I decided to update my Surface Pro 3 running Windows 8.1 to Windows 10. Here’s how it went (roughly):
I first noticed the cool interface. I liked that the start screen was back (for desktop mode at least). However, all of my pinned items were out of order. So I spent some time re-ordering them. Next I discovered Edge. Nice, however I later discovered that it doesn’t support LastPass, so I can’t import my passwords. Also, I tried to import my bookmarks from Chrome, and they not only imported out of order, but most of them lacked favicons. I tried searching for a fix for that and went so far as to “ask the Microsoft community”. Someone replied with an action that involved making changes to the registry. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I should need to mess with my computer’s registry to solve a problem. I mean, it’s nice that we’re allowed to do that, but I thought Windows10 would be so fantastic, you wouldn’t need to! I didn’t feel comfortable messing with the registry, so I left that one alone, and continue to use Chrome for most things.
This next issue requires me to tell you that I like to use my virtual keyboard and writing tab. I noticed my open windows were not resizing to make way for the virtual keyboard. For those of you who don’t use an on-screen keyboard, I use it because I don’t like lugging a physical keyboard around with my SP3. It just gets in the way when I’m trying to draw (first world problems, I know). So, if the window doesn’t resize to make way for the keyboard (or writing tab), I can’t see what I’m writing after jotting down a few paragraphs. Facebook, for example, has a message box at the bottom of the screen. If I want to write a Facebook message, I need to continually switch the keyboard on and off so I could see what I was writing.
After about a day of searching, I discovered that this feature was no longer available in Win10. I was feeling the suckiness of being me and possibly the 5 other people on the planet who actually use that feature. Then I realized I could just pop off the keyboard and move it around the screen. Not a bad compensation, but not what I was expecting I’d need to do.
My next issue occurred a few days after I upgraded. OneDrive stopped working. I’m not sure it ever started to work after the update – I just didn’t notice until I tried to save a file to it. It would just crash quietly. Sometimes it would tell me it was crashing. Most of the time, the little cloud icon at the bottom of the screen would vanish and I couldn’t find a trace of it in the task manager. I asked the MS community again. The first response was to run some kind of a “reset” for OneDrive. That didn’t work. The next thing I tried was turning the computer on and off (it works for some things, but not this). Then someone suggested I go into my “Libraries” and disconnect that. No dice. Another someone suggested I get a new Microsoft user ID and transfer everything over to that one. Mind you, I have a crawling baby I’m caring for while all of this is going on. I only got as far as to set up a second user ID – never figured out how to make the transfer. I gave up on making a new ID and (as another online alias suggested) I decided to “refresh” my computer. I’m not sure if “refresh” is the right term. What it really did was to erase most of my Windows settings along with almost every installed program. After that, OneDrive still didn’t work and I was feeling defeated. I was contemplating one of two things; either I was going to revert back to windows 8.1, or I was going to toss the whole machine out the 3rd floor window.
After several deep breaths (and a 2 mile run in the great out doors), I’m happy to say that I did neither. With a little more searching, there was a mention of changing some OneDrive settings in the cloud. I did just that. I went straight to my browser, opened up OneDrive in the cloud and promptly deleted the offending computer from the list of “PCs”. Initially, I thought it actually worked! I was able to open up OneDrive and the program went through a brief initiation process (wanted to log me in) before abruptly crashing after an attempt to assign a OneDrive folder. This new issue lead me to a small thread that gave me the answer. A very, very strange answer! “Change your display settings” it said. So, I was willing to try anything at this point. I went to settings, display and changed it from 150% to something else. Logged out, logged back in, and it was fixed! Oh, fixed at last! Onedrive now works on my SP3 running windows 10.
Do I get a consolation prize for figuring this out? Probably not. But I got Windows 10 for free. Isn’t that nice?
To celebrate, I drew this picture:
Now I’m having problems getting the flicks to work in my drawing programs and the baby is pressing buttons on the printer again. *Sigh*
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