It’s Time To Move On From Windows 10

Microsoft is ending support for Windows 10 in October 2025. So ends a decade of a somewhat confused operating system but one we kind of grew to love. But what happens next? Should you upgrade to Windows 11? What other options are there?

In 2015, Microsoft was clearly nursing its bruises over the failure of Windows 8, with many choosing to stick with Windows 7. At the time, I was running Windows 8.1 with Start8, which made it a much more familiar and enjoyable experience, bypassing the needless MetroUI. Windows 10 was designed to refocus the UI back towards the desktop – you know, the thing 99& of us were using it for. After 10 years of maturity, it’s easy to forget that Windows 10, in it’s first incarnation was a pretty disjointed up mess itself. Mainly when trying to change settings, where you were thrown about between the control panel and the new settings UI that exists for…. reasons. God knows what Microsoft were thinking, but it felt unfinished. Over the years, it has been refined, if still not perfect, and I daresay the feel of familiarity over that time also helps get over the inconsistencies in the UI.

However, time marches on, and whilst Microsoft could maybe keep on updating Windows 10 without much issue (although breaking changes probably warrants a new version number), Microsoft also want to enforce TPM on users. That in itself isn’t a bad thing. In the modern world computers are under constant threat from ever more sophisticated attacks, especially so with the rise of ‘Artificial Intelligence’, which you can’t get away from, whenever you turn on your TV. They also want to suck ever more data out of you. So hold on for Windows 11, with even more telemetry than 10. Think you own your PC? Pah! All your computer are belong to Microsoft. I hopefully await some lawsuit that will order them to reduce/remove telemetry in the near future. With that in mind, why should you move to Windows 11? Read on for your options…

What Can You Do?

Stick With Windows 10

Just like Windows 7, there will be many people that flat out refuse to move to Windows 11 from 10. I can understand it but, honestly, don’t do this. If your hardware supports Windows 11, then upgrade before Windows 10 is officially dead. The biggest reason is that security exploits will not get patched – well not unless you’re one of those corporations paying MS large sums to do so. If you’re still on Windows 10, you will be susceptible to attacks.

In addition to this, updates to your software will no longer be guaranteed to work with Windows 10. You may find that your web browser will not update, leaving you vulnerable to any flaws found in that version of the browser. Various other apps can be left outdated. You may not be able to update your drivers for things such as your graphics card.

Unfortunately, if you’re on a machine that doesn’t support Windows 11’s requirements, then you are out of luck anyway. You are stuck with now obsolete hardware. Your options are to live with the issues above, move to Linux, or buy a new machine that supports Windows 11.

Or disconnect from the internet…

If you don’t need to access the internet on your W10 machine, then disable all it’s network connections and enjoy a blissful life. Although, in this day age, it’s getting hardware to find software that doesn’t require you to be connected to some cloud service in order to just work.

Upgrade To Windows 11

Windows 11, telemetry and AI aside, is kind of nice to use. I do feel it’s better than Windows 10, in some areas, once you get used to it, of course. The settings area has had an overhaul and feels far more cohesive than Windows 10s. I have a MiniPC that runs 11 and it’s not all that different, although it’s not my daily driver, so there may be some frustrating things that will become more apparent, once I am using it every day.

Plus, of course, all your current software should just work after the upgrade. It’s a good reason for sticking with Microsoft.

My primary concerns are with it being a privacy nightmare, which is likely only going to get worse.

Move To Linux (or another OS)

Now this won’t be for everyone, but it is my preferred option. With Microsoft getting ever creepier with increased telemetry, AI and locking down abilities to create local accounts, it feels almost inevitable that some will want to make the jump eventually. You may as well do it now. There are many computer savvy people that would be quite happy sticking in an Linux boot device, wiping the system drive and installing Linux. Plus there are many options to choose from, of which the likes of Ubuntu is one of the most well known. However, that strength is also a Linux weakness; the simple wealth of options, when it comes to distributions really isn’t for those that just want a PC that they can doom scroll Facebook on. And installing a new OS is not for those that just want a button that says ‘Click here to do The Thing’.

