You actually have to opt-in to the Bing-driven image gallery, or at least I had to, which isn't really an ad gallery by any stretch of the imagination (any more than typing "scenery" in Google Images is an ad system). Does it work by default? I thought choosing a static lock screen image was the default option, has that changed?
I never saw the Tomb Raider one either, so that's really confusing.
You actually have to opt-in to the Bing-driven image gallery, or at least I had to, which isn't really an ad gallery by any stretch of the imagination (any more than typing "scenery" in Google Images is an ad system). Does it work by default? I thought choosing a static lock screen image was the default option, has that changed?
I never saw the Tomb Raider one either, so that's really confusing.
It must have changed, if it used to be that way -- I did not choose to have the rotating images on the lock screen, but they're showing up on my recent clean install. That said, I've never seen an advertisement so I've never cared enough to figure out how to turn off the pictures.
You actually have to opt-in to the Bing-driven image gallery, or at least I had to, which isn't really an ad gallery by any stretch of the imagination (any more than typing "scenery" in Google Images is an ad system). Does it work by default? I thought choosing a static lock screen image was the default option, has that changed?
I never saw the Tomb Raider one either, so that's really confusing.
It's the toggle at the bottom of this window, on by default. I don't think it's always been there, but I'm not entirely sure. It was definitely present when the Tomb Raider ad happened.
I guess that means that Home/Pro users can look forward to forced ads on the lockscreen sometime in the near future? That's the only reasoning I can think of why a lock screen even exists on a desktop/laptop and why MS would be so adamant about forcing it on people.
I'm assuming there will be a workaround, there usually is for this sorta thing.
you can turn the ads off, it's one setting under settings-->personalization-->lock screen. there's a "turn tips off" toggle.
It took me like 15 minutes to figure out what you were even talking about because I didn't even remember that lock screen stuff was a thing, as that's always been off.
I know that you can turn off lockscreen ads, my point is that the only reason I can think of for Microsoft to be disabling the option to remove the lock screen is that they would want to remove the option to disable ads on it.
There's no reason to even have a lockscreen on a non-mobile device, unless you like having a picture instead of a login screen? We've already had that functionality for decades - it's called a screensaver.
No, there are many reasons to have a lockscreen on non mobile devices. Shared computers, public computers, enterprise computers where a lockscreen looks better/would be preferable to having just a person's name and a password prompt visible.
Just because you don't think there is a reason to have a lockscreen in your use case doesn't mean there aren't millions of devices where it could be useful.
First of all, you've provided one reason, and it's not even a good one: again, we've had that functionality for decades, it's called screensavers. I highly doubt anyone in a corporate environment gives a shit about whether or not there is a pretty picture of a mountain or the old "press CTRL+ALT+DEL to login" box (which is actually useful) on their machines or a password prompt.
At any rate, even if you were right and the overlords actually cared what Carl from Accounting's PC looked like when he wasn't sitting at it there is no reason to force that functionality on home users.
Also re: lockscreen ads, people getting an ad for Tomb Raider is kinda funny when you find out later that less than 2% of PC copies of Rise of the Tomb Raider were sold on the Windows Store compared to through Steam.
Tangent, but requiring ctrl+alt+del was a security measure, in Windows NT based OSes that specific key command would only be recognized by the system/winlogon, and wouldn't be intercepted by other programs.
The theory was that by hitting ctrl+alt+del to activate a login prompt you would know that that login prompt was genuine, and not a spoofed one designed to steal logins/passwords, because third party programs wouldn't know that you had pressed anything on the keyboard.
Windows calls this a "secure attention sequence", but similar functionality exists in other operating systems.
Nah, Ctrl-Alt-Delete to log in is still there. If it's enabled, instead of clicking/swiping/pressing a key to dismiss the lock screen, you hit Ctrl-Alt-Del.
Nah, Ctrl-Alt-Delete to log in is still there. If it's enabled, instead of clicking/swiping/pressing a key to dismiss the lock screen, you hit Ctrl-Alt-Del.
