Windows 10 . Anybody downloaded it yet?

[mezzoman253]

On 28/10/2020 at 19:43, mezzoman253 said:

Today I used my desktop for the 1st time in a few days. It's W10 pro 64 bit.

 

The internet seemed to be running very slowly, so I had a look at updates and sure enough it had started a download of 2004.

 

Now that download had been an option previously, and I purposely hadn't downloaded it as a few things that had come to light by others, impacted on certain things I use the PC for. So I'd left it until such time as I was happy that the problems were resolved. So I wasn't happy to see it being downloaded without me asking for it.

 

My question is, has the option now run out and it's not user selectable, or has MS just decided to do this on it's own?

 

Thanks, Rob

Well I though everything was OK, then today I had no sound from the speakers. sound was OK, as I had another app' using it and it was working OK.

 

When I looked at sounds the speaker and headphones were there but it said " not plugged in". It clearly was, so I tried another set and the same.

 

Long story short, I had to reload the RealTek drivers and eventually the sound was back with the speakers showing again.

 

Why on earth did an update reset a load of my sound settings, and re-install my USB connected mouse and display?? 

 

As I said above, I didn't download this update (2004) because of these very problems having been flagged up. But MS seems to do what it likes mostly!

 

I'm fairly PC savvy, but most people aren't. In this pandemic situation, losing your PC is not what you want.

 

Rob

[stewartingram]

Another Realtek user here, and updated within the last 2 weeks. No problems to report.

[melmerby]

A slightly different question.

Is their a way of finding out whether a Windows License has been used?

 

The reason is, I found an OEM copy of Windows 7 at the bottom of a draw and it hasn't been opened.

The seal is still intact with the disk inside.

I'm wondering whether a new copy of Win 7 was downloaded rather than using the disk, but I don't know why I would do that for a new install.

[RFS]

27 minutes ago, melmerby said:

A slightly different question.

Is their a way of finding out whether a Windows License has been used?

 

The reason is, I found an OEM copy of Windows 7 at the bottom of a draw and it hasn't been opened.

The seal is still intact with the disk inside.

I'm wondering whether a new copy of Win 7 was downloaded rather than using the disk, but I don't know why I would do that for a new install.

 

Are sure that didn't come with a PC which already had Windows 7 pre-installed? 

[melmerby]

25 minutes ago, RFS said:

 

Are sure that didn't come with a PC which already had Windows 7 pre-installed? 

Definitely not.

I bought it 18th Mar 2014, the same time as this PC that I assume it was "installed" in.

I actually bought two copies, one for this PC & one for the Railway Room PC.

The other one was opened, so I could have used the same disk for both installs and just typed the different codes in.

Trouble is these days, what I did more than 6 years ago is a distant blur

 

The only PC I have had with pre-installed OS was my laptop.

 

 

[stewartingram]

4 hours ago, melmerby said:

A slightly different question.

Is their a way of finding out whether a Windows License has been used?

 

 

Settings>Activation in Win 10 will tell you if it is activated

[Brit70053]

I had a similar but slightly different problem to that posted by Mezzoman253 on Monday @18:53.  Did the latest update last week and actually noticed a 'positive' change in that the laptop has since consistently gone to 'Sleep' when I've chosen that power option, instead of randomly completely closing down when 'Sleep' was selected. Crossed fingers touching wood as I type that.

        I also successfully listened to music from my Windows Media Player 'Library' via headphones, a test following Mezzomman253's post as mentioned above. At that point I thought all was ok on the sound front.

        Today however, I attempted to view and listen to the Hattons' You Tube video , ostensibly on the subject of Oxford Rail's model J27.  When the video started I got the visuals only, no sound.  Other RMWeb members have since confirmed that sound was available to them. 

         I then tried to listen to music from my Library on the laptop speakers and got silence.  Looking at the HD Audio Manager (probably for the first time ever) I found that sound had been set to 'Mute', certainly not done by me

 Thankfully it was a straightforward  matter of clicking on the icon to get the sound back.

 

Regards,

 

                John

 

             

         

[melmerby]

42 minutes ago, stewartingram said:

Settings>Activation in Win 10 will tell you if it is activated

Unfortunately that only tells you it is activated with a digital license, not the actual license code.

 

I as trying to determine if the unopened one had actually been used.

I'm now pretty sure I did activate the two PCs with the respective codes but must have only used one disk.

The railway room one is now spare as the current railway room PC had a brand new license copy of Win 10 installed, rather than use the old upgraded from Win 7 one.

[DIW]

Is there anything here which helps you?

 

Let us know if so or if not!

 

[melmerby]

1 hour ago, DIW said:

Is there anything here which helps you?

 

Let us know if so or if not!

 

Yes, the VBS script found a product key and it's not the one on the unopened Win 7.

 

EDIT

Oh dear, it returns the same product key on three different PCs, so whatever it is, it doesn't seem to be the Windows product key as claimed in the article.

I know the product key for Win 7 on the two other PCs as the MS sticker is still on them.

