APC - September 2015 AU.pdf

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EDITORIAL
Editor-in-Chief Dan Gardiner
Managing Editor Melanie Pike
Acting Senior Sub Editor Olga Jevdic
Journalist Joel Burgess
Journalist Stephen Lambrechts
ART/PRODUCTION
Creative Director Troy Coleman
Senior Designer Nykke Coleman
Designer Sharnee Brisbourne
CONTRIBUTORS
Louise Blain, Matt Bolton, Neil Bothwick, Simon Crisp,
Helen Bradley, Matt Clapham, Alan Dexter, Craig Grannell,
Daniel Griliopoulous, Christian Hall, Dave James, Lindsay
Handmer, Phil Iwaniuk, Jeremy Laird, Kevin Lee, Matthew
JC. Powell, Shaun Prescott, Zac Storey, Nathan Taylor,
Alexander Tolstoy, Luis Villazon, Darren Yates
SENIOR MANAGEMENT
Chief Operating Officer Neville Daniels
COMMERCIAL
Sales Director Paul Marttila
paul.marttila@futurenet.com
Do yourself a favour: If you’re upgrading
to Windows 10, use the manual ‘media
creation tool’ to do it.
The Windows 10
upgrade experience
Living on the edge can still require
a lot of troubleshooting know-how.
Senior Sales Manager Jairo Manzoupo
jairo.manzoupo@futurenet.com
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As we go to print with this
issue of APC, Microsoft
has just started rolling out
the free Windows 10
upgrade. Judging just from the
numbers — Microsoft claims 14
million devices were upgraded just
on the first day — it’d seem to be off
to a good start. Unfortunately, my
own upgrade experience didn’t
quite go as smoothly as I’d hoped
— although, admittedly, part of that
could definitely be my own fault.
When upgrade day rolled around,
I decided I’d leave my home PC (which
runs an almost 2-year-old Windows
8.1 installation) switched on to see
if the required 3GB of downloads
would come down automatically
via Windows Update — which
apparently, they did… and then some,
as I discovered when I got home.
Windows 10’s temporary upgrade
folder housed not just 3GB of files,
but a whopping 15GB! It seems that
some of the downloaded files had
been corrupted — apparently
repeatedly — and Windows Update
had been trying to replace them with
good ones… and, failing time and
again. (Thank goodness for unlimited
broadband plans.)
Deducing that this problem
probably wasn’t going to resolve itself
cleanly, I then went about deleting all
the corrupted files and then trying to
force Windows Update to start the
process again… which, after a couple
of hours of downloading more files,
once again failed. The installer was
still ending up corrupted.
“Screw Windows Update,” was my
general feeling at this point, so I went
about looking for alternatives,
finding that Microsoft’s smartly put
together a standalone tool for
creating a Windows installer on a
USB drive — the so-called ‘media
creation tool’, which you can find
here: tinyurl.com/apc419-w10mct. Using
this to create a USB 3.0 flash drive
with the Windows 10 installer, the
upgrade process was fast — taking
around 30 minutes — and completely
flawless. (APC’s creative director,
Troy Coleman, went through a similar
‘corrupted downloads’ experience,
but also had a great experience with
the media creation tool.)
And now that it’s running, I’m
pretty fond of the new OS. It’s very
quick, not just for Microsoft’s own
apps (like the excellent but a little
under-featured Edge browser) but for
using and launching third-party ones
too. Not everything is working great,
however. I run a dual-monitor setup,
and trying to game on one screen and
watch flicks on the other results in
choppy video — and this is something
that worked perfectly on Windows
8.1. Hopefully, these are just driverrelated
teething problems that will
improve over the next few months
— it still is very much early days for
Windows 10.
If you’ve upgraded to Windows 10
already, what was your experience?
And is there anything you
particularly love or hate about it?
DAN GARDINER
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
dan.gardiner@
futurenet.com
www.apcmag.com 3