It seems a lot more a case of, "People didn't want our (old) security measure, so we added another way to make it optional."
I was just wondering if there was some weird security reason I didn't know about that would make pressing a key prior to starting to type your password better than just typing your password, that's why I asked.
I decided to go ahead and set up a partition for Windows 10 so that I can activate it with my retail Windows 8.1 key. I really should have used the key on the initial Windows 10 installation rather than immediately wiping it, but hindsight is 20/20.
So in the fun area of things broken in Windows 10.
Has anyone else noticed that trying to bring up system settings through Cortana--checking updates, setting up a PIN--nothing works? It works on my Surface Pro 3, but every system setting you can bring up via Cortana's search bar is broken on my PC.
It's a pity that you didn't post that a few hours ago, or I'd have checked myself. It's too late now, unfortunately.
I'm going to be installing it on my SP3 on the 30th to check if my Windows 8 retail key is now also a Windows 10 retail key (hopefully I won't have to wrestle the thing to install Home when I already have entitlement for Pro through the OEM upgrade). Of course, that's worthless for answering your question.
It's a pity that you didn't post that a few hours ago, or I'd have checked myself. It's too late now, unfortunately.
I'm going to be installing it on my SP3 on the 30th to check if my Windows 8 retail key is now also a Windows 10 retail key (hopefully I won't have to wrestle the thing to install Home when I already have entitlement for Pro through the OEM upgrade). Of course, that's worthless for answering your question.
Well, you would've had to install it on your SP3 anyway.
According to Microsoft, it's a sign of a broken User profile (with corruptions in Cortana) that cannot be fixed. Which means I need to recreate a new user profile.
I could be off base, but I remember this being a complete nightmare in the past, that left you with broken file structures, missing references, and duplicate files up the wazoo. I'm worried about migrating my OneDrive data too. So I'm doing a complete backup of my entire C drive in case I need to wipe away the horrible mess that the account transfer leaves (or recover files, which you can do from it as well) and start from scratch.
I may prefer Microsoft to its competitors, but I've used Windows long enough to know the lesson: never leave a backup to Windows that you could just make a complete copy yourself of. You'll regret it.
I'm annoyed--very annoyed, to the point where if I knew i was going to do this a few weeks ago I may've held off upgrading from Windows 8.1--but what did I expect upgrading Windows across versions? I'm shocked it works as well as it does on my Surface Pro frankly.
I'm annoyed--very annoyed, to the point where if I knew i was going to do this a few weeks ago I may've held off upgrading from Windows 8.1--but what did I expect upgrading Windows across versions? I'm shocked it works as well as it does on my Surface Pro frankly.
I hear that completely destroying all of your program installations and data is the cool, trendy thing to do now.
So, about 5 minutes from calling Microsoft and rebuilding my user profile, and after backing up my boot drive, I decided, "What the hell, I'll rebuild my search results index."
~39,000 search results is a lot of results. I'd actually rebuilt it just last week as part of my experiments with Windows 10.
As it started to re-index, finally, I decided to check my bug--viola, system settings now can be opened through Cortana.
Assuming this is, in fact, a fix--everyone else who might run into this issue, take note. I've heard pretty often that upgrading an existing profile across operating systems is inviting disaster, and I sort of believe it, but at least you can avoid the nightmare that is recreating your profile from scratch. Learn from my mistakes, maybe you can avoid wasting a whole afternoon. I'm starting to suspect a number of issues with Cortana's search results can be solved by spending 10 to 20 minutes re-indexing everything you want to search.
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ShadowfireVermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered Userregular
Yeah, a lot of those user profile issues are a nightmare to fix. Sometimes just creating a new admin account is enough to fix the problem. If that doesn't fix the old profile, but the new profile does work, you can either copy your data over to the new profile and leave the old one to the wolves, or you can occasionally copy the tilelayerdata from the new to the old.
Failing all that, sometimes an in-place install of Win10 fixes the problem using the 1511 upgrade.
