Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Decided to give it a shot.

Background: i5-750 (old first-gen Lynnfield from 2010), 16 GB. Just bought a new 240GB SSD to be my boot drive, and have relegated my old 120 GB SSD to be a dedicated page file drive.

I did a fresh install, rather than an upgrade. Downloaded the Media Creation Tool from MS and used it to burn a DVD. Booted into it with the new, unformatted SSD in the SATA 0 position and installed as usual. Entered my old Win7-64 Pro OEM key, and it accepted it, installing Win10 Pro.


It's been a week, now. First thoughts:


The UI is better than Win 8, almost as good as XP / 7. I do like the fact that they've brought back the "up" button in the file explorer, which was absent from 7 and 8. Still not a huge fan of the new Start menu, specifically how even though I've removed all the tiles and disabled Cortana, the "All Programs" view is still relegated to a little window through which I have to scroll, rather than expanding to the full height of the screen. The ability to manually pin tiles to the menu makes up for this, though it is annoying that I have to set it up manually. I assume that within a year or two, installers will present a "pin new tile" option along with "add desktop shortcut" and "add quicklaunch shortcut."

At least they did away with having two separate desktop modes- one with nothing but tiles and one with a start menu. That was just awful, and whoever proposed it years ago needs to be raped in the *** by a bear with AIDS.

Performance is unremarkable. It seems neither faster nor slower than 7 in all regards. Seems like Win10 might be doing a slightly better job of memory management, in that Chrome and Comodo don't seem to bloat nearly as much as they used to with a few dozen tabs open in each.

Thus far, only one program which worked under 7 has failed to work under 10: Acronis True Image Home. But that's a really important one, and that annoys me. I still haven't installed ACAD or Office '03 yet, so there might be some surprises there.

It took quite a bit of work to re-enable the old-style Photo viewer. The new one, quite frankly, was designed for tablets and just sucks horribly on large screens. The old one is still present, but is deeply buried and disabled by default. There are writeups which tell you how to locate and activate it. I hate with MS does snarky **** like that.

Pay attention to the "advanced" config screens during the install. You can disable a lot of the malware / bloatware / anti-privacy functions right there.

The forced updates can be annoying. If you need to just do a quick reboot, you can't if there are updates pending. It forced you to install them before it will reboot. I'd assumed that the "Pro" version would offer a way around this like the "Enterprise" version does, but so far, no luck. There are ways to shut off updates entirely, but I'd prefer to still have access to them manually, on my schedule, like previous versions have done.


Recommendation: If you're doing a fresh install anyway, you might as well use 10. If you're happy with 7, stick with it. The only reason to update would be that you recognize the inevitability of the fact that eventually, applications will start requiring it, you plan to keep your current PC for several more years, and figure "might as well do it while it's free."

JasonC SBB

I upgraded from Win 8 on an HP Spectre with 4 MB RAM and an SSD. The memory management is waaay better. I open shitloads of apps and I never get the "out of memory" message. Bootup is much faster.

If you're on 8... do it.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

No doubt- if you're still running 8, go for 10. It gets back most of the good stuff that 8 took away from 7.

If you're happy with 7, and think you'll probably be getting a new PC at some point in the next 3 or 4 years, stick with 7. It's unlikely that any new software will require 10 before that point.

If you're like me, and will probably be hanging onto your existing machine (which is presently running 7) for the foreseeable future, it's a toss-up. 10 does seem to have better memory management, but it also adds some new annoyances. You'll probably be forced to upgrade eventually, so you might as well save the $100 and get it over with now.

doward

I'm on an older Gatewat FX series "gaming" desktop running 7. It auto updated to 10 sometime midweek.

I did what Joe mentioned and de-selected a ton of check boxes during finalization and also deleted cortana. It's "fine". It's an OS. I don't think it's any slower or faster than 7.

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

make sure to remove all the spyware now. I installed it fresh with a brand new SDD; great decision.

Leafy

iTrader: (1)

Joe, do you get the login screen ads? And have the start menu ads they were talking about a couple weeks ago started? My chromebook is hacked in a way that lets it run windows 8 or newer and its got 10 on it buck I havent turned it on in months.

mgeoffriau

iTrader: (7)

Discovered my first significant irritation with Win10. Something related to authenticating access to mapped network drives is broken. Over the last week or so, I can't get our Win10 desktop to maintain access to a mapped drive on my storage server (also Win10, as it happens). The Win7 HTPC has not had the same issue.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Thus far, I haven't seen any ads of any kind within the OS itself.

