News Microsoft credits AI for Windows Update improvements

Oh, also forgot to mention, 2 or 3 times now Windows Update breaks my mouse as well. Back and forward buttons stop working in browsers, explorer, etc.

 

When it comes to the more hardcore side of PC Gaming Windows is within the margin of error of having 100% marketshare.
Due to that any HW manufacturer (be it AMD or not) who wants to sell HW in that market has a duty to make sure their Windows drivers are as close to perfect as technically possible regardless of how difficult Microsoft makes it for them.

 

Go ahead and play some "proper" games on the PS4 after you installed your Linux flavour of choice...
Hardcore gaming on a PC? Accept whatever MS craps out, Hardcore gaming on the PS4? Accept whatever Sony craps out.
The point simply being that you haven't improved your freedom of choice when it comes to OS choice and the long tail of consequences arising from it by buying a console.

 

I feel like the outlier in the community.

My home PC, work PC, and laptops have all been doing 10 updates fine.

Admittedly, the laptops and machines we supply often need a kick, but even then it's only the ones we don't flatten and reinstall 10 from a 'clean' source first.

The biggest bugbear I have at the moment is that 10 installs the MS driver for Realtek network cards, and coming back after sleeping, the network is borked. Solution seems to be manually installing the Realtek driver and changing the sleep/power settings on the adaptor, but still.

 

Sounds like dual-booting would be both cheaper and provide a better experience. Or running both Windows + OS(es) of choice under a Hypervisor to eliminate the 'reboot' switching time.

 

I too have never had an issue with DDU, but I don’t use it to install drivers after the clean. It’s purely a scrubber for me, as I continue to install again as normal in a fully booted OS. Sounds like operator error...

On the subject of updates; constant issues across a whole range of PCs. It just ****s up at any conceivable moment in the update, with a stock work PC to my gaming machine to my Ultrabook... I hate Windows 10 and have since their first update.

 

I also only use DDU as a scrubber. Reinstalling the drivers after a Windows update doesn't bring back shadowplay. You gotta clear out the cruft first.

 

you are overestimating what PC hw you need to beat a console:


An ancient 750ti would be enough to match a PS4, but we don't do matching we want to beat it, so lets go with a 1050ti.
How much faster is a 1050ti than the 750ti?
About 75% (sauce: http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-GTX-750-Ti-vs-Nvidia-GTX-1050-Ti/2187vs3649) which is more than enough of a difference.

You have the rest of the PC bits already anyway from the office PC, so the only HW cost is the £150 GPU. (and if you don't have an office pc that is fine, you can pick one up on ebay for the cost of a one year PS Plus sub).
Then you have the £100 for a Windows License bringing the total cost to £250.

And what a coincidence, the 500GB PS4 is £249.

So if you have console like performance expectations then yes, its perfectly possible.

Where it all goes out of the window is when you fall into the sweet sweet trap of raising your standards and demanding 60 FPS as an absolute minimum on ultra settings with AA and AF cranked all the way up and fun stuff like that.
And while I see nothing wrong with having high expectations you have to accept that your expectations are on you, not on the hardware.

 

I've had a PS4 since 2015 and while that admittedly was the first console I ever owned in my life (has been binned since in favour of a PS4 Pro) it should be sufficient to have have figured out how to use a controller, yet it still takes me longer to highlight a static object on the floor than to headshot a moving target with a mouse so you ain't going to convince me of anything by bringing up the completely optional cost of a controller.

As for future games, who cares? HW requirements don't change significantly until a new console generation comes along anyway.

And lets not forget what started this whole argument, MS being a bunch of unethical d***s due to which one would prefer to stay away from Windows, not like Sony gets any points in that regard either, hell they even get indirectly called out by EA of all people:
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...19-cross-platform-play-a-net-benefit-to-users

So no matter what you do, you just end spending more and more money until you have a separate device for everything you want, which really is a workaround rather than a solution.

 

Excuse me while I laugh... *looks for laughing-until-sick smiley*

...OK, now that's out of the way, I suppose that, yes, taken long term, i.e/e.g: when compared to installing 98SE/XP/Vista/7/8, it is indeed the case that update rollouts are getting smoother. For example, I no longer have to devote an entire day to install the OS, install basic drivers (NIC), update the OS, reboot, update the OS again, reboot, update the OS again, reboot, install drivers, reboot, install more drivers, reboot, install more updates that Windows Update forgot to mention the last five times I asked, reinstall a driver that Windows Update just decided to hose, reboot again... then struggle to get the exotic stuff set up (multimonitor, high-end scanner, I'm looking at you...). Or Vista, which remains the only OS I've ever had to BSOD immediately after installation before any drivers were installed at all; although to be fair that could have been the laptop it was running on. Maybe.

...yeah, in comparison, Windows 10 is much better. It's an hour or two (if all goes according to plan) on an SSD (but considerably longer on a HDD...) but the updates are not getting smoother. The wired NIC in my desktop and the wired NIC in my laptop now take minutes to negotiate a network connection with the router, to the point where Steam autostarts, falls over due to lack of internet and gets all whiny, where they used to have no problems before 1803. Boot and everything was up in seconds. Linux on my laptop has no issues so it's not a hardware problem.

The last update my mothers laptop had (she doesn't seem to have been force-fed 1803 yet) had some weird issue where the updated SATA driver had regular catfights with the firmware of the SSD in the thing, resulting in the laptop locking up hard for 10-15 seconds every 20 seconds or so. The previous SATA driver had been fine. The Windows version before that had exactly the same trouble. It's quite fun to install a driver when the system locks up every few seconds, even when in safe mode; but at least there was a fix...

My major complaint with Windows 10 is the lack of control. Every update, it gets a little harder to move away from what Microsoft thinks it should be. Things keep getting tweaked. The forced updates every six months are a perfect example. They add one feature I like (but don't allow me adequate control of it, see "Night light") and do a half dozen things that wind me up, suddenly "Documents" "Downloads" etc text are too big and end up "Docum..." "Downlo..." at my favoured icon size. It's always little things, never quite enough to make me swear, "Enough of this! Goodbye forever!" ...and aside from games, I need to use Office 365 and Endnote. Neither of which play nicely with CrossOver.

I've used both the open source AMD driver and the binary blob and never had problems. I used to use the old FireGL drivers back in the day and they were solid. AMD/ATi got a bad rep on Linux and I could never quite work out why, because everyone I've interacted with in person has had about as many issues with nVidia as with AMD/ATi in Linux...

The only surefire way I've found of keeping Windows from trying to hog every drive it can is dedicate one to Windows and one to Linux. As long as GRUB is installed to a drive that Windows didn't try putting its bootloader on, the two coexist peacefully. I've done SecureBoot setups this way; even with Bitlocker; no issues, MBR installs, UEFI installs... it's only asking the two to share one drive where they get all grumpy. Or full disk encryption with Linux, that gets a little finnicky too. Of course, it does mean you have to find a laptop you can have two drives in... which drops options a little.

 

What exactly is crap that is actually the fault of MS? Not talking about stuff like AMD drivers since that is the responsibility of AMD not MS.
Closed instead of Open Source? All the unnecessary spying? UWP? The insufficient testing of updates prior to release? The horror that is Cortana? Three of those five things come down to MS being a bunch of unethical d***s.

 

It does appear that using DDU to 'clean out the cruft' requires having to re-install drivers to fix X not working after a Windows update, while not using DDU does not appear to result in these issues (I haven't had a Windows update break any drivers thus far).

 

Do you use Shadowplay or Nvidia's overlay?