It’s also the case that there will be software many people use, daily, that just isn’t available on Linux. My main candidates being MS Flight Simulator and Ableton. Da Vinci Resolve also doesn’t seem to work as well on my Linux installation as it does on Windows, and is a bit of pain to get it to work with an AMD graphics card.

And yes, if you’re not the type to learn or understand the intricacies of an operating system, it can be difficult to troubleshoot when applications don’t work or install correctly.

However, for me, the positives far outweigh the negatives. I have an operating system that is free, highly customisable, isn’t spying on me, and isn’t sending all my data off to some undisclosed location.

If all the above doesn’t sound appealing, and you have lots of spare cash, then you can always move to Apple. But there’s no guarantee they also won’t start siphoning data from you. Big corporations like to be all corporationary.

My Upgrade Experience

Both my main desktop and laptop run Windows 10 – dual booting with Kubuntu. I’d be massively annoyed if the upgrade to 11 breaks all that. My plan was to do my laptop first and see how that goes. If things go wrong, I’ll be less annoyed than if the same happened to my desktop installation. I spent some time with it on my laptop before I upgraded the desktop. I’m not a fan of the start menu in Windows 11, so I’ll be sticking Start11 on both devices (my desktop already uses it, and it’s so much less intrusive)

Laptop Upgrade

I opened Windows Update and clicked on the button I’d been putting off for months (though at least those annoying ‘Upgrade to W11’ screens that pop up on boot now and then will be gone forever. My desktop is thankfully immune to these). It took just over an hour to download and install the upgrade. For reference, the other night, I upgraded a Raspberry Pi 4 from Ubuntu 20.04, to 22.04, to 24.04 in less than that time. After it had done that, the system prompted me to restart, which I did so. My OS boot screen selection screen was still there. Good good; it hadn’t messed with the bootloader. I selected to boot in to Windows. There I was greeted by a black screen and a huge mouse pointer…. and that was it. No message. No little whirly animation. No progress percentage. Just a black screen. Great feedback there, MS. I decided to leave it in case it was actually doing something, and also hoping it hadn’t gone and broken everything. Sure enough, after close to 15 minute of blackness, it rebooted again. This time I did get a progress percentage and a message about it working on updates, and after a minute or so I was greeted by a login screen. I logged in and my desktop looked close to how it did before; all my icons where there, and it looked like everything that was originally in the taskbar was still there. My desktop wallpaper was also untouched. I do also like the new default font. It make things just look that little bit more professional. It almost feels a little MacOS, with that ‘I can’t explain why it looks better, but it does’ feel.

Oh, but the start menu. Now I have no problem with the taskbar being in the centre. After all, in my previous job I used a Mac, which does the same, and one of my Linux installations has the taskbar centred as well. You can get used to that. However, when you click the start button itself, it would make sense for the menu to appear above your mouse, like most menus. Oh no… not Microsoft. The start menu is centred to the screen as it’s default setting. So you may click on a button, that is more towards the left of the screen, with the menu opening away from you. Who thought that one up?

With the taskbar being centred by default, this also means the placement of the start button will change, as more icons are added. That’s not great for muscle memory. Although I usually just hit the Windows key on the keyboard anyway. Fortunately, Microsoft have learned from at least some of their past mistakes, and they do allow you to move the taskbar to the left, and with that, the menu opens directly above the mouse. It’s a start (no pun intended) at least. There is a search box on the taskbar as well. That is another thing I instantly got rid of.

And, of course, they’ve changed behaviour once again. Now there are default pinned applications that I don’t use. Also typing an applications name often brings up a Bing search result, rather than, you know, the application installed on my machine. Ugh. What pops up, when you type is also inconsistent

Another instantly obvious change, and in my view another improvement, are the menus when you right click. In previous Windows versions these can get horribly large, and sometimes go beyond your visible screen, even on high resolutions displays. So it’s nice that this is organised a bit better.