I did disable a bunch of stuff during the initial install process (remember, this was a fresh install, not an upgrade), and I seem to recall that one of them was something along the lines of "may we share your personal info with advertisers?", but aside from that I've not done any hacks or tweaks, nor am I running Peerblock or similar within the main OS.


One thing I just realized is that even after authenticating the Win10 install using my old Win7 key, my Win7 install remains valid and operational. I still have that drive installed in the system, and I've booted into it a couple of times to scrape up some old data. It's not complained at all.



Interesting. I only have one network drive mapped- the internal storage within my WD set top box- but it's been stable.

yossi126

iTrader: (6)

Just installed Win 10 along with an 850 Evo on my 5 year old laptop that doesn't even have an i3 in it.
The thing just went into skyrocket mode, seriously I can't act as fast as this ssd.
And Win 10 is amazing. So much more intuitive than Win 8.

Erat

iTrader: (5)

So I'm drunk posting this from my apple device at almost midnight on a Thursday. So take the following comment with that in mind.


Win 10 for my touchscreen tablet/laptop hit my **** list. I'm done.
Im done with it. Rotation doesn't work. Volume controls do not work. Screen brightness does not work. Start bar does not work. Audio drivers are funny. Restarting fixes nothing the first 3 times. Running avast Internet security so I'm sure it isn't a virus.

The trick thing is. This laptop was upgraded for free from win 8. My desktop I bought the top of the line win 10 and I have literally none of these issues with that machine. Only the laptop struggles with working win 10 properly.

z31maniac

GIGO

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Understandable. Win 10 isn't a Tablet OS. Win 8 shouldn't have tried to be. This is one area in which the Apple and Linux crowd really got it right. Recycle the kernel if you wish, but don't try to use the same presentation manager for devices which couldn't be more disparate.


I've ID'd my first notable Win10 malfunction. In the time since I installed the OS, my machine has twice gotten into a state in which it wants to go to sleep after ~5 minutes. I've got the sleep timer set to 25 hours, and when it's in this state I've checked, changed, and re-checked that setting with no effect. Walk away, it goes to sleep after 5 minutes. Re-booting the machine clears this malfunction for a week or two.

No ideas at all on this one. It's not a major gripe in the grand scheme of things, I suppose. At least carnivorous bats aren't flying out of the power supply fan.

Downmented

iTrader: (1)

Sounds more like a hardware issue than a software issue. Don't toss the OS out because the hardware is not compatible.

mgeoffriau

iTrader: (7)

You have 30 days from the install date to revert to Win8 (or can just reinstall if you have the media or a restore disk).

If you just did an upgrade though, and are stuck with it, then I would at least pull your data and do a clean install of Win10.

Girz0r

iTrader: (1)

Making me 2nd guess with all these Win10 complaints.... and I'm about to build a system and install it.

Though I do see a trend. Those who go through the free update have more issues than those who do the full install (which will be my route on said build).

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

To be fair, the only major (and valid) complaint I've heard so far was Erat's concerning some drivers for his touchscreen laptop.

Laptops and tablets are notorious for requiring lots of obscure little drivers for things like rotation sensors and special-function buttons. I had the same issues when I installed Win7 on my Dell Latitude E4200 years ago. They were all resolved by going to the Dell support site and downloading the correct drivers for the OS.

Maybe Win10 drivers aren't available for Erat's machine- impossible to say. Mobile devices have short life-cycles as compared to desktop machines, and manufacturers don't seen to be as good about ret-conning drivers for older machines as new OSes become available.


But getting back to your point above; my desktop machine is about seven years old (I built it in 2010, using mostly new-ish hardware), and the only two drivers I had to hunt down for it were for the on-board Realtek audio system and for my SteelSeries mouse. Everything else happened automagically when I did a clean install of the OS.

Downmented

iTrader: (1)

I recently just did my first "build" and was initially hesitant to go with Win10 because of the complaints I read elsewhere. I can say that I am absolutely satisfied with it and have no regrets having chosen it for this setup from the beginning. If you are building your own rig, IMO there is very little reason NOT to go with Win10.

Just my opinion

z31maniac

Yeah, even though I'm not sure if I'm having PSU or Video card issues at the moment.

On my old MOBO (6+ years), but with a fresh SSD and Win 10 install. My computer will literally go from turned off to desktop in roughly 10 seconds.

Erat

iTrader: (5)

Windows 10 on my desktop is fantastic. I have had literally zero issues with the OS so far. This is with windows 10 professional.
From what I understand dx12 is win10 exclusive.

Leafy

iTrader: (1)

Learning that good office still works on 10 (needed confirmation), and the fact that part of forza 6 is free on windows 10 makes hitting that update now button more promising.