In spite of my best efforts to capture the event for science, Microsoft ninja’d Win 10 Anniversary onto my work-at-home computer in the wee hours of the morning.
I was braced for misbehavior and mischief, but so far, things seem to be functional. The same thing happened to my gaming machine, which has been operating perfectly since the update. On neither computer have I experienced any of the terrible crimes so often reported on the intarweb. My privacy settings remained unchanged. Nothing blew up. Microsoft sent me a message to the effect that Skype was ready to use, but it won’t do anything until I activate it. Cortana is not in my face. The dreaded ad spam people cry about never happened.
Even more interesting: this is an upgrade of an upgrade. I originally had Win 8.1 on here. Win 10 was installed over it. Then Anniversary was installed over that. This is a perfect recipe for bugginess and slowdown, but that isn’t going on. Maybe I missed a step.
In completely related news: my spirit mage in Titan Quest is now lvl 25 and no longer seems utterly useless. She makes decent money and has managed to find or buy some nice doodads. I don’t mean to imply that she’s getting good drops. She has a whole transfer stash full of crap for melee and archer classes but almost nothing for a mage — nothing that dropped for free anyway. I’ve had to craft every performance increase from completed charms and essences.
The upper half of my skill tree is still untouched, as leveling in Titan Quest is much slower than in D3. Adding points to the skills in the lower half is getting me by nicely for now. I haven’t done anything with my secondary Dream mastery. I doubt that I’ll even get to it by the end of this playthrough in Normal difficulty. Actually, I doubt that most of the upper half of the Spirit tree will get any meaningful attention.
Mostly, I’m just playing to see the new locations. Presently, I’m in Thebes and am making a tour of the nearby Valley of the Kings. Whether this is geographically accurate in the real world, I don’t know. Probably no more than in Serious Sam. This troubles me not a whit. I’m just enjoying the casual nature of everything. I will note that the monsters are slightly more aggressive now. They’re also attacking in multiple species groups, so I’m having to be a little more alert. I wonder what happens at serious level tiers and difficulties?
Windows has actually gotten a great deal better in terms of performance, clean installs, clean upgrades, etc.
Unfortunately it’s also gotten a great deal better at letting the NSA read all of your files while profiling your typing and facial expressions for corporate advertisers.
So, you know, a mixed bag really.
That image is on Wikipedia and probably from someone’s 1360 x 768 laptop. The menu on my 1680 x 1050 work monitor takes up much less real estate. I pity the gubment schlubs tasked with reading my files. Even the bots are probably refusing to look at them.
It may be from a screencast. People run them in awfully low resolutions. But yeah, probably on a Surface or something.
I run Win 10 on my 27″ 4K iMac and the start menu is barely larger than the classic one, or at least it seems to me.