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OK, after allowing my Win 10 update to settle in and myself to become more acquainted, I can definitively say that the upgrade has some significant issues. I have no sound, my screen saver and some power management settings aren't working, and several other smaller bugs in previously-existing software and the windows environment persist. I just finished upgrading a family member's computer using a clean Win 10 install. This results in a much stabler system; however, the invasions of privacy, attempts to "make my life simpler" by taking a lot of the convenient control out of my hands, and the interface masking the underlying UI confirm that I cannot generate any interest in using Win 10 ... ever. A version of Metro still persists and is evident in the "Settings" UI that sits above the traditional settings UI (Control Panel items). This is an attempt to reconcile the UIs of Win 10 PC with Win 10 mobile. Totally useless baggage that only serves to bloat the system and discombobulate the UI. I couldn't care less about Win 10 now and have happily reverted back to Win 7 ... eventually, I will be moving to Linux!

I just imaged my Win7 to test drive Win10 (update version). The good thing about the update version is that you are able to see Win10 in the context of your preferred-environment setup --with some exceptions. UAC was back on, so disabling it was annoying, due to my initial lack of understanding at how to get to Control Panel ... and then finding that it is buried now inside User Settings. My initial impressions: I like the GUI changes with default 'desktop', icons, layouts, etc.I hate that Windows 10 assumes I have a Win tablet or phone ... a great many features attempt to integrate my non-existent Win mobile devicesI don't like that 'privacy' elements include so much more to monitor and tame ... and that they do not 'stick' between updates as alt3rn1ty mentionsI wish that the group-alphabetized "All Apps" menu moved to the group I want by just typing the letter (as in Explorer)Like the Xbox app, but still need to determine its efficacy and invasiveness, given my disabling of other ancillary 'convenience' servicesI have much more to explore though, so my first stop now is to decent websites that admonish Win 10, so that I can uncover all of the invasive and inconvenient 'convenience' aspects of this OS. Once I determine all of what I hate about Win 10, I will find Win 10 advocate info and try to reconcile the good with the bad and report back. EDIT: After reading more and playing more with the OS, I am not too excited about Win 10 ... Generally, there are too many over-steps of my personal preferences, especially since this is an upgrade that should at the very least retain all of my compatible personal preferences (security related or not).UAC - This was back on after upgrade, even though I had disabled it under Win 7. At lease Defender remained disabled.Forced updates - They will be a problem in the future at some point. I want to choose one way or the other. many updates under Win 7 were a total imposition that either hampered functionality, imposed restrictions, or added bloat. I don't trust MS to be "big brother"MS Account - I was initially signing in with my local account, but after launching and linking my Xbox Live account via the Xbox app, I was suddenly required to sign in with my MS account. Just setting up this app integrates my account into the OS (and the reverse, I assume ... not nice without advanced notification and details about this integration).MS Edge - lackluster and featureless. What's more, it cannot access the internet. FireFox works fine, and I have connectivity ... Edge just does not work for whatever reason. Maybe a driver issue, but only with respect to Edge. Nothing to Google on this topic that I found.Bloatware - Lots of useless/feature-poor junk installed (e.g., MS Mail). Lots of inherent software clearly not appropriate for a desktop env with no obvious way to remove this software.Privacy - This OS invites MS into your personal life. Major infringement of your personal information for the bad side of the dark web (as well as MS and its affiliates).Default software - Even the upgraded OS did not retain my default programs. I have to affirm each app that I prefer over the junk that MS offers at first launch.Settings/Control Panel/Computer Management - total mess. hodgepodge of needless nonsense mixed with hard-to-access basics. Very little customizability options.Perhaps some of these issues are related to the upgrade method. I will next try a clean install and really determine the strengths and weaknesses of this OS now that I have my proper Activation Key. Incidentally, for those wanting a clean install, here is a method: Allow the key updates if hidden according to this post then restart and click the taskbar icon to upgrade Windows ... alternatively download the upgrade for "another PC" (bootable media or ISO options available that work for both upgrade or clean install). Install the upgrade. Determine your new product key Whipe your drive and install again with a clean OS using the new product key.

I may test drive Win 10 for kicks (after imaging my win7 setup, of course) ... what I gather is that I have to upgrade to get it for free. Then I can use the tool to create a bootable USB and Belarc Advisor to grab my Win10 product key, then do a fresh install (I refuse OS upgrades). Found a good guide that I plan to shadow.

Agree that power supply needs to be at least 600+ W (I would go 800 Cooler Master for scaleability and assurance of amicable power leads for all future components). DX12 ... how many (relevant) games are written to DX12 standards? It would be nice to have the most relevant display adapter, but this is an easy future upgrade (whose price will constantly decrease). $450-ish seems way too pricey for me. I would go for the Radeon HD 7970, which is quite powerful, with 3 GB VRAM, and easily can accommodate all relevant games right now ... probably less than $200 at this time. Also, consider a full tower case for low noise and lots of room for upgrades ... I use and highly recommend CM HAF series, which accommodates anything and should be pretty future proof. You can also fit a huge fan in there (I use a V8) if you plan to OC.

