Windows 10 - The upgrade

[melek]

As most Windows users know, Microsoft unleashed Windows 10 on the world.

My wife asked, "What's the purpose of Windows 10?"

I told her, "It's to make up for releasing Windows 8 on the world."

Will Windows 10 wash the bad taste from your mouth that we call Windows 8?

Yes and no.

WINDOWS 8
I really want a streamlined operating system with as few bells and whistles as possible. No animation or flyout menus or fading, transparent whatever. I want my PC to run as lean and as fast as possible.

For Windows 8, I revived the "Start" menu with Start8, an excellent program made by Stardock, from which I also use ObjectDock Pro.

The main issue that I had with Windows 8 is that Microsoft made it for the mobile environment and stuck its corporate finger into the eye of everyone who uses a computer for a living.

THE UPGRADE
Rather than a clean install, I upgraded my Windows 8 installation, which has slowly been dying - one Metro app at a time.

The upgrade took several hours - probably between three and four hours. I had other things to do, so I ducked in and checked on its progress from time to time.

A number of reboots later, and the computer was now running Windows 10. Well, mostly. First, my antivirus program AVG ran an update and forced another reboot.

CORTANA
Microsoft has been known for "borrowing" from Apple, and Cortana clearly is a ripoff of Apple's Siri.

If you want the truth, I don't talk to my computer, and I don't want my computer talking to me. It took quite a few clicks until I was able to shut down Cortana - for good, I hope. We'll see.

Plus, my desktop computer doesn't have a microphone attached, so it would be a relentlessly irritating one-way conversation.

PRIVACY (OR LACK THEREOF)
The newest buzz word in computing is "sharing." To that end, Microsoft wants you to share everything. Your location. Your interests. Your contacts and their information. Supposedly, it's to make your "computing experience" better. I've had a wonderful computing experience without revealing all kinds of personal information to Microsoft.

Supposedly, Microsoft won't retain any personal data. How many of us believe that?

Shutting down the sharing requires a huge amount of time, browsing many items in the "Preferences."

Share my contacts? No thanks. Location? Nope. My webcam and microphone? Nope. My maps? Allow these programs to use this or that? No, no, no and no.

Microsoft also believes that you want every app on the planet to run in the background. It took nearly 10 minutes to shut down most of the apps that run in the background. After rebooting my computer, some of them returned. So I had to shut them down again.

On my daughter's computer, there was a 15-second pause every time I disabled one of these programs in the list. I can only think that it was punishment for going against Microsoft's wishes.

STABILITY AND PERFORMANCE
I haven't run any tests, but I'm happy to report that all of my programs that ran under Windows 8 still run under Windows 10.

On my computer, I haven't noticed any performance penalties, but on my daughter's computer, it definitely feels like a slower computer.

It also is not possible for you to turn off automatic updates. You'll get them, and you'll like it.

"Thank you, sir, may I have another."

MICROSOFT - THE CORPORATE MACHINE
At some point in the last few years, Microsoft seems to have lost its sense of humor. No more games that you can play by yourself. It has to be an Xbox experience and multiplayer (sharing) environment.

Hey, Microsoft, I just want to play a simple game of Freecell without having to download anything.

Office 2013/365 brought a drab, terribly uninspired, colorless interface that might work well for a tablet but is dull as dirt on a desktop or laptop PC, where millions of us still spend hours a day.

The choiceless interface that spread to Windows 8 now offers even fewer choices with Windows 10.

If you enjoyed selecting custom colors for your Windows interface, which was last seen in Windows 7, then you'll enjoy Windows 10 - as long as you like the colors white and gray.

Here's an example. The title bar of all programs is white - active and those in the background. That can make it difficult to figure out which program is on top and also to locate the title bar, because it usually runs right into the rest of the program's window.

There are very few cursor choices. Again, a total lack of a sense of humor or creativity.

I can only imagine that the interface was designed by a humorless pencil-pushing bureaucrat.

