I transfer gigabytes and sometimes terabytes between both machines. Do you have an idea how long it would take to transfer that via iCloud?
Even if I was lucky like some other people in my region to have fiber internet and therefore a 1 Gbps up and down, it would still take too long. And I have crappy Spectrum cable, so 500 Mbps down, 20 up.
Well, there’s no point in arguing opinions, so I’ll bow out, despite disagreeing with what you have here.
But I will say that just because you think something is a bug in an operating system doesn’t mean that it actually is. So declaring something as being the result of someone’s buggy code, is an opinion, not a fact. Unfortunately, the way search engines and AI-answer chats work today, the two are often given equal weight after forums are crawled.
Whatever OS you are happy using, I hope you are making music in and enjoying Cubase.
Pete
Microsoft
It’s refreshing to see mature, measured responses in these kind of discussions 
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Your expectations about this are rather absurd my friend. I mean, I would have to remember all the people in this forum as well as all the other forums I interact with. Then I would to remember that the user with the handle Psychlist1972 signs “Pete” and “Microsoft” right below.
Then there’s the fact that Pete didn’t add the Microsoft to his signature in the post he made about the network configuration.
So you basically expect me to have a magic ball or something.
Regardless, I don’t hate Windows. I hate Microsoft for the same reason I hate Adobe. At least Microsoft is not charging me a subscription to use Windows, but just like Adobe, it tries to push me to pay for a subscription to use Office and have more online storage.
I’m happy to pay Apple for the 2 TB storage for two main reasons:
I’m not happy and won’t pay for Microsoft 365 because:
Now, macOS also has the Documents and Desktop folders by default under the iCloud drive, but it’s very easy to take them out of there and set it to put them in the user’s home folder. And by the way, in macOS, the real user home folder is right there from the start, while in modern Windows, if you want to get to the real user folder, you have to start at the C:\ and work your way to it, then pin it to quick access, because what you get in the left pane that you think it’s the home folder, it’s not, it’s actually the Onedrive folder.
Another reason why Microsoft got on my nerves recently. Upon building this new PC, and paying $170+tax to have a legit version of Windows 11 Pro on it, while maybe I could’ve turned a very old license into the new one, but I wanted to do things right, so I bought Windows 11 Pro.
A parenthesis here. When you install macOS from scratch, meaning booting from a USB drive with the installer, wiping the internal drive and installing macOS, the process is smooth. It only takes a few minutes, then the steps when it reboots to enter the basic information to get it running, like what user name and password you want, and light or dark, and if you want, your iCloud login and password (not mandatory like Windows). In less than 30 minutes, with macOS, you’re up and running. Once or twice a month, you have an update, which will take about 10-15 minutes. Sometimes it comes along with other updates like Pro video codecs and things like that.
Let’s say you built a new PC and want to install Linux. Probably a friendly distro like Ubuntu. Also, a breeze. And I did this recently with my PC from 2012, not the new one. So installing Linux on a 12 year old PC was a breeze, and updates were minimal after that. It’s a great OS, and if all the programs I use were available for it, I would be more than happy to switch to it.
Now, both the macOS and Linux Ubuntu install experiences are a breeze. Now let’s talk about the Windows 11 install experience.
Boot from the DVD, and the DVD is so old that it doesn’t have the ethernet driver for my motherboard, an Asus ROG STRIX Z790-E GAMING WIFI II. But it doesn’t tell me right away; it gets to a point where going online is mandatory, so the installation cannot continue. I search for this online with my Mac, and it turns out that I had to load the LAN driver at the very beginning. I’m not going to reboot from the DVD and try an installation over what it already did. So I boot from the DVD, repair, diskpart, select disk, clean, exit, reboot, etc. I just wasted about 20 minutes for nothing.
This time I do load the LAN driver at the beginning, so it does connect. After following all the steps, I have to put up with hours of downloading updates even before I even see the Windows desktop. Keep in mind this is a 500 Mbps connection, not the fastest by today’s standards, but not slow in the least.
Meanwhile, I’m typing like a log in my Mac while I’m working on other things and going through the installation. This is what I typed:
Windows 11 installation new pc started from DVD at 23:00
25 mins later, after going through the questionnaire, it starts downloading even more updates than already did
It is now 0:15. The screen has been showing the spinning thing with the text “Updates are underway. Please keep your computer on.”
