Party of one, your laptop is ready… So, another Windows milestone, and I have to see how this new version is going to work out. First up is upgrading the laptop from Win 8.1 to 10.
First thing I notice: the upgrade install takes a long time. Over 2 hours in my case. Once completed, I ran through a few apps to see how they performed. I initially had a problem with Faststone Image Viewer where the windows taskbar would still be displayed when viewing pictures in full-screen mode. That problem went away after my AMD graphics driver applied its proper settings.
Then I tried the Edge browser. Nothing would connect. Odd, because Skype worked, and I could ping Yahoo, I just couldn’t browse anywhere. I disabled my HOSTS file and rebooted. No luck. I had Firefox installed, so I tried that. Websites load fine in Firefox. So what did I have different in Edge. It seems to be a DNS issue.
To get right to the solution, it was my fault. At some point long since forgotten, I disabled the DNS Client service on the laptop. This service caches DNS entries so applications don’t have to call to remote servers over and over to get IP addresses. It’s never been required before. Until now. The Edge browser apparently uses the DNS Client service exclusively. Maybe Cortana does as well.
So, that’s resolved. All my other important applications worked as well: KeePass, Veracrypt, Zune. I tried out the Groove Music application, since it’s the successor to Windows Media Player. It’s not bad. It’s close to Zune, if it only had a better Now Playing view.
Interesting quirk with Groove Music. When I was testing Windows 10 out in beta, I wanted to see how OneDrive-integrated music would work. So I uploaded a few albums to OneDrive and did some testing on my phone. It didn’t seem to do what I expected, so I deleted all but one of the albums. On my fresh install of Windows 10, some songs from a couple of those albums appeared in my library. I couldn’t play them, couldn’t download them, and they had the message “To play, purchase a Groove Music Pass.” I guess Groove Music has its own library that syncs? Oh well.
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