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Microsoft Temporarily Suspends Availability of Windows 10 Builds
Mark Wilson writes: If you haven't already downloaded Windows 10 build 10162 or 10166, you're now too late. Microsoft has suspended the availability of these two builds — previously available on the Slow and Fast rings respectively — in the run up to the big launch day in a couple of weeks' time. As we edge closer and closer to the RTM build of Windows 10, Microsoft is now asking Windows Insiders to stick with the build they currently have installed for the time being. Anyone who hasn't upgraded to these latest preview builds is out of luck. As well as disabling upgrading through Windows Update, Microsoft is also suspending ISOs and activation.
I botched up my disk drive's EFI partition while trying to install Windows 10. By the time I resolve all my problems, I may not be able to activate the damn install!
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
In the past, there were last minute "gotchas" which MS tossed in right before a build went RTM. In the antediluvian past, it was removing direct MS-DOS access in Windows ME, with XP, it was the Secure Audio Path (which was a DRM stack which required all audio drivers to be signed, in order to prevent programs like TuneBite from existing.)
I wonder what is going to be tossed in at the last minute. Hopefully nothing too headache-forming.
The summary is quite wrong.
Microsoft is asking people to receive the next update via the same channel that they'll eventually use (in a few weeks) to push the operating system to retail users. They didn't say that there would not be more builds (in fact, they explicitly said that there would be). The whole point is to test out the new distribution channel.
Any other examples from 15 years ago?
When I was 10, I was rude to my parents. I wonder if I'll call my Dad a bastard tomorrow?
Seriously - no sense of humor at all in Slashdot anymore. Conform citizen!
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
If you fire all of your QA, you don't plan to test anyway. So, what's the difference?
I hope this is the case, and I'm proven brain-dead wrong. MS hasn't really pulled any real "fast ones" recently. W10 looks like it will be the next Windows 7 or XP.
As for OS releases, MS's real interesting OS release will be Server 2016. I'm guessing MS is going to wait and see what bugs pop up with W10, get them fixed before WS2016 goes out the door (which is a wise move.)
WS2016 is (for me that is) the one to watch, especially the added virtualization and container capabilities. I wonder how many places will be using the Docker capabilities once that gets out onto servers.
My hunch is MS does not want piracy.
Since I am grandfathered in with the insider program I can download. I am doing this now so I have a free VM image for my labs as MS made it clear it is a free upgrade for registered as well as beta fresh installs as a thank you for the insider program.
I can't wait until it updates to RTM and I can finally get RSAT tools to make it useful as a virtual joined computer. In the meantime I am stuck with time bombed versions of 8.1 for the labs. 10 being light and EFI means very light resources and fast boot times :-)
http://saveie6.com/
Let's see: Windows 3.1 was ok. Win95 sucked. Win98 good. WinME sucked. WinXP great. WinVista sucked. Win7 good. Win8...yeah what about Win8? And what happened to Win9? And now Win10? WTF??!!!
Let me correct you a bit..
Windows 3 (3.1, workgroups) = Great OS for the Time
Windows 95 (a, b, c) = A huge leap forward but very buggy
Windows 98 (rel, SE) = Great but buggy
Windows ME = Useless
Windows 2000 = Excellent OS for the time.
Windows XP = Great
Windows Vista = Great if you had decent driver support.. (the OS was great, was communicability/driver issues people had.)
Windows 7 = Best release to date
Windows 8 (rel, 8.1) = A lesson learned on not listening to the community.
Windows 10 = Good, it's what windows 8 should have been.
As for windows 9, it's been stated several times they would not name of for various 3rd party code comparability reasons.
if(version.StartsWith("Windows 9")) /* 95 and 98 */
{
} else {
1) Its probably not available. If its available, it won't be soon.
2) I already had a copy of build 10162. The problem is that the Insider blog mentioned that Microsoft would NOT be activating 10162 builds anymore.
3) It still activated for me today. But the experience was odd. When I ran the initial install, it hung at "Please wait for a moment". I was certain that it was hung because Microsoft was not validating build 10162 anymore (sic). Of course, I waited for 30 minutes, and then rebooted. It then displayed a "login" (activation, whatever you want to call it), asking for my "insider" account (which is basically linked to your Windows Outlook account, provided you had already successfully applied for an insider account). The install appears to be complete, and working as expected.
