Post by BatHeart on Aug 19, 2015 11:27:55 GMT
Introduction
I'm not sure whether this section of the forum is really intended for this kind of – well, it's an article really I suppose – but maybe some people are thinking of doing this in the near future, or have already done it and had some experiences of their own, and would find it interesting.
Of course, I play Minecraft and I record videos for YouTube. Not in a big way, but enough to say that I have some experience. All of this experience has been with Windows 7. Just to give a bit of background, I use Fraps to record the game video and sounds (although for most of 2015 I had been using Predator – built into MSI Afterburner – to do this job after I started having problems with Fraps on my old PC). I record my commentary into Audacity. For video editing, I have a copy of PowerDirector 12. For any artwork, I am still using Paint Shop Pro 7 from the dark ages!
I recently upgraded my PC, while still on Windows 7, and the new kit is powerful enough to avoid the problems that had made me move away from Fraps and on to Predator. So I returned to Fraps as my main video-capture weapon.
Windows 10
What about Windows 10? Well, I had been looking at it for a few months – on a laptop that I don't use for gaming – where I had installed the preview builds. It seems to be pretty OK as an operating system: rather like Windows 7 to use, and with some styling that is reminiscent of Windows 8 (ugh!) but not as bad. Actually it is a style that is recognisably Windows 10 - quite clean and bright, but with less colour-graduation and translucency than 7.
Some of the screens – especially in the Control Panel (or Settings, as it now is) – seemed a little unfinished, but I guess they really were unfinished because we were still in development builds. It amused me, too, when you would suddenly find yourself in a screen that was straight out of Windows 7 (e.g. Power Options) complete with all of the Windows 7 look and feel. Clearly, in some areas, Windows 10 is just a smart new covering stretched over the old machinery underneath.
The Big Upgrade
I was a little wary before upgrading my main gaming/recording PC. After all, I needed to have all of these tools and programs running just as smoothly as before. When I had upgraded my laptop, I had been impressed by how the upgrade procedure kept everything exactly as it had been – desktop backgrounds, icons, the apps that were installed, and all of the settings and preferences! But to dampen this down a little, I reminded myself that my laptop had virtually nothing installed on it, and certainly nothing that would have pained me to have to reinstall.
I weighed up all of the pros and cons, and decided to go for it! It was about a week after Windows 10's official release, and I'd heard of some of the main pitfalls to watch out for. Graphics cards linked together in SLI or Crossfire seemed to be one dangerous area – but I didn't have this, so I felt safe on that score.
So I settled down one evening and left my precious main PC upgrading over dinner.
When I returned to it, it was proudly announcing that it had completed successfully – and I could see that it was right in some ways (desktop background, icons for all my apps) but deluding itself in some other ways. Most notably, it hadn't recognised my graphics card and had chosen a default screen resolution of 1024x768.
Trial and Error
I set about correcting anything that was noticeably wrong, and trying out all of the apps and games that I could find. This was a relatively quick – though sometimes frustrating – process. I had all of the essential things working by the end of the evening – so about 3 hours after upgrade.
I'll run through the things I tried and those that I had to tweak before they worked.
Graphics Card. Mine is an nVidia, so I got a new driver from their website and installed it. This was a bit messy, as it thought it had failed to install, but it was actually OK after a restart.
Other peripherals. I have a mic, a headset and an external hard-drive. Windows 10 seemed to have identified them all correctly, so that was good.
Browser. Windows 10 has a new browser – Edge – which is kind of clean-lined and smart looking, but I wanted to continue using Chrome. Chrome wanted to set itself as the default, but this isn't allowed any more – you have to do this yourself in the Settings. No bother, really.
Minecraft! I thought it important to start with this. I run it from the MultiMC launcher, but first I remembered to check that I had Java installed in the expected location. It was all OK, so I ran Minecraft … only for it to crash horribly with a string of messages in which OpenGL figured prominently. It could have been nasty, but I got past that by running the Mojang launcher – which downloaded files that it needed (probably LWJGL the main one). It ran fine. Then I went back to MultiMC and this time I asked it to check that it had the right files before launching. Everything was fine after that! I played with Minecraft a bit, and it all seemed to be running well – just like before.
