding lots of nice stuff in the next big update for 'creators'. And they learned from the backlash of Win8 original edition - the desktop users essentially have two interface options and can boot right to the old desktop mode.

The biggest issue I have had is that some system tools are not in the same menus, but the search function is efficient for finding those.
 
You can disable most telemetry features. Everything that remains was already present in Win 7/8.

"But users don't know and just click express installation..."

If they don't know how to install windows they shouldn't do it. I don't try to fix the breaks of my car either.

Those telemetry updates on 7 can be avoided/uninstalled. They can't in windows 10. You are correct that disabling cortana and such does limit the amount of spying 10 can do.
 
I have my cards optimized for double precision compute performance though for crunching for scientific and humanitarian research in the background while I game.

These Titans?

Anyway, would it be possible for you to test something for me? There is a setting in AppConfig.xml in the main game directory called "PreferNativeDoubles". Evidently it has to do with the default precision of terrain generation and is set to "false" by default. With the GPUs that I have with significantly lower FP64 than FP32 performance changing this setting to true seems to produce a moderate frame rate hit with little benefit. Could you change the value to true and see what sort of performance you get on planetary surfaces, and if there are any loading/LOD improvements?
 
I use win 10... mainly since I can stream the few games from my Xbox I don't have on the PC....works relatively seamlessly too [up]
 
Privacy ..

Win7 works just fine, for the minimal performance gain you will get it would probably be more cost effective to put that money for Win10 into hardware instead. Win10 offers little improvement.
 
Privacy ..

Win7 works just fine, for the minimal performance gain you will get it would probably be more cost effective to put that money for Win10 into hardware instead. Win10 offers little improvement.

How much hardware can you get for £€$0.00
While M$ have openly not removed the ability to get 10 for free by enabling the accessability option temporarily, and dont seem to be bothering to get round to it, also most corporate supplied 7 and 8 keys will upgrade free anyhow. Why worry.

That said I understand some people's reservations. 7 M$ support is pegged for 2 years iirc. So everyone still has breathing room yet.
 
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As an IT Tech i'll give you my opinion.

We've upgraded all the systems at work to 10 and all its done is created more work, think VISTA bad.

I've used 2 PCs gaming wise for ED with Win10 and they were, well seemed ok but when i was on 10 ED lost a lot of FPS due to NVIDIA shield putting some terrible overlay on top of my 3 screen setup, Win7 is flawless.

My opinion: not broken dont fix, 7 is great, 10 isnt :).
 
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