At 0:43 it finally rebooted. Now I have the desktop back. I went into Windows Updates, and there’s another pile of updates to download. Will this torture ever end???
1:13 Still installing updates. Kill me. Please kill me now.
1:18 After finishing what seemed
Yes, I’m American but I use the 24 hr format and the metric system because they are better. Also, while my log might seem of a somewhat dark nature, my intention was more comical than anything. Like, it shouldn’t take hours and hours to install an OS. And Microsoft should not manufacture one installation DVD and ship that forever, they should update it to at least the year we’re in, especially when you buy it the last day of the year.
But the last entry seems incomplete, and that’s because I got so fed up, I stopped taking notes on it. I didn’t have a usable Windows desktop, ready to install all my programs, until like 3:30, at which point I said screw this, I’ll finish this tomorrow.
In the following days, every time I would open Windows Update, there would be a pile of new updates. And one of those piles started updating and it just stalled at one point. It was late at night, I was watching TV and every now and then I would turn on the monitor and the update would still be going. I could’ve killed it and rebooted, but that could leave the system unstable, maybe not, but I was checking in several forums, and people were saying that forcing that update to stop in the middle messes up their computers.
And many people were complaining about the same, an update stalled for hours on end, and some people were saying that after five hours or so, it finally rebooted the machine. The update I mean. Other people were saying four hours, three, eight. One was saying that two days later it was still stalled.
Well, in my case it was something like five hours.
So, can you see now why I dislike Microsoft and Windows so much as opposed to macOS and Linux? Can’t say much about Linux, it was just to see what’s it like these days. But macOS and Windows are two OSes I have been using for the best part of the last 25 years, Windows a longer time, and Windows to me always seemed like a giant mess, with tons of bugs and an inconsistent user interface. The good thing is that I’m a computer nerd so I know how to deal with most of those things, or I figure it out one way or another.
And macOS has its share of problems, but the general sense after using both for so long is that macOS is far better. The main problem is that with Apple Silicon Macs, if you want 192 GB of RAM, you have to pay up the wazoo and you can’t just take out the RAM you have now and add the 192 GB.
And there’s a certain pleasure for a nerd like me to build my own machine, and have all the power I want to work in Cubase, Nuendo, Blender, DaVinci Resolve, Unreal Engine, you name it. But if all those apps were available in Linux, my machine would have no Windows at all.
I’m thinking a real nerd would have bought a USB drive to install from rather than a DVD… in 2024… Or maybe being a nerd is akin to masochism.
I managed to get a USB drive and install Windows without it taking hours upon hours.
I also am not “nagged” to get Office 365. Not sure what you’re looking at when you see this but I’m not seeing it.
As for OneDrive you can turn it off. It’s not that big of a deal.
Well yeah, that is basically what people usually do when they read multiple forums. There are not many people in DAW-land who don’t know who Pete is or don’t recognize his avatar.
It is pretty revealing if that one guy who doesn’t, shows how little basic understanding of the whole audio/MIDI thing he has pretty much in his first post.
I can’t remember the last time I installed anything from a DVD. This wasn’t a mac vs PC thing, this was your personal choice.
I always build from a USB drive. BTW, I don’t use the OEM builds because they don’t transfer to new hardware. When you buy a regular retail license, it’s portable with your account, and so you never have to pay for Windows again. With OEM licenses, you are the system builder and are responsible for the license, and replacing the license if you have to replace a motherboard or something.
I buy the Windows license key, and then use the Media Creation Tool to build an up-to-date thumb drive with the install.
For folks who don’t have another machine to do that from, or don’t have enough bandwidth to download the image, you can purchase Windows on a USB thumb drive rather than DVD.
macOS install has a very limited domain of hardware the install has to support, so of course they can include everything. Windows runs on just about everything out there, and so there will be components not yet supported. The post-install downloads are because there are so many different devices out there, that the install image contains only what is known and critical to completing the install at the time. The rest has to come from Windows Update servers, and are mostly third-party drivers and components. Sometimes, you are an early adopter of a board, and the OEM hasn’t provided the driver to Microsoft yet for inclusion in the images. I ran into that with the 10gbit port on my new 285k board, but the 2.5gbit port had the required drivers in the install image, so I used that.
