Happy with Windows 10?

Very happy with W10 here. Definitely my fav since XP. Few issues with C8. Dropouts and clicks every once in a while. Not sure if this is connected to W10, C8 or a combination of both.
Sometimes I get clicks when I open and close plugin windows, which is annoying.

W10 feels simple and solid and looks nice (for MS at least!)
I want to stay on W10. Def not going back and hope Steinberg will make it work soon.

Win10 is indeed much better then win 8 in terms of desktop friendlyness. Just the fact that the horrible charmsbar has vanished is a reason togo for it. (one of my laptops has V10 for the moment, but not the DAW computer)

But yesterday is was broadcasted nationwide that Windows 10 has HUGE privacy issues. They are recording everything you do, and even passwords, bankaccounts and securitycodes are recorded. That is something to be aware of. It is not illegal, but it is a bit up to the limit of what is acceptable…

@Katylyst: recording from network and desktop is very dependend on the soundcard you use. if you have one that has a return from the external device back in to cubase, then your fine. A virtual cable could also do the job, but it is messy.

Given how much FUD has hit about W10 on these forums and elsewhere, may I suggest you provide a link to the site where these claims are made.

Too many sites seem to pick up on FUD stories without doing ANY checking of the facts.
While ZD-Net has mostly click-bait bloggers, Ed Bott seems to know his Win stuff, so I suggest if any new W10 seeming horror stories crop up, check out his posts because they often have a much more sane and pragmatic approach.


I remember a lot of FUD cropped up a few months ago about Samsung TVs transmitting everything that was said near them back to their ‘masters’, unbeknownst to their owners. Blitzed news sites and stations everywhere.

As it was, it is only if you actually activate the voice control facility on the remote control AND voice some particular recognisable commands that it takes action. Plus a huge microphone symbol appears in the upper middle of the screen when it is activated. Hardly secretive!

So, unless you have a sex life that involves S&M fantasising that uses the remote control in ways not dreamt of by its designers and directly addressing your Samsung TV out loud, your TV remains mum about any drama going on near it.

I’m afraid that the internet has bred too much hair-trigger stupidity. Popular != truth.

I meant national broadcasting by the official national broadcasting company, and it was news item nr. 1.
But it’s in dutch… so you will hear how we talk here… :slight_smile:

In this age of cut-throat news departments, with sub-editors being dumped en masse, it is quality that is suffering. In particular, stories are being transmitted from the wire without double-checking.

There is a program on our national broadcaster (Australian Broadcasting Commission = ABC) called Media Watch that regularly gives examples of the total failure of news organisations, print, radio or TV, national or local, to vet their wire stories, including from the ABC itself, with many just picking up pure rubbish that’s gone viral on the web, and running headlong into stupidity walls with it.

Once the province of local rags, stories direct from advertiser’s copy seemed to have become the modus operandi of modern news presentation.

Ever since many news organisations got caught out waiting for confirmation of the rumours about Bill Clinton’s indiscretions, they have thrown the verifying veracity of stories to the wind, just to make sure they appear ‘current’, even if they later appear stupid, because nobody remembers the gaffes after the next bit of titillation arrives. We are in a shallow ADD Twitter universe, after all.

Which is useless for me if I want to verify the veracity of the story. I couldn’t find any reference to it on their English language pages.

It appears to centre on what was raised in ars technica, but there they highlight that the concerns are about some unknown activity, rather than known breaches of privacy.

Some less sensationalist advice is in this Guardian article.

As the Guardian article points out, the direction MS is taking with all this was largely already in W8.x, and following the direction every other major player (read Google, Apple, Facebook et al) has been taking everybody for years.

Basically, if you are using your smartphone for anything other than making calls, you have already given up much more of your privacy already.

Like any DAW user, you have to not accept the OS defaults, but make activity choices more fitting of your needs.

Yes sure patanjali.
And the broadcast was neutral, with several experts on the matter, and they added that as a user you still are in control of the settings.
I think it’s a nationwide information campain for users that are unaware of it.
Without any user interation, they just record everything. That’s what they were telling.

