
Windows 10 Fall Creators Update: the 10 best new features - plurby
https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/17/16487760/microsoft-windows-10-fall-creators-update-features-review
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jakebasile
I really dislike the weird "named update" thing Microsoft is doing here. There
are now two "Creators Updates" and searching for info on them is problematic
as they only differ by one word. I much prefer a simple "Service Pack N" or
something like it. Also, it's difficult to know at a glance which came first.
Also, what does it have to do with "Creators"? I'm not a Creator on my Windows
machine, I just game on it. Is there going to be a "Consumer Update" later?

Also, I'd be remiss to not bemoan the ridiculous fact that as a Windows 10
user I am not able to avoid updates if I so choose. These updates that are
forced upon me routinely break my games until drivers/games are updated and
I'd very much like the ability to only apply them when and if I choose.

Oh, how I wish gaming on other platforms was viable. Sadly, I don't think
that's ever going to happen with Apple not taking Mac gaming seriously and
Linux gaming having been "almost there" for a decade.

edit: typo and update to first paragraph

~~~
sbx320
>Also, I'd be remiss to not bemoan the ridiculous fact that as a Windows 10
user I am not able to avoid updates if I so choose. These updates that are
forced upon me routinely break my games until drivers/games are updated and
I'd very much like the ability to only apply them when and if I choose.

You actually can (partially) do that by simply disabling the Windows Update
service. The only downside I've experienced thus far is that it also breaks
the Windows Store. Apart from that you obviously need to reenable the service
when you want to apply the updates. It's not quite ideal since you cannot
apply individual (e.g. security) updates, but it works very well to avoid the
random updates & included reboots.

~~~
panarky
I set network connections as "metered" since updates are disabled over metered
connections.

When I'm ready to update, I switch to a non-metered connection.

~~~
bluehazed
This is really the only sane workaround. Unfortunately you have to set wired
connections as metered through regedit (afaik).

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RandyRanderson
Here are my 10 fantasy features:

1 Improved Cortana: you can now remove it in one click

2 Improved OneDrive: you can now remove it in one click

3 Improved resistance to featuritis: you cannot install anything AR or VR

4 Improved UI - will not freeze entire laptop for 3 secs by clicking the
battery icon

5 Better Edge - downloads Chrome/Firefox 20% faster

6 Emojis - auto-bans contacts who use non-text emojis

7 Replaces Task Manager with much better MS Process Explorer that already has
GPU stats

8 Does not try and gather all my contacts emails under the pretext of "People
Integration" whatever that means

9 One button to turn off all the tracking/telemetry

10 Improved UI - Clicking on start does not result in times' square popping
up.

Windows 10 fall creators update: No one asked for any of this but here it is
anyway.

Windows 10 fall creators update: You should've seen the features we cut!

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roesel
I must say I am rather disappointed with most changes discussed here. They all
seem very superficial changes and I wish they would solve/improve other
things. Some examples include:

1\. Bring the "power plan" (balanced/presentation/high performance) switching
into the tray battery icon next to "Battery saver", which is independent of
the "battery saver" power plan. This seems (!) like an easy change which many
users would adore.

2\. Finally unifying settings into one and only one place instead of having a
"Settings" app only to find that every other thing you want to change
eventually leads to the old setting window which hasn't changed since at least
Windows XP.

3\. Fix the occassionally horrific Start search, which will do things like
find "Word 2016" as "Best match" when having pressed "wo", but once another
"r" is pressed to make the search string "wor", the "Best match" changes to
"Wordpad". Way too often does it happen, that you notice the best match as
you're typing and then hit Enter only to find that by the time another letter
was pressed (still the right one considering the current "Best match"!!), the
"Best match" changed to something else.

That's in the cases where the Search only finds programs installed to a
specific date and is not able to find anything newer, which has already
happened on two computers I've seen. Not even mentioning that the "best match"
gets updated with time even when no new keys are pressed. So the same can
happen just due to the "Best match" changing between you start and finish the
movement to hit "Enter".

4\. Finish improving the horrific thing that is looking up a network
drive/device using explorer.exe, leading to freezes and delayed error popups
that feel very Windows 95ish.

5\. Maybe change that a window of Explorer becomes unresponsive if waiting for
a HDD to spin up. This happens regularly if your system is on an SSD and you
have a second disk (HDD) mounted on another letter (D:\\). When you haven't
clicked that disk for a while, everything freezes between you clicking on it
and it spinning up to start reading.

But hey, let's add another presumably more sexy and unifying look to the
uppermost layers of the system.

Edit: Maybe they did other under-the-hood changes that are just not being
discussed. If so, where would one find them?