I’m a bit surprised you’re mentioning linux in this context. I’ve done a lot of Linux installs, and there’s a ton of manual apt-get after the install runs. You just have to know each and every one of those to do yourself, rather than having a screen with a % complete counter doing it for you.
As to the rest of the negativity in the post, it’s opinion and bias, so I’ll leave it alone, as before.
Pete
Microsoft
Although I appreciate some of the comments, I do think we should stop talking about who knows me or who doesn’t. I don’t think that’s useful.
My earlier response to it was not because it was said to me, but because it was said at all, and with such certainty. But now I see the background info, so know the bias that drove it.
Pete
Microsoft
Before ordering the DVD, I looked for the OEM for builders version of Windows 11 Pro, and as far as I could tell, it only comes in DVD. Which is not a problem for me at all, because the part of the installation where it reads from the DVD, that took minutes. I didn’t put into my machine an optical drive from 2001, I bought a very fast LG Blu-ray burner. So to me, the DVD as an install medium is perfectly fine, it’s just that Microsoft should send updated copies to Amazon and other retailers at least once a year, if not twice.
Say it’s December 1st, 2024. Microsoft calls Amazon and asks them for an updated stock number on their Windows OEM installation DVDs. Amazon says “we still have 5,263 in stock”. Microsoft says “Send them all back and we’ll send you updated replacements at no cost, plus we can sell you as many more as you want”. End of story. So instead of having two years of updates, you have half a year.
Is it easier to create the bootable USB drive? Yes? Can you buy an OEM version of Windows 11 Pro on a bootable USB drive manufactured by Microsoft? Can you save some money by paying Microsoft for a downloadable OEM builder version instead of the full Win 11 Pro version they sell online? Apparently not. Stupid on their part. It’s bad enough that an OEM version used to cost $100 for the Pro version and now $160 (I was wrong before, it’s $160, not $170), so why keep making DVDs when they could simply sell the OEM version for $160 online and forget about manufacturing DVD costs? Anyone who buys the OEM version knows that it’s tied to that motherboard forever, so you pay less because you won’t be able to move it to another machine.
Since I built this machine and installed Windows 11 I got the following nagging prompts 5 times. I only took photos twice, so you may or may not believe that I got this 5 times. But this is what I was pestered with 5 times in less than one month:
OMG!! I am soooo lucky that me, and only a lucky few, landed a free trial of Microsoft 365!!! This kind of patronizing crap is what makes people hate corporations. When they treat us like morons and think we’re so stupid that we really believe that we are among those lucky enough to get a free this or that. But we continue:
I admit I was wrong in one thing. I thought the second screen was more like “Are you sure you don’t want to get Microsoft 365?”, but it offers another thing, which is more storage. Still annoying. Wouldn’t be annoying if I had seen these things just once, the first time I installed the OS. But I saw them 5 times.
Same for this. I’m not a gamer, but I would like to become a mildly successful composer some day, and I know that composers do music for games as well. So given that I built what could be considered a gaming PC among other things (And Need for Speed Unbound runs amazing at 4K with all the settings in Ultra), I thought at some point I might get this Game Pass for a few months, and see what kind of music these games have. But after 5 times of seeing the same nagging prompt, I’m not so sure anymore.
By the way, the photos above were taken on 1/2/2025. I believe that was the second time I was getting these prompts, and I took the photos because I couldn’t believe that I had to go through them again like a day or two after them appearing the first time.
Now, these are from 1/12/2025, which I believe was the fourth time they showed up after some major update:
So this is the kind of nagging I was talking about.
I wish you had the same experiences I had with it. Turning it off completely is not an option. Even after uninstalling it, it still keeps those folders, and you move all the pictures in the Onedrive picture folder to the one in your home folder, and then Windows moves them back. It’s extremely annoying, and is part of the reason I never use it.
Another reason is that I kept getting error messages about conflicts between the local and online versions, etc ,etc. Onedrive is a disaster. iCloud works the way a virtual drive should work. I’m not a Mac fan boy that has no experience with Windows at all. In fact, I have used Windows more years of my life than macOS and its previous versions. I have used and troubleshot Windows since version 3.1. So I know what I’m talking about. That you specifically haven’t come across some bugs that I have, doesn’t mean that they don’t exist.
Well, if you expect someone who started using Cubase in March 2023, and wasn’t an audio engineer or musician, or dealt in any way with MIDI, either the protocol MIDI, or the MIDI that is used by instrument tracks, to have a vast knowledge of these things, and on top of that, to know who everyone is in this forum, I think you have expectations that are a little excessive.
