[Rwp] the ongoing experience with windows 10

[Chris Belle]

Well, I am hear to report that my initial win10 audio issues with asio 
not working well are fixed.
and again I learned an important lesson, always religiously check for 
driver updates.
But this one wasn't so obvious.
I had initially gone on dell's site and it said my machine wasn't 
supported for win10 testing, which means they don't guarantee all 
features working.
for attached devices and the like.
Usually for the most part, legacy hardware is supported well by 
microsoft on modern operating systems,
at least to a point.
so there were no obvious issues in control pannel device manager, no 
devices not found,
or unknown or other devices, you know the usual things.
I had done extensive updating and the USB seemed to work well, but asio 
would never allow me to turn down the buffers without giving me nasty 
clicks, although wasapi mode worked way better.
Well, I decided to go on dell's site one more time and try to see if 
there were any updates.
This machine was upgraded from a w7 install, with win 10 going in over 
the top of it, not the way I usually like to do a machine, but I figured 
this was the safest way to do it and get speech in places I needed it,
and I was experimenting anyway.
Plus the image I had burned from the media creation tool didn't work, it 
wouldn't boot for some reason, so I ended up doing it this way.
Well, to my surprise, dell scanned my system, and recommended a chipset 
upgrade.
and that went in and when I re-booted, I was able to set the asio 
buffers down nice and low on my steinberg interface,
and no clicks or pops.
so even us so called experienced techs can get bitten by the old driver bug,
and sometimes it's not a straight forward path, because often an older 
driver or piece of software can work better than a newer one, as many 
DAW builders know,
and if something is wrong it will not always be indicated by something 
in device manager.
But this chipset upgrade sure made the difference in my old dell second 
gen i5 based system,
so even though dell indicates it doesn't support this machine they had 
obviously done some work with it because this upgrade wasn't available 
for the w7 install when I did it for that OS, but it was available for 
the w10 install.
so w10 is working sweetly now, and plus I have the added niceness of 
wasapi working well.