Otherwise, nuke it from orbit and start over. The user profiles in Win10 are a fucking nightmare right now.
Call me crazy, but what's wrong with Windows Explorer? It still works well, for me, when digging up files. I mean, I get that Cortana should be better, but jumping through hoops to re-index constantly doesn't really get you where you want to go.
Explorer's great if you've organized your files in a meaningful fashion. But Apple (and now MS) have been trying to force a shift in how people store information -- where and how something is stored becomes irrelevant if you can find what you're looking for by typing in a keyword. I suspect this has something to do with their respective cloud storage services. The more "drives" you have, the harder it is to remember where you stuck something -- unless where you stuck it doesn't mater at all.
I would argue that Microsoft/apple/google aren't trying to force people into shifting how they store things, they're reacting to how people actually have been storing things and trying to make it easier to find.
Look at a "normal" person who actually still does have things stored on their computers, be it pictures, etc. Most of them won't have things stored in any kind of coherent system, except for maybe pictures if they use import tools that do it for them. This is a bit of an extreme case but I once saw someone who had everything stored in the downloads folder that lived on the desktop. every file created, every picture from camera, etc. And the only "order" she had was that it was sorted by date and she would kind of remember when that picture was from or when she typed out that recipe, etc.
Usability researchers have been saying that a lot of people have trouble with the files and directory paradigm for something like two decades now. IIRC, Raskin mentioned it in The Humane Interface.
Explorer's great if you've organized your files in a meaningful fashion. But Apple (and now MS) have been trying to force a shift in how people store information -- where and how something is stored becomes irrelevant if you can find what you're looking for by typing in a keyword. I suspect this has something to do with their respective cloud storage services. The more "drives" you have, the harder it is to remember where you stuck something -- unless where you stuck it doesn't mater at all.
It wasn't even just a cloud thing. Search was an emphasis in Longhorn around the same time that WinFS was going to allow us to tag files with keywords and seamlessly unify drives. I'm still kinda sad WinFS never panned out; the stuff it would do sounded great.
ReFS promises to do a lot of what WinFS was supposed to do. We're just seeing it 10 years later being rolled out in a sensible way.
it debuted as a file system you could use as storage drives on Server 2012 (maybe R2, can't remember), but you can't use it as an OS drive. I believe you can now create ReFS drives in Windows 10, but again cannot use as the OS drive. at some point in the future they'll add the ability for it to be used as the OS drive, but not by default, and then eventually new computers shipped will have it by default.
WinFS looked great but was ahead of it's time. We didn't have the I/O needed for it to be feasible. We're only just starting to see the benefits of it.
All of my files are stored in a way that makes sense to me, I've noticed that the less I use Windows' "helpful" search/library features the more work I get done (I realize that this sentence makes me sound like one of those "it interrupts my WORKFLOW!" kind of people, but I'm not, I promise). I don't believe that it really takes anything more than a token amount of time to establish a data structure that leads to you being able to find information you need fairly quickly using your existing operating system. You could ask me where any piece of work or media I possess is on my machine and I could tell you without even turning it on or using search at all.
The only part of my computer that still retains the wild west atmosphere is a huge folder of funny pictures I have saved from the internet that I have to look through if I ever need one that I feel is appropriate for a conversation at hand:
I know that people (and I am including Microsoft Engineers in this statement) have been trying to find new ways for people to search for and retrieve saved data for quite a while now, but I don't know if this is an example of me being different from the norm or if this is just another example of people looking for a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist. Of course if you don't have any structure to your data storage it's going to be hard to find something later on - this exists in PCs and movie collections and cookbooks and warehouses. I believe this is a user issue, not a software issue.
If there is one area in modern Windows that desperately needs standardization with regards to meaningful data placement it is saved game locations for PC games. If you are a PC gamer for any length of time odds are you have games saved in everywhere from My Documents to My Saves to %appdata% to the game's install folder to who the hell knows where else, which makes backing up saves before an OS update or reinstall or transferring them to another machine a pain in the ass. If there was one standard location for saved games you could just point [YOUR CLOUD STORAGE PROGRAM HERE] at that directory and presto, now every game you install has cloud saves.
