...well, I've been already using Windows 10 because even the earliest iGPU driver still requires 1607, and with no hacking can I get it working on 8.1, so I decided to give in.
The reason for this sudden change will be explained in the rest of this post. Those who know that I have a very big grudge against Windows 10 will be surprised by this, so hear me out.
A few days ago the Start Menu and the time popup stopped working. I can kinda live without the Start Menu (albeit very painfully and inefficiently), but considering that I used the most out of the time popout, it breaking was a motivation to install a test Windows on the HDD.
After deleting the leftover folders from a test Windows 8.1 install using icacls, takeown, and rm -rf, I used dism (formerly only found in ImageX) to install Windows on the HDD without the installer. (if you want a tutorial on this then write a comment)
I chose LTSB 2016 nov (1607), because that's the earliest version for which I have iGPU drivers for, and because this laptop actually came with factory 1607, so I thought I'd give it yet another chance.
I chose LTSB, because I don't need Windows Store, I want to be able to disable updates at my will without nuking half of the system in the process, and just generally want to get rid of all the bloat which is present in the Home edition (which is what I got an OEM license for).
And damn, was this a good choice! At the start I had very low expectations. I spent countless hours installing ALL updates, because I was too slow to disable them, and didn't wanted to break the system because I was too impatient. In hindsight, this was a VERY wise choice, and I got rewarded for it.
LTSB 1607 is SO stable with all the updates installed! I have very low latency in osu (same settings, 0.28 in Windows 8.0, 3.8 in Home 1709, and 0.70 in LTSB 1607), and the iGPU drivers are VERY responsive (again, in osu, I get 4.2-4.6ms avg. in Home 1709, and I get 1.2-1.8ms in LTSB 1607 WITH iGPU!), opening a new tab in Firefox no longer softlocks EVERYTHING for a whole second, and it even starts up very fast from HDD, even though this HDD is AWFULLY slow (for comparison, Windows 8.0 took AT LEAST two minutes to start up, when a fully updated Windows 8.0 on my Athlon PC starts up in LESS THAN 20s FROM HDD USING FLOPPY BOOT)
So I'm trying to figure out a way to save most of the installed programs and their configs from the already existing broken install, wipe the SSD, and reinstall LTSB completely fresh on the SSD.
However I still think that people who praise Windows 10 and tell me that it's stable are full of biowaste exerted out of a bull
tl;dr
Losedows 10 is shitty and broken, the Home edition is a sin, fully updated LTSB 1607 rulez! I'll be upgrading from Home 1709 to LTSB 1607. Yes, upgrading, because it does feel like an ACTUAL upgrade from something very beta to a working and stable product, JUST LIKE HOW IT SHOULD BE IN THE FIRST PLACE If you praise any version past 1607 then you're full of SHIT.
The reason for this sudden change will be explained in the rest of this post. Those who know that I have a very big grudge against Windows 10 will be surprised by this, so hear me out.
For those who don't know, I used a MacBook Pro (2011, 13", i7-2620M, 8Gigs of RAM) before I got this laptop, but I accidently fried the board twice, so it no longer works, and costs too much to repair, so I gave up on it. With some complications I bought the laptop I'm using now (which is a very boring story).
So, I was initially biased against Windows 10 at the time (and still am) because of the negative experience I accumulated from the last month of school and my IT exam, so me getting a Windows 10 laptop wasn't something I really appreciated.
When I first powered on the laptop, I got jumpscared by Cortana on max volume with Dol️by drivers (which boost the output volume, so 8% with Dol️by drivers was like 20% or 40% with Realtek / HDA drivers, imagine how loud 100% was...), and because I didn't find the mute button, I force powered off the machine. This was a big mistake, as this action already broke Windows from the very start, AND I DIDN'T EVEN START USING IT YET
. But the breaking only has began here...
Not even two days in, the dreaded Windows Update keeps spinning the CPU out, and disabling wuauserv has no effect, so I wasn't able to suspend the updates even for a damn second. Because of this, the updates kept coming, and coming, and slowly making the system slower and more broken.
