6 ms·

In all these discussions about Windows 10 phoning home, there are a couple of things that I haven't yet seen properly discussed. 1. Do the different versions o

In all these discussions about Windows 10 phoning home, there are a couple of things that I haven't yet seen properly discussed. 1. Do the different versions of Windows (Home/Pro/Enterprise/Education) behave differently? If so, how? 2. Do the pro/enterprise versions behave differently when they're connected to a domain? I'd imagine that the answer to at least one of these questions would be "yes." This kind of behaviour would be a deal-breaker in many enterprises.

electricblue 11y ago
I'd like to know the difference between free upgrades and Win10 installs with a real product key
- DrPizza 11y ago
  There's no difference (obviously).
  - ConceptJunkie 11y ago
    There _should_ be no difference, but who knows? Who can be sure? MS probably doesn't even know. I recall reading that there were 6 different versions of the Service Pack update for Office 2000 depending on where you got them from, and they weren't all compatible with each other. Do you think after another decade of Monkey Boy and his winning business strategy of pitting all the departments against each other that they've improved? Nardella actually seems like a grown-up, but he's still a dyed-in-the-wool Microsoft exec.... less stupid certainly, but just as evil. One of the biggest problems with Microsoft is that they are too big and disorganized. They have no vision, and no guiding principle, other than maintaining the lingering shreds of their monopoly. This is obvious from looking at the designed-by-committee, piecemeal UI for Windows, which is getting worse every release and not better. The best you can hope for for any particular feature from release to release is that it's just arbitrarily different and not broken or hidden or completely removed. Windows clearly peaked with XP, but their UI peaked with Windows 2000. The only reason 7 is liked is because they backed off most of the bad things they did with Vista, and the only thing, the _only_ thing I think is better in Windows 8 than any previous version is Task Manager, which is not something I use often. But it is nice. My #1 wish for Windows post-7 is that I could just use the "Classic" theme, but apparently Windows is now too sophisticated to do what it could do 15 years ago. Their UX department has gone totally off the rails or maybe was taken over by wild monkeys. Microsoft used to be _the_ place for good UI design back in the 90s. They were very scientific about it, and their designs were very well-thought out, based on CUA, and an absurd amount of user-testing and most of all, consistent. Not perfect, but they were very good. But as soon as graphics cards could do more than 256 colors and Photoshop was invented, everyone went wild and UI became the lawless, Wild West funhouse it remains today. Except in the past few years, everyone decided that the "flat look" is cool (news flash: it's ugly and hard to make out) and now we have UIs that are as usable and good-looking as Windows 2, but without the consistency. I'd thought Microsoft had run out of sharks to jump with Windows 8, but they keep finding more. But here's the thing. I still like Windows. I just wish I could make Windows look at work like it did when it looked and worked well (I'm not referring to the underlying technology, which is presumably improving all the time, although I still think Windows 8 is absurdly slow compared to 7 and much worse compared to XP... and I have empirical evidence. I do a lot of work in a Windows 2003 VM running on VirtualBox (long story) and it's much faster than the Windows 7 host and doesn't suffer from the, oh gee, everything's going to go "Not Responding" for 30 seconds to 2 minutes for no apparent reason that I see with the apps (at least MS apps) on the host.
brudgers 11y ago
Discussions about differences in behavior among versions of Windows would not be as informative as a discussion of Windows in comparison to other OS's. Ubuntu bounces stuff off Canonical servers, iOS off Apple's iTunes and in-the-wild Android...well where to begin? Facilitating high connectivity is what modern mass market operating systems do and Microsoft is playing catchup not leading a charge against anonymity. They couldn't if they wanted to. The commercial internet is built on tracking individuals and their behavior. I guess everyone would feel better if the Windows splash screen said "This OS Uses Cookies, by Continuing You Agree to Our TOS."
- Silhouette 11y ago
  Facilitating high connectivity is what modern mass market operating systems do That's a bold claim, considering that until recently Windows was exactly what you used if you didn't want that kind of always-online emphasis and instead wanted to retain a degree of control and running your software locally. Like many of the software companies moving in user-hostile directions, Microsoft's biggest competition is still themselves from a few years ago. And we know from both Vista and 8 that even Microsoft do not automatically have sufficient influence to get people to upgrade to a system that is perceived as being worse than what everyone already had. [Edit: Perhaps instead of numerous people downvoting, someone could actually reply and say what they object to about this post? I don't think either my characterisation of Windows or my characterisation of Microsoft's competitive situation is unreasonable.]
  - brudgers 11y ago
    Having owned 3.1, 95, 98, Me, 2000, XP, 7, and 8 boxes and been paid to use 2.0, NT and Vista, my experience has been that each version [except Me which was meh] has been significantly better...and the amount of improvement from version to version has been markedly increasing...that is, 8 a larger improvement on 7 than 7 was on Vista. People can legitimately disagree on the meaning of "user-hostile". If the way in which people have voted with their wallets in favor of convenience over anonymity, then the view that Microsoft's OS is user-hostile appears not to be in an ascendency [which I am not saying makes it wrong].
blackbeard 11y ago
We have an enterprise edition VM in test and it appears to react the same as Pro at least. Haven't tried home. What is scary is the lack of GPOs to turn this stuff off which you'd expect in an enterprise product. Technically we can't apply policy to make this compliant with our data protection requirements. Their funeral to be honest.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- ultramancool 11y ago
  There's actually some GPOs to turn this stuff off. I'm running Enterprise on my desktop... the problem is that many of them don't work or only disable the UI, but still connect out to random Microsoft servers. How the hell does Microsoft think that's acceptable in an "Enterprise" product?
  - uxcn 11y ago
    This was something I was wondering about. It seems like any company that has proprietary data to protect or privacy laws to comply with (most) don't even have a choice. I personally don't use Windows a lot, but even knowing that information was being sent out by default would be a deal breaker for me. Can you give some examples of the stuff that does actually have switches?
    - ultramancool 11y ago
      > Can you give some examples of the stuff that does actually have switches? Yeah, if you disable the Search thing in the start menu for example, it _does_ stop sending your queries to Bing. That switch does work. It just sends a bunch of tracking info instead. On Enterprise, you can also disable telemetry which does appear to work.
- api 11y ago
  You mean this will chase MS out of enterprise? Awesome! It means we don't have to support them anymore! (Supporting Windows is 10X more work than all other platforms combined due to stupid "can't reproduce here" problems on rotted and unpatched Windows machines and general Windows driver API hell. I am including Android and less-commonly-used OSS operating systems like FreeBSD and OpenBSD.)
mtgx 11y ago
Only in Enterprise you can fully disable "telemetry", but just in all the other versions expect most of this stuff to call home by default and send data to Microsoft. I wouldn't assume the opposite by default if I were you.