If you care about having a working copy of Windows 10 (beta) for the next two weeks, install/activate 10162 now. I doubt it will work if you're not already registered with the Windows Insider program. I don't know if it (build 10162) will activate if you try installation tomorrow.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
I saw it on a coworkers machine and we were both disappointed.
The whole endless list menu is way too long. /S
Love the Single Letters too to make it longer still.
If this was a tablet Ok fine but this is gonna cause training issues.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
This just in: Well known Linux zealot and anti-Microsoft troll previews Windows 10, calls it shit. News at 11.
Works for me too, and outside the browser, so no cookies needed.
wget http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink...
Windows 10 Insider Preview (x64) - Build 10162
Download (3.86 GB)
SHA-1 hash: C1C08D22876F45444880275D26CB5ECB8347620B
http://windows.microsoft.com/e...
It was build 10162 and previous that Microsoft was going to turn off the activations. They did not say that "fast ring" evaluators were going to have any problem with activations. Thus, your 10224 build works fine. (The issue is moot for me, because I got my install activated anyway; just not on the machine I intended.)
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
The new start menu is pretty nice. "Pin to start" is great. You can go with small or large icons for the pinned apps. The pc mode is improved where you don't have the ridiculous full screen "modern apps" that you have to switch away from with alt-tab or by using hot corners. Hot corners in general are gone. Dual monitor is pretty good. All my devices work. I'm using it on my daily work and home machines. VMWare runs fine on it.
On the not so good side. It is hard to make search only search my machine and not the internet. You really feel this with a slow connection. Sometimes the start menu will not come up when I hit the windows logo. They kind of dumbed down the windows update making so you can't pick which ones you want now. That may be a good thing for most folks but I don't like it. Settings in general are an ugly mix of modern and classic. Device Manager and some of the Network settings are classic but the tray interfaces are all moder. The Moder App version One Note is confusing. It is even more confusing that you end up with two versions of OneNote if you install office. You can set the zoom / scale differently on multiple monitors but you sometimes get weird font behavior if you drag a window across the monitors.
It feels like an improvement over ghastly windows 8 , which I previously ran on all machines so I could get task bars on all monitors.
It really is in a lot of ways.
1. They still have two separate control panels: The windows vista era one, and the one that uses that butt-ugly 'modern UI' that looks and works like something thrown together on linux 15 years ago, complete with badly rendered fonts. They didn't even try to consolidate them either. Fucking idiotic.
2. The new scheme follows office2013/16's 'all white' mantra, making it hard on the eyes. Like windows vista and up, this is not easily editable. Window metrics are fixed and unchangeable without hacks, like win 8.1.
3. The start menu is usable again, but still isn't as flexible as previous ones. Startisback++ exists and works fine, but still.
4. They totally hosed ddraw fullscreen support which breaks a lot of backward compatibility. There's no reason for this either. Hacks that existed for win 8.1 no longer work (disabledwm.exe).
5. More pointless 'metro' apps that also look like shitty linux X11 from 15 years ago. What's worse is that some of these have replaced traditional windows utilities like calculator.
These are the issues I've noticed. This list is not meant to be all encompassing.
Has anybody tried Skype on Windows 10? Does it work? It crashes the moment I start it up on my Winbook in either tablet or laptop mode
is that what stopped my Sonicstage (which worked flawlessly on Windows 2000) from properly detecting my NetMD on xp?
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
One major issue which for me means I'll be disabling Windows Update when they EOL 7: NO MEDIA CENTER IN 10.
Fuck that. I'm sticking with 7.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I'm on 10166 but when I try to launch Visual Studio I get a bad install warning on some of the choices to start it.
I loaded Steam and tried defense grid 2 but the video drivers aren't working properly.
Start up and surfing is faster than Ubuntu 14 was on the laptop - so that was an eye opener.
I hate that windows is moving to type it to find it, I prefer list it and click it.
I don't want to remember what what I need to use. I want the list of stuff so I can find what I need to use.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
You probably don't know the difference as a windows user.
As someone who has to develop on linux, Mac and windows, switching over to my windows partitions or vm env's is like going back in time a decade or more.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
I've been trying out the various Technical Previews over the past few months and I'm not surprised that they've pulled the plug on this. There's no way it was going to be ready by the target date of July 29.
They didn't kill their July 29 RTM date. They suspended new TP builds "briefly", specifically to switch over to using the production channels distribution channels. According to the quote, it sounds likely that they will resume TP builds prior to RTM.