First the audio broke, because Windows Update kept reinstalling the f------ Realtek driver I didn't want (I prefer HDA drivers because it has (cheap) Bass Boost), and managed to earrape me so many times that I attempted to disable Windows Update even more, and managed to somewhat destroy it enough for the updates to stop coming for almost a week because I kept constantly breaking it because it kept re-enabling itself magically.
But once I forgot to break Windows Update, so it pushed 1709 on me. It bricked safe mode, and the ability to log in (after logging in, it instantly throws you back to the login screen due to a crash). I spent countless hours in the Get Help applet because of this. Since this update, I can't enable HDR support, and the screen is driven at 6bits instead of 8bits color which causes very noticable and headache-inducing flicker, which is ESPECIALLY noticable when using a dedicated GPU -accelerated program (like a video editor), because the UI flickers just ever so slightly due to the bit difference. Some updates also broke some other things, but they probably weren't so significant because I forgot them.
1803 was what tipped the piss jar. It bricked login again (which meant more hours spent in Get Help), broke multilingual keyboard support (if I did something, the keyboard got reset to USA instead of staying on Hungarian), updated Intel drivers to a newer version which were awfully slow and CPU-intensive, and it just generally rendered my device unusable due to all the countless things it broke. So I reverted back to 1709 which resetted a lot of my settings (a penalty for not taking the big wide long cactus up the wastepipe), and introduced general instability and freezes.
At this point I was so fed up, that I used psexec to competely ruin Windows Update as much as possible (and it turns out that THIS was the right way to delete those nasty protected sheduled tasks), and managed to keep the system in this broken state without an another f------- update breaking it even more. I just don't trust these updates anymore, not even if they ACTUALLY manage to fix ANYTHING without additionally breaking the rest of the system.
For a very long time (many, many months, or probably even half a year) I was using this half-assedly broken install until one day I left to take images in Vienna using one of the cameras I got from mom's boss. I took some nice pictures which are worthy of a separate blog post.
Anyways, when I came back I noticed that 3 new folders appeared in the C:\ folder, which are the signs of a very big Windows update (almost the same as upgrading from XP to Vista, or 7 to 8.0). This is where it started going exponentially bad.
From that poin on, I wasn't able to type in Start Menu to search for anything. I had to manually click the letters to search for an entry.
A week later the videos applet stopped opening. Almost a day later the Photos app stopped working.
So, I was initially biased against Windows 10 at the time (and still am
) because of the negative experience I accumulated from the last month of school and my IT exam, so me getting a Windows 10 laptop wasn't something I really appreciated.When I first powered on the laptop, I got jumpscared by Cortana on max volume with Dol️by drivers (which boost the output volume, so 8% with Dol️by drivers was like 20% or 40% with Realtek / HDA drivers, imagine how loud 100% was...), and because I didn't find the mute button, I force powered off the machine. This was a big mistake, as this action already broke Windows from the very start, AND I DIDN'T EVEN START USING IT YET
. But the breaking only has began here...Not even two days in, the dreaded Windows Update keeps spinning the CPU out, and disabling wuauserv has no effect, so I wasn't able to suspend the updates even for a damn second. Because of this, the updates kept coming, and coming, and slowly making the system slower and more broken.
First the audio broke, because Windows Update kept reinstalling the f------ Realtek driver I didn't want (I prefer HDA drivers because it has (cheap) Bass Boost), and managed to earrape me so many times that I attempted to disable Windows Update even more, and managed to somewhat destroy it enough for the updates to stop coming for almost a week because I kept constantly breaking it because it kept re-enabling itself magically.
But once I forgot to break Windows Update, so it pushed 1709 on me. It bricked safe mode, and the ability to log in (after logging in, it instantly throws you back to the login screen due to a crash). I spent countless hours in the Get Help applet because of this. Since this update, I can't enable HDR support, and the screen is driven at 6bits instead of 8bits color which causes very noticable and headache-inducing flicker, which is ESPECIALLY noticable when using a dedicated GPU -accelerated program (like a video editor), because the UI flickers just ever so slightly due to the bit difference. Some updates also broke some other things, but they probably weren't so significant because I forgot them.
