In 2012 I wrote Christmas gift for someone you hate: Windows 8. Today I allowed Microsoft to upgrade my desktop computer to Windows 10, which took about 10 minutes (presumably the 1 TB SSD C: drive helped). Everything seems to work, including the Dropbox and Crashplan background processes. The Windows 8 tablet interface seems to be gone and I’m back to “just a desktop” (conspiracy theory: Microsoft secretly replaced Windows 8 with Windows 7 plus a light re-skin and just told everyone that it was a new operating system).
How are readers doing with Windows 10? What new and useful features are there? Is there anything substantially better about it than Windows XP? Google Chrome was crashing pretty frequently for me before the upgrade. Is it time to move to the new Microsoft Edge browser?
I would say that replacing “C:\Documents and Settings” with “C:\User” is a massive improvement. I realize that was new to 7 (or maybe Vista), but any version of Windows with that change is a lot better than XP.
An ad executive told me
“If something is free, it is not the product. You are the product.”
Read this before considering Edge or Cortana
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2015/08/windows_10_privacy_problems_here_s_how_bad_they_are_and_how_to_plug_them.2.html
Windows 10 is the first-ever free MS-Windows upgrade specifically because Microsoft wants to enroll you in their walled-garden future. Microsoft envies Apple and Google which cream off 30% of spending on installable software (“apps”). The free-upgrade to Windows 10 is just the camel’s nose in the tent. Pretty soon updates to Windows 10 will ensure that ordinary customers (those without the savvy and energy to jailbreak their (formerly-) “personal computers”) can only get software from the Windows app store with a +/- 30% commission to Microsoft added to the price. This will help Microsoft minimize the competition independent software vendors might pose to the “cloud” subscription fees Microsoft intends to charge for its own application software.
Basically, Windows 10 is meant to turn your PC into a giant cell phone without the actual cell-phone function, but with the monthly subscription and huge provider rake-off on software.
What exactly did you settle on for your new PC?
I read with some interest your quest for a suitable replacement earlier this year, but I didn’t know if you had ever pulled the trigger.
I am in the same boat myself with a DELL XPS 410 that I have upgraded over the past 5+ years. It now struggles with some large photography tasks I throw at it (multi-image composites for High Dynamic Range using Photomatix). I get insufficient memory messages, so I suspect that my 32 bit Windows 7 system should be upgraded to 64 bit in order to bump the RAM up past the 4 GB (3 really) limit.
Specs?
ScottP
I’m not installing Win10 since I learned that I every keystroke I type in every app is sent back to the Microsoft mothership so they can better target ads and sell my personal data. Without asking it also uploads your files (in my case, private financial data) to their cloud. It also scans all your files and images for keywords and data to be monetized by Microsoft. You can supposedly turn off this spyware with settings in over a dozen places, but can you really be sure? How long until some hacker gets a hold of all this data? No thanks.
Yes Win10 is not as nauseatingly ugly as Win8 but it is infinitely more evil. Besides, Win10 offers me no compelling features over Win7.
A note of caution. My son tried updating his W8.1 machine to W10 when he received his invitation. The upgrade stalled about half-way in, leaving his machine in a state where he couldn’t move forward to W10, or move back to W8.1. He has now re-installed W8.1 from scratch.
Had sound problems on 2 of 3 upgraded computers. (Windows thought it was working, but no sound was coming out.) Complained about it on Twitter, and got some help which fixed the problem on one computer, and which was later rolled out as a hotfix.
Current problem on my gaming rig is that the network will just… stop working, and Windows can’t repair it. The network is fine; all the other computers carry on. I have to reboot — sometimes forcibly — and sometimes the NIC is set to disabled when it comes back up. Was hoping that the recently released SP1 would just fix it, but it happened right before I could download the update, and then happened again soon after applying it.
Unfortunately, I can’t help but wonder if it won’t reboot cleanly when the network is jacked is because it can’t finish phoning something home. I hope I’m just being paranoid, but, if there’s anything life has taught me, it’s that, when I think I’m being too cynical, I’m usually not being half cynical enough.
I’ll just leave this here, Windows Crash Simulator: http://www.virtualglitter.com/
Updating a dual boot W8.1 machine to W10 left a crippled W10 installation. The Ubuntu side still works, though.
Before you attempt to upgrade any machine, do a complete image backup so that you can get back to where you were without endless hassle (Windows preferred method when anything goes wrong is a fresh install, which leaves you with a machine with no apps and no data).
I’ve (attempted to) install W10 on 4 machines. Not a single one would upgrade from Windows Update, even after I forced the upgrade, so I ended up doing upgrade installs from a DVD.
Machine 1 – older Lenovo laptop w. W8.1. Installation went well, but then the 1st cumulative update fried the SSD. It borked the partition table and no recovery software would put Humpty Dumpty back together. I was able to recover most of the files to another drive, and then restored an (unfortunately older) backup image to SSD (did not heed my own advice above). Then re-upgraded the image and it’s working so far. Countless wasted hours and I still haven’t reintegrated the newer files from the recover with the old drive. Grade: F
Machine 2 – Asus netbook running triple boot WXP, W7 and OSX. Upgraded the W7 partition. Surprisingly, this went flawlessly. It even left me (without asking) with a nice boot boot menu giving me the choice of which OS to boot. Grade: A+
Machine 3 – new Lenovo i7 workstation laptop – upgraded the factory image from W8.0 to W10. Went smoothly but somehow at the end I didn’t get any tiles on the desktop and had to reconstruct that manually. BTW, have you seen a M.2 42mm SSD? I still can’t believe a 256gb disk can be the size of a postage stamp. Grade: B
Machine 4 – AMD quad core desktop running W8.1. Upgrade went all the way thru and then failed at 1st boot. Machine automatically rolled back to 8.1 (came back flawlessly). I tried stripping the machine of all peripherals and upgrading the barebones but still will not go – fails at 1st boot every time. Grade: C
So overall I give my experience a B-/C+ but you can see the experience varies widely.
In Microsoft’s defense, there are a billion, billion possible combinations of hardware and software so upgrading every possible machine out there is a nightmare.