September 13, 2016

Windows 10 -- Humongous update

I woke this morning to find my torrent machine turned off. Which means Windows UPDATE installed something that required a reboot, and it timed out and auto-shutdown afterwards.

So... power on, log in, start uTorrent again, and then switch over to my main machine and manually invoke the same update.

Man, it was huge. Between downloading and installing it took about 4 hours! They must have replaced most of the OS.

It pinned Edge on my task bar, so I gave it a try. It doesn't interest me, if for no other reason than because it doesn't run flash. I visited Chizumatic and the top rotation was blank. It also doesn't like the way my LAN is set up; it works, but when it starts it complains that it isn't working, even though it does work. It also used Times New Roman (which I despise) as the default display font. Probably there are ways to fix those things, but frankly I can't see any reason to bother trying to find them. I did try to figure out where the font was controlled and spent about 5 minutes before giving up. I don't need the hassle.

So it got unpinned, as well as a couple of other cruft icons which automagically appeared.

My biggest problem right now on the main computer is that the clock at the bottom of the task bar is displaying in black on a black background, making it pretty useless. Strangely, it's white-on-black on the other computer.

I really don't like having the taskbar being black, anyway, but I can't find anywhere that allows me to control that color. Anyone know where it is? And it would be nice if I could make the clock be white again instead of black.

I just noticed something else: windows used to be blue on the top line and gray all the rest of the way; now they're blue all around. (When selected.) Which is an improvement, but I would like to find the place where that's controlled and do some adjusting.

I do hope I'm not going to regret installing this update. I always feel a bit of fear when I install something like this. I don't think it's going to be a problem, however. The torrent machine, which installed it first, seemed to be working fine afterwards before I did the update to my main computer.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 11:31 AM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
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1 Settings | Personalization | Colors | Accent Color lets you set the border around windows. Edge does support Flash; not sure why you're not seeing it, unless it's turned off in Edge's settings? I think you can set the color of the taskbar but apparently in the latest build I've got (14915) if you go to Settings | Personalizations | Colors it seems to crash after a couple of seconds, so I guess that's buggy right now.  You've probably just gotten the Anniversary Update--I don't think they have released anything newer for non-Insiders.

Posted by: RickC at September 13, 2016 12:27 PM (ECH2/)

2 Yeah, it was the "Anniversary update" though why it's named that is anybody's guess.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at September 13, 2016 12:50 PM (+rSRq)

3 Used to be you could set the color for damned near everything but now there doesn't seem to be any way to set the background color for the task bar.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at September 13, 2016 12:51 PM (+rSRq)

4 Aha! There are themes!

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at September 13, 2016 12:52 PM (+rSRq)

5

A lot of people online are complaining about this. It turns out you can fix it by picking a theme, and then the clock is visible. However, when I did that it also gave me drop-shadows on the text labels of all the icons on my desktop, and I hate how that looks.

There must be a way to do fine-tuning on themes, but for the moment I don't know what it is.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at September 13, 2016 02:20 PM (+rSRq)

6

Unfortunately, the theme I chose also overrides the "accent" choice, so now my windows all use a pure white bezel instead of the blue that was there after the update.

I have a feeling that Microsoft will be issuing a patch about this; a lot of people are going to bitch about it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at September 13, 2016 02:22 PM (+rSRq)

7 Steven, it's called the Anniversary Update because it became available on the one-year anniversary of Windows 10's release.  Apparently it's getting rolled out to people in stages--Ars Technica has a just-out article saying some people might not get it until November unless they force it.  Also, if Windows 10 themes work like older versions, you can probably pick a theme and then set the accent color separately.
BTW, I just checked my son's computer and you CAN set the taskbar color and window caption color--but they're the same as your accent color.

Posted by: RickC at September 13, 2016 03:15 PM (Ir5TZ)

8 It's odd they set Times New Roman as a default font. Didn't MicroSoft spend a boatload of money creating themselves new custom fonts? "Georgia", "Verdana", and "Segoe" are the ones I remember offhand.

Posted by: Boviate at September 13, 2016 03:52 PM (XRvFv)

9 TNR or other serif font has pretty much always been the default in browsers.

Posted by: RickC at September 13, 2016 04:08 PM (Ir5TZ)

10 After I picked a theme, I tried changing the accent color and it ignored me.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at September 13, 2016 05:42 PM (+rSRq)

11 Ok.  I didn't want to try it because I was on my son's computer and I didn't want to mess with his colors, and as I said earlier, on my PC the app kept crashing.

Posted by: RickC at September 13, 2016 07:00 PM (Ir5TZ)

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