Windows 10 Surprise Penis

Ahh, Christmas! That special time of the year where you drink lots of alcohol, cuddle up on the sofa watching nothing but reruns and take pictures of each other's peepees when nobody is looking. At least that's what I assume must have happened when I tripped upon a folder of last year's Christmas photos. I found pictures of the pets in there, Christmas food, family and (what I hope is really) my junk, as well as whatever the fuck it is that Claire has got down there. I genuinely don't remember taking those, but it's pretty much the only time of the year where I drink.  The bear and I are horrible people, so I'm not really surprised by the depravity of our past selves. Way to go, guys!

We looked at all those pictures the other day, tried to reconstruct whatever the fuck happened that night and moved quickly on to more important things - Windows 10, for one. A free upgrade to a shiny new OS - just install it, keep all your stuff, keep doing things the way you always do, just... cooler? Faster? I dunno. More up to date, I guess. Reviews have been pretty positive, it runs all the games you could play on 7/8 and then there's that massive performance boost on the horizon, which may come with brand new DX12 games as soon as the end of this year. Tempting stuff.

Rawr!

I had this really reasonable stance on the whole thing - wait for the first service pack, which irons out the biggest kinks. Wait for actual DX12 games to be a thing. The free update is available for an entire year and there's no need to rush things. Wait and see what everyone else thinks, first. But then we went ahead and just upgraded Claire's old Windows 7 anyway, because she has no work-related stuff on her PC and whatever games she could have lost in a messed up upgrade could have been restored via Steam in no time. And less than two hours later she was on Windows 10, which looks slightly different with that weird start menu and its tiles, but aside from that it's like nothing ever changed. It kept her rotating snake wallpapers, her animated snake mouse pointer, all the desktop icons were arranged exactly the way she remembered from Win 7 and the only thing that disappeared were the desktop gadgets, which had long been discontinued for being a security risk, anyway.

There are free weather apps and other such handy things in the App Store, so she didn't miss the gadgets much. With that said, it would be cool if it was possible to pin live tiles directly to desktop. I'd like to see sticky notes on there. Or maybe a big, stylish clock, just for looks. You can have all that in the start menu, but that's not really the same.
Minor nitpicking aside, everything just worked. She could connect to the internet straight away without us having to set up any networky stuff, all her favourites and bookmarks were still there, Steam still worked fine and so did all of her games. Heck, GTA V ran better than ever on her machine and showed no more annoying stutters and hitches. She also freaked the fuck out when she launched WoW, so I assume she noticed a slight FPS increase on there, as well.

I think I'll stay in Los Santos.

It all looked very promising. Stuff just worked, some of it better than ever, and the whole thing was relatively quick and easy. And most of my friends confirmed this, saying the upgrade went without any problems and most of them were very satisfied with Windows 10. And I had a backup and nothing to lose, so... yeah. I decided to give it a shot.

Steam, Skyrim, Chrome, my sound card, GeForce Experience. Those are some of the things which didn't work after the upgrade. Steam told me it had to be reinstalled before either crashing or freezing my entire system. Skyrim would produce an error message, which came back an infinite amount of times until killed via task manager. My old Soundblaster X-Fi was no longer recognized - the Windows 10 software pack told me there's no compatible hardware. The Chrome shortcut spat out error messages and would no longer launch Chrome at all. Instead, it could only be launched via the new File Explorer, which just so happened to show a massive version of the Xmas dick pick whenever I started it. I'm not really sure why I kept it in the first place. Thanks and goodbye, recent files section!

The little santa hat was your idea!

It took a few hours to fix all the issues, which shouldn't surprise me, really. I mean, just because everything worked immediately for everyone else is no guarantee that I'm safe from fuck ups, so I get the whole lot. Could have been worse - I didn't lose any data and everything worked a few hours later. Well, except the old Soundblaster. Rest in peace, old friend! Performance is pretty much the same across the board and things don't really feel any different. Well, with one exception - I can now talk to my computer and tell it to show me ostriches. Seriously!

Cortana is a pretty amazing feature, though I'm not feeling super comfortable about all the information Windows 10 wants to gather for me in order to run the whole thing in the first place. I can see why it would want to keep voice recordings to understand me better, but why the fuck do you need my contacts, my internet history, my location, inking and private messages? The word private is right in there. Yes, I get it, she's supposed to be a virtual assistant, so she needs to see my calendar and schedule and shit, but I wouldn't let a real flesh & blood assistant see my private messages or my search history. That shit is called private for a reason!

Windows tells you about all those things upon installation and allows users to deactivate all that, so my Cortana is turned off for now. I don't need Microsoft to know what I do on the internet, what I talk about with my friends or who these friends are. Which is a bit hypocritical, considering I've signed in to Chrome, so I can look at furry watersports porn using any device I want without having to remember my login information.

On a less creepy note, our monitor lizard eats ice cream. I had last weekend off and took him out for a bit. It was a nice, sunny day, so I had a Cornetto and I gave him some. He bit some huge chunks out of it. He dropped most of it on the floor and licked it up. Weird stuff. Yes, we licked the same ice cream cone. Big deal. It's not like he has any balls to lick like that dog of yours, who licks your face every morning.

-Cat