Hi guys, Happy New Year everybody.
2015 ended in a fatal computer crash for me, so I now find myself in front of a new computer running Windows 10 – I had XP on my old rusty bucket so the leap is rather huge!
I’m slowly getting my head around how things work, but a few tips from seasoned Window 10 users would be much appreciated.
Most importantly: what did they do to the WMP? It looks like a shitty i-Tunes, and the one CD I’ve ripped so far (just to find out how things worked, before I try to upload my old WMP library from an external memory) only displays as an album, without showing the individual tracks in a list, possibility to rate them etc.
I tried to look for ways to change that but no luck. Is it because I ripped it in the wrong format? Because it was a trial run I didn’t bother to choose and went with the default settings, is that the problem? Is it possible to get the WMP to look like it did before?
Another annoyance is the red squiggly line appearing as I write anything (right this minute for instance) plus the first letter of random words in the middle of sentences turning into capital letters without my doing! I thought it might be connected to the settings in Word, so I unticked the spellcheck/grammar box there, but it made no difference here. How do I get it to go away? It’s making writing and proofreading everything very tiresome.
So, the apps. I don’t quite get what the point is of those, but I did have a trawl through the free apps in the store last night, and I’m sure some of them are useful or entertaining, but which ones? Presumably they slow the computer down if you have too many, so I only want to install them if they’re going to be great.
Any tips from the good people of the Afterword?
Any tips in general about Windows 10 that you wish someone would have told you when you had it installed instead of finding out months later through trial and error?
I’ll be very grateful for any information, as I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed by all of these changes at the moment!
Thanks in advance,
Anna.
Recently appdated –>
I’ve just been with Win10 for about 3 weeks (was Win 7 so jump not as bad as yours) so still getting to grips with it myself.
To see individual tracks etc in iTunes…it’s now under the playlist tab..(why, don’t ask me..) & here you can edit etc as before…
WMP/Media Centre are no longer what they were but I recommend VLC media player as it can deal with FLAC files etc (if you need them) and you can view many AVI (visual files) without extra Codecs being installed and clogging up your computer…
The world of Apps I’m avoiding and instead of paying/being online for Office…try LibreOffice which is free & has word processor, excel, powerpoint alternatives…
Hope this gives a good starting point & enjoy ‘fiddling’ (or discovering as they sometimes call it…)
VLC is what pretty much everyone recommends and what a lot of people have been recommending since back in the old XP days so, for a lot of us Windows 10 doesn’t represent a change at all. It’s often the case that, even when MS bundles an application, there’s another better (or preferred by you) one available free from a third party. It’s a good idea to seek these out as you have more control over them than you do with Windows and, as MS are now calling Windows 10 “Windows as a service” they presumably reserve the right to pull or significantly change any bit of it they want to. VLC is multi platform too so you, once you get to grips with it, you can have a familiar interface whatever OS you’re using.
I’m just upgrading an old PC from Windows 7 to 10 this afternoon and the first thing I’ll be installing is ‘Classic Shell’ so that I get all the advantages of a new OS with none of the disadvantages of learning a new interface.
This is very good advice. I’ve used Classic Shell on all three Windows 10 machines that I have at Foxy Towers – it’s a great way to stay in proper control of your desktop and start menu.
VLC is deffo the way to go, and has been for some time now. I’m afraid I can’t help you with questions about playlists and so on in WMP, as I abandoned the Microsoft solution a long time ago for VLC.
If you need a replacement for Windows Media Center (not WMP, but the previous Microsoft solution for watching TV on your PC) I can recommend that you download and install MediaPortal, which is almost as easy as the old Microsoft application. It’s open source, and has some of the flakiness of a constant work-in-progress, but is basically a good means of getting access to the signal from a USB connected TV tuner.
Finally, don’t forget to turn off as much of the data-sharing as you feel uncomfortable with (in my case, almost all of it) via the Settings panel.
I know you are fruit free VV (a very sensible decision BTW) – I wonder if VLC will play Apple encoded files? I guess trying it is the only way to find out. Anything to escape bloody iTunes.
You can see what it covers via
videolan.org/vlc/features.html
not quite everything but enough for most of my purposes…
Apps? I don’t bother with them on my main PC. Useful on the Windows Phone or Tablet, but I’ve not found a wortwhile one for the desktop.
WMP? Microsoft default settings are awful. They think they know how people want to use the applications, but the settings are very restritive. Have a tinker with the options to see if you can find a layout that works for you (it probably is the only way).
Windows10 is ok as an operating system, but ca be annoying/frustrating when things freeze for no apparent reason – example: Start button and taskbar.
The most amusing failure was I was asked to give feedback on the “upgrade experience”, and the Feedback application froze
(still better than a Mac or Android though)
I’ve updated both the laptops I use to Win10. The process was remarkably quick and stress-free compared to previous upgrades I suffered, notably the XP to Win7 nightmare. I have stuck with the Desktop screen style as I think the colour scheme for the App screen look is hideous and it doesn’t make sense anyway unless used on a touch screen.