Next up, Fraps. It ran OK, and so I recorded some Minecraft and it all seemed to work fine. I had heard that there were some problems with Fraps, but these all related to recording your Windows desktop (like if you were making a tutorial) and I never use Fraps for that anyway – preferring to use OBS as it seems to produce a steadier image with less cursor-jitter.
Audacity. As I mentioned, I always record my commentary into here, and not into Fraps. It allows me to adjust the relative sound levels, and to blot out background room noises if necessary, without affecting the game sounds. The slight downside is that I have to sync my video and audio every time I start editing, but that's a fairly minor chore.
Anyway, I set up a full recording test: Minecraft, Fraps and audacity.
The main thing I noticed was that my mic was being recorded quieter than before. I suppose this must be down to the new drivers that Windows 10 decided to use. Anyway, it was not too low, and just necessitated me turning my recording level up from about 70% to 90% to get a good volume.
Video-editing. I was pleased to see that PowerDirector was still installed. I was still more pleased to see that it ran. I opened up some of my recent projects, and everything looked fine, and played in preview. I pulled in the video and audio from my recording test OK. Then I ran into the first of a series of related problems, when I tried to save the project: Windows 10 was not giving me permission to write to the disk folders where I keep my video work.
Permissions and Ownership
This was the most annoying set of problems I had to overcome, and I think a lot of it was because I had changed the way I logged in to Windows. On Windows 7 I logged in with a typical old-style account – just my name. On Windows 10 I took the option of switching over to a Microsoft account based on my email address. It's what I had done on my laptop, and that had all gone smoothly and well. However, the difference here is that I have several other hard-drives apart from the one the operating system is on. When I hit the problem and checked, I found that all of the folders were owned by <my PC name>\Administrators, and that my own account only had low-level read-only permissions. So it would be OK if I ran everything as Administrator, but who wants that kind of hassle? Instead, I had to go into each folder structure that I was likely to need to write to, and change the ownership to me, and give me full control permissions. I could have done this to the whole structure of each disk, I suppose, but that probably would have run all night and I was waiting to write my files!
Video Playback
I normally use VLC player to watch videos back. I never really liked Media Player. Now, however, we have a new option with Windows 10 called Film & TV. I tried it. It's quite good. Very clean-looking and minimalist – but there might be a problem – it seems to have a very small set of controls. Maybe they're there and I haven't looked for them hard enough! But it seems to be another option for video playback. VLC player is still working for me, though, so I'll probably stick with it.
Later News.
Well, I have ended up reinstalling Windows 10 from scratch – and going through all of the above for a second time – because I got serious errors! I don't know at this stage whether to blame Windows 10 or my new computer. All I can say is I did get 1 blue-screen with my new PC while still on Windows 7, but then I started to get a blue-screen per day for about the last 5 days.
When I tried to get Windows 10 to repair itself, it said it couldn't, and then the whole system seemed to be corrupted and wouldn't boot
So the need for a clean reinstall.
So far, it seems like the clean reinstall is better than the upgrade from Windows 7. No blue screens so far, but also the file security seems a bit better (at least I owned all of my files on the operating system disk this time, even if I was back to not owning anything on my other disks again)
Overall Impressions
I think I may have just been unlucky in getting some corruption in Windows 10 that caused my later problems – but a search online shows that I am not alone. As an operating system, Windows 10 seems perfectly fine to use, and all of my vital applications work exactly as before. The file security headaches are frustrating, but I can't really say these are a Windows 10 thing, as I have seen a lot of the same on Windows 7 when you upgrade PCs with several hard disks.
I think all-in-all we will have to wait and see if I start to get problems again after the fresh install.
My main bit of advice to anyone who is about to go for the upgrade is this: don't assume that everything is working perfectly afterwards. Test everything and fix all of the little problems.
I hope my experiences my be of some small interest to anyone else who is teetering on the brink of upgrading, and I'd love to hear other early upgraders' tales too!