Similar statements were made around the advent of GUIs. My father recalls the computer science folks at his campus looking at the new Mac Classics with disdain. Anyone could use a command line if they put in the minimum amount of effort. An easy to use graphical interface was just holding people back from using the machine to it's full potential. This was just companies trying to fix a user problem with needlessly expensive technology.
Edit: agreed on the save game thing, though. There's a freeware utility that makes managing that a lot easier. I personally just run a Python script that junctions everything into a Dropbox folder.
The problem with relying solely on searching is discoverability. If you forget what something is called, or that it exists at all, there's no way to find it ever again.
The problem with relying solely on searching is discoverability. If you forget what something is called, or that it exists at all, there's no way to find it ever again.
For non-text-based stuff, yeah. This is why the default "recent stuff" explorer view in Windows is great.
There have been a few alternative metaphors proposed that use spacial navigation. The most livable one I've seen (which was/is also a Raskin thing) is an infinitely zoomable plane. Which is neat in theory. In practice, I kinda suspect that I'd spend most of my time working at a microscopic level, enormously large ten year old documents towering above me, lost forever.
and I also think a lot of people heavily over-estimate the amount of stuff a "normal" actually has. Pictiures will be the big thing. Past that? What does the average person actually keep on their computers now? Not a whole bunch. I look at myself as a "power user" I have a NAS full of video that I could honestly unplug and not even notice for a while for how much I use it now. I have my resume and a couple work related documents. As I look through the rest of what i have..... there isn't anything I really need to keep, if I'm being honest with myself.
Even 3-4 years ago I would have said thing like tax information or banking documentation but all of that stuff is stored online more securely than I wold store it at home (if you trust government/banking systems).
I have about 1TB worth of pictures, that's the bulk of what I care about for locally stored stuff.
The overwhelming majority of the data on my home PC is media: movies, TV shows, music, audiobooks, old radio shows, images, etc. Second to that are archived installers for games or actual installed games. "The Cloud" is great but with hard drive space being as cheap as it is now I feel much more comfortable with all of that stuff being local and available at a moment's notice at any time regardless of network speed or connection.
I kinda worry about a future where everything is stored online and the average user just owns a glorified terminal and access all of their information remotely (basically the current Chromebook craze but on a higher level) so when Microsoft does stuff like push OneDrive as hard as they have it makes me uneasy.
On the subject of weird stuff in Windows 10--my PC is plugged both into my new monitor, and my 4K TV in the next room. Is there a way to keep Windows 10 from automatically going to "extend screen" when it detects someone turned on my TV? In Windows 8 it simply ignored it until I commended it to switch.
EDIT: And now it's not happening. Windows truly is a strange, mysterious force.
On the subject of weird stuff in Windows 10--my PC is plugged both into my new monitor, and my 4K TV in the next room. Is there a way to keep Windows 10 from automatically going to "extend screen" when it detects someone turned on my TV? In Windows 8 it simply ignored it until I commended it to switch.
EDIT: And now it's not happening. Windows truly is a strange, mysterious force.
make a backup that isn't relying on the rollback before you do. I'm sure 99.9% of people who do rollback have no issue but you don't want to risk being the 0.1% and no backups.
Other than that, I'm sure a great many of the 300million-ish Windows 10 installs are 8.1 upgrades. It goes fine, unless it doesn't, in which case you have a backup. But again, 99.9% of the time it will go fine.
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There was a Tomb Raider one a while ago.
Yeah, I'm confused about this too.
You actually have to opt-in to the Bing-driven image gallery, or at least I had to, which isn't really an ad gallery by any stretch of the imagination (any more than typing "scenery" in Google Images is an ad system). Does it work by default? I thought choosing a static lock screen image was the default option, has that changed?
I never saw the Tomb Raider one either, so that's really confusing.