electricblue 11y ago

I'd like to know the difference between free upgrades and Win10 installs with a real product key

DrPizza 11y ago
There's no difference (obviously).
- ConceptJunkie 11y ago
  There _should_ be no difference, but who knows? Who can be sure? MS probably doesn't even know. I recall reading that there were 6 different versions of the Service Pack update for Office 2000 depending on where you got them from, and they weren't all compatible with each other. Do you think after another decade of Monkey Boy and his winning business strategy of pitting all the departments against each other that they've improved? Nardella actually seems like a grown-up, but he's still a dyed-in-the-wool Microsoft exec.... less stupid certainly, but just as evil. One of the biggest problems with Microsoft is that they are too big and disorganized. They have no vision, and no guiding principle, other than maintaining the lingering shreds of their monopoly. This is obvious from looking at the designed-by-committee, piecemeal UI for Windows, which is getting worse every release and not better. The best you can hope for for any particular feature from release to release is that it's just arbitrarily different and not broken or hidden or completely removed. Windows clearly peaked with XP, but their UI peaked with Windows 2000. The only reason 7 is liked is because they backed off most of the bad things they did with Vista, and the only thing, the _only_ thing I think is better in Windows 8 than any previous version is Task Manager, which is not something I use often. But it is nice. My #1 wish for Windows post-7 is that I could just use the "Classic" theme, but apparently Windows is now too sophisticated to do what it could do 15 years ago. Their UX department has gone totally off the rails or maybe was taken over by wild monkeys. Microsoft used to be _the_ place for good UI design back in the 90s. They were very scientific about it, and their designs were very well-thought out, based on CUA, and an absurd amount of user-testing and most of all, consistent. Not perfect, but they were very good. But as soon as graphics cards could do more than 256 colors and Photoshop was invented, everyone went wild and UI became the lawless, Wild West funhouse it remains today. Except in the past few years, everyone decided that the "flat look" is cool (news flash: it's ugly and hard to make out) and now we have UIs that are as usable and good-looking as Windows 2, but without the consistency. I'd thought Microsoft had run out of sharks to jump with Windows 8, but they keep finding more. But here's the thing. I still like Windows. I just wish I could make Windows look at work like it did when it looked and worked well (I'm not referring to the underlying technology, which is presumably improving all the time, although I still think Windows 8 is absurdly slow compared to 7 and much worse compared to XP... and I have empirical evidence. I do a lot of work in a Windows 2003 VM running on VirtualBox (long story) and it's much faster than the Windows 7 host and doesn't suffer from the, oh gee, everything's going to go "Not Responding" for 30 seconds to 2 minutes for no apparent reason that I see with the apps (at least MS apps) on the host.

