Windows 10: Can someone point me in the direction of the 'real' upgrade benefits

I have spent many hours helping 1) my brother-in-law installing a dvd play for win 10, but more importantly trying to fix my sister's pc with win 10. My b-i-l 's was an upgrade. My sister's is a new PC. From what I've seen and troubleshot, win10 is a total POS! I've had to do a factory re-install with my sister's pc. I have been thinking about a new PC, but with win 10 I may just stick it out with my win 7 pc. My head hurts from all the problems!! *Sick *cry After 27 years of MS releases, I may just think about linux ... not easy to install, but may be worth it in the long run

 

A wise decision. Win 10 is still in beta and there are nothing it can do that you can't on Win7/8

 

Reasons to NOT upgrade to Windows 10:
- system (in conjunction with device drivers) is immature and can be unstable
- missing drivers for legacy hardware
- incompatibility with some legacy applications
- incompatibility with SecuROM/Safedisc games
- insufficient control over windows update
- lesser control over system behavior and privacy
- disadvantageous EULA
- it is still unclear whether upgrade of FPP (transferrable) license remains FPP or goes to OEM Win10

Reasons to upgrade to Windows 10:
- more distant end of support
- support for future applications/games
- free of charge for now
- fast (same as all older systems when they were new)
- trendy

 

Some of my reasons to keep on using W10 as opposite of W7:
System is more stable than W7, easier recovers from any problems, misbehaving, problematic programs rarely crash whole system.
Safer, WD is superior to malware protection in W7. No special need for 3rd party AV.
Drivers found and usable for some ridiculously old HW, had great problems to find and use in W7, had to change some from XP to make them work.
CPU usage much better spread over multiple cores, only some games that insist on using one core favor one core while rest of cores are used for other tasks.
RAM is better used specially since Th2, using memory compaction so even programs notorious for insisting on large cache/PF are content with only 1GB pf.
SSDs are recognized and system set accordingly without intervention. Trim turned on, defrag turned off etc. In W7 that was pretty "iffy" proposition.
Start and interface are a nice combination of W7 and 8/8.1 and with just a bit of setting and shuffling if you have (like I do) hundreds of small programs, easier to sort and find.
Things I like less but can live with:
Customization of looks is not on the level, they could have allowed more flexibility but that's way down on my list and for serious use of OS it doesn't matter anyway,
Forced and mostly unexpected updates may make some problems for people that do not follow trends and could be a surprise, MS should stick to announcements only with options to download at later date.

 

It's clear MS is still on a learning curve. The big November upgrade, implemented after the manner of a Windows installation, caused many basic problems and inconveniences for people. However, it also offers (through in-place upgrade repair install using the same installation medium) an excellent way to repair a broken or damaged system when all else fails. This will presumably be maintained as each such upgrade is released, albeit each means a couple of hours down time.

If you want the free upgrade, either leave it to near the end of the 1 year free period, or take a complete disk image (so you can restore your system- which you really are recommended to do anyway) and install Win 10 so as to get your activation registered. You can then see where you are placed briefly.. what sort of issues you face- how it seems to you- (you'll want to replace the start menu!) - and then revert to Win 7 using your disk image.

 

I am typically a mac user... my 2 desktop computers at home are apple and they work flawlessly. I switched to apple when windows vista came out. never thought I would enjoy using windows again until I bought this dell latitude e6410 laptop that had windows 7 ultimate on it and upgraded it to windows 10 pro the same night I bought it. I have been using it for 3 weeks now and have not had one crash or any major issues with it yet... had an annoying issue with Cortana and the touch pad until I figured out to turn the right edge sweep for the touch pad off but other than that it seems to be as stable as my apple desktop which is something I never thought I would ever say about Microsoft windows

 

If everyone had issues like this, maybe. But the vast majority don't. There's no way it takes hours to install a software DVD player, such as PowerDVD, etc. If you bought a new PC and it had issues, you can either return it or go right to a clean install, which is pretty much mandatory with an OEM system to remove all the preinstalled junk and be certain it is gone.

