Hi All,
Sorry for the cross posting, but I thought I'd just write about my
experience with Windows 10.
Obviously I cannot speak for all the setup with Windows 10, and someone
might have different experience even with the same setup. I'm sure as
more adventurous people try Windows 10, we'll have better picture and
workarounds. Anyways, this was my setup for testing.
2015 MacBook Pro running Windows 10 on Bootcamp.
Sonar 8.5
Cake talking 8.8
Sibelius 5.25
Jaws 16 and 17
First, here's the story for Sonar with Cake talking.
In short, if you are a pro user who uses a lot of plugins and HSC, it's
a probably good idea not to update unless you have a backup and want to
experiment.
After changing resolution, DPI, even copying and pasting classic theme
from Windows 7, CT fails to jump to a lot of controls for tracks. You
can however, move to different controls using cursors. Jaws 16 was
little better, but not much.
Also, I couldn't activate a lot of buttons on plugins like browser
buttons on dimension or session drummer. However, you can use preset
button and load the patch file.
If you want to be able to load up some patches and just sequence, and
you don't mind using cursors, it's definitely doable.
However, if you tweak a lot of plugin settings and rely on a lot of hsc
for third party plugins, it's not going to be fun.
Sibelius
I ran Sibelius in windows 7 compatibility mode, and it was a lot better
than Sonar.
The major obstacle was that the script wasn't able to fix the
overlapping windows.
If you keep pressing ctrl+shift+f1, it'll keep trying and eventually say
tool has been fixed. However, when you actually try to navigate, it'll
still complain about the overlapping windows again though.
The good news is that if a sighted person resizes the windows like
playback and properties, it starts working.
The script seems little sluggish, but it works. For example, when you
press right arrow, you'll sometimes hear a ding instead of moving to
next note. If you press right arrow again, it'll work. It doesn't happen
all the time, but it does happen once in a while.
It reads chord symbols, dynamic marks, lines, everything else I tried.
It's just little slow but manageable.
For a lot of people buying new computers, Windows 10 will be
unavoidable. Even if you manually install Windows 7, you’ll have a lot
of headache with Windows 7 not being able to support newer motherboard
during the Windows installation. If you have a lot of experience
installing Windows 7 with loading drivers and tweaking Windows image,
you definitely can, but it’s not going to be fun for many people who
don’t have the knowledge.
Lastly if you have the latest mac, Windows 7 seems out of option. I
tried many different methods such as downgrading to Yosemite, running
the initial Windows 7 setup on bootcamp partition using VMware, changing
the partition scheme, loaded custom boot loader, restore Winclone image
of Windows 7, and so on. any of the combinations won't even start the
boot up process. It seemed They blocked it from the BIOS.
Lastly, Microsoft nailed coffin on Windows 7 for future Intel CPU
including Skylake. Even for people who already have a setup that works,
this is something to think about when you want to upgrade your system in
the future.
Chi