~~~
WorldMaker
> Maybe they did other under-the-hood changes that are just not being
> discussed. If so, where would one find them?

Yeah the article here is explicitly "10 Best New Features" and so doesn't
explicitly include improvements to old features, and clearly doesn't represent
the breadth of changes in the Windows release.

The easiest way to find hints about just about every change made in the update
is probably to browse through the Windows Insider blogs. They are quite
detailed and rather intimate looks into the changelog of Windows over time. I
don't know if anyone is building a good summary of everything that changes.
Some of the area-specific blogs will do summary posts just before the release
of everything going into the release; in particular I'm thinking about summary
posts I've seen from the Windows Subsystem for Linux team (biggest tl;dr:
multiple distro support, side-by-side distro-support, no need for Developer
Mode anymore, just download distro(s) of your choice from Windows Store) and
Windows CLI/CMD.exe team.

As with each previous update, more Settings have incrementally moved to the
modern Settings app, per your point 2. That likely will remain a slower
process than everyone would like (there are a lot of Windows settings), but
they continue to work on it.

I can't speak to most of your other points as they've not been personal pain
points for me; I don't do most of them often enough to notice.

~~~
roesel
Thank you for the nice reply. I will try to look into the changelogs/blogposts
and keep hoping that someone someday will address my pain points.

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UnoriginalGuy
While I am overall pretty positive about Windows 10; has anyone else been
having ongoing issues with this large "upgrade" updates?

For example my work machine is outright refusing to install the last one, and
Googling suggests the only way to get around it is a manual install via USB. A
family member's home machine also got corrupted during an install, and I had
to wipe it to recover (since it couldn't roll back or complete the
installation).

I like the concept of these "big bang" updates with new features, but there's
something wrong with how they're delivered.

~~~
seanwilson
Also, is there a reason they take so long to install? I've had to wait a solid
15 minutes involving multiple reboots and multiple cycles of it showing 0 to
100% progress where you think it's done but it just keeps going.

~~~
WorldMaker
My lay understanding is the big updates like this include a full Windows image
rather than a delta, and basically replace the existing Windows image
entirely, then replay the registry and settings into the new image.

It's somewhat akin to provisioning an entire new VM template and then
replaying an automated install script to bring it up to date.

As someone that remembers how long in-place upgrades of that sort used to take
(something like 98-ish to XP I recall taking hours), it's amazing they've got
it down to "just" 15 minutes and a couple reboots.

(It feels like most Insider Preview builds get installed in this full image
in-place upgrade system, too, and it's fascinating to see it happen sometimes
two or three times in a week.)

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megaman22
Best new feature - Task Manager locks the system up completely for about five
minutes when I go to launch it to see why another process is behaving
sluggishly...

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marklit
I find the Windows 10 Task Manager very useful. Good to see GPUs will be
listed as well now.

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anotherevan
The Windows Fall Creators Update, which they are calling the Autumn Creators
Update outside of North America, including in the southern hemisphere where
Spring is in the air. No apostrophe. Marketing fail on so many levels.

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rbanffy
It'd be nice if the reviewer were familiar with other OSs. A lot of these best
new features are stuff that other proprietary desktop OS had for some time
now.

