Windows has always been using the network for various things out of the box, a few minutes of tcpdump will show a newly installed Win7 vbox VM start talking to all kinds of IPs once it's booted up for the first time. It's the same with a lot of applications that you install on Windows. Upstream bandwidth is a new one though.

The bigger concern is if there's ways to circumvent or bypass any safety measures (even if you're just downloading) to get non-Microsoft stuff (e.g. malware) installed.

I have a question about Windows 10 as I'm planning to get a new laptop in around a month. Is it possible to use the printer that I'm using now with the new OS? It still works pretty well and I can still buy ink cartridges for it, so it would be a waste.

What printer do you have? Doing a search online may yield a quick answer (Unless you already have tried)

I have ~ 10 year old HP deskjet that works flawlessly on 10 (As it did on 7) and it is from the XP era.

Mine's HP as well. The problem I have is that the drivers are on CD-ROM, and laptops today don't have disk drives anymore. Would the drivers be on HP's website?

That's where I would start. I used the driver for 7 without issue for mine, though there stands the chance 10 may install the proper drivers itself since it did that for a lot of my stuff. Best to be prepared though I think.

cyharding wrote:Mine's HP as well. The problem I have is that the drivers are on CD-ROM, and laptops today don't have disk drives anymore. Would the drivers be on HP's website?

Drives can be bought for most laptops, though. Apple started cranking them out years ago back when they first started producing the Mac Mini.

Now that I'm hearing compatibility issues, I think I'll hold off Windows 10 until they come up with SP1.

With HP printers (business ones) I prefer to use the drivers that Windows assigns to the more bloated ones from the HP website.

In the case of the Lexmark printer I use at home, there are no drivers post-XP on the Lexmark site, and yet Windows 7 gets it working OK.

Win10 went on smoothly for the first 3 machines I did, but the 4th got to 80% and then rolled back; I didn't record the sub-error code, but I think it has to be network drivers given that it was through the actual install part and into the finishing stretch. So rather than just being able to leave it to cook, that means I'm going to have to find a day to spend nursing it through the process, possibly more than once.

pwhodges wrote:With HP printers (business ones) I prefer to use the drivers that Windows assigns to the more bloated ones from the HP website.

So your're saying that there are two printer drivers, one provided by Microsoft and one provided by HP? This is getting complicated I wonder if it's worth getting a Mac instead but wouldn't there be the same problems?

In the past (I haven't looked recently), HP themselves offered the choice of a dedicated and straightforward driver for each printer or a bloated and over-featured "Universal" driver. Presumably they also supplied the drivers used by MS.

cyharding wrote:So your're saying that there are two printer drivers, one provided by Microsoft and one provided by HP? This is getting complicated I wonder if it's worth getting a Mac instead but wouldn't there be the same problems?

I had a way of trying to get the proper drivers, in that I took only the least bloated installer after careful searching, as it was of late that they're trying to add the unnecessary into those drivers, ostensibly to improve end-user servicing.

Is anyone else getting an invalid certificate error when making an HTTPS request to Wikipedia?

EDIT: It looks like it is trying to return non-SSL-encrypted data over what should be an SSL channel and Firefox ain't havin' that shit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/3hrii6/reminder_to_use_high_quality_surge_protectors/

Amazing that this kid should've bought a UPS in the first place, skips it in favor of a surge protector, considering how much he bought to build this high-end machine.

I ended up buying a UPS myself a couple months ago for that exact reason. I've got about $1500 in my machine and no longer was comfortable with just a basic surge protector. It's already proven itself valuable a couple times already when we have had voltage drops for a few seconds.

MAGI_01 wrote:I ended up buying a UPS myself a couple months ago for that exact reason. I've got about $1500 in my machine and no longer was comfortable with just a basic surge protector. It's already proven itself valuable a couple times already when we have had voltage drops for a few seconds.

Bought a 500VA unit a year ago for the equivalent of US$36, and since then I use the computer with confidence knowing that the UPS is ready to make a save anytime the power lines go crazy.

-------
The more I read about Windows 10, the more I feel discomfited with the fact that it's working as much as Millennium Edition. -_-

Mr. Tines wrote:Win10 went on smoothly for the first 3 machines I did, but the 4th got to 80% and then rolled back; I didn't record the sub-error code, but I think it has to be network drivers

The code was C1900101-4000d and it was the atheros ar9200 WiFi card, which seems to be out of support (and is presumably why Toshiba didn't list my laptop model as supported for the upgrade). Disabling the device in Device Manager before trying again got the upgrade to take, re-enabling it in WinX put the machine into a restart loop, which I got out of in safe mode w/o network, disabled it again and now I'm using an old dongle I had to hand, which 'just worked'.

soul.assassin wrote:Now that I'm hearing compatibility issues, I think I'll hold off Windows 10 until they come up with SP1.

If you value your privacy in any possible way, you should keep off Windows 10 forever. It spies on everything you do, and even when you switch off all of the telemetry options it still continues behind your back. They better could have called it "Windows 10 Malware edition"

Worse is that if you have Windows 7 or 8 they are trying to backport their Windows 10 spying practices through Windows Update: [url]http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/01/microsoft_backports_data_slurp_to_windows_78_via_patches/[/url]

On top of that, the Windows 10 installer is downloaded on all Win7/8 computers, whther you want it or not. So if you have a limited data plan, and wonder why it has taken a big hit or is over quota much earlier than you expected, blame the 3-12 Gb Windows 10 installer download that was done behind your back.


Oh, and if you make use of any filesharing service for getting animes, you might find that with Windows 10 you will not be able to connect to them, as some administrators have decided that Windows 10's spying is dangerous for their practices and have banned Windows 10 users.

Paranoia is a wonderful thing. Pretty much everything that's collected is innocuous, as you can discover by reading around; good information is out there as well as wildly inaccurate assertions.

Cortana is a new facility (like Apple's Siri) that needs to know where you are and the sort of things you do to be useful. Think it'll be handy? Let it do its job. Think it's a cover for spying on you? Turn off the information you want to hide in the settings.

By default Windows 10 sends information to MS on your typing. That's not to steal your new novel, but to analyse your typing, the physical actions, that is, and the use of spelling correction and the like, with a view to improving them. Don't want to help? Turn it off.

Personally, I have no particular feeling about computers having the information on me that is readily available from publicly accessible sources in any case. If I want to hide some information, I simply do not let my computer have it. I dislike things like Cortana, because I don't like the idea that they may be able to know what I want better than I do - same with targetted advertising. But given an opportunity to give them misleading information, this amuses me (to no end, I admit).

Downloading Windows 10 before you ask for it; that's a real abuse, I agree. But downloading an enabling stub, that would be no more a problem than routine updates.

I will say only one thing.

Datadisk on a network server containing mission critical information.
RAID 0.