Windows 10 on Samsung Notebooks

The official roll-out of windows 10 is approaching and the "Get Windows 10 " notification has appeared on many Samsung notebooks. However, is it safe to proceed? Windows 8 / 8.1 caused a lot a grief for both Samsung and the owners of Samsung notebooks. Have lessons been learned regarding Windows 10?

Given that many of the potential problem areas are likely to be generic across the range of Samsung notebooks it is probably advantageous to bring together all the Samsung + Windows 10 discussion into one place so I am starting this new thread.

A few posts from other threads to keep this ball rolling:

Samsung support for Windows 10

Someone who tried the preview

Please post more links.

BTW, I am personally likely to first try Windows 10 on my Dell E7440. It is more likely to have propper driver support and, if Windows 10 doesn't fix a sleep issue I've been having then Windows 7 will need to be reinstalled.

 

I've installed the Windows 10 preview a couple days ago on my NP700Z5A-S04DE (from 2011 I think?) and I thought I'd share my experience.

I must say that I had much fewer problems than expected (and than I had when upgrading to 8.1 - damn, that was a fight). I didn't bother installing any of the drivers provided by Samsung since almost everything was running smooth from the start. The only thing I installed was the Smart Settings software, which, by the way, starts much faster than it ever did on Windows 8/8.1 and all the options I needed so far seem to be working (incl. keyboard backlight).
I didn't install the SSD software, since I didn't feel like it was working properly on Windows 8.1.

Then I tested the gaming performance. So far I've only tried League of Legends and AC Rogue and in both games the framerate is much lower than it was before, on Win 8.1. Even lowering the graphics settings didn't help. After investigating a bit, I noticed that the GPU load on the AMD gpu almost never goes above 30%. The CPU load isn't particularly high and the ram isn't full either, so I'm kinda stumped atm. As for display drivers, I tried the leshcat UnifL drivers as well as the official ones - they don't seem to make any difference for my problem, but both of them do work fine otherwise.
When / If find out what limits my gpu to perform, I'll let you know (until then, I'll gladly accept any help identifying the bottleneck).

TL;DR: working fine, but gpu bottleneck.

Edit: I managed to resolve the issue, however I'm still not sure what caused it. Here are some things I did that might have helped:

• disabling the silent mode in smart settings
• Windows updates
• reinstalling LoL

 

For now this needs a sticky just to be safe.

 

Good thread, while I think probably everyone should perform the FREE upgrade to W10 over the next year, I'd also say there's no harm in waiting a few weeks or months in case there are issues. I have a few concerns before I take the plunge:

My biggest question is what happens to your W7/W8 key. There have been rumors that once you upgrade to W10, your key is essentially a W10 key and may no longer work for your previous version. I find this hard to believe, but the key issues with W8 were copious, so perhaps. Once I confirm the W10 upgrade does not somehow magically deactivate your W8 license I will kick the tires on my X3G.

Secondly, I would like to use an official W10 version of the elan driver and Samsung settings.

Finally, I don't want to do the in place upgrade, clean install only. Ideally I would like to dual boot W8.1 and W10 with one license. I anticipate obtaining the W10 iso will be a pita.

What is not a rumor is that WMC will not be available in W10. I realize only people in the HTPC community will care, but I thought I'd mention it. Because of this, it's going to be a long time before all my systems are on W10. I plan to save a W10 image from a clean install for each system, provided I can roll back to W8/7.

 

Here's my take on the licensing thing, but do not think this as official as I only speculate from what I have seen or heard:

• When doing the upgrade, Windows 10 will either convert this into a suitable W10 key or issue a key that basically a match of the W8 key but only for W10.
• If it is happening like that, you will be able to reinstall both OS later.
• Clean installation is supported after you are upgrading from W8. Since they do not provide any activation key, your best way to do is to upgrade and verify if there are any problems, then using the Reset/Restore option in Windows to do a clean install.
• For dual boot, I don't believe we can do that unless they provide an activation key that is seperate with W8 or we somehow can look up that after upgrading. However, it might be possible due to the fact that they continue to provide alpha/beta builds and those are only activated by some generic key with our Live accounts. That could mean we can use our email just to activate the license.
• Rollback is also possible so I guess we do not have to worry about that. The only thing I can think of is that when we are doing the rollback, they will deactivate the W10 key and allow us to use the old W7/8 key to reactivate OS.

Those things are my guesses only and I hope they would clarify more on the release date. I am not worrying much about downgrading since I am always use the lastest software as possible and I have tested the preview on my laptop and it has been great so far, despite some minor things that could be fixed by updating new driver/software. For activation key, I am confidence that MS will not do something like revoking the old license key so that they want everyone to be on W10. They do not want more backlash for their OS, so they will provide as many options as possible. If it is possible, we should all migrate to W10, since it combines the best of 7 and 8 together.