Granted, my memory is not the best, but even if it were, I’d probably would not remember every user in this forum, and certainly I have no obligation to know who Peter is. Of course now, after all this back and forth, I will certainly remember Pete from Microsoft, but I don’t think it’s fair to expect me to know who he was before all this.
Well Pete, you can take my observations as two things:
An Apple fanboi that thinks Apple products are the best in the universe and everything else is absolute garbage with absolutely no redeeming qualities, including Windows. I think that would the wrong take.
You can realize that someone with 30 years of Windows experience as a user, troubleshooter of his and several machines, and about 25 years of experience as a Mac user is not biased, at least not in the sense that I drink the Apple Kool Aid, but because my experience with both platforms told me that macOS is a much better OS. And you can copy and paste my observations on Windows, send them to your manager and tell them “Look, this is a guy that has been using Windows for 30 years and thinks Windows is buggy and a bit of a mess. Can we make this better so we can put a sock in his mouth and eat his words?” That would be a better choice. The fact is, you can see me as a hater as much as you want. But I’m far from being alone in being fed up with Microsoft and Windows. Just go online and see the thousands of rants from people since the internet started.
Or, you can think I’m a doucheface and not do a damn thing about it. But you’re right, this is definitely not the reason why I started this thread and it’s not that productive. I admit my fault in it. What can I say? Don’t temp a nerd into a discussion about computers and software.
Well, since you work at MS perhaps you can give me an educated answer. Does Microsoft sell the Windows 11 Pro OEM for Builders in a thumb drive version? I couldn’t find it, on Amazon, Newegg, or even Microsoft’s website.
And if you purchase the thumb drive, it’s not the OEM version. In fact, if you go to https://www.newegg.com/microsoft-windows-11-pro-usb/p/N82E16832351749 you can see that if you want the USB version, it’s $199. If you switch to the OEM version, the media changes to DVD, and it’s $159. So I pay $40 less for the OEM version, knowing that it will be attached to my motherboard, and I’m perfectly fine with that. I spent a fortune on this machine mostly to be able to run Cubase better, and other programs as well, and it’s meant to last over a decade. When I built a PC in 2012 I chose the best components I could afford, and it’s a machine that I still use to this day. I upgraded the internal drive to a SATA SSD at one point, and now it has a new graphics card so I can send Blender projects to it over the network and have a render node.
I mean, if you have 30 years of experience and you decide to get the OEM version then surely you would know what that entails. It’s not meant for the average user. The USB stick version is for us regular users.
One of the things that follows is apparently all of these updates and so it isn’t really “a thing” that Windows nags users about 365 or storage or whatever because most normal users, even normal power users, won’t go through what you did because they pick the consumer Pro version, not OEM.
And certainly if you’re picking the best components and are spending a fortune then surely you didn’t pick OEM to save money, right? Which in turn makes me wonder why you picked it in the first place.
Hate to say it, but it really does seem like some of what bugs you could have been avoided.
Now, going back to the original topic, I just found something interesting. I don’t know if this was installed by Windows, or by Nvidia or what, because it has no branding at all:
And when I open it, this is all I get:
Here’s where it’s located and its properties:
Now, at first Googlelance I can’t find any information on it, but it certainly peaked my interest. I don’t think it’s the device I was thinking about, but I certainly want to find out more.
What I do is make sure my /etc/apt/sources.list is configured properly and is up-to-date with the current distro. I’ve got several Debian distros in multiple AWS availability zones for my Duo auth proxies, and can issue a single sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y command via SSH to update everything in one go. If you’re doing a lot of that, I’d look into that, and know that the repositories will change from distro-to-distro. Going from buster to bullseye to bookworm requires changes at each stage (though I kind of cheated with bullseye to bookworm). It can really save you a ton of time and make your 'nix updates a breeze, so figured I’d reply.
