I might suddenly vanish for a while

[PZ]

OMG, mandru is the new I.T guy! 

On a serious note, mandru is spot on with the control panel. In fact, you can find most any of the old functions by clicking on the search (Cortana) icon and typing a few letters. When I type "con", search brings up the link to control panel.

As to Edge - I'd not use that any more than I would use Internet Explorer. FF is still an excellent browser, and I use it for anything I need secure.  However, my Internet connection being what it is, Opera works orders of magnitude faster than any of the others, and is my "go-to" browser for places like OWG and other places I trust.

[fragger]

Thanks for that tip mandru, I've done that now

Re: Edge, I can't bring myself to trust any MS browser, for two reasons: One, Internet Explorer was the most commonly hacked browser ever and if Edge isn't on a par with it yet, it will be sooner or later, and two, I don't trust MS not to stick more back doors in it than you'd find in a shipping warehouse.

Anyway, I just woke up from a post-w0#k afternoon nap, so I'll be spending this evening restoring all my graphics files. Probably take a good few hours... But then, it might not take as long as I think. They're all on an external USB drive and I've now got two spare USB3 ports, plus the main HDD is a hybrid - a regular drive but with a solid-state cache. Hopefully those bits of hardware will help expedite the process.

[Art Blade]

hurry up, then nah, take your time

[fragger]

I've made a start, working from my favourite games down. Civ V went first, followed by XCOM. Civ took and hour and a half to reinstall, XCOM took two and a half hours. Which was a surprise - I thought Civ would take longer as it also had two expansion packs' worth of additional stuff to install, but it went quicker. Next will be Starships, and that will take care of the strategy titles I want.

Then the biggies - Fallout 4 and Far Cry 4 (yep, I still enjoy playing that). FO4 won't be a problem to reinstall as it's a Steam title, but FC4 is a bit of a worry as it isn't. It's a hard copy version, which means reinstalling it from disk, then waiting God knows how long for all the updates that have been made for it since its release. I don't know whether there will be hassles registering it again either. It might tell me the code is already in use or something.

That's all the games I'm playing at the moment. I might - might - get No Man's Sky again. Hopefully the new hardware will make that horrible frame rate issue I was having go away. I'll think a bit more about that one later.

Other than that, everything is restored. I'm having an issue when I try to open an image file from File Explorer though. For any graphic format other than .tif, this dialog pops up:

Spoiler

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Images won't display from Explorer, no matter what app I choose nor whether I tick the "Always use..." button at the bottom. The dialog just keeps re-appearing. Doesn't matter whether the format is .bmp, .jpg or anything else - except .tif format, which works fine I have thumbnails displayed in Explorer, not icons.

This is the weird bit: The app "Photos" won't see any images at all when I run it by itself, not even .tif ones, but if I click a thumb in Explorer and use Photos as the display app, it works fine (it still won't w0#k with other formats though). From Explorer, all image apps will load up to show a selected .tif image, but no other formats - that dialog above just keeps re-appearing. The Photos app will not see .bmp, .jpg, .tif, or anything else when it's run by itself, so it's useless. I can't even see my photos on it, which makes its title a bit of a misnomer.

I've diddled around online and apparently issues with the "How do you want to open this file" dialog are fairly common. Sometimes it fails with images, sometimes with sound files, sometimes with things like emails. It's not a deal-breaker as there are other ways I can view images (all other image apps w0#k fine when run by themselves, except for Photos). It's just annoying as sometimes it's quicker and easier for me to view an image straight from Explorer.

3D files, such as Bryce and Poser ones, will load up with the appropriate app when opened from File Explorer, as will video clips. It only appears to be 2D graphic images it has a problem with, unless they're .tif format ones. Odd.

I've tried manually associating apps with file types in Settings too, it makes no difference. I still get that dialog all the time, no matter what app I set to be the default one.

[nex]

Won't it be easier to open it with the Photo App fragger?

[fragger]

If you mean "Photos" nex, no, that won't see or load any graphics files at all. Otherwise, I'm not sure which app you mean. As far as I can tell, W7's Photo Viewer has been scrapped for W10 (or W8) and replaced with this Photos junk. Looking online, I know I'm not the only one having hassles with it.

I can open images without probs by running any image-handling app, like Paint, Irfanview, even the old - and I mean old - Paint Shop 4, which has actually run just fine in every version of Windows I've ever owned, including this one, and is actually quite good for browsing image directories, which is all I ever use it for. Presumably Affinity Photo will be fine too when I get it. But I have so many graphics files, particularly things like object maps and textures, that there are times when it's quicker and easier to open up File Explorer (which used to be the old Windows Explorer) and view them from there. I used to use Photo Viewer as the default app for "Open With" in W7, but it's gone now.

If it ain't broke... Stupid Microsoft. If they want to introduce a new photo app, fine, but they could have left the old one in place too. I suspect it's because it's easier for them to get access to your pictures with their new piece of cloud-storing crappola

There is a way that the old W7 Photo Viewer can be restored to W10 via the Windows Store, though. I might give that a go, but something tells me that Photos is at the heart of my image-viewing-from-Explorer troubles. As long as that bully is beating up all the other kids in the playground, restoring Photo Viewer will likely not fix anything.