 

I upgraded from 8.1 to 10 on Saturday, and I must say this is about the cleanest and quickest upgrade I have ever done. Normally when I upgrade my OS it is around the same time as I upgrade my PC with new motherboard and cpu, so I do I clean install.
However in this case, I am about a year or two away from my next build, so I elected to go with upgrade to 8.1 route with the free MS offer for Win 10.

The upgrade process took 30 minutes. Another 30 minutes or so for me to grab the latest hardware drivers for my peripherals that I wanted.
The system has no conflicts in device manager, and event log is pretty clean as well. It is running very well for me.

I had taken painstaking efforts prior to doing the update, making sure my system would be compatible, creating full images of my working 8.1 install and saving to external USB drive in case I needed them, deleting un-necessary programs I no longer needed or I thought might conflict. Just doing a nice cleanup before hand.

I have been very pleased with 10 so far, it is very robust and I certainly like it's functionality better than 8.1. I am still a little undecided on the new Edge browser, but I am using it for now and getting a little more used to it as I go. I have also imaged my system after the 10 install to have an image of the new install should I need it.
The upgrade process worked very well for me.

 

IE is still there too ! In case you are more used to it and it certainly has better functionality than Edge (for now).

 

Thanks, yes I noticed that but thought I would try to get used to Edge a little more first and see how I like it. I may end up going by to the traditional IE, the verdict is still out in my case lol.

 

Might have to wait for full Redstone for full functionality of Edge.

 

Hi riddell,

I too am a pro photographer and use several systems. My main computer still runs Windows 7, has a pretty high-end i7 processor and 32GB RAM. I frequently work on 2GB multi-layered images and it works well enough. The small Lenovo laptop I use on location runs Windows 8.1 which has certain small advantages but nothing that has tempted me to update my Windows 7 to 8.1. I use the Adobe Creative Suite apps on both systems.

I just did a clean install of Windows 10 on a separate SSD on my laptop (that's on my lap right now) to see what it has to offer. So far I'm rather underwhelmed after day 3. I have no use for Cortana and turned it off. I don't have a touch screen. I hate the new Photo viewer app and replaced it with the old Windows Photo Viewer. The new 'flat' icons are pretty ugly and are harder to see. For example the old red tag on the Taskbar volume icon that appears when volume is turned off has been replaced by a small monochrome x - no more colour. I think trendy flat design has replaced functionality. I'll have to search for a hack to restore the old icons.

Photoshop, Lightroom and Bridge all run fine. But as this is a rather under-powered laptop (compared to my desktop system) I cannot say if the newer OS is making anything run better than it did with 8.1. Overall everything is running very similar to before. I think it's the SSD and 16GB RAM that make this laptop snappy.

The Lenovo Password Manager which I've enjoyed using in the past is not supported by Win 10.

I prefer the system font set to 120% on this 11.6 inch screen. Windows 10 now also enlarges the fonts of many application screens by the same amount, which is new. It results in many overly large app screens and lots of fuzzy type. You then need to set each app's compatibility to "Disable display scaling on high DPI settings", or use a 3'd party system wide hack, to fix it globally. This issue is probably my biggest complaint and I'm sure Microsoft will hear from many 'moms and pops' who succumb to Microsoft's nagware and accept to upgrade their systems. The fuzzy text is pretty ugly and some app's option menus enlarge past the screen edge to become inaccessible.

Bottom line: I'm sticking with Win7 on my main image editing workstation and might even go back to Windows 8.1 on this laptop if I don't find more compelling reasons to stick with Windows 10. So for it's added very little while being incompatible with my preferred password manager.

R

 

Hi, Icon Changer (freeware) Damian's Homepage replaces some 77 icons in imageres.dll with Win 7 icons. Although it's supposed to be fully automatic, I found I had to take the modified imageres.dll from its installation folder and manually replace it in Windows via a boot command prompt. (The destination folder is protected so you can't do that within Windows in the normal way).

 

Don't upgrade to Windows 10 as it's still under development, IE11 broken, Edge broken and this morning frequent sites wiped out with some updates. It's very unstable for me but the experience vary between different systems.

 

I hate to disagree but, WIn10 works just fine for the vast majority of users,,, including me. IE11 works just fine on my PC and I bet it works just as well in the majority of PCs. As for the stability.. it's rock stable as long as you don't have driver issues or you mess around with things like the registry.

Jeff