I hesitate getting involved with the details of this thread since we passed Kevin Bacon about 10 degrees ago (from Midi and GPUs ). I would recommend against using an OEM installer for a machine you built yourself. I would also recommend against trusting Google AI to tell you it’s legal. @Psychlist1972 can correct me if I’m wrong, but you are not technically allowed to use an OEM license unless you are actually a manufacturer and are providing the installation media along with the retail system. Building your own system is not, to my knowledge, an eligible application of an OEM license. I’m not going to get in the middle of the Holy War going on, but I’m just looking out for. You should also know that the OEM disk is typically customized to the manufactures device specs, including motherboard component support. If I were you, I’d stick to full retail versions of Windows. I’m actually thinking your OEM sku is why you’re getting NagWare prompts. I mean, that could be coming from, say Dell if they had something to do with the OEM bits. A little late at this point, but I would go through Device Manager and make sure you don’t have any warnings for generic and/or wrong drivers particularly for the motherboard components. I shall now return back to </lurk:on>.
GPU AUDIO IS the brand?
Although I appreciate you thinking of me and giving me options in how I can take what you said, it’s not really needed.
The comment was about network connectivity issue specifically.
Everything that has come after has been about all the other things you dislike, but which aren’t “Microsoft’s buggy code”. You’ve covered the gamut with the complaints here from business decisions to not integrating with a closed ecosystem to known limitations with a physical media DVD delivery of software not really intended for individuals, plus an actual UI bug. I’m not disputing the validity of any of your opinions.
Folks who know me know I do bring these to much more than just my management here. But the fact is, all the other things reported here have nothing technically to do with the original problem reported. And so, my observation about bias.
Specifically on the install media and duration:
OEM / System Builder licenses are not meant for individuals building a computer for their own use.
I haven’t seen OEM available in anything other than DVD. Historically, the actual OEM would ship the DVD with the computer, with the key on the sleeve (although the key is usually in the UEFI BIOS now). But there’s more lift required for you as an individual to pretend to be an OEM, including more updates, because we don’t recreate the media there all the time; the larger OEMs don’t need us to, so the availability is more for the smaller OEMs who tend to burn-in and test each PC anyway.
Microsoft does not provide the OEM / System Builder version directly to individuals. We provide Home and Pro retail licenses for download or USB through our store. Newegg provides those same versions, plus the OEM DVD. On Newegg you can see the disclaimer for the OEM version, emphasis mine:
Use of this OEM System Builder Channel software is subject to the terms of the Microsoft OEM System Builder License. This software is intended for pre-installation on a new personal computer for resale. This OEM System Builder Channel software requires the assembler to provide end user support for the Windows software and cannot be transferred to another computer once it is installed. To acquire Windows software with support provided by Microsoft please see our full package “Retail” product offerings
OEM / System Builder is more of a loophole at this point. Folks trade a few short-term dollars for a bit more work, and the inability to change or upgrade the PC outside of certain parameters. And, of course, if the boot drive has to be replaced due to failure, you end up having to get a new license, just like how Dell would need to send you a new activated copy of Windows on a replacement drive if the boot drive in a laptop dies.
So I think your experience may have been a bit better if you had use the media creation tool. There would still be updates afterwards to the reasons I’ve mentioned, but probably nowhere near as many.
I’ve always built my USB images myself using the media creation tool, but I have not checked to see if an OEM key works with the resulting media, but comments from purchasers on Amazon and other locations say the key does work. Also, I do understand about lower bandwidth connections, but you’ll get hit with that either way, it sounds like.
My apologies to folks here for me continuing to reply to this.
Pete
Microsoft
Yeah, right, like Dell, HP, Lenovo and so on pay Microsoft $160+tax per installation DVD, and at the factory, once each machine is assembled, a factory worker inserts the DVD (and it’s a unique DVD per machine) to install Windows 11 Pro and spends hours installing it and then all the updates like I did.
I don’t need Google AI to tell me that’s a load of crap. Microsoft sells that DVD because they know that people who build their own systems can get a small discount with the caveat that they can’t move that license to any other machine. Just like my 2012 machine, that was a Windows 7 Pro OEM DVD that eventually became 8.1 and then 10.
Actual mass system builders like the companies I mentioned, get Windows OEM licenses in bulks where they probably don’t even pay half of what I paid for my OEM DVD.
GPU Audio make products that process audio and run on the GPU. They target musician products, but none of the DAWs I have installed install that. I assume you grabbed their plugins from somewhere earlier this month and either didn’t realize, or forgot.
GPU Audio has been at NAMM a few times, and have videos on YouTube. I know Sonic State has interviewed them
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=sonic+state+gpu+audio
Pete
Microsoft