The main laptop (this one) was upgraded from Win8.1 and the other one (music server) from Win7.
No big problems thus far, though I had to reset all of my network share settings after, as they didn’t survive the change and neither did my previous power-saving options. Those didn’t take long to fix, though.
I haven’t used WMP or iTunes for years, preferring MediaMonkey, and my browser of preference has been Google Chrome for quite a long time too. I’m told the new Edge browser is actually rather good but see no need to change when I’m happy with Chrome.
I have Word 2010 on both machines but I don’t use it all that much. I rip all my CDs to .flac with Exact Audio Copy as it does the job better than the alternatives I have.
None of the programs I’m used to using have given problems thus far, no freezes on either machine so far either.
Power Options seem to be completely redundant following upgrade from 8 to 10.
(Windows Feedback informs me “we are aware of this issue”. The phrase”… and we are sorting it out” seems to be missing from that sentence)
I mostly use an imac but I have a laptop for my music recording software; Cakewalk Sonar. Cakewalk no longer support the version that I use and said they wouldn’t warranty its use under Windows 10. I took the upgrade plunge a few months ago and it works great. Until today, when for no apparent reason the start button disappeared. I googled this and there are pages and pages on it. Lots of different ways of getting it back, so far no good
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
(we have now reached the limit of my IT capabilities)
….is what worked for me with the disappearing start button. I was getting worried.
Whacking it very hard with the side of your fist can work too. I once hit a printer so hard it theatrically fell apart like a clown’s car at the circus. And it felt good.
Frank Zappa wrote a song (well, an instrumental) about that
Thank you everyone for the advice. I’m taking it one step at a time, to avoid my default setting: tech rage…
I turned off the autocorrect stuff in the settings like GCU told me about on another thread, but it’s still doing it now…I hope it just needs to be restarted. I’ve no idea though what those random upper case letters are about, hardly a case of autocorrect to write Before in the middle of a sentence and have it automatically changed into a capital B?
You might want to seek out the latest copy of WebUser (30th Dec 2015) (in the UK it’s only £2) which has a handy article explaining which bits of software you should steer clear of downloading and recommends alternatives (one example is that you should get VLC rather than MS Media Player). It might give you a bit more confidence to be adventurous knowing that you’re not doing something stupid.
I find WebUser is often a good read. it’s articles are clear and unpatronising. Mind you, for me it’s a free download from our local library so it’s a bit of a no brainer for me to get it!
Web User is well worth 2 quid a pop. It’s like having a geek mate who stays up 24/7 surfing the web looking for interesting “stuff” and saving you the hassle – it’s basically just a fortnightly list of worthwhile application updates/new freebies/interesting urls to visit and so on. There’s frequently some drivel op-ed pieces peddling “controversial” ill-informed crap, but no mag’s perfect. In a none-more-Afterword twist, the Production Editor is one Miki Berenyi.
I’ve learnt two things today.
1. A web based discussion about computers can actually result in people agreeing with each other
2. Miki’s surname isn’t, as previously thought, Fromlush!
We have a couple of magazines like that in Sweden as well (in Swedish, which is helpful when your computer speaks Swedish…)
Yes, they do have some very useful tips and tutorials, and working in a shop that sells magazines I can pull out the relevant pages before I send them back, thus saving the 2 quid/Swedish equivalent… 🙂
But the knowledge of the AW shouldn’t be underrated!
Windows Media Player hasn’t been updated since 2009, making it effectively unsupported, and hence bugs are not going to be fixed. It’s possible that a future update to Windows 10 could stop it working altogether.
Groove Music is the current Microsoft music player. It’s fairly basic, but it can integrate with an existing iTunes library.
Aha, I can see the tracks when I use Groove! So basically I’ll have to use WMP (or iTunes, but I haven’t got that) to rip my CDs to the computer, and then use Groove to listen to them (if I want to be able to see what tracks I’m hearing)? Seems like a lot of extra work for a less userfriendly option.
It’s as if they just gave up and accepted that everybody’s using iTunes anyway, so why bother competing?
Also, this means I can’t rate my tracks individually, just the albums. Which may not seem like a big deal to you, but I have a terrible memory for titles, so this means I’ll have to listen to a lot of shite tracks before I find the great one that I love, the one I could find quickly when it had a five star rating next to the title…
Or I’ll have to make a playlist called “Five Star Tracks” and put all of my favourites in it now.
I’m definitely getting old: having to change the way I do things pisses me off!
It does seem odd for a company that until fairly recently marketed a Media Center version of their OS to then drop most of it’s features from the flagship OS.
MS has a bit of a history of not competing. You only have to look at Notepad to see that! Who, apart from those forced to by locked down company systems, uses it these days? It’s really had a single update since it was bundled into Windows 3.1. It just makes everything as hard as it used to be before TextPad, Notepad++ or Notepad2 came along and surely just give anti MS folk more ammunition.
The issue with Windows Media Center was to do with licensing of codecs, particularly regarding DVD playback, which made it impossible for Microsoft to produce a free upgrade for it alongside Windows 10.