1803 was what tipped the piss jar. It bricked login again (which meant more hours spent in Get Help), broke multilingual keyboard support (if I did something, the keyboard got reset to USA instead of staying on Hungarian), updated Intel drivers to a newer version which were awfully slow and CPU-intensive, and it just generally rendered my device unusable due to all the countless things it broke. So I reverted back to 1709 which resetted a lot of my settings (a penalty for not taking the big wide long cactus up the wastepipe), and introduced general instability and freezes.
At this point I was so fed up, that I used psexec to competely ruin Windows Update as much as possible (and it turns out that THIS was the right way to delete those nasty protected sheduled tasks), and managed to keep the system in this broken state without an another f------- update breaking it even more. I just don't trust these updates anymore, not even if they ACTUALLY manage to fix ANYTHING without additionally breaking the rest of the system.
For a very long time (many, many months, or probably even half a year) I was using this half-assedly broken install until one day I left to take images in Vienna using one of the cameras I got from mom's boss. I took some nice pictures which are worthy of a separate blog post.
Anyways, when I came back I noticed that 3 new folders appeared in the C:\ folder, which are the signs of a very big Windows update (almost the same as upgrading from XP to Vista, or 7 to 8.0). This is where it started going exponentially bad.
From that poin on, I wasn't able to type in Start Menu to search for anything. I had to manually click the letters to search for an entry.
A week later the videos applet stopped opening. Almost a day later the Photos app stopped working.
A few days ago the Start Menu and the time popup stopped working. I can kinda live without the Start Menu (albeit very painfully and inefficiently), but considering that I used the most out of the time popout, it breaking was a motivation to install a test Windows on the HDD.
After deleting the leftover folders from a test Windows 8.1 install using icacls, takeown, and rm -rf, I used dism (formerly only found in ImageX) to install Windows on the HDD without the installer. (if you want a tutorial on this then write a comment)
I chose LTSB 2016 nov (1607), because that's the earliest version for which I have iGPU drivers for, and because this laptop actually came with factory 1607, so I thought I'd give it yet another chance.
I chose LTSB, because I don't need Windows Store, I want to be able to disable updates at my will without nuking half of the system in the process, and just generally want to get rid of all the bloat which is present in the Home edition (which is what I got an OEM license for).
And damn, was this a good choice! At the start I had very low expectations. I spent countless hours installing ALL updates, because I was too slow to disable them, and didn't wanted to break the system because I was too impatient. In hindsight, this was a VERY wise choice, and I got rewarded for it.
LTSB 1607 is SO stable with all the updates installed! I have very low latency in osu (same settings, 0.28 in Windows 8.0, 3.8 in Home 1709, and 0.70 in LTSB 1607), and the iGPU drivers are VERY responsive (again, in osu, I get 4.2-4.6ms avg. in Home 1709, and I get 1.2-1.8ms in LTSB 1607 WITH iGPU!), opening a new tab in Firefox no longer softlocks EVERYTHING for a whole second, and it even starts up very fast from HDD, even though this HDD is AWFULLY slow (for comparison, Windows 8.0 took AT LEAST two minutes to start up, when a fully updated Windows 8.0 on my Athlon PC starts up in LESS THAN 20s FROM HDD USING FLOPPY BOOT)
So I'm trying to figure out a way to save most of the installed programs and their configs from the already existing broken install, wipe the SSD, and reinstall LTSB completely fresh on the SSD.
However I still think that people who praise Windows 10 and tell me that it's stable are full of biowaste exerted out of a bull
tl;dr
Losedows 10 is shitty and broken, the Home edition is a sin, fully updated LTSB 1607 rulez! I'll be upgrading from Home 1709 to LTSB 1607. Yes, upgrading, because it does feel like an ACTUAL upgrade from something very beta to a working and stable product, JUST LIKE HOW IT SHOULD BE IN THE FIRST PLACE
If you praise any version past 1607 then you're full of SHIT.
