Still holding out on that reviled Windows 10 "upgrade"? Well you're an adult and far be it for me to tell you what to do, but it's the 19th and Microsoft will only be offering the install for free until July 29th.
Tag: windows 10
Rise of the Tomb Raider gets DirectX 12 today: First in the industry, Kind of
As of today, March 11th, 2016, Rise of the Tomb Raider will implement one of the industry's first integrations of DirectX 12. This is great news.... really.
Steam users will automatically download the small 129mb patch and will expect to see some pretty big improvements in performance across the board. This doesn't mean that folks without Windows 10 can't play any more as DirectX 11 is still an option.
Grab the newest video drivers for your graphics cards to get the best performance as of yet. AMD users, make sure you choose the 16.3 hotfix driver suite.
I myself finally cracked and jumped on the Windows 10 bandwagon so I look forward to seeing the changes first hand.
You can read the patch notes here
And you can check out the dev blog post on the subject here
Forced Windows 10 Installations Have Begun
Well, it's happening. Microsoft has added Windows 10 to the list of recommended updates for Windows 7 and 8.1 users. That means if you've got a Windows PC and you're perfectly happy with the operating system you chose, bought and payed for a few years back then you may wake up to an unwelcome surprise soon. That is if you've got Windows Update set up to automatically install updates.
Thankfully you can get around this by entering your control panel, choosing System and Security, then clicking on Windows Update. From there you can change settings to let you decide what's installed on your PC. I'd personally recommend "let me choose when to download and install updates" as the automatic download isn't exactly small and will suck up your bandwidth if set to anything else besides "never check for updates".
For the record here, it's still advised to install security updates and the like to keep things flowing normally, but if you don't want to walk in to a room after refilling your coffee cup and see that you have a new OS installing, I'd recommend unchecking the one that says Windows 10 before confirming any installations. If you -do- get caught in the auto upgrade, you'll have 31 days to choose to reverse the action.
Also here's how to stop that annoying little nagware popup telling you your free copy of Windows 10 awaits.
- Open the Registry Editor (search for regedit in the Start Menu and run it).
- Set DisableOSUpgrade to 1 in HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate
- Set ReservationsAllowed to 0 in HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\OSUpgrade
Furthermore, if your reason for not updating to Windows 10 is the fact that it spies on basically everything you do... Well Windows 7 and 8.1 have been doing that for quite a while now, so they're just as bad. Bigger reasons to avoid the upgrade are things like these:
- Your PC is optimized to run it's current OS, not Windows 10. Things could bog down, you may see tons of errors etc.
- Your PC is old/unsupported by Windows 10. Microsoft doesn't care about that, they'll still install Windows 10 for you and it could brick your machine potentially costing you money to have it reverted to your previous OS.
- Your PC is running software that cost you loads of money and will not be supported by Windows 10. Again, Microsoft doesn't care and you may not be able to use that software any more.
Opinion: Why I’m Not Crazy About The Direction Microsoft Are Headed With Windows 10.
Words by Greywolfe
We've kind of established that I don't play very many modern games at all.
Some part of this is indifference. A lot of modern gaming tropes seem to boil down to "kill all the things," but a lot of it has to do with the fact that games made over the last fifteen or so years seem to just have no soul at all.
If I've seen one Doom, I've pretty much seen them all. Likewise, while Assassin's Creed seems to slowly be creeping towards something interesting, every iteration just feels like the iteration before with some other gamification going on in the sense that you need to collect MORE of these shiny things.
There are other problems: gaming is moving ever more in the direction of DLC-being-the-game. Recent examples include Street Fighter X Tekken, where Capcom sold you the disk, then locked some of the DLC away on the actual disk they sold you and expected you to fork over money for those locked characters.
On top of that, there's the bugbear of terrible DRM schemes where you need to - for example - login to your Rockstar Social Club account and also Steam before you can bother playing Grand Theft Auto V. This doesn't even bring up the travesty that is Diablo 3. A complete single player game locked behind an internet login.
So, modern gaming is problematic for me.
But more problematic still is the new version of Windows. And Windows 10 is seriously making me re-think my stance on gaming. Read more