I'm not sure whether this section of the forum is really intended for this kind of – well, it's an article really I suppose – but maybe some people are thinking of doing this in the near future, or have already done it and had some experiences of their own, and would find it interesting.
Of course, I play Minecraft and I record videos for YouTube. Not in a big way, but enough to say that I have some experience. All of this experience has been with Windows 7. Just to give a bit of background, I use Fraps to record the game video and sounds (although for most of 2015 I had been using Predator – built into MSI Afterburner – to do this job after I started having problems with Fraps on my old PC). I record my commentary into Audacity. For video editing, I have a copy of PowerDirector 12. For any artwork, I am still using Paint Shop Pro 7 from the dark ages!
I recently upgraded my PC, while still on Windows 7, and the new kit is powerful enough to avoid the problems that had made me move away from Fraps and on to Predator. So I returned to Fraps as my main video-capture weapon.
Windows 10
What about Windows 10? Well, I had been looking at it for a few months – on a laptop that I don't use for gaming – where I had installed the preview builds. It seems to be pretty OK as an operating system: rather like Windows 7 to use, and with some styling that is reminiscent of Windows 8 (ugh!) but not as bad. Actually it is a style that is recognisably Windows 10 - quite clean and bright, but with less colour-graduation and translucency than 7.
Some of the screens – especially in the Control Panel (or Settings, as it now is) – seemed a little unfinished, but I guess they really were unfinished because we were still in development builds. It amused me, too, when you would suddenly find yourself in a screen that was straight out of Windows 7 (e.g. Power Options) complete with all of the Windows 7 look and feel. Clearly, in some areas, Windows 10 is just a smart new covering stretched over the old machinery underneath.
The Big Upgrade
I was a little wary before upgrading my main gaming/recording PC. After all, I needed to have all of these tools and programs running just as smoothly as before. When I had upgraded my laptop, I had been impressed by how the upgrade procedure kept everything exactly as it had been – desktop backgrounds, icons, the apps that were installed, and all of the settings and preferences! But to dampen this down a little, I reminded myself that my laptop had virtually nothing installed on it, and certainly nothing that would have pained me to have to reinstall.
I weighed up all of the pros and cons, and decided to go for it! It was about a week after Windows 10's official release, and I'd heard of some of the main pitfalls to watch out for. Graphics cards linked together in SLI or Crossfire seemed to be one dangerous area – but I didn't have this, so I felt safe on that score.
So I settled down one evening and left my precious main PC upgrading over dinner.
When I returned to it, it was proudly announcing that it had completed successfully – and I could see that it was right in some ways (desktop background, icons for all my apps) but deluding itself in some other ways. Most notably, it hadn't recognised my graphics card and had chosen a default screen resolution of 1024x768.
Trial and Error
I set about correcting anything that was noticeably wrong, and trying out all of the apps and games that I could find. This was a relatively quick – though sometimes frustrating – process. I had all of the essential things working by the end of the evening – so about 3 hours after upgrade.
I'll run through the things I tried and those that I had to tweak before they worked.
Graphics Card. Mine is an nVidia, so I got a new driver from their website and installed it. This was a bit messy, as it thought it had failed to install, but it was actually OK after a restart.
Other peripherals. I have a mic, a headset and an external hard-drive. Windows 10 seemed to have identified them all correctly, so that was good.
Browser. Windows 10 has a new browser – Edge – which is kind of clean-lined and smart looking, but I wanted to continue using Chrome. Chrome wanted to set itself as the default, but this isn't allowed any more – you have to do this yourself in the Settings. No bother, really.
Minecraft! I thought it important to start with this. I run it from the MultiMC launcher, but first I remembered to check that I had Java installed in the expected location. It was all OK, so I ran Minecraft … only for it to crash horribly with a string of messages in which OpenGL figured prominently. It could have been nasty, but I got past that by running the Mojang launcher – which downloaded files that it needed (probably LWJGL the main one). It ran fine. Then I went back to MultiMC and this time I asked it to check that it had the right files before launching. Everything was fine after that! I played with Minecraft a bit, and it all seemed to be running well – just like before.