It must have changed, if it used to be that way -- I did not choose to have the rotating images on the lock screen, but they're showing up on my recent clean install. That said, I've never seen an advertisement so I've never cared enough to figure out how to turn off the pictures.
It's the toggle at the bottom of this window, on by default. I don't think it's always been there, but I'm not entirely sure. It was definitely present when the Tomb Raider ad happened.
(image spoiled for size)
First of all, you've provided one reason, and it's not even a good one: again, we've had that functionality for decades, it's called screensavers. I highly doubt anyone in a corporate environment gives a shit about whether or not there is a pretty picture of a mountain or the old "press CTRL+ALT+DEL to login" box (which is actually useful) on their machines or a password prompt.
At any rate, even if you were right and the overlords actually cared what Carl from Accounting's PC looked like when he wasn't sitting at it there is no reason to force that functionality on home users.
Also re: lockscreen ads, people getting an ad for Tomb Raider is kinda funny when you find out later that less than 2% of PC copies of Rise of the Tomb Raider were sold on the Windows Store compared to through Steam.
yes
Tangent, but requiring ctrl+alt+del was a security measure, in Windows NT based OSes that specific key command would only be recognized by the system/winlogon, and wouldn't be intercepted by other programs.
The theory was that by hitting ctrl+alt+del to activate a login prompt you would know that that login prompt was genuine, and not a spoofed one designed to steal logins/passwords, because third party programs wouldn't know that you had pressed anything on the keyboard.
Windows calls this a "secure attention sequence", but similar functionality exists in other operating systems.
It's way cheaper to send 50 million phishing emails than it is to engineer and deliver a trojan to hijack the lockscreen.
It seems a lot more a case of, "People didn't want our (old) security measure, so we added another way to make it optional."
Has anyone else noticed that trying to bring up system settings through Cortana--checking updates, setting up a PIN--nothing works? It works on my Surface Pro 3, but every system setting you can bring up via Cortana's search bar is broken on my PC.
I'm going to be installing it on my SP3 on the 30th to check if my Windows 8 retail key is now also a Windows 10 retail key (hopefully I won't have to wrestle the thing to install Home when I already have entitlement for Pro through the OEM upgrade). Of course, that's worthless for answering your question.
Well, you would've had to install it on your SP3 anyway.
According to Microsoft, it's a sign of a broken User profile (with corruptions in Cortana) that cannot be fixed. Which means I need to recreate a new user profile.
I could be off base, but I remember this being a complete nightmare in the past, that left you with broken file structures, missing references, and duplicate files up the wazoo. I'm worried about migrating my OneDrive data too. So I'm doing a complete backup of my entire C drive in case I need to wipe away the horrible mess that the account transfer leaves (or recover files, which you can do from it as well) and start from scratch.
I may prefer Microsoft to its competitors, but I've used Windows long enough to know the lesson: never leave a backup to Windows that you could just make a complete copy yourself of. You'll regret it.
I'm annoyed--very annoyed, to the point where if I knew i was going to do this a few weeks ago I may've held off upgrading from Windows 8.1--but what did I expect upgrading Windows across versions? I'm shocked it works as well as it does on my Surface Pro frankly.
I hear that completely destroying all of your program installations and data is the cool, trendy thing to do now.
~39,000 search results is a lot of results. I'd actually rebuilt it just last week as part of my experiments with Windows 10.
As it started to re-index, finally, I decided to check my bug--viola, system settings now can be opened through Cortana.
Assuming this is, in fact, a fix--everyone else who might run into this issue, take note. I've heard pretty often that upgrading an existing profile across operating systems is inviting disaster, and I sort of believe it, but at least you can avoid the nightmare that is recreating your profile from scratch. Learn from my mistakes, maybe you can avoid wasting a whole afternoon. I'm starting to suspect a number of issues with Cortana's search results can be solved by spending 10 to 20 minutes re-indexing everything you want to search.
Failing all that, sometimes an in-place install of Win10 fixes the problem using the 1511 upgrade.
Otherwise, nuke it from orbit and start over. The user profiles in Win10 are a fucking nightmare right now.