I have one win10 computer here running now, and all privacy settings are like they should be: off.
You can find plenty on that on the internet too.

It’s just that bank accounts and security codes are really really personal, and that is not something a commercial company should be recording. That is property of the bank and of yourself. Every database is hackable, and these combinations are very close to what is needed for access to your account.

In Europe we have an extra digital tool as a step inbetween called digipass.
For the moment i guess this is still save.

I have a smartphone, but i never use the internet apps on it. No facebook, twitters or other social media.
Actually, you notice here in our country quite a lot of people who just have had enough of it.
It’s not fun anymore, just pure BU.

and everyone is free to do what he wants, but i posted it FWIW.
kind regards,
R.

By accepting the new EULA of Windows 10 you agree that you will be constantly spied on. Even the content of your emails is used by Microsoft as they see fit.

No wonder they are offering this “free”.

Well yes, but there’s no need to sign into a Microsoft account, or use ony of their online services. You use just a local account.

Presumably when you turn off Cortana and anything else that requires a Microsoft account login you have opted out of all this stuff. Time will tell if that is actually true, but there will be, or already are, articles and blogs out there about it to verify.

Here’s one of many articles talking about how to opt out of all that stuff. Windows 10 is spying on almost everything you do - here's how to opt out | BGR

Even with Cortina off there are a myriad of thing still running in the background.
fortunately someone has made a little GUI to make it REALLY easy to tun off unwanted background qui-spyware stuff.
It free and worth looking into if your taking the plunge into Win 10

the link → DoNotSpy11 » pXc-coding and its FREE

Im still waiting to upgrade as i have question if e -licence USB dongle will work for cubase 8 & drivers for my Motu Ultralite & TI chipset based firewire card

EZ

Jaymo

Microsoft is not to be trusted, but Facebook is. People are strange :laughing:

Some small amount of paranoia can be good, but not too much (then you just have to pull the plug - No NO, not that plug :wink: ).

I really like Windows 10 on one of my office computers (laptop) and on a test computer, both using a local accounts only.
It is what Windows 8 should have been (I guess that’s why it is a free upgrade).

So far Win 10 works great with Studio One 3, Reaper 5, and so far Cubase 8 (not tested very hard yet).

PS. All my production DAW’s are always offline.
I’m doing office work, downloads and checking updates, iLok license management, etc from one of my test/office computers.

I would advise being very cautious about installing an app from an unknown, or little known, publisher that offers quick fixes like this, especially when they are free. These are a very common vehicles for malicious code.

Recording data has been going on in WIndows and OS/iOS for a while now. Browser have been remembering passwords for years now (although you can turn it off). iTunes and Google Play remember your credit card information to make it easier for you to buy stuff. As several have already said it is all about the users choice for convenience or privacy and the options are there. To be honest, I am not really concerned about my credit card number getting out. It has happened before and it was no problem. The bank called, I told them which charges were not mine, those charges disappeared instantly, and they sent me a new card overnight. I would not recommend anyone use their bank account for internet transactions. Or, if they do, open a new account at the bank only for this purpose and keep a minimum amount of money there to cover charges. Of course, be VERY stingy with personal information like birthday, address, etc. The Microsoft account only requires an email address such as Yahoo!, Gmail, etc. and you don’t have to enter any personal information to open those accounts.

The browsers have had “InPrivate” or “Incognito” browsing for many years now.

It is very easy to maintain the privacy but it is important that people understand what is happening. The problem is, in my mind, that the fear-mongers are already trying to profit from it. First make them afraid of something, and then sell them something or solicit a vote on the promise to protect them from it.

Do NOT use the express option, but the custom one, AND uncheck ALL subsequent options or select the option that does NOT add anything else.

Hypocritically, these sites promote stuff for you to be taken out of the surreptitious software route, BUT try to sneak all manner of nuisance software on you while installing.

Unfortunately, the whole ‘free’ software craze has just deferred the up-front $ for insidious adware, hijackware, and stowaway-ware. What’s worse is that it is becoming common for there to be no way of buying a junk-free version to relieve one of the annoyance for those apps that one does find useful.

