Windows 10 update–Still limping along

I am slowly working through the various hickups and straight out bugs involved with upgrading to windows 10. The list is too long and boring to try and explain here but I have had to update a numbers of drivers and re-install software (strangely some only needed to be reloaded on one machine but not on another) and a lot of fruitless searching forums on the net. It felt like I needed to stand on one foot, do some incantation, wave my hands over the keyboard and paise an unknown deity. {only joking}

Most of the forum notes and recommendations are a little mis-informed and my conculsion is that so much of the “crowd sourcing” assistance is not that worthwhile, infact I am concerned those elaborate procedures could either be damaging or be malware to encourage you to unknowly open security doors. Thus I suggest that you only take notice of genuine sites (eg the manufacture’s or developer’s verifiable sites) and not following a google or bing link to an unknown author, software utilty supplier etc. However having warned you off internet advice I have a little of my own, having found a couple of good solutions to many issues that are pretty simple to fix.

If your icons are still on your desktop from before the upgrade, but the programs no longer work. It may be as simple as running the program under compatibilty mode. To do this right click on the shortcut icon on the desktop. Then right click and go down to the properties item at the bottom of the list of options. This brings up the shortcut dialogue so choice the compatabilty tab, and tick the run this program with compatibility mode for check box, Click on the V on the righthand side of the selection box below and select windows 7 compatability. Finally click Ok. Its very obvious in retrospect but watch a lot of issues dissapear. This worked especially well with my no longer functioning version of HP’s great HP Soltions Center (which handles many of the multi function of HP Photosmart printers). I have to admit I didn’t find this solution till after I’d uninstalled and re-installed the HP printer drivers and all-in-one-printer software updates for a third time only to find the exact same problem not being able to start the software from the computer but that I could correctly invoke some actions from the printer panel!

On at least some occasions when the same software misbehaves under windows 10 it might be as simple as running the software using administrator. this can be done by right clinking on the icon and selecting the Run as Administrator option. If this does fix the problem you can set up a more permanent setting so the program is always run that way. Once again you start with a right click on the desktop shortcut icon, find the properties option and click on it. This will bring up the shortcut dialogue. Now click on the advanced button, to bring up the advance properties dialogue, where you just need to tick the run as adminstrator check box and finally click on OK.

The real elephant in the room for Windows 10 is the problem where the start menu doesn’t work (I have had this on my laptop) and there are often associated problem that cortana doesn’t work and the search windows is unresponsive (can’t type anything in it, if it appears at all) you can not select or run windows apps. Its a long list of associated woes, which all significantly reduces the functionality of windows 10 if you have been used to using it under windiows 7. Lookiong for web advice is frustration overload, especially unhelpful are the microsoft and microsoft oriented forums. Clearly there isn’t one fix for all variations of this problem but this link from Bristish Telecom is the most authorative explaination I have found (and worked for me). It is astounding Microsoft have not already created an upgrade to fix this problem or at least put together a simple to follow set of instructions themselves.

If your icons aren’t on your desktop already you’ll have to solve the third issue first!