File Explorer has also been tweaked, in positive ways, looking somewhat cleaner. There are also icons for file options (such as copy, paste, delete, and new). I’m not all that sure about the usefulness of those, when it’s a lot quicker to right click the mouse. But I guess there may be those that will find the visual cues helpful. MS have also added tabs to Explorer, so you can now have multiple folders open in one place.

Windows has also not lost my mapped network drives, and the hosts file (which I use to map internal network devices to urls) is untouched. I’m glad I don’t I don’t have to go about reconfiguring everything all over again. It seems all my devices work as before. Overall, bar the black screen of nothingness, and the default start menu, the initial impressions are overall good, and it’s mostly business as usual. I also like the UI tweaks, with a nice icon set. Windows 11 feels more polished than 10, for sure.

Desktop Upgrade

After using the laptop for a couple of weeks I decided I may as well pull the trigger on the desktop upgrade. I was slight more apprehensive about this one, as my desktop has more software, hardware and external peripherals, that have been built up over many years. Far more that can go wrong.

As it happens, the upgrade process was also just as smooth. No black screen of doom, this time round. After a couple of hours it was mostly done and I was greeted by the Windows 11 desktop. It didn’t look all that different to my Windows 10 desktop, so everything was instantly familiar. I was getting a prompt about AsIO.sys, but it seems that is something that isn’t required anyway, so I got rid of it. Naturally, I did an update to device drivers, to ensure Win 11 compatibility.

I did have a couple of hardware issues. a recurring problem was that the Intel bluetooth driver kept on failing. This then gets fixed by reinstalling the device drivers. This eventually went away, which is just as weird. I figured I must have found a driver that worked that little bit better.
I was also having issues with the desktop not loading. This was causing me a lot of grief; most of the time it loaded fine, but then would suddenly not work on later reboots. Completely removing and reinstalling the AMD graphics card drivers fixed this.
I have also experienced times where my I was getting random pops in my right speaker. This appears to have resolved itself.

The Elephant In The Room: Recall

As it turns out, Recall seems to need machines that have been specifically built to be able to use Recall. Mine aren’t, so it appears it is disabled. Sounds good to me, but there is no telling if/when Microsoft may decide this gets turned on for all devices. I just don’t want this on any of my systems.

Verdict

Ultimately, I’m mostly happy with this upgrade. I’ve not looked into just how much is being sent to Microsoft, and what they are finding out about you, so I can’t comment on that side of things (I have read that local accounts spy far less than Microsoft’s online accounts – but I can’t vouch for that). I’ll also be looking to erase all mentions on Copilot from my devices. I’m not a fan of ‘AI’ and I do worry what it could do to humans, in terms of intelligence, incorrect information, and yes, large scale unemployment. But that’s a topic for another day. Bar the start menu choices, I feel the updated UI is a huge improvement over 10 with the overhauled settings area being a massively welcome change. So yes. In my view, get upgrading.

Over time though, I noticed Windows may break on a whim. The amount of updates I noticed happening, seemingly almost daily, will fix something but break something else. Not a good experience for a user.

Fact of the matter is though, is that I am using Linux for most of my daily tasks, and I recommend moving if you are up to it. I wish Ableton was available on Linux but there is always dual booting – but it does mean I’m stuck with Windows, in some form, for the near future.

A Word On Site Stability

Since the server move, from AWS to Google, I had noticed that every now and then, you’d be greeted with a database has gone away type message, requiring a restart of MySQL. This has been bugging me a little and turns out it was a pretty simple fix (that better not be famous last words!) to implement. Thing is, the free servers on Google Cloud are not particularly well specced (funny that). They have about a gig of usable memory and CPU’s that share their load amongst other servers. It’s fine for a small blog with low traffic, such as this. You wouldn’t want to run something that requires numerous threads/users and all sorts going on.

Anyhoo, I realised the server was probably running out of memory, causing the MySQL Server to crash. Whilst upgrading the server, adding more memory is an option, that would take it out of the free tier. To keep things cheap, I am using the hard drive as usable memory; setting up a 1GB swap file which the server can access. Slower than RAM but should fix the crashes.

