Just had another rewarding 20 minutes attempting to get the speech recognition features of Cortana to work.

 

Now, if the impression created by the TV advertising is to be believed, if you say "Cortana, 'Make me a supra-expresso with blown sugar-glass topping in the image of the Pope, call President Obama at his country retreat and build me a high powered off-shore power boat whilst flying to the moon without a face mask', it will do all these things, simultaneously, speedily, to 100% compliance and without error.

 

I now have to reveal it hasn't got this capability. To be frank it hasn't got any effing capability - the speech recognition is just as bad as it was on W7 & 8. It "Recognises" about one phrase out of five, and for the other four it always seems not to recognise the last word of any phrase I was uttering. Needless to say I was using the prescribed key words and phrases in my utterances, which the stupid thing was supposed to recognise, and, additionally, changed microphone and settings at least a couple of times to see if any improvement was possible. Absolutely, no joy. I spent a good five minutes saying "Bill Gates" and "Steve Balmer" , to which the response was consistently "Try again in a little time" - as a minimum it should have picked-up the Bing listing thru IE.

 

And to top it all, whilst in the process of attempting to tweek the speech recognition characteristics, I discovered that it was also able to load the old speech recognition module from W8 & 7 . . . under the Control Panel menu. Interesting, bearing in mind that this was a fresh install from a W10 ISO disk. 

 

And lo, this older software was incompatible with the layout of the Apps in the new start Window - so if you said "Start" it would open the start window OK and then if you said "Numbers", as was possible under W8, it should have populated the Start window with an overlay which superimposed App numbers over the Tile icons, at which point you would utter the number that overlayed the tile which you wished in future to activate by voice and the association would be saved for future use. On  subsequent occasions you could use say the Tile name, e.g.  "Mail", to bring-up the application. However, when I said numbers, the overlay that came up had only a limited number of numbers in the overlay compared with the number of tiles showing and the association could not be made. Outstanding !

 

Bearing in mind the advance PR claims that this has been on Beta testing since Noah finished woodwork classes ( A Bit like the I30 I drove recently) how can they release a final version of the software where these features do not marry-up ? What a piece of Carp.

 

I can only suggest to the current CEO of Microsoft, that he secures, with all despatch, both the platinum key to the Redmond  Executive Washroom and the master copy of W10 and does the decent thing.

 

 

Nick

Edited 11 October, 201510 yr by Clunkclick

 

I haven't actually tried plugging the phone into the PC yet, the only reason to do it would be to update the playlist I have on the phone.

 

Or put some non standard ringtones on.

Or put some non standard ringtones on

 

I plugged in my Nokia Windows phone and Windows 10 asked me if I wanted the links for "Office for Android"

 

Edited 12 October, 201510 yr by Aspman

You are going to get Win10 whether you like it or not - unless you turn off auto-updates and research each and every update before installing.

 

If you look at the current batch, other than security and virus scanner updates, EVERY Win7 update presented to me today is an attempt to get either a data slurper or a Win10 update onto my Win7 machine, yet ALL of them claim to be a "fix" for a problem.

Heres a question for the techies on here.

 

I have a 3 year old Samsung rc520 laptop. Love it. Works great but I guess the hdd was getting a bit long in the tooth so to speak so I decided to fit an ssd,

 

This is where the issues started.

Laptop came pre installed with win7 x64.

 

I had to "Look around"   for an iso to do an install,

I had to try several before i got it to run satisfactorily.

So I left well alone, Then along came the option to upgrade to win 10, I took a few weeks before making the decision to go ahead, After a few weeks i am happy with win 10 as it seems to run smoother than 7,

As said, did the upgrade  but then discovered it was only win 7 x32 i had installed and as a result win 10 x32 was downloaded and installed. Something I should have paid more attention to..

 

No I want to do a clean install of 10 but want to install x64 this time,

 

I contacted win support and some support female told me I cannot do the x64 install as it would give too many errors. 

I said OK thanks :P

 

I understand my laptop is now registered with M$ for the win 10 installition, but I wonder as I have a win 10 x64 iso can I install this with no issues?

 

thanks

I don't think they would allow in-place upgrading on an upgrade license (retail comes with both, and I think you can switch, but upgrades are more limited).

 

Personally, since you're looking at a clean install anyway, I'd just put an x64 7 back on (using the CoA that's on your laptop already) and then upgrade that, making sure you have a current hardware "hash" stoerd with MS for re-activation if you have to reinstall in future.

You can't upgrade to W10 64 from Win7 32.

 

You have to go 64 -> 64.

 

Unless you're running more than 3Gb of RAM on that old laptop I'd just leave it on 32bit. You won't see any benefit from 64bit.

My "lounge" or backup PC has just re-discovered Win7! After a couple of weeks running WIN10.

 

Running Win10 I hadn't been too impressed but as long as it was working.....

Then I tried WOL - (Wake On LAN) - and that wouldn't work - muttered a bit after reading of others having similar problems from the start of the year but played on....

Then, inexplicably, it broke, wouldn't boot, ended up in a long winded loop of booting to recovery console, re-boot - same failure, - recovery console etc.

Tried looking at the disks in Linux - couldn't, got a helpful message saying they were in hibernation state and could only be mounted RO etc..

 

So after 45 minutes to an hour of gradually louder swearing at it, I did a full system restore to WIn7.... Which I'd backed up immediately prior to installing Win10.

 

I'll revisit it when I have to or when it looks reasonable to do so.

 

J.

I assume you have an older motherboard without the EUFI bios system, Win10 has been reported to overwrite part of the BIOS to stop non Win10 OS from working, even if Win10 is removed and a different OS installed.

Any links? You seem to post a lot of what I would refer to as "tinfoil hat" content (i.e. your previous thing about a government Windows Update which you couldn't find a source for)...the only thing I can think of that you might be talking about is the new "Secure Boot" stuff in recent versions of the UEFI standard, but that's been floating around since Windows 8, it's not new.

I know it is not new, but a discussion in a members only* forum showed up several Admins reporting problems with Win10 installing on machines without permission and locking out Linux dual boots and stopping auto-booting of non Win10 partitions when the Linux partition was restored - even if the Win10 partition was removed and the machine restored to Win7/8 using a recovery image.

 

My mistake in the above, it didnt stop the restored non-Win10 OS from working (once you installed a fresh boot manager), just stopped it starting as the default boot option; you have to manually select the non Win10 OS, even if Win10 had been removed from the machine, the HDD wiped and a fresh install of a different OS installed - showing that the changes were to the BIOS, not the boot sequence..

 

Incidentally, this is exactly what was predicted when UEFI was announced - the MS would use it to try and stop people from running non Windows OS.

 

*Why I cant post a link; you could Google the issue though,  I believe it has been discussed on the Register and the ISPR forums amongst others - and probably a shedload of discussions on the various Linux forums.