Note that in among the links provided here, I managed to get Super Optimizer installed. Beware! Possibly just an accidental click in one of the pages.
If you get it:

  1. Run the uninstall .exe in c:\Program Files (x86)\Super Optimizer.
  2. Delete that folder.
  3. In the registry, under HKEY_USERS, search for, and delete the key: Super Optimizer.

It used to be that banks just assumed that a compromised card was from the user being reckless with their password, so the onus was on the user to prove otherwise.

However, they have now acknowledged that the user is not necessarily the problem, and so have finally taken on the responsibility for detecting and fixing bogus transactions.

The problem is that several online suppliers must have been hacked, leading to credit card details being harvested and onsold to criminals. We are in NSW Australia, but have had someone in the UK buy really expensive conference tickets and another purchase accommodation in remote Tasmania. The nuisance is the having to replace a card.

Once, there was a few attempts by the one attacker, increasing from a couple of dollars, 100, then 2,000, at which point the bank’s fraud detection kicked in and dropped the set of transactions.

I now use the bank’s app to block international transactions, and set low limits on ATM withdrawals, and just up them as required immediately before making a larger transaction. Unfortunately, I have forgotten that sometimes, and have had transactions rejected.

Getting a little off topic but they don’t even need to get your credit card information anymore.
They have algorithms that “guess” a credit card number. They test them on $1 purchases online and when they get one that works, they print the card.

To keep on topic. I will add that so far, I like Windows 10. It looks nice like W8 did but makes the desktop mode easier to get to and goes back to the traditional Start Menu . The Start Screen with the tiles wasn’t a bad idea for tablets and such but I think for desktops too few users cared for it.

Does it?

I was on a ZD-Net forum, where one commenter cited what he used it for – which, though I can’t remember what it was, seemed a legitimate use case for it – and the W10 one definitely doesn’t support that.

Personally, I can’t remember much of what the Start menu did because I hardly used it from W7 on. The Start menu was already deprecated in W7 in favour of the taskbar, but those heavily invested in it apparently didn’t notice.

I don’t tend to invest too much in OS UI functionality as things can just be changed around. I just use whatever is available to its best advantage, but only in a shallow way, just to avoid the sort of disappointment people had in the Start menu loss, and to not have to build up a whole new dependency in each replacement.

Best to use a paid third-party app dedicated to the required functionality, as it will stay the same, and they will do whatever it takes to make it work under different versions of the OS, as their livelihood depends upon it. And hope that they do not decide to embark upon world domination by trying to make their utility a Swiss Army knife of all your computing needs.

The differences in functionality and basic performance between Windows 7 and 10 are minor. The visual changes are plus or minus depending on your taste.

The privacy discussion has been only slowly starting during the last weeks. Apparently some clever people have had time to read the Microsoft Privacy Statement and the Services Agreement. Thank you.

One excerpt:

“We will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to”, for example, “protect their customers” or “enforce the terms governing the use of the services”.

In other words they will have access among other things to everything on your hard drives, your private folders etc. The content of your emails and whatnot.

So the story begins to unfold and experiences will slowly cumulate. The people who are somewhat concerned, try turn off such problematic functions as Windows allows. The rest – apparently only partly known yet -remain.
All in all, the W7 works very well here, so no need of changes. Rather see what happens.

Btw let’s keep this topic at clean information level, no need to vote should you upgrade or not. And if you are already using Windows 10 happily, that’s good for you.

Here is the direct link to the excerpt.

Section “Reasons We Share Personal Data”.

Pretty buried I should say.

Type ‘microsoft privacy statement’ into your favourite search engine. For Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo, it was the first item.

Note that replacing ‘microsoft’ with ‘google’ or ‘apple’ will make their respective privacy statement pages the first item.

After reading a few of these things, it seems that if you want your computer to do anything useful for you in particular, some of your private information is required to make it happen. The main thing to remember online is to use secure encrypted connections (https:// prefix) if available, so that no one else can get hold of the data. Note that these forums can be accessed securely.

FYI, DuckDuckGo.com is a search engine that does not track you at all. After the NSA revelations, it got a 40% boost in usage. It is now my default search engine.