That kw+color could be added, but I am not sure it wouldn't cause more confusion or would need to be explicitly defined at the beginning of every guide so that people would understand that text with this different format stands for the 'default' ... just seems a bit confusing outside of the context of a guide that uses this mechanic a lot and defines it up front.

We tell them to read the manual (RTM) ... that is why we wrote the ancillary guides, provide links to more information, and provide a forum for discussion (and all of the constant maintenance that goes into keeping all of this relevant). STEP (this site) never intended to allow those completely new to modding to mod their setup without prerequisite knowledge/experience. The expectation is that users RTM and learn the basics of modding before they expect to successfully tackle STEP or any other modding guide. We all started out knowing nothing about modding. Some of us did RTM (when there really wasn't any manual, BTW), and compiled what we learned. Nowadays, you will not find any comprehensive/consistent source of information about modding Skyrim (or any Bethesda games) outside of STEP (except maybe TESCosi, which was originally done by TomLong, but has since been revived by others). We have drastically simplified the process of learning how to mod, so we expect due diligence on the part of the user. It's a "right of passage" as much as a practicality with respect to an efficient use of our (the STEP maintainers') personal time. I wish those that felt modding was too complex had tried it back in 2006! Back then, Wrye Mash/Bash was what you used to install mods (or you simply copied them into skyrim/data) ... and Wrye's mod managers were far more complex to learn/use than MO. Modding is a technical learning experience, a pastime, a challenge, a culture ... it's a community effort here at STEP, and I think we have made modding methods/tools far more transparent than they ever were. You can use our resources to create the type of guides you want ... and on this site if you want.

AV may conflate with audio/vidio, and OBiS seems best for the third option. ... added last three

This discussion has been moved to an administrative forum that is not publicly accessible.

gray are files existing only in the destination ... review the DDSopt Guide. It is organized by tab, so it is easy to find all the info you need to run the program. That's the browser tab, so all you want to know about the info you see on that tab is located in the guide. I would advise you to abort using the batch files if you want to understand what is happening. the guide is descriptive and simple to reference (use the TOC). I have even gone through the pain of indicating uncertainties and spurious functionality (in yellow)

We will happily add the 20 meshes to our compilation, and you can remove it. Seems like an efficient means to an end of that one if you like the idea.

What is the reasoning for removal of DLC options? I think it is better if they are there, since it is informative at a quick glance. There is the advantage of reducing vertical space though. I also prefer the more wordy intro. People that don't want to read it don't have to, but those that do can gather more context. No reason to cater to the lazy in this regard. I also prefer the sitetable class for the requirements. Go ahead and keep mocking up your ideal though, because there may be some merit to making certain changes, especially where maintenance efficiency is concerned.

Yes, and it should be : USLP ... and UHFP makes sense, since we have UDBP and UDGP, which are otherwise ambiguous. (but the UP team is not so efficient with patch nomenclature: USkP, UDgP, UHfP, UDbP, USLP are the most efficient ... collectively called the "USPs") UESP conflates further with the USPs though

Yes, it is a mediawiki thing that cannot be easily accounted for in the skin without js. Not impossible to deal with, but far down on the list of priorities.

adding to Neo's last: ... or after XBone (and masterchief collection). Big companies constantly fail to learn from the past though in favor of going to market to beat out the competition. Short-term gains ... everything is always short-term wins in our global economy. Future be damned. Win 10 may be interesting to me in a couple of years once all the typical MS attempts at redefining 'standards' within their own proprietary context have either failed or faded into obsolescence. (Bing/Google, Silverlight/Flash, MS HTML/open HTML, Communicator/Lync/Skype, blah, blah).

Please use spoiler tags for giant walls of text lists ... fixed.

ENBoost is essential for a highly modded game with lots of demanding textures. You probably won't notice any performance increase, but you should see a reduction in load times and CTDs. It certainly should not hurt performance. I also would not run without vsync enabled (via GPU). Best way to judge for yourself is to run with and without for each of them. You be the judge ... but we recommend them for a reason ;) 30+ FPS is pretty reasonable. There is no need ever to want or have > 60 though. You will notice gfx anomalies at those rates (well, anything over your monitor refresh rate). We actually have doc and links on the wiki regarding both of these methods/tools. Have a read.

There are plenty of 'critical' updates to ignore. Two of them were posted on this thread by alt3rn1ty, and they were those updates that facilitated pushing Win 10 on all of us :P Other 'updates' have been incompatible with my external devices as well. Need the ability to ignore and choose.

