Windows 10: Advantages over Windows 7?

I have a 4 year old laptop that was updated from Windows 7 to Windows 10 last Wednesday. The recovery screen says that I have 1 month to decide whether to switch back to Windows 7 (I guess I could do it later too, but that would mean a clean install which is rather time consuming). My general impression of Windows 10 is that it is not terrible, but not particularly great either. That is, it does not inspire the reaction of "Why, oh why in the world would you do this?" that I had in response to the changes introduced in Windows 8 or in Gnome 3, but there are some fairly serious problems and no notable advantages. The problems I have are:

1) Boot time went up from under 30 seconds to over 2 minutes due the "black screen" problem (see, for example, this thread). I've seen the problem mentioned in many different places, but there is no universal solution to it.

2) Everything is a little bit slower. Applications in Windows 7 opened practically instantaneously (I have an SSD). With Windows 10, there is a noticeable delay in opening some programs (e.g. Thunderbird, VLC).

3) The fan seems to on a little bit more often.

There's also a bunch of other annoying stuff (e.g. the built-in games have advertisements that you have to pay to get rid of, the interface is slightly uglier, etc.) that I mostly don't care about. The advantages I know of or have noticed are:

1) Task Manager is much nicer than it was in Windows 7. On the other hand, in Windows 7 I haven't actually had to look at the Task Manager so often.

2) Direct X 12. This is nice to have, but given that the laptop is so old, I rather doubt I will be get much use out of it -- laptop GPUs aren't that powerful to begin with and my GPU was mid-range 4 years ago.

So, are there any features that I'm missing? Should I let this laptop live out its life using Windows 7 and move on to Windows 10 with my next machine?

:)

 

Advantages of Windows 10 over Windows 7?

The advantages of Windows 10 are numerous and plenty.

In Windows 7, the problem of your computer randomly dropping connections to the internet can often be fixed by going into your power save settings and changing your wireless adapter to Maximum Performance. In Windows 10 you'll drop your wifi connection
regardless of your power settings, and Microsoft will most likely never fix the issue.

Windows 7 has problems with dropping network shares, but that's a problem that can be resolved through a roughly thirty step process that requires significant knowledge of Device Manager and the Command Prompt, Windows 10 will drop connections to network
shares and no amount of Device Manager or Command Prompt knowledge will ever resolve the disappearing shares issue.

Windows 10 promises you an option to create a USB installer that will never actually work, so you'll be able to go through the process, but then when you plug your USB installer into another machine you will get an "Operating system not found" error every
time!

These are just some of the exciting changes that Microsoft is planning for the Windows 10 operating system!

 

Advantages of N96 over N95 8GB?

Thanks johnmcsweeny did not know that piece of info. hopefully the new firmware would reslove much of the issues and we all know about the n95s when they first came out...that phone has indeed come a long way to become quite the marvel that it is today...and
i read somewhere that Nokia has sold 7 million of those worldwide...and i hope the same will happen with the N96s.

 

The choice to retain Win10 or go back to Win7 is purely a personal one. Having been in the Insider program since the beginning, and having participated in numerous actual beta testing programs over the decades, I personal was very disappointed by the lack of real improvements in Win10. I tried to upgrade two Win7 laptops to Win10 just to try it out on them, and in both cases, the upgrades failed -- miserably. If I had experienced the performance degradations you have (and I probably would have, if the upgrades had succeeded), the machines' lives on Win10 would have been very short.

Since, like you, I have older hardware, and was never a fan of the "live tiles" UI, to me, there is no compelling reason to switch over to Win10 other than the curiosity of seeing how well it works on specific machines. A free trial is all I was interested in doing.

I'm sure that now that MS is offering the free Win10 upgrades to Win7 machines, it's only a matter of time before they phase out support for Win7, but by then (my guess is that's at least a year away), Win10 might finally have matured and I will just purchase new machines with Win10 already on them.

There's nothing wrong with staying with something that you like, and does what you need it to do!

 

"In place" upgrades often produce varying results. I did an in place upgrade on my desktop and my laptop (both Windows 7) and it went well. By that I mean everything worked fine afterward and the systems are actually a bit more responsive; boot time and resume from hibernation are a bit faster.

As for the "look" I liked aero better, but the flat, minimalist style is growing on me.

Regarding your performance problems I would troubleshoot and give it some time. Also keep in mind that another big update is coming - supposedly at the end of this month - to address many issues. Last there is the option to do a clean install now that you've done the upgrade; you can just reset the OS from the advanced boot tools option (there's the matter of backing up and reinstalling applications of course). Hope this helps.