The Fun and Games of Linux (Bluetooth Edition)

Started up my Linux dev machine, this morning. Right off the bat, Bluetooth wasn’t working. My bluetooth settings, in KDE, were showing a ‘no bluetooth adapters found’ message; resulting in no mouse. First thing I did was do an apt upgrade on packages, to see if that resolved anything, and rebooted. Nope. Next up I tried removing everything under /var/lib/bluetooth and restarting the bluetooth service. Still nothing. Restarted my machine and went into the BIOS to check it hadn’t somehow been disabled. All looked good there. But still no adapter found. Despite the bluetooth adapter previously working under kernel 6.8.x, I decided to install HWE, in order to upgrade the kernel to 6.11.x, in case something had gone wonky. Nada.

By this point I’d tried several reboots with no joy. This was getting frustrating, as I had work to be getting on with. After about an hour of tearing what little hair I have left out I decided to power down the machine and perform a cold boot…

Bluetooth was back. I paired my devices back in and carried on with life.

Sigh…

The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley.

It’s been some time since I last properly posted, which, even then, was in acknowledgement that I don’t post a lot. There are good reasons. The main reason was that I wanted to get away from WordPress as, frankly, I hate it, from a developer’s perspective. If you hate a codebase, you’re unlikely wanting to spend time customising it – especially if you’re not getting paid for it. I also had my own css templates ready to completely overhaul the look of the site (and didn’t want to create a theme in WordPress), and had that planned to be built in to whatever next CMS I wanted to use next. It’s not been easy to find a CMS that will suit me. As I work with it daily, for my job, I’d like a Laravel based CMS, with PyroCMS being the front runner. However, development on that seems to be halted, or at least very slow, which doesn’t give you confidence of there being a codebase that won’t outdate very quickly. So I’m still on the lookout for a replacement.
With the above in mind, I was on a data freeze until I had gotten that part of the project done. I really am not looking forward to the data migration to a new CMS, and the fewer posts to move the better. Obviously, it hasn’t materialised as yet, and I have articles I had prepped just sitting in draft, being forgotten about and also outdating. So I should at last try and keep this site ticking over, whilst we wait – as it could be a long wait.

I also wanted to do a server and domain migration. It was getting annoying having to manually update the SSL cert, every 3 months, due to .dev domains not having port 80 access (yes, I know there are plugins that can do this but it’s quicker to do the 3 month manual thing than sort it out). Now I’ve moved to a .net domain, the SSL cert can be automatically renewed. I have also moved to a different server, which will help with running costs.

And life also got in the way. I was recently diagnosed with FND – which is something I have been dealing with for many years, and took a hell of a complaining to even get to see a specialist. It plays havoc with my memory, and ability to think clearly, amongst a host of other things – just great for my line of work. The whole condition can be very frustrating on a daily basis.

So there we are; big plans that kinda went wrong. C’est la vie.

Ryzen 5900X: One last hurrah for AM4.

Disclaimer: I actually wrote this post back around October 2022, so things are already pretty out of date. The CPU is still going strongly, at least. :)

I’ve been looking at building a new system, lately. My current one is certainly no slouch, and it was also treated to an AMD Radeon 6800, summer of 2021. Mainly so I could play Microsoft Flight Sim 2020 at high resolutions, with the settings mostly turned up. (Yes, the card was expensive. No, I don’t regret the purchase). This system was originally built back in early 2018. In that time, I upgraded the CPU from a Ryzen 1700 to 3800X and was very impressed with the results. However, I am doing a lot of video work, these days (editing, encoding and such), plus large projects, in Ableton, did start to get a bit too much on the CPU. FS2020 is also pretty CPU limited too. So a fresh system has been on the back of my mind. However, amazingly, 4 generations in and I still had an upgrade path on the AM4 based CPU, plus my motherboard had a BIOS update that would support it. AMD have recently released the new AM5 based Ryzen 7000 range, which look to be utterly incredible, but with no support from motherboards you already own and the fact it’s DDR5 ram only, an upgrade gave me two choices:

  • Build a new system from scratch. Naturally the hard drives, graphics card, case and PSU would be transferred over. But the CPU, Motherboard and RAM would have to be entirely new. That’s a pretty expensive upgrade, but would offer a fair mount of ‘future proofing’.
  • Upgrade my current system with a Ryzen 5xxx. With the massive benefit of keeping my existing motherboard and RAM. Less of a hassle to upgrade – and wouldn’t have to to pester my CPU cooler manufacturer for a new bracket. Less ‘future proofed’ but still an upgrade over my current CPU. and better value.
Under £350 for a high performance 12 core chip is great value. Last gen or not.