Next up, Fraps. It ran OK, and so I recorded some Minecraft and it all seemed to work fine. I had heard that there were some problems with Fraps, but these all related to recording your Windows desktop (like if you were making a tutorial) and I never use Fraps for that anyway – preferring to use OBS as it seems to produce a steadier image with less cursor-jitter.
Audacity. As I mentioned, I always record my commentary into here, and not into Fraps. It allows me to adjust the relative sound levels, and to blot out background room noises if necessary, without affecting the game sounds. The slight downside is that I have to sync my video and audio every time I start editing, but that's a fairly minor chore.
Anyway, I set up a full recording test: Minecraft, Fraps and audacity.
The main thing I noticed was that my mic was being recorded quieter than before. I suppose this must be down to the new drivers that Windows 10 decided to use. Anyway, it was not too low, and just necessitated me turning my recording level up from about 70% to 90% to get a good volume.
Video-editing. I was pleased to see that PowerDirector was still installed. I was still more pleased to see that it ran. I opened up some of my recent projects, and everything looked fine, and played in preview. I pulled in the video and audio from my recording test OK. Then I ran into the first of a series of related problems, when I tried to save the project: Windows 10 was not giving me permission to write to the disk folders where I keep my video work.
Permissions and Ownership
This was the most annoying set of problems I had to overcome, and I think a lot of it was because I had changed the way I logged in to Windows. On Windows 7 I logged in with a typical old-style account – just my name. On Windows 10 I took the option of switching over to a Microsoft account based on my email address. It's what I had done on my laptop, and that had all gone smoothly and well. However, the difference here is that I have several other hard-drives apart from the one the operating system is on. When I hit the problem and checked, I found that all of the folders were owned by <my PC name>\Administrators, and that my own account only had low-level read-only permissions. So it would be OK if I ran everything as Administrator, but who wants that kind of hassle? Instead, I had to go into each folder structure that I was likely to need to write to, and change the ownership to me, and give me full control permissions. I could have done this to the whole structure of each disk, I suppose, but that probably would have run all night and I was waiting to write my files!
Video Playback
I normally use VLC player to watch videos back. I never really liked Media Player. Now, however, we have a new option with Windows 10 called Film & TV. I tried it. It's quite good. Very clean-looking and minimalist – but there might be a problem – it seems to have a very small set of controls. Maybe they're there and I haven't looked for them hard enough! But it seems to be another option for video playback. VLC player is still working for me, though, so I'll probably stick with it.
Later News.
Well, I have ended up reinstalling Windows 10 from scratch – and going through all of the above for a second time – because I got serious errors! I don't know at this stage whether to blame Windows 10 or my new computer. All I can say is I did get 1 blue-screen with my new PC while still on Windows 7, but then I started to get a blue-screen per day for about the last 5 days.
When I tried to get Windows 10 to repair itself, it said it couldn't, and then the whole system seemed to be corrupted and wouldn't boot
So the need for a clean reinstall.So far, it seems like the clean reinstall is better than the upgrade from Windows 7. No blue screens so far, but also the file security seems a bit better (at least I owned all of my files on the operating system disk this time, even if I was back to not owning anything on my other disks again)
Overall Impressions
I think I may have just been unlucky in getting some corruption in Windows 10 that caused my later problems – but a search online shows that I am not alone. As an operating system, Windows 10 seems perfectly fine to use, and all of my vital applications work exactly as before. The file security headaches are frustrating, but I can't really say these are a Windows 10 thing, as I have seen a lot of the same on Windows 7 when you upgrade PCs with several hard disks.
I think all-in-all we will have to wait and see if I start to get problems again after the fresh install.
My main bit of advice to anyone who is about to go for the upgrade is this: don't assume that everything is working perfectly afterwards. Test everything and fix all of the little problems.
I hope my experiences my be of some small interest to anyone else who is teetering on the brink of upgrading, and I'd love to hear other early upgraders' tales too!