 

Edited November 4, 2020 by melmerby

[melmerby]

On 21/10/2020 at 18:58, RFS said:

 

One option is to set up the PC so that, when you boot, it logs on to the local account immediately without requiring a password. Should be fine if it doesn't cause security issues.

 

This MS article describes the process. Skip all the bumf about editing the registry yourself and go down to the bottom line where you can download an autologon tool from MS to do it all for you. Doesn't have to be installed - it's just a program. The old way of doing this, via netplwiz, seems to have disappeared. 

Having set up auto log in on all the all the PCs I note that on SWMBO's laptop and only on that laptop, after a Windows update it doesn't re-log in but sits with a log in window with the username and password already filled in but needs the enter key pressing to actually log in.

A strange quirk and not really much of a nuisance but why?

[RFS]

2 hours ago, melmerby said:

Having set up auto log in on all the all the PCs I note that on SWMBO's laptop and only on that laptop, after a Windows update it doesn't re-log in but sits with a log in window with the username and password already filled in but needs the enter key pressing to actually log in.

A strange quirk and not really much of a nuisance but why?

 

Very strange. All our PCs (mine, wife's, railway) have used this feature for years and I've never seen that problem. Very occasionally I've had to logon manually, but that's not happened for many months now. 

[jonhall]

On 02/11/2020 at 18:24, mezzoman253 said:

 

 

Why on earth did an update reset a load of my sound settings, and re-install my USB connected mouse and display?? 

 

 

 

The latest update seems to have killed the USB controller drivers on my Lenovo Ideapad, last week I managed to uninstall the driver and it was fixed, but repeating the same today has failed to fix the problem.

 

Jon

[Pete the Elaner]

I am not sure it is due to Windows 10, but I have a rather frustrating issue which I never saw with a previous version.

I regularly use 2 PCs - 1 in my spare room/study & the other in the layout room. Both are now on Win 10.

I store my files on a NAS so connecting to this is 1 of the first things I do. I do this from a command line with the command "start \\nas" . This was fine until recently. Now it only sometimes works. When it doesn't I need to use the FQDN ("start \\nas.domain") for the same resource. It treats this as a different resource, so anything accessing the NAS by a UNC fails (ie: \\nas\rail for my model railway stuff or \\nas\media for all my audio & video files)

I could get around it by using mapped drives (which I do for my rail files), but this is clunky, which is why I moved away from doing it about 20 years ago.

JMRI was a good example: I moved the roster files to the NAS so if my PC fails, I lose nothing. When Windows decided it needed to use the FQDN, JMRI failed to start. I spent a while digging through JMRI config files to move the file locations in order to use it again.

Media player was another. After several session of using the FQDN, I zapped my media library & re-added it from the new UNC. The PC then decided it was happier connecting with the local host name.

 

I use a Raspberry PI for DHCP & DNS & this seems to work fine with all other devices. Until today my other regular PC has worked fine with local hostnames, but it installed an update last night & wanted to use FQDN today..until I rebooted it.

 

I really can't understand why it sometimes want to use a FQDN but is inconsistent in doing so. Has anyone else seen this?

I have tried googling it but can't really find a suitable search phrase.

[raymw]

Maybe helpful - https://www.techinpost.com/the-network-location-cannot-be-reached/ and others out there. When your Nas fails, what then? If proprietary system, you'll be stuffed, until you can get the same system working again. Why not fix the ip addresses, don't use domain names?

Edited November 20, 2020 by raymw

[Pete the Elaner]

1 hour ago, raymw said:

Maybe helpful - https://www.techinpost.com/the-network-location-cannot-be-reached/ and others out there. When your Nas fails, what then? If proprietary system, you'll be stuffed, until you can get the same system working again. Why not fix the ip addresses, don't use domain names?

I have a second NAS & regularly back up data to it. The hostname is an alias so if I need to use nas2, I can just change the DNS entry.

A drive has already failed on the primary NAS but because it was using RAID5, it just beeped at me & I swapped out the failed drive. If you use internal storage, you would not have RAID set up every PC so a hardware failure will take data with it.

Using network storage also allows me to connect to data from any PC, my phone, tablet or Chromebook.

It may seem OTT, but I did network support for a living for some time so I have seen devices fail & know how to prevent it becoming a nuisance.

 

Why use hostnames? Good question.

I was used to supporting a larger network at work, where IP addresses were a pain & after I switched roles to a sites where DNS had been mis-configured, we changed IP addresses to something more scaleable, I realised that some of their applications had been set up with IP addresses & they stopped working. My colleagues & I had already started to fix their DNS issues & got some of the programs set up to use it otherwise the address change would have been a complete nightmare!.

When my ISP provided me with a new router, instead of 192.168.0.1, it has 192.168.1.254 as its IP, so I was able to update my DHCP to expand the network to a /23. I only needed to update DHCP to cope with this change.

That may not be an issue but...

I found out through experience at work that some US ISPs switched to using a class A network for their internal addressing which conflicted with the VPN devices I supported. (I think this was 10.0.1.100). You can't just expand a 192.x.x.x network to include that.

