Windows 10 upgrade issues and fixes

I've recently upgraded to Windows 10 from Windows 7, while the upgrade itself was pretty quick, some issues were found that took some time to deal with. I recommend anyone considering the upgrade to go through the following first.

General Windows 10 issues

Privacy

Windows 10 has issues and by issues I mean some major privacy issues. I recommend anyone upgrading to Windows 10 to go through this site and more or less disable everything shown there (except of course for things you actually use, Cortana for instance, if you use her). As stated, it would probably be wise to visit the site once in a while for updates.

Bloatware

Microsoft seems to have made some money from 3rd party apps in exchange for them being part of the Windows 10 environment, even though you really don't need them. That includes Grooveshark, a Minecraft/Photoshop/Flipboard store links, and a whole bunch of other useless things that I could've downloaded myself if I wanted to.

Thing is, not all of these can be removed easily, and require the use of Window's power shell.

For most apps, the instructions in here are good enough. For the Minecraft link I actually downloaded the game, entered it, and then uninstalled it. That seemed to remove the link completely. No such luck with the Photoshop Express. Although I guess it's only a link, so you could right-click and unpin it from the start panels.

Windows 10 driver/new settings issues

Slow boot

For me, the Bios boot seemed to slow considerably. I use an SSD HD, and still it would take about 20 seconds to get the Windows logo. The fix here was an update to the BIOS itself. I, having an Asus Mobo, downloaded it from Asus's own download links for my Mobo. Unfortunately, the BIOS upgrade did not go all nicely, leading to the next issue.

WOL stopped working

This, I believe has to do with both my BIOS and my Mobo's NIC driver in Windows 10. First off, the BIOS no longer had an "enable" flag in the power options for WOL. But fortunately, it looks like enabling the "Wake by PCI/E" was enough for me.

As for the network adapter's configuration, something seemed to have changed in Windows 10, and having all options enabled in the network adapter's advanced and power options as I had them in Windows 7, no longer worked. The fix seemed to be to disable these two options:

• Shutdown Wake On Lan
• Wake on pattern match

and only enabling the "Wake on magic packet" option.

In the "Power management" tab, I had all options enabled. It looked like disabling "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" would be a good idea, but for some reason, it didn't work that way.

Wrong resolution on TV screen (not necessarily an issue)

I normally have both a normal monitor and a TV screen connected directly to my PC. It seems that after the upgrade, Windows decided that on the TV screen it would be preferable to have larger text and app images. So far so good, but it seems that in order to do so, it lowered the screen size. In the display settings, my TV screen would still show 1080p as it should, but using something like the following python code, would show that the screen size is 720p:

    import ctypes

    user32 = ctypes.windll.user32

    screensize = user32.GetSystemMetrics(0), user32.GetSystemMetrics(1)

    print screensize

The best way to see it was to just create a canvas in MSPaint with a height of 720 pixels and watching it fill the TV's screen although it shouldn't have.

Moving the "change the size of text apps and other items" bar all the way to the left fixed the issue and restored the actual 1080p display I wanted to see (the 720 pixel canvas no longer filled the whole screen).
This by itself is probably not an issue as long as the apps you're using are DPI aware. But since all I'm using my TV for is to watch movies, and don't really care about DPI, I kept it as 1080p to be on the safe side.

PlexConnect (AppleTV3)

In another room, I use my AppleTV3 to watch my media with Plex by using PlexConnect on a PC. On Windows 10, PlexConnect had an issue with listening on port 80 because of Window's "World Wide Web Publishing Service" (W3SVC). This service seems to open the port for itself and doesn't allow PlexConnect to connect as it should. Since I don't host any web servers, disabling the service fixed the issue.

Another issue with PlexConnect seems to be that its service doesn't start after a system restart, even in delayed automatic state. To fix this, I added a recovery option for it to try again after 2 minutes.

League Of Legends

My favourite game also had a minor issue. When trying to start it, I received the message: "PVP.net Patcher Kernel has stopped working". To fix this issue I had LOL start with admin rights, which fixed the issue. Other workarounds can be found here.