Considering at one time they averaged 2 months between fast ring releases, any new TP release prior to RTM would be much faster.
And then there's all the pointless, useless "apps".
You think that is a recent phenomenon? It's been that way since Windows came into existence.
It's not that I disagree with you though, the Windows Store is full of crapps. Microsoft has specific plans to crack down hard on those, so I'm going to withhold judgment on the state of the Windows 10 Store until some time after RTM. Also consider that app capabilities will increase due to a larger API set of the UWP and the ability to put Win32 apps in the Windows Store (via Project Centennial).
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
2. The new scheme follows office2013/16's 'all white' mantra, making it hard on the eyes. Like windows vista and up, this is not easily editable. Window metrics are fixed and unchangeable without hacks, like win 8.1.
Incorrect. The colour scheme is very easy to edit, just right click on the desktop and select "personalize..." from the menu. Like Windows 8.1, it has a feature where the colour scheme will track the colour scheme of the desktop wallpaper, or you can edit it manually.
Window metrics scale with DPI and accessibility settings, or as you say you can do some trivial registry edits.
4. They totally hosed ddraw fullscreen support which breaks a lot of backward compatibility. There's no reason for this either.
The reason is for high DPI support. If the app doesn't scale it's going to be unusable on a 4k monitor. Sadly, sometimes you have to break broken apps to progress.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
1. They still have two separate control panels: The windows vista era one, and the one that uses that butt-ugly 'modern UI' that looks and works like something thrown together on linux 15 years ago, complete with badly rendered fonts. They didn't even try to consolidate them either. Fucking idiotic.
Wait, what? I though they consolidated them late last year already.
I'd call it more a case of "work in progress". They both still exist, but more and more settings are moving into the new "modern UI" settings.
No way they'll have this completely transitioned by RTM (not even sure if they are planning to transition everything)
I recently built a Windows 7 box (out of an old Linux box - my how times have changed) and it was a hair pulling, teeth gnashing, ragefest.
It makes you really appreciate how much help Linux gives you in sorting out weird problems.
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Activation can be delayed on Windows at least twice. It's kind of hidden but is supported. Lets you have sort of a trial period.
Open a root prompt (cmd, powershell, whatever). /rearm /r /t 0 if you want to use the command line for that too).
slmgr[.vbs]
Reboot (shutdown
The slmgr (Software Licensing Manager) script, and its rearm flag, is documented here: https://technet.microsoft.com/...
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Selecting from a few predefined themes and colors is hardly flexible compared to past editions of windows. I shouldn't have to edit the registry to get rid of all that white space (and color) either. Those themes also don't affect the majority of the window, which stays white. The metrics are also not editable in the GUI either, and the defaults are terrible. Sure, the 'high contrast' themes are there, but they don't resolve the metrics issue, are much more limited in what can be colored, and all of this requires editing text files and hoping they don't get clobbered. If you're working on a domain controlled machine, forget it, you're stuck with white on white hell (or green and black hell).
In-window ddraw seems to work fine, it's full screen that doesn't. If it's trivial to scale the UI with the gpu, then it's trival to scale ddraw buffers, or just honor the exclusive video mode switch like past windows editions (even windows 8.1 disables dwm while doing this). Whether it's 4k,2k, or 640x480, d3d and opengl applications' requests are honored, so why not ddraw? Better yet, make these scaling options toggles in an advanced pane. Of course, this solution is anathema to the U'X' hipsters running things now.
I bought a laptop (Core2-Duo CPU, 2MB RAM) that came with Vista shortly after Vista was released. I actually liked it, and that's saying something when you consider that every single Microsoft OS has let me down at one time or another. It seemed to me that most of the people that didn't like Vista were trying to run it on systems that were optimized for XP.
I now have Windows 7 on all my gaming systems (long story, i'm all about using the right tool for the job), and I'm considering Win10.
When politicians are involved, everyone loses.
My roommate bought one that came with Vista in 2007, it had better specs, and she would swear at it non-stop because it would always be running something in the background/slow doing nothing but word processing. Does my anecdote trump yours?
I'm on Win8.1, I'd upgrade to Win7 if I could, Win10 isn't touching my system until I can confirm without a doubt that it doesn't suck as much as Win8.1. If that's the case, it'll get installed but no way am I subscribing to the yearly release Microsoft wants. My next system will be Microsoft free.