 

My 4-year old Toshiba laptop fan has run non-stop since upgrading to Windows 10. I just discovered a post on another site that said to turn off "Show me tips about Windows" (under Settings/System/Notifications & actions). Voila!! I can basically turn my laptop fan on and off by sliding this toggle switch -- too funny!. I would have never believed it until I tried it. It is spiking the CPU utilization, which is obviously affecting battery life and overall performance as well. Hopefully this will be resolved in a build soon. HTH...

(Here's some additional information regarding the behavior of this off/on switch...)

When I turn the switch ON, a process named "Runtime Broker" jumps to the top of the CPU usage list, and it typically is using 18%-22% CPU non-stop. Turn the switch OFF, "Runtime Broker" drops back to 0%.
A few other processes also spike during the "switch ON" period. "Service Host: Remote Procedure Call (2)", "Service Host: DCOM Server Process Launcher (6)", "Host Process for Windows Tasks", and "Shell Infrastructure Host".
All together, my CPU usage stays at 43%-45% while this switch is ON. Switch it off and all of the above tasks go idle (or disappear) and CPU idles at around 1% usage. HUGE difference.

 

Thanks, this was my thought as well. I don't think this laptop will outlast Windows 7 support. It's a Hewlett-Packard model and not one of the business-oriented ones. I've already had to replace the hard drive, the battery lasts two hours tops and I'm making pretty heavy use of it.

I heard about the big update; if it comes before the deadline for reverting to Windows 7, I will give it a try. I'm not so confident that it will fix things that I would stick with Windows 10 past the deadline though.

Regarding the clean install: I thought about it, but aside from reinstalling everything being a pain in the neck, I'm not sure that I wouldn't end up installing the Windows 7 drivers anyway. This laptop is rather idiosyncratic: when my hard drive died and I had to reinstall Windows 7 from scratch, most basic devices simply did not work. Not even the Ethernet! I had to boot Linux on a USB to download them from HP's website before I got it into shape... but HP has no Windows 10 drivers for this laptop.

Thanks. I've turned this switch to OFF. Hopefully it will help, though my problem was not quite as severe as yours -- my fan did occasionally turn off even with the switch ON.

 

If you do a "reset" using the built in recovery feature I believe the OS will retain the existing drivers (maybe double check that given your situation). See here:

How to refresh, reset, or restore your PC - Windows Help


In "10" go to Settings/Update & Security/Recovery and you will see the "Reset this PC" option. Click "get started" and you will see the choices (you can still cancel at that point).

 

Since Windows 8, the upgrade only benefits to Microsoft, not to the user.

Today I went back to W8.1 and I have my windows with colors again and my big start menu again. The rest is basically identical.

 

Windows 10 is not ready for prime time. Do yourself a favour and go back to Windows 7. It will be better to get a new machine with 10 on. 10 phones home everything you do as an opt in. You can opt out . Basically 10 is a slightly more polished turd than 8.1 was. More of the same privacy issues. I tried it out and returned back to 8.1.

 

I am not having any issues with Win 10 Pro, true the task manager looks like crap but I use Procexp to see what processes are running. I am sure someone will come up with a mod for it, they did with 7.

 

I would give it a little more time. After running windows update and another reboot ot two it will run a lot better for you. A clean install is a pain, but that may also fix your problems.

 

If fast boot works well on r system, it's definitely a reason to upgrade, but it looks like it isn't. The multiple desktops feature is also really nice. Direct X 12 is another reason to upgrade which already acknowledged, but I won't be able to utilize it until I upgrade my graphics card. I have had no problems regarding the operating system itself. It's snappy, fast boot works well, all of my drivers work with it, etc. However, I could not upgrade by computer even after uninstalling my antivirus and as many programs as possible (I just left Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate and a few other programs because it would be too much trouble to download them), so I had to back up my files and do a clean install of Windows 8.1 with the product key, update it (which took forever), upgrade to Windows 10 using Get Windows 10, download a Windows 10 ISO, burn it to a disc, format the upgraded Windows 10 installation and install it using the disc, then install all of my programs again. My files didn't pose that much of an issue because I didn't have many.

 

If want the old task manager back, simply go to the Details tab.

 

I had to run b10240 for a week (i.e. multiple restarts) before my "mouse not starting" and "excess RAM usage" issues stopped.

I haven't downloaded the latest update yet (actually it hasn't been offered).

Update
I "spoke too soon".
The mouse has started misbehaving again. *Sad