I did give the new system upgrade a lot of thought but in the end, I opted for a Ryzen 5900X to keep my current system going that little bit longer (we could get in to a Trigger’s Broom argument about what constitutes a PC setup, and when is it no longer the original machine. But we’ll leave that for another day). Ryzen 5xxx CPUs can be found for excellent prices, now they’re not the latest shiny. I’m sure at this point there will be some people screaming ‘why not the 5800X3D!?’. They would have a point. That thing is beastly for gaming, However, I need an all-round CPU. And the extra cores will certainly help with my music and video work. I also sold the 3800X and made back close to 50% of the cost of the 5900X. So it didn’t hit the wallet all that much, and was a pretty cost effective upgrade.
I’m not too bothered about my new CPU being a generation behind. Tbf, it’s not as if I was unhappy with the 3800X either. It proved to be an excellent workhorse and was leap years ahead of the 1700 I originally built the system with.

I’ve also had a case upgrade recently. Far more room for the GPU, drives and better cable management.

Massive kudos to AMD for making AM4 so upgradeable. Going from a Ryzen 1700 to 5900X, on the same platform is excellent service to consumers. I did note, in my last CPU upgrade post that I’d have to get a new motherboard for a Ryzen 4000 CPU (which was actually released as the 5000 series), but that ended up actually not being the case and many 3xx/4xx motherboards were updated to use the 5xxx CPUs. Such a nice change from Intel’s policy of a new motherboard with every CPU change.
However, this will certainly be the last CPU upgrade, for this system. And I will expect this set up to now see me through for the next 3-4 years. Maybe more. There’s a chance I’ll double the RAM to 64GB, if I see a bargain.

Installation

Before I started pulling apart the system, I made sure the BIOS was on a version that would support the new CPU. If you are also thinking of upgrading your Ryzen do this before you do anything else. You don’t want to install your new CPU only to find it no longer posts, and you’re left staring at a blank screen, forcing you to swap the CPUs round again. The CPU swap was about as painless as you can expect. Naturally you have to remove the heatsink, give various bits a clean, do the swap, apply thermal paste and replace the heatsink but I didn’t shred any fingers in the process.

The 5900X dropped in to place. Remember to apply thermal paste before you stick the heatsink back on!

Thoughts

As before, with the 3800X, I won’t go in to scientific benchmarking. There’s plenty of people that do that if you need to compare CPUs. But, as with the Ryzen 3800X over the 1700, there was a very noticeable improvement over the chip it replaced. Flight Simulator 2020, which is a very CPU bound game was the largest benefactor, with higher frame rates at – Well, I must be honest and say I didn’t record the framerates, before and after, but the difference was perceptible enough. And it should be too. The Ryzen 5900X has a much improved single-thread and multi-thread performance, plus the 64MB L3 cache is double the amount on the Ryzen 3800X. All in all, it’s yet another powerful upgrade for a modest amount of cache. Especially with the sale of the 3800X recovering some of the costs. The likes of Transport Fever also enjoyed smoother gameplay.

FS2020 is visually stunning, and an easy way to lose hours to simply enjoying the view.

Along with the game performance benefits, the productivity benefits are also present. Ableton allows me to run even more tracks, with more plugins on the go. Editing and rendering projects in DaVinci Resolve is effortless. Handbrake chews through frames like they weren’t there. It’s been a massive boost.

This will be the final configuration for this machine, as far as motherboard, and CPU go. It’s possible I will upgrade the RAM, and maybe a GPU upgrade. But, with the amount of power available, it will be a few years yet before I start considering an entirely new build.