I can live without being able to open images straight from Explorer, but it's just annoying that it won't w0#k for me now. Maybe a future update will fix it, but until then, it seems I have to put up with it.

Regarding Far Cry 4, I've decided against reinstalling that. Reading up on the net, it looks like reinstalling it will be a major headache and will take an inordinate amount of time. So bugger it. I've played enough of it anyway. I'll just have to wait until FC5 comes out to get my next FC fix.

Right then... onto FO4. I might go and rent a DVD to watch while that reinstalls

[Art Blade]

 

I know that dialog window, too. Only I don't see it that often because when I want to view pics, I fire up IrfanView and start browsing from there.

[nex]

It could be you don't have a default app for images
go start/settings/system then type in default apps in the search box
and see if images is set here.
if you scroll down you can choose default by file type or protocol

[Dweller_Benthos]

My laptop has Win10, and since I usually only browse the web with it when I'm out somewhere, I hardly ever use any of the stuff on it. One thing I did notice after a recent update was that I ran one of my programs, forget which one, and up pops this dialog about not running anything that isn't listed in the windows app store.

So, of course, I had to make a trip to some dialog to configure it to allow programs that aren't approved by the all mighty Microsoft. Is that something we need? No. It's something Microsoft needs to sell you more *bleep*.

[PZ]

I'm like AB regarding irfanview, and it is the default viewer in my W10 installation. In my opinion irfanview  the best photo viewer ever developed, which even allows you to do some minor image adjustments as well as a host of image manipulations - use it all the time.

However, for image organization, I still use the no longer supported Google Picasa. I've over 50,000 images going back to 1998, and they are all flawlessly organized. I can upload albums, selected photos, or whatever I like to my photos.google.com account in the proper size that it does not impact my Google Drive limits.  In my opinion, the best photo organization tool ever developed.

I too am an "if it ain't broke..." kind of guy - I've used the image tools above for many years with not a single failure, even in W10.

[fragger]

It's not really a huge deal to me. Irritating, but not hair-pulling inducing.

I'm currently re-downloading FO4, will take about 5 1/2 hours altogether according to Steam's estimate, which is usually pretty accurate. Still got an hour or so to go.

I got lost in Civ V all morning When Civ V is launched, you get the option to run it in DirectX 9, DirectX 10/11, or Win8 Touchscreen mode. On my old rig I could run it under DX 10/11 and it would be okay for a little while, but would then get progressively slower and jerkier the more of the map I uncovered and the more I built, until it would become too painful to play, so I was forced to use DX 9 all the time. On the new rig, it runs beautifully under DX 10/11, smooth as silk even with the entire map exposed and a sprawling little empire established. It's glorious, almost like playing a whole new game, so I kind of got hooked in for most of the day . I'll do a comparison picture sometime.

Civ V is surprisingly heavy on resources for the type of game it is, because everything you see in it - every little soldier, horse, boat, ship and building - is a 3D model, not just 2D animation cells. That includes the map itself. And it's all animated. Waves are always slowly moving across the map and breaking on shores, flags are always fluttering and units never just stand stock-still - every one of them has an "idle" animation which kicks in when you're not moving them around. Ships subtly rock from side to side, horses toss heads, wave tails and stamp hooves, and if you watch, say, a Swordsman unit (made up of a phalanx of twelve little men) occasionally one of the men might scratch, stretch or examine his sword. Even when they aren't doing that, you can still see subtle movement by all the men in the unit. So there's always a lot of animation going on, which naturally takes up more and more resources the more you build and expand and the further back you push the fog-of-war. The game also uses a completely different graphics set for map textures under DX 10/11, which is much finer and more richly detailed than the DX9 set. The rig is taking it all in its stride under DX 10/11. It looks gorgeous

I'm happy as a clam so far

[Art Blade]

that's good news.

[fragger]

Okay, done FO4 is installed.

And wow, I can play it maxed out and it runs beautifully I started from scratch because I wasn't happy with the way I'd started my original game. Not knowing any better at the time, I'd started with my initial points evenly distributed among all the perks (or whatever the seven main categories are called). This time I concentrated more points in Perception, Strength and Agility, with the lion's share going to Perception. Then more in Strength and Agility, with just a couple of points in each of the remaining areas. I'm playing as the woman this time - you don't get to be a female character in very many games. Makes for a bit of a change

The rig is handling it without a problem, it's not even cracking a sweat I've never owned such a quiet machine. Can't hear a thing.

Anyway, can't stop to talk for too long. I'm off to check out Affinity Photo. I was going to wait a few more days to get it, but I don't want to. Need Photoshop replacement, need now, must have now Just need to look into it a little more and make sure it's okay with W10. Can't imagine why it wouldn't be.

[Art Blade]

 

good luck and have fun

[PZ]

You're going to have tons of fun fragger; I just know it