You should know the style guide ... you made some good edits to it a couple of days ago. It's the STEP Wiki Editing guide (link on MP). Feel free to make other edits to that as you see fit, adding things we have not yet covered. Right now, it is a place where we (mostly me) jot things down so that we can begin some semblance of editing standards. The principles in there are what we want, but much is still lacking, and org could be better. That guide itself does not adhere to the writing style it posits, which is one of the biggest problems with our wiki in general ... writing style is kind of all over the place. I have made many revisions to correct, but only piecemeal ... lots left to do :/ We need more proactive wiki editors! (I will add you to that forum group, BTW).

If that is ever the case, then we can create that variant of this template by simply copying for that purpose. I wanted to name it according to the purpose it serves now. We should create other templates to aid editors in adhering to standards (take a look at Template:Fc now, fe). Proton had created v1, and I modified it just a bit. Proton also created templates for our Changelog formatted text. (see Template:Moved, fe). We should be implementing more of this stuff ... also see Template:Tl

I updated this template and the OP to reflect. It's a good template, and I just wanted to incorporate some minor embellishments to aid with look and usage. Also updated Skyrim INI guides to use. Will do the same for ENB INI guides next.

That's why we have the changelog listing "interim release" changes. People will need to be familiar with their own particular setup to understand whether or not they are in sync with the latest. Most people don't vigilantly monitor the changelog. Furthermore, most people also customize STEP to their own needs. Finally, we also make mistakes that must be corrected ... going live drastically increases the effective testing pool that uncovers those mistakes. It's just a 'guide.' each user constructs it independently, and we have limited ability to test everything outside of our own unique setups. We also don't have the time to optimize for user convenience (branching, versioning, hotfix notifications, alerts, announcements, etc.). At any given time, if one follows the live guide, they should be good to go. We don't commit to resolving all diffs for each of our users, nor do we want to. I would be surprised if more than 5% of our user base has STEP and supporting elements installed exactly as specified in the guide. I would be just as surprised if any two of those 5% had an identical setup. Our current process is as simple to maintain for our staff as possible, and first priority is convenience of the maintainers. Given our limited time, user convenience is necessarily the second priority. Much of our work goes into simplifying maintenance, which is limited due to the instability of the hundreds of independently-maintained dependencies. We often get opinions from people with good ideas, but at the end of the day, the ideas of the people actually committed to ongoing maintenance rule things. There are only 5 of us handling most aspects of the workload (mod testing, guide building, community outreach, infrastructure maintenance). We get invaluable assistance from other staff and the community, but only we 5 have been around consistently long enough to shape the mechanics and maintain consistency. The best way to understand is to become active in mod testing and guide(s) administration. You will quickly see that handling STEP as 'software' is impractical. The STEP guide is really very much like a wiki. Stasis can never be achieved, and volatility rules each moment. It works quite well, actually, given so few are administrating. It would take on the order of 100 full-time employees to administrate STEP to the degree stated in the OP. We encourage anyone to jump in and help out, but we won't adopt any new methods unless they are no-brainers that ease maintenance for us within the current paradigm. On the other hand, we will adopt new ideas/paradigms if the bearer of those ideas is as committed to long-term supporting the project as us 5 ;)

The dev wiki is necessary for Semantic wiki dev and generally good for novice wiki editors to practice. It is also a better place for things like Template:Heading, which, when implemented, is a real PITA to undo without reverting changes. Reverting is fine unless there are several 'good' edits interleaved with those changes. If a bunch of templates that we don't want get used a lot, undoing is an inconvenience.

@Tech Thanks for clarifying that the 'desktop' will be the default in Win10. That is at lease something positive. I would also like to not only disable, but uninstall mobile apps from the OS in favor of the standard, non-portable, more feature-rich versions.

Exactly. This is why I want to explore the limits of our ability to use site styes over templates, templates over HTML markup styles. Style sheets should provide everything look/feel as a first priority, and then templates can handle things more having to do with content and layout and whatever else impractical for style sheets.

Your mobile user dictionary needs a lot of help! Agree, templates are the way to go, but probably best to determine exactly what kinds of templates we really can use and make accessible to the public (because they serve a site-wide purpose) versus those that are experimental. I think that we would be better off fine tuning our existing templates rather than developing a bunch of new ones ... unless the new ones are flagged as 'experimental' and use discouraged outside of testing grounds. In other words, we need to bring a dev wiki online for 'experimental' development. This way, our creativity creates less chaos, and the general public won't have an opportunity to run rampant with something that is not necessarily needed or finalized. I also want to see what we can accomplish using behind the scenes style sheets before we go building look/feel templates that could either become obsolete or incompatible with any future skin alterations.