In the meantime, I'm still trying to fix indexing--this time, trying to get video results to come back. Have the rebuild the index again.
The search bar is a fantastic function, too bad it breaks so easily.
Look at a "normal" person who actually still does have things stored on their computers, be it pictures, etc. Most of them won't have things stored in any kind of coherent system, except for maybe pictures if they use import tools that do it for them. This is a bit of an extreme case but I once saw someone who had everything stored in the downloads folder that lived on the desktop. every file created, every picture from camera, etc. And the only "order" she had was that it was sorted by date and she would kind of remember when that picture was from or when she typed out that recipe, etc.
I think also the way Google (and Gmail) has changed searching means that people now expect that level of search function in every product they use.
It wasn't even just a cloud thing. Search was an emphasis in Longhorn around the same time that WinFS was going to allow us to tag files with keywords and seamlessly unify drives. I'm still kinda sad WinFS never panned out; the stuff it would do sounded great.
it debuted as a file system you could use as storage drives on Server 2012 (maybe R2, can't remember), but you can't use it as an OS drive. I believe you can now create ReFS drives in Windows 10, but again cannot use as the OS drive. at some point in the future they'll add the ability for it to be used as the OS drive, but not by default, and then eventually new computers shipped will have it by default.
WinFS looked great but was ahead of it's time. We didn't have the I/O needed for it to be feasible. We're only just starting to see the benefits of it.
I'm still trying to get my SteelSeries mouse to remember its configuration.
The only part of my computer that still retains the wild west atmosphere is a huge folder of funny pictures I have saved from the internet that I have to look through if I ever need one that I feel is appropriate for a conversation at hand:
I know that people (and I am including Microsoft Engineers in this statement) have been trying to find new ways for people to search for and retrieve saved data for quite a while now, but I don't know if this is an example of me being different from the norm or if this is just another example of people looking for a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist. Of course if you don't have any structure to your data storage it's going to be hard to find something later on - this exists in PCs and movie collections and cookbooks and warehouses. I believe this is a user issue, not a software issue.
If there is one area in modern Windows that desperately needs standardization with regards to meaningful data placement it is saved game locations for PC games. If you are a PC gamer for any length of time odds are you have games saved in everywhere from My Documents to My Saves to %appdata% to the game's install folder to who the hell knows where else, which makes backing up saves before an OS update or reinstall or transferring them to another machine a pain in the ass. If there was one standard location for saved games you could just point [YOUR CLOUD STORAGE PROGRAM HERE] at that directory and presto, now every game you install has cloud saves.
Edit: agreed on the save game thing, though. There's a freeware utility that makes managing that a lot easier. I personally just run a Python script that junctions everything into a Dropbox folder.
E2: links.
For non-text-based stuff, yeah. This is why the default "recent stuff" explorer view in Windows is great.
There have been a few alternative metaphors proposed that use spacial navigation. The most livable one I've seen (which was/is also a Raskin thing) is an infinitely zoomable plane. Which is neat in theory. In practice, I kinda suspect that I'd spend most of my time working at a microscopic level, enormously large ten year old documents towering above me, lost forever.
Even 3-4 years ago I would have said thing like tax information or banking documentation but all of that stuff is stored online more securely than I wold store it at home (if you trust government/banking systems).
I have about 1TB worth of pictures, that's the bulk of what I care about for locally stored stuff.
I kinda worry about a future where everything is stored online and the average user just owns a glorified terminal and access all of their information remotely (basically the current Chromebook craze but on a higher level) so when Microsoft does stuff like push OneDrive as hard as they have it makes me uneasy.
EDIT: And now it's not happening. Windows truly is a strange, mysterious force.
Cortana is always listening!
i basically don't want to lose a free upgrade, but i also don't want to actually run Win 10.
steam | Dokkan: 868846562
Other than that, I'm sure a great many of the 300million-ish Windows 10 installs are 8.1 upgrades. It goes fine, unless it doesn't, in which case you have a backup. But again, 99.9% of the time it will go fine.