Now, for software, WMC is definitely removed from W10. I have not use that much in a while and I know for some people, this might be a deal breaker. However, back then, there was no equivalent software to it. Nowadays, there are a lot of them like Plex, Kodi, so it is possible to ignore WMC completely. That is only my reference as other people might think WMC is much better.

For driver, as I mentioned in another topic, you can reuse old W8.1 driver/software because much of the underlying structure of W10 is basically W8/8.1 except for things like graphic and touchpad. Those two are definitely important and Samsung should release them as W10 compatible. Other driver/software, they probably reuse the old one since they are still working. Samsung settings does indeed working except for brightness, but there is a patch/fix that can be applied to fix that issue so do not worry about that.

 

How is everybody doing today? I have a question about upgrading to windows 10 and drivers. I am planning to do a clean install for windows 10. I currently have the Samsung Gamer 7 (NP700G7C-S01US),which came out 3 years ago and I was wondering.

Will Samsung be supporting this laptop with Window 10 drivers?

Will drivers from Window 7/8.1 be fine for Windows 10? I did go from windows 7 to 8.1 and they had drivers for 8.1.

Does anybody with this laptop have the technical preview or the full version? If so, can you tell me your opinion.



http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Gamer...id=1438007030&sr=8-1&keywords=samsung+gamer+7

 

I don't have this one, but I am sure that your computer will not be supported officially by Samsung. Why I said that? If you look on Samsung Support page, you will see that they currently list the Ativ Book 9 and some series 3 models, even mine NP880Z does not make the cut. However, you can search for it inside the SWUpdate. As far as thing goes, Samsung has phased on their notebook division and they are currently not releasing any new model. That does not mean the old models will be obsolete. I asked their support and they just said they will release software and driver update for notebook, but did not mentions any model and even not referenced my model.

Now, for this particular laptop, you should be able to use current W8.1 drivers with W10. Everything should be fine, except for graphic and touchpad. I mention these two particularly because I had some issues with them. Your graphic should be fine since it is NVidia and they are more on the good side to provide good driver and software than AMD. Their Optimus switching support is much better in term of driver and software than AMD. For touchpad, I have not seen any news on the one that will be compatible with W10. That does not mean we will not have one though, it just that we will have to use the bad one until the good one arrives. For other drivers, I tended to go to their OEM websites and download them separately, because most of the time, Samsung would only provide one set of working drivers and stop doing update after awhile.

Here my suggestion. If you still have a good size of hard drive, then split that drive into two partitions and install the technical preview build 10240 inside the new partition. That way you can test out the preview or I should say the RTM build since we will get that build plus other fixes when W10 is released. By doing that, you ensure your laptop is able to run W10 and after the release, you can just delete the partition and update/clean the old one as you want. MS will release the official on the 29th, however, you might not be able to get it on that day those. They are rolling the build by stages with Insider first, and then for PCs/Laptops that meet the requirement. I suspect that laptops like Samsung or some other OEMs will not meet the conditions since MS are relying much on their OEM partners to release compatible drivers. So we could see that the build will come as a later with the support of drivers and software. In the mean time, just test out the preview and see if it works for you or not. If not, wait until everything is good, and then do the upgrade. Otherwise, people will just blame on MS for releasing bad OS like W8.

 

Thanx for the input. I rarely use the touchpad since I have a dedicated mouse. This is one of the reasons I'm moving away from laptops and going to get a desktop. Don't really know if these manufactures are going to support the systems after the warranty is up With that said, I wouldn't mind a updated Gamer 7 lol. It's a solid notebook.

 

I have the notebook NP700G7C-S01, but no Windows 10 on it. One issue, with the preview, is it wants to use UEFI and GPT on the primary drive being as this system is UEFI compliant. If you have all MBR on the primary you may have an issue. The other issue may be with using Samsung proprietary easy settings software to get the function keys working. Hardware wise everything else is pretty standard so there should be little issue.

For the touchpad I use the touchpad settings to disable it when a mouse is plugged in, this helps immensely.

 

You can definitely switch around GPT or MBR as both are compatible with UEFI bios, although it is recommended to use GPT for better future-proofing. I am running mine W8.1 and W10 on an SSD with MBR and have no issue with either OS or the BIOS. The boot sequence is really fast as you will not notice any slow down just because using one or another. Easy Settings is working properly like I said by using the current newest version for W8.1 in W10, maybe they will release a good compatible one for the new OS.

Currently, the preloading is starting for people did the reservation. I have seen it has started download the bits on my desktop, but have not seen them on either my Samsung laptop or the SP3. It could be they are preloading by stage and only unlock by midnight. By tomorrow, if I can have it on my laptop, I will report the issues that I could find.