brudgers 11y ago

Discussions about differences in behavior among versions of Windows would not be as informative as a discussion of Windows in comparison to other OS's. Ubuntu bounces stuff off Canonical servers, iOS off Apple's iTunes and in-the-wild Android...well where to begin? Facilitating high connectivity is what modern mass market operating systems do and Microsoft is playing catchup not leading a charge against anonymity. They couldn't if they wanted to. The commercial internet is built on tracking individuals and their behavior. I guess everyone would feel better if the Windows splash screen said "This OS Uses Cookies, by Continuing You Agree to Our TOS."

Silhouette 11y ago
Facilitating high connectivity is what modern mass market operating systems do That's a bold claim, considering that until recently Windows was exactly what you used if you didn't want that kind of always-online emphasis and instead wanted to retain a degree of control and running your software locally. Like many of the software companies moving in user-hostile directions, Microsoft's biggest competition is still themselves from a few years ago. And we know from both Vista and 8 that even Microsoft do not automatically have sufficient influence to get people to upgrade to a system that is perceived as being worse than what everyone already had. [Edit: Perhaps instead of numerous people downvoting, someone could actually reply and say what they object to about this post? I don't think either my characterisation of Windows or my characterisation of Microsoft's competitive situation is unreasonable.]
- brudgers 11y ago
  Having owned 3.1, 95, 98, Me, 2000, XP, 7, and 8 boxes and been paid to use 2.0, NT and Vista, my experience has been that each version [except Me which was meh] has been significantly better...and the amount of improvement from version to version has been markedly increasing...that is, 8 a larger improvement on 7 than 7 was on Vista. People can legitimately disagree on the meaning of "user-hostile". If the way in which people have voted with their wallets in favor of convenience over anonymity, then the view that Microsoft's OS is user-hostile appears not to be in an ascendency [which I am not saying makes it wrong].

blackbeard 11y ago

We have an enterprise edition VM in test and it appears to react the same as Pro at least. Haven't tried home. What is scary is the lack of GPOs to turn this stuff off which you'd expect in an enterprise product. Technically we can't apply policy to make this compliant with our data protection requirements. Their funeral to be honest.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
ultramancool 11y ago
There's actually some GPOs to turn this stuff off. I'm running Enterprise on my desktop... the problem is that many of them don't work or only disable the UI, but still connect out to random Microsoft servers. How the hell does Microsoft think that's acceptable in an "Enterprise" product?
- uxcn 11y ago
  This was something I was wondering about. It seems like any company that has proprietary data to protect or privacy laws to comply with (most) don't even have a choice. I personally don't use Windows a lot, but even knowing that information was being sent out by default would be a deal breaker for me. Can you give some examples of the stuff that does actually have switches?
  - ultramancool 11y ago
    > Can you give some examples of the stuff that does actually have switches? Yeah, if you disable the Search thing in the start menu for example, it _does_ stop sending your queries to Bing. That switch does work. It just sends a bunch of tracking info instead. On Enterprise, you can also disable telemetry which does appear to work.
api 11y ago
You mean this will chase MS out of enterprise? Awesome! It means we don't have to support them anymore! (Supporting Windows is 10X more work than all other platforms combined due to stupid "can't reproduce here" problems on rotted and unpatched Windows machines and general Windows driver API hell. I am including Android and less-commonly-used OSS operating systems like FreeBSD and OpenBSD.)

mtgx 11y ago

Only in Enterprise you can fully disable "telemetry", but just in all the other versions expect most of this stuff to call home by default and send data to Microsoft. I wouldn't assume the opposite by default if I were you.