PC hardware and OS (Win 7 or Win10) upgrade questions

[Santuzzo]

Thanks again.
Yeah, all things considered, as of now I will take the "if it ain't broke..." approach.
For as long as Win7 is fine and working well, I'll stick with it. Once the security updates are discontinued I will have to reconsider....

 

[TedEH]

Yep, forced updates that also break the hardware occasionally or roll over drivers.

I find one of the other big nuisances is when windows decides to update a driver for you, and it re-installs some kind of helper app to go with it. I don't want all those little tray icons and "utility" apps, wasting my resources and looking ugly.

 

[odibrom]

I find one of the other big nuisances is when windows decides to update a driver for you, and it re-installs some kind of helper app to go with it. I don't want all those little tray icons and "utility" apps, wasting my resources and looking ugly.

I don't remember that happening to my computers... CCleaner is a fantastic software (free version) to clean up a machine and RevoUninstaller (also freeware) to deeply uninstall software. Some brands leave leftovers way deep inside the computer, spread through many different folders (Autodesk stuff, for example), Revo cleans it all...

 

[TedEH]

I don't mean bloatware from a pre-made machine that was removed uncleanly, I mean a fresh install of Windows 10 allows Windows Update to install drivers for things, which in some cases come with their own bloatware that it installs as part of the update. Driver installs that come from Windows Update are allowed, for some reason, to put things into registry to auto-run on every boot without checking with the user. It's not a new problem, but previous versions of windows at least made it easier to be selective about what updates or not and when so that it would be less of a problem.

 

[odibrom]

I've done several fresh installs of Win10 in my laptop and don't remember that, but I might not get what you get... different hardware, different drivers, different regional policies...? I have my 7+ years old Laptop pretty clean...

 

[TedEH]

I might not get what you get... different hardware, different drivers

Unless you have the same laptop, or a laptop with exactly the same audio hardware, you wouldn't see the same thing. But the potential is there.
It would be like if you had an older laptop with a touchpad that ran off of those synaptic drivers -> that's something I could see being pretty common. In that case, whenever the touchpad driver got updated, it could re-install synaptic and put the tray program back into your startup so when you reboot you get that ugly red icon next to the time. Not every driver is going to do this, and I would hope that most people writing this stuff would choose not to do that, but the option is there.

In my case it's the Waves Maxx Audio software that adds a little blue icon in the tray that gives you things like reverb effects and eq that affect the whole system. I've uninstalled it sometimes, I've also sometimes just deleted the startup entry that it adds to the registry, but every time there's a new sound driver, it re-installs itself and gets put back into startup.

 

[Descent]

In my case it's the Waves Maxx Audio software that adds a little blue icon in the tray that gives you things like reverb effects and eq that affect the whole system. I've uninstalled it sometimes, I've also sometimes just deleted the startup entry that it adds to the registry, but every time there's a new sound driver, it re-installs itself and gets put back into startup.

Yup, seen that as well. Quite a few others do it, GPU drivers for example like Radeon / ATI get reinstall without authorization, it is an absolute rogue mess.

 

[TedEH]

I don't know if it still happens, but I think the Geforce experience app does the same.... I've given up fighting that one off.