Technology Ramblings

Back in late May - MS released Windows 10 Tech Preview build 10130.  While the build showed some improvements - it was not very great either and I stated in my review on May 30 - that Windows 10 still seemed pretty unfinished. Well here we are on June 28 - almost a month from the 10130 release and while there have been screen shots and leaked builds of 10146, 10149, etc, there has been no official release to the Fast Ring group. So this concerns me.   Like many I was expecting to see at least 2 builds from the May 29th release of 10130 to RTM release scheduled for July 29.    Now - I am getting the feeling we may not see any.. With that said - if you think back to the release schedules for previous versions of Windows there was always a 45 - 60 day gap from the last "Release Candidate" to RTM - but that was mostly to support the M part of RTM or manufacturing - so packaging, media, etc.  Windows 10 is really not going to have that.  I...

For work I recently had to choose a corporately owned phone.   I was given two choices either a Nokia Lumia 820 or a Samsung Galaxy 5.   I chose the Samsung.    The reasons were two fold.  First the Nokia device was approaching 3 years old and second I wanted a chance to live with Android for a while and see what life would be like with the leader in the Android space. Previous to Samsung I had been using either a Lumia 635 or 735.  Which while nice phones for their price points, were very much hamstrung by the BYOD policies of my firm.   I was forced to use Good Networks email client which is probably the worst Windows Phone app out there.   I'll focus the comparison in three areas - Hardware, Apps and Overall Usability. On the hardware side, when compared to my 735 for example, the Samsung has a more powerful processor - a Snapdragon 801 vs a Snapdragon 400, double both the RAM - 2GB vs 1G and internal storage 16GB vs 8GB and both suppor...

On June 26 Microsoft released Windows 10 Mobile build 10149 to Fast Ring.   As always I installed on a Nokia Lumia 635 and a 735. So versus 10136 you could update directly to 10149 - which is a big yea over the 10080 to 10136 road.   There were some issues - when I first ran Windows Updates on both devices I got a 0X80080005 error and had to perform a phone restart to get Windows Update to run properly.   I also noticed a Fast Ring Configuration update that came down with build 10149 as well.. The 735 updated cleanly.  The 635 again struggled.  Especially with what I call post upgrade app updates.   When the update on the 635 completed and the start screen appeared - all looked good.   But slowly - tiles started to disappear. For example individual contacts pinned to the start - at first all there and then gone.   Flipping to the All Apps screen - it will refresh as apps get updated.  But then when I tried to open settings it stated "ca...

On June 16, Microsoft released Windows 10 Mobile build 10136.  I've been using two different phones to test - a Nokia Lumia 635 and a 735.   One of the first challenges you ran into for this particular update is that you could not update from a previous Windows 10 build.   You had to use the MS Phone Recovery tool and go back to WP 8.1 and once you then got all the WP updates for 8/8.1 and reinstalled Windows Insider - then and only then could you get the 10136 build top install... For the 635 - this was literally an all day ordeal.  From the time I first plugged the 635 in to a PC to run the Phone Recovery Tool (PRT), until the time that Build 10136 actually downloaded and installed and all the apps updated - was somewhere in the 8 - 10 hour range across two days.  Now I blame a part of this on T-Mobile.   They have never updated the 635 to Denim or supplied WP 8.1 update 1.   In fact T-Mobile has provided no support at all for the 635. So that m...

Back at the end of March - I installed Windows 10 Tech Preview build 10043 on my daughters HP Pavilion dv6t laptop.     It was a pretty horrible experience - the update itself took several attempts to even complete and when it did the end result was a mess.    So I wiped it and went back to Windows 8.1. I decided to try again with the most recent 10130 build to see if there were any improvements.    So here is the good the bad and the ugly... The good - yes Windows 10 did install okay via FastRing install over Windows 8.1 with no issues.  But that over what was a clean install of Windows 8.1 back at the end of March. The bad - Even though this dv6t runs a Core i3 V2 with 6GB of RAM and an Intel 525 SSD - it doesn't run that quickly.  If doesn't do networking well either - very slow activating WiFi and doing simple tasks like getting DHCP Addresses. Switching from wired to wireless is also poor... The ugly - The Synaptics touchpad support...