3259 - Last Rays At The Pizzeria


I have no idea what the “true color” of this wall is. This rendition at least feels like how it was to be there, shortly before sundown, with some extra hot chilies on my pizza.

By the way, I’ve seen three upgrades to Windows 10 in the meantime, two of them from Windows 7 I’ve done myself.

In the first case, a laptop, the upgrade went fine, but the new system was extremely unstable. It invariably froze within a few minutes or at maximum half an hour.

The culprit was ESET Internet Security 6, an old version, that on Windows 7 still got virus signature updates, but that told me itself, that I needed to upgrade to version 8, because version 6 was not supported on Windows 10.

It sounded plausible, after all, a virus shield and firewall is deeply integrated into the operating system. Indeed, an upgrade to ESET Internet Security 8 fixed all stability problems.

In the second case, the desktop in Villach, Windows 10 insisted on 1920x1080 being the highest supported resolution of my monitor. It didn’t allow me to choose the monitor’s native 2560x1440, a resolution that I had used under Windows 7 for a year.

In this case the fix was changing cables. The problem is, that I had always used the HDMI connector and that 2560x1440 at 60Hz is not supported over HDMI. You need Display Port (DP) for that. Windows 7 seemingly had preferred resolution over refresh rate, while Windows 10 insisted on 60Hz and instead dropped resolution.

Thankfully both graphics card and monitor have DP connectors, and I even had a spare DP cable at home.

Other than that, there were no problems at all.

Could the average user have fixed the problems? Likely not.

Would it have been harder on Linux? Maybe, but not by much, and in any case, if the average user can’t do it on Windows and needs an expert, it’s too hard. Any remaining difference is academic.

Would it have been easier on the Mac? Likely yes, but I’ve seen annoying problems on Macs as well. My current problem is, that the latest version of Firefox on the Mac can’t play videos. Older versions could. The same version on Windows and on Linux can, Safari on the Mac can do it as well. Firefox has the same plugins and settings on all systems, because they are automatically synced. I have no idea and Google finds nothing but a few threads from 2012 🙂