I didn't intend this to be so negative. I think Microsoft has lost its way and needs to deliver an OS that makes you want to use it. Stop trying so hard to be cool.

Cool is decided by others, not yourself.

[scott]

Good to know, Mike, thanks for the info. I was debating on accepting the push notifications and updating my 7 laptop to 10. Think I'll skip it for now, especially considering Microsoft's history of rushing OS upgrades to market before they're full debugged...

[Martolod]

i have got 10 now ...the task bar has a few bugs in it. i had to set up a new profile to get it working again.
my advice is to create a backup profile as soon as win 10 is installed so you can back up and restore any setting that may have been borked.
other than that it is quite nice.

[melek]

Being the privacy nut, I sometimes wonder if turning off all of the options has no effect. Sort of like a light switch that is marked "Energy Saver" but in reality isn't connected to electricity. (I guess that would make it an energy saver.)

It makes you feel good, but doesn't do anything.

[Dustin McAmera]

I uninstalled the update to Windows 7 that started the Windows 10 nagging (KB2952664) and have set myself an alarm to look at the whole issue later - maybe after Christmas...

I have Cortana on my phone, and though not without its uses, it's a lot less useful than the adverts would suggest. 'Interests' are a particularly disappointing feature. In principle this might be good; if I could set it up to know I like photography, I might get alerted to exhibitions, or new shops opening. Photography doesn't exist, however; within 'Events', there's a category called 'Visual arts', which hasn't given me any alerts yet, though like any reasonably-sized city, we have some galleries here. Trying to sidestep the menus, I tried saying to Cortana 'I'm interested in photography', to which it replied 'Are you, now?'

[melek]

'I'm interested in photography', to which it replied 'Are you, now?'

Dustin, that is hilarious.

[PFMcFarland]

I haven't used my laptop (with WIN 8.1) in so long, I'm sure I don't have the proper updates on it to get the automatic "upgrade". I'm considering wiping the hard drive, and installing Linux. Unfortunately, there isn't a version out now that will work on my old Pentium 4 desktop.

PF

[jim.ware]

I upgraded from Windows 7 Pro to Windows 10 Pro. After two days of frustrating attempts to get my Realtek wireless adapter working again, I rolled back to Windows 7. It turns out, Google now tells me, this has been a problem since beta testing began. Great.

Even the upgrade process was a pain. I kept getting fail notices when I tried to upgrade. Eventually I had to use a backdoor method suggested by Microsoft. Even then it took a couple of tries to get it right.

All in all, it was a frustrating experience -- much like using Windows 8.

[melek]

Jim - good to see you! I'm thinking that I will get a Win 7 installation disk at some point and retro back two versions.

[P C Headland]

I haven't used my laptop (with WIN 8.1) in so long, I'm sure I don't have the proper updates on it to get the automatic "upgrade". I'm considering wiping the hard drive, and installing Linux. Unfortunately, there isn't a version out now that will work on my old Pentium 4 desktop.

PF

OpenSUSE should work. Just download the 32bit version of 13.2. You can install from the "Live CD", but I always prefer to get the full DVD version and do the install from there, particularly with laptops.

Current Ubuntu and Ubuntu based versions (like Mint) won't work without a lot of faffing around due to the default kernels needing some processor feature (I forget exactly which one). I have OpenSUSE running on an old 10" Dell netbook with 1GB RAM and an ancient processor, with the default KDE environment. Performance is fine, even with a glacial hdd, whereas XP was unbearably slow.

I've upgraded one of my machines at work from 8.1 to 10, and everything works fine so far. Of course, I turned off all the "share everything" settings. We've got a few other people running it, doing early adopter testing. Boot speed is improved over 8.1, which was faster than 7. Generally it seems more snappy than either 8 or 7.

On a tablet or convertible, I'm not yet convinced it is a step forward, UI wise. On these types of devices, 8.1 actually worked quite well, and the native VPN clients have been well received by users. 10 seems to have regressed in that respect, as all the VPN clients bar Microsoft's own have disappeared.