[raymw]

When I was referring to 'why use a NAS', I was assuming it was some proprietary system, wd/hp whatever. I have a window media server, but the 2012 version of windows server therein is being de-emphasised by M$. Realising that, I bought a cheap w10 single board PC with usb3, and a number of usb external drives, as a home-brew NAS. It runs headless, but it is easier to rdc via an android phone, cf a w10 pc!  All files are in ntfs format, mirrored, etc, and if that, or any pc on the network, fails, I can more or less immediately get at the data via another pc. I run Octopi, to remotely control a printer - that needed a fixed ip address, assigned in the router, as the name did not always work. Of course, it may be something to do with the number of defunct hostfiles I've scattered around the system, with names of computers that no longer exist. As you are finding, windows networking can be 'interesting'. The history of their passwords is more interesting - some  widows versions automatically capitalising words, some requiring special characters, etc. M$ probably owe me ten years of my life...

[John Tomlinson]

On 28/10/2020 at 22:02, mezzoman253 said:

I was on 1909, and 2004 was there as an option to download.

 

After 6 hours or so I'm now on 2004. (Slow BB less than 10M/bs).

 

I've not checked everything, but it appears to be doing OK.

 

We'll see tomorrow if it's done any damage.

 

Rob

This has also just happened to me, the option to update to 2004 yesterday became compulsory. Fortunately it seemed to go fine, and didn't take too long, certainly less than 45 minutes as I went away and did something else before returning to the machine.

 

Looking through the list of new features, I don't understand what most of them mean, let alone wish to use them, so as another contributor implied earlier, it does seem a bit like they're scratching their heads dreaming up new toys for people to play with! As long as the security is up to date, I think that is the most important thing.

 

John.

[Brit70053]

I'm not sure if this is the correct topic to ask about this problem in, but since a W10 upgrade might have some bearing on it, here goes:-

 

Two friends who I have regular email exchanges with have recently started to comment that my replies to messages they initiate are corrupting the original email format by a) introducing excessive spacing between lines and paragraphs and b) randomly introducing ‘Bullet point’ style numbering into the body of the text. This sometimes numbers all the affected passages of text as 1, but equally randomly in a numerical sequence 1. 2. 3 etc. When this happens, I see the numbering on their emails as I receive them and have thought it intentional.

They are able to exchange emails between each other without problems, so the conclusion is that the fault lies with my BT email system.

I have not knowingly changed any settings for my BT email address in question, but two things have happened recently which might be contributing to the problem.

My laptop updated to: Windows 1020H2 Build 19042.630

BT notified me that they are in the process of improving my email and this might take some considerable time. One immediate adverse (to me) effect of this is that I am unable to ‘switch’ between 2 BT email addresses as I was previously able to do. This is the only material change in function I have noticed so far and BT did forewarn of this.

 I have not been able to recognise any ‘Settings’ I could alter or see a way to ensure these are set to ‘default values’ as has been suggested.

Forum members will know I am not well versed in techy functionality, so I am appealing for any suggestions as to why my friends’ emails are being corrupted only when I receive and / or reply to them.

Thanks in anticipation of helpful replies,

Regards,

                John

 

 

[martin_wynne]

Hi John,

 

The way emails are displayed is controlled by the settings in your email client software. Somewhere there will be a setting which you can change to control that.

 

For example, this is the setting in Thunderbird:

 

 

 

I would advise against ever displaying the original HTML -- too much risk of security issues and scams. Use simplified HTML or preferably plain text.

 

Martin.

[Brit70053]

Thanks martin_wynne, looking for a similar view, I got the error message "mail client is not properly installed" and have begun to read troubleshooting advice which says ' you will have to install one and suggests : Ms outlook, windows live, Thunderbird etc. That advice appears to have been placed on the internet circa 2015 when Windows 7 was new(ish). 

Do you know if those 'clients' would be ok now on a Windows 10 laptop and are any preferable for a btinternet.com email address ?

Sorry to be asking about what is probably very basic information, but having had no cause to investigate such matters until now, I'm really in need of sound advice.

Regards, 

                   John

Edited December 3, 2020 by Brit70053
Correction

[melmerby]

Hi John

Thunderbird works fine with Win 10

You should be able to set it up for btinternet.com

 

BTW is the mail address format "<anything you like>@username.btinternet.com"?

I'm with Plusnet and that's what mine is like.

Edited December 3, 2020 by melmerby

[Brit70053]

Thanks Keith,

 

The address format is just 'username@btinternet.com. Can you advise me if this is free to install and do I just search on line to obtain it please? 

Also, I'm intrigued as to why this problem has only arisen recently and wonder whether it is a result of either the windows update or whatever BT are doing with the email system. Any ideas please.

 

Regards, 

 

                    John

[raymw]

Thunderbird is free https://www.thunderbird.net/en-GB/download/

Plenty of advice there and elsewhere on how to set it up.

[D9020 Nimbus]

Windows 10 has a built-in email client. Personally I prefer it to Thunderbird but YMMV.