Windows 10 snippets.

[Suff]

OK so an update on the USB 3.0 issue.

I was trying to test performance of some USB3.0 hubs I just bought, I'm having issues with them on 8.1 so I thought I'd try 10 on the netbook.

What I found was that it was worse. So I connected my gig-e network adapter into the netbook port (it only has one USB3.0 port) and tried that. When I did that I found out that I could not copy any large files over the network, the copy failed every time after about 3%.

First I did a bit of driver checking. There are some unresolved USB issues so I thought I'd get the drivers. My chip is a FrescoLogic chip in the netbook (Renesas in the laptop), so I downloaded the hostdriver and ran it.

That forced the driver in. Reboot and I had a stable network connection. At 312Kbytes/s instead of nearer 125Mbytes/s.....

So I had a look for the driver for my USB3.0 network adapter.

I downloaded the driver from ASIX, unpacked it and pointed Windows at it. Windows told me that I already had the latest driver so I had to do a Manual update using the options


Browse my computer
Let me pick from a list of drivers
Select network adapters
The Have disk button then search for the folder containing the driver.

After another reboot, I had full performance back on my network card. I copied a season 1 dvd from Bablyon5 to my local hard drive then I disconnected the network adapter, connected the hub and one of my hard drive caddies. Then copied the dvd onto one of my faster external drives twice as fast as I got it from my network place.

So, drivers are still not 100%. The USB3.0 network adapter is not so much of an issue, as I'm fairly eccentric that way. The USB3.0 drives on the netbook itself not working is an entirely different situation. This is not good news as most people won't be able to either diagnose it or resolve it easily.

[Suff]

I was having some issues with my Wifi on my Netbook. A bit of now you see it now you don't and only wanting to connect to some wifi networks and not others.

Finally I found an article which stated that W10 was failing to connect to wifi networks because of incompatible VPN software. I knew my Netbook was not running VPN software because I checked both with Windows and Revo Uninstaller, but I removed all network related software such as the Juniper my work put on the Netbook, I was still confused as I still had the issue.

Until I looked in my services today to see what W10 had added which might slow my machine down. There I found an orphaned Avaya VPN client running.

I had to run the installer again and tell it to uninstall the client. On reboot my Netbook immediately started connecting and I was able to push it to my Apartment wifi before login. Now it works perfectly.

Things to check before upgrade.

Do you use your computer to connect to work? If you do has the work software been certified to work with Windows 10? Check with Work and get an update.

If you have ever used your computer to connect to work but don't now, do you still have work software installed which was never removed?

[Suff]

I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that my Netbook is too slow to run W10.

It was slow but OKish with W8. It came with W8 in the first place so it should be sort of OK with that. On W10 I'm noticing some critical lags and one of those is with the WiFi. Basically if the netbook is not doing very much, it will now connect immediately and work perfectly. However as soon as I start pushing the machine (I'm trying to completely defrag the drive with multiple tools), it drops the wifi connection and refuses to reconnect until the system gets it's performance back.

Unfortunately the drive is so slow that this is taking waaay more time than it should.

The performance has been pretty poor since I upgraded. It's always been bad for boot so I almost always hibernate it as 5-10 minutes to get into the machine again even under W8 was no fun. But now that poor performance has extended to normal activity.

I haven't removed all the crApps yet. Perhaps that will help a bit. Certainly the WiFi dialog is now a crApp and I can't remove that one. It's frustrating in the extreme.

Also I've been noticing, during defragmentation, that my netbook is not fast enough to support the process. It sits there on high cpu with low disk, then switches to high disk and low cpu. That is a clear indication that the system is not fast enough. It's also swallowing 50% of my 4GB of RAM. Which means anyone with 2GB is stuffed immediately.

I've switched off SuperFetch and a few other things I don't need, but, basically, if I can't get some more functionality I may have to clean install back to 8.1 and that's really going to irritate.

If we talk relative terms, my Laptop is using 5% of cpu and 8% of memory for the same job. OK my laptop I is extreme, but, all the same....

So the upshot of this ramble is simple. If you have a Laptop or a desktop which uses the AMD A or E chips, you are likely to be in trouble. Only the A8 and above are going to be viable with W10 and I know for a fact that there were a lot of cheap laptops sold with A1 chips running at around 1ghz. My Netbook is a dual core E2 1800 running at 1.7ghz and it's really struggling.

So worth checking before thinking about upgrading.

[edit]

I haven't had to truly customise the power settings since Vista. In Vista they were dire. Tonight I switched the power plan from balanced (it's been there since I got it), to High Performance. I went in and did some more tweaks. I stopped it from powering off usb adapters, put the minimum CPU to 100% on battery and ensured the Wifi was at max performance. All in the advanced settings from the power plan.

I also installed the latest AMD Catalyst suite and rebooted. Wifi connected before I logged in, netbook boots a bit more quickly than it did (possibly due to the disk optimisation I've been doing) and, pretty much, it's back to where it was. Certainly not faster and now using half the RAM all the time.

I'd still be very wary if upgrading either a very cheap W8 laptop or an older cheap laptop to W10.

[pederito1]

Is anyone else unable to print a pdf with W10?> I tried to download an app for it but Chrome said it was malicious and blocked it, Never had any trouble with W7.

[Aggers]

Blinkin' 'eck.

You've persuaded me now not to bother about upgrading to Windows 10.

[Workingman]

Ped, if you can open and read the .pdf then that program or application should let you print it.

[Suff]

Is anyone else unable to print a pdf with W10?> I tried to download an app for it but Chrome said it was malicious and blocked it, Never had any trouble with W7.

I'll check the netbook.

As for Chrome, it could be right. What are you viewing the PDF with? Did you install the latest PDF viewer from Adobe?

If you are using Adobe there should be no reason why it won't print unless the pdf itself has security on it which blocks printing. I haven't tried printing on my netbook yet and I have no functioning printers either in the Apartment or at home. At home my printer has blocked heads which I have no time to deal with and I have both new cartriges and heads for Mrs S printer but she won't give me the time to fix it for her. Just keeps whining every time I tell her it's not fixed....

[Workingman]

I read that W10 had MS Print to .pdf as part of the package.

If the .pdf is protected then that's another problem.

Most of the .pdfs I get from insurance companies etc. are editable, for my answers, and can be printed no problem. The main doc is protected, but the answers are open.

[pederito1]

Thanks WM and Suff. They are mostly from solicitors and others also created ones but I have not tried many which may be protected though I can open and read them. I tried to update Adobe to 10.1.3 but that is what Chrome blocked. Adobe said there were no updates available. I also tried Foxit which had a "print pdf" option but that did not work either. So I have to resort to an old machine which has XP though is painfully slow.

[Suff]

Thanks WM and Suff. They are mostly from solicitors and others also created ones but I have not tried many which may be protected though I can open and read them. I tried to update Adobe to 10.1.3 but that is what Chrome blocked. Adobe said there were no updates available. I also tried Foxit which had a "print pdf" option but that did not work either. So I have to resort to an old machine which has XP though is painfully slow.

If you open it with Adobe, what does it say when you ask Adobe to print it?