You know, in IT the golden rule is never run bleeding edge, ‘n-1’ FTW.
MS comes along with Win10 and says ‘fuck you, you will have our patch when we tell you, whether you like it or not’. Then shit fucks up for a bunch of customers. Who’s surprised?
There’s nothing stopping people - especially IT admins - from deferring upgrades like this or even controlling the updating schedule entirely just like they always have.
For ordinary consumers who don’t change any settings, most haven’t even started getting the update yet since it’s rolling out very slowly, especially to help catch issues like this.
So the biggest audience of people being hit by these bugs? People who are deliberately seeking it out by opening the update page and manually installing it or even getting the Upgrade Assistant tool to force it sooner than Windows Update is offering it to you.
This forced upgrade thing is awful. I never took these big updates as they rolled out… now I get the update whenever MS feels I must take it.
I got the upgrade prompt yesterday. My immediately apparent options were to either install then and there, or defer to some time no more than 48 hours later.
In Settings there’s a “defer updates” toggle you can enable at any time before updates are detected. But yes, once your PC has downloaded and prepared it for installation, the only thing you can do is delay the restart.
From what I read when I enabled, defer updates gives you a roughly quarterly update? I got prompted to restart the day after Anniversary went live and I was surprised when it was some unrelated patches.
Defer Updates still allows the monthly cumulative updates to come through, but it delays the feature updates like 1511 / 1607. Don’t recall how long though.
I wonder if the bluescreen issue 1511 introduced for me has been fixed yet.
OTOH, I will never know, because I cannot have the DX stack bluescreening my machine.
Ed Bott has written instructions on how to completely turn off Cortana in Windows 10 Anniversary Update. You now need a registry hack as there’s no longer a UI option for that.
One of the main reasons why I am not running Win 10 and still have a working OS basically…
I recently started using Windows Update MiniTool and strongly prefer it. It’s essentially a GUI shell around the built-in powershell update commands, so no funny business here.
Lots of words about DPI scaling improvements in the anniversary update, along with an acknowledgement of what they plan to improve next:
I still can’t figure out why MS doesn’t use Apple’s solution; render up to a very high resolution, then scale back down to native DPI. Yes, it wastes some GPU cycles but it always works and looks pretty good.
That’s…not how it works. Think it through.
The “render up to a very high resolution” is the problem Windows applications face in the first place. Old applications which don’t properly tie into the high-DPI hooks the OS offers, combined with some limitations in the OS itself which weren’t addressed until the anniversary update that the blog explains.
I haven’t had any issues with the Xbox One controller on my Win 10 Anniversary gaming rig.
However, I’m having some frustration with the arcade cabinet I just built. EDIT: Weirdly, the option to disable the login screen disappeared due to my password settings. Adjusting those caused the option to reappear and it’s working like a charm now.
The Apple solution works fine for OSX programs that aren’t retina-aware. It just renders the whole screen out to double the logical resolution, then scales it back down. Eats GPU cycles, but kills the blurries.
Denny, remove the login screen using this link or just install Winaero Tweaker from winaero.com and it will do it for you.
@stusser, badly behaved Windows programs never check the screen resolution to begin with. They render everything with fixed pixel sizes. And you can’t just double those or whatever because dependent internal calculations might not scale with that. “Rendering at a higher resolution” from the OS side is in fact impossible under Windows.
But again, this requires starting from a point where “doubling the resolution” would work in the first place. On OS X it works. On Windows it wouldn’t.
You’re misinterpreting the problem, because your solution would only work for applications which never declared anything about how they should handle different screen sizes, resolutions, or DPI settings in the first place. In such cases it obviously would be fine, and what you’re suggesting is what Windows has done for a decade now (simply scaling up the applications and making them look blurry until developers redesign things correctly).
Rather, the problem is with applications which claim to be DPI-aware, but in actuality are not DPI-aware. That’s where Windows tries to treat them correctly with DPI awareness, but since the applications falsely declared what they support, they end up broken in high-DPI screens. And hence the workaround you suggested wouldn’t work, because the workaround wouldn’t be applied to applications which declare themselves to work correctly.
That’s what the blog post I linked to is describing, including how they’re working around it (among other things).
Ahh, so the problem is that OSX and Windows are inherently different under the hood. Gotcha.
I’ve noticed massive problems since I updated my Xbox One controller with the latest firmware. Now it turns off or disconnects randomly from the PC a few times an hour. REALLY annoying & I don’t see a way to go back.
Diego