Windows 10: My Windows 7 to Windows 10 Upgrade Experience So Far

I decided to take the plunge and do the Windows 10 upgrade from Windows 7 on my Lenovo T510 laptop (i5-m520 processor, 4GB RAM). Before I did the upgrade, I did a disk image copy of my hard drive to make it easy to go back to Windows 7 if I decide to. I've been running Windows 10 for about a month.

Positives

• The upgrade went fairly quickly and smoothly.
• I was able to to get all the basic functionality I need working (like my old laser printers on the network, etc, as well as my HP network scanner utility.
• I have a few programs that I wasn't sure would run on Windows 10. In spite of a warning here or there on one of them, they all seem to work fine.
• The Windows 10 start menu is differently (and arguably) better organized than the Windows 7 start menu. It is also easy to customize.
• All the programs I use that ran on Windows 7 run on Windows 10. One old development environment I run always warns me that it may not be compatible, but I click the warning away and it seems to run fine. Windows 10 recognized my old HP Laserjet 6L and 1018 printers.
• Windows 10 provides a number of Windows 8 style apps and the Windows app store. The provided Edge browser and the Mail/Calendar program are thin apps that are fairly peppy, but have reduced features.
• Task Manager is more useful, with a startup program tab one can use to check on and disable/enable startup programs.
• Right click uninstall for programs is very handy, helping to avoid to fish into the groggy control panel applications list to remove a program.

Negatives

• Windows Explorer. Sometimes the thumbnail that appears when hovering over an active task icon on the task bar will be persistent unless the application is selected, or the mouse is moved to a different icon on the task bar. A reboot fixes the issue.
• Mail. Sometimes deleting one mail note in a multi-note conversation deletes the entire conversation. Restarting the application resolves the problem temporarily but it returns promptly. There's no command to empty the Trash folder. There's no command to select all or multi-select emails within a folder to facility moving, deleting, or otherwise operating on mail notes. There's no junk mail management.
• Calendar. Although the calendar will sync with a Google calendar, any other Google calendars shared with it will not be visible to Microsoft's Calendar program. This makes the Mail calendar program useless for my needs. Any other calendar program I've used shows me all the calendar events, even those shared with my calendar. There's a Windows 10 app I've found in the MS Store that doesn't have this severe limitation, called One Calendar.
• Networking. SMB2/3 had to be disabled and SMB1 enabled in order to see a Samba server in the Network neighborhood. It took quite awhile and many Google searches to figure out why the server wasn't seen on the network (although I was able to access it be directly typing in the UNC path).
• General Performance. Lots of those "why doesn't anything happen when I click" moments as the hard drive light is stead on for a minute-ish. I had some of these with Windows 7, so it may not be a Windows 10 specific issue.
• Start menu search is wonky. Search for "backup and restore" and you'll get some web hits and an app store hit, but it won't find "Backup and restore (Windows 7)" applet. But if you search for "Windows backup" it will find "Backup and restore (Windows 7)".
• Change of focus. At times when typing in an edit box in the Edge browser, something in the system will slow down and the box I'm typing into just loses focus for no reason. I end up "typing into the air". I have to reclick the box I'm typing into and pick up where I left off when the box lost focus.
• Edge Browser. Left/right mouse wheel click has no effect on horizontal scroll. I have it set to start with the few sites I had open last, but it frequently forgets the settings and starts over. In these cases, the "New Tab" feature also seems to lose several of the recently/mostly used site links.
• Edge Browser. Clicking on a link or button on a page often does nothing unless I refresh the page. I think this pertains to links that are javascript related. I haven't figured out the exact pattern of failure scenario (e.g., does it happen on every first entry of a page and require a refresh). But it is a very common failure mode.
• Edge Browser Printing. When in a new Edge browser session, the first time I print from a web page (using the "... > print" menu command) I get some kind of error indicating the contents weren't able to be printed. I have to close the print window and issue the Print command again, and then the print dialog will be successful.
• Keyboard Input in Edge Browser. Sometimes the spell/grammar checking feature will randomly start highlight text as being an issue with no further explanation. Here's an example: in an edit box on the screen I had typed: "Without knowing a rule for how it is applied, it's very difficult to determine the code to implement it." I underlined the portion that all had a red, squiggly line underneath. There were no misspellings, and there was no recommendation for grammar corrections. It was just sort of a long, random section of the text being called out. This happens regularly.
• Action Center Tray Icon. Sometimes the icon indicates "quiet hours ON" whether I turn quiet hours on or off. Usually, this can be fixed by turning quiet hours on and then off again. But there are times when it persistently shows ON even if quiet hours are off no matter what is done with the setting.
• Keyboard Input. Once in awhile, while typing into an application like OneNote, and input box on a web form, or anything else with an input text box, the active cursor will just suddenly jump to someplace else in the box or page and I'll end up typing someplace unexpected. I have to use the mouse to relocate the active cursor, then all is normal again for awhile. This happens often enough that it's pretty annoying.
• Awakening from Sleep. When logging in after awakening from sleep, I can see my whole desktop but no mouse cursor for at least 30 seconds, even though I can tell the mouse is active because moving it around highlights icons that it hovers over. Another thing that happens very occasionally is the window I'm typing in will bounce up or down a little.
• Random freezes. I have had two hard lockups so far. I don't recall ever having any with Windows 7 or Windows XP before that. Mouse cursor won't move. Hard drive light is flickering very intermittently, if cyclically. I'll wait minutes and not observe the freeze changing. I have to do a hard reset of the laptop to recover.

I'm still going to keep moving forward with Windows 10, but I have kept my Windows 7 disk image in reserve in case I get tired of wrestling with all the quirks. I have reported a couple of the issues I've seen in other threads in the Ten forums awaiting potential solutions. I started out using Edge browser and the Windows 10 email program because they fast, thin client applications. But the quirks and limitations have caused me to move back to my trusty Thunderbird Mail client with Google calendar plugin, and Chrome browser which, once started, seem fast enough in comparison.

:)

 

Directx 12

well it is a free upgrade to people who already purchased windows 7 , 8 and 8.1 and ide guess they just want as many people upgraded to windows 10 as it the OS win 7 to 8.1 just isn't from my experience windows 10 rocks I have it on several machines
2 laptops 2 desktops and on my Lumia phone so from where I stand the future look great as far as windows is going.

 

N95 - Experience so far

Thanks for this info, but via which "ikon" shall i download these files? - "Download", "App.manager" (nokia.com) or any other?

Many thanks, Kate

 

For printing any page I go to More Action, Scroll down and Click Print from there.
In Favourites you can make folders and just put files in there.
There is a junk mail in all e-mail apps
But glad you like it, I love it and don't use any other browser but Edge

 

Try running sfc /scannow in the command prompt(administrative level) that might clear up some issues.

Otherwise.. great review.

 

............................. I started out using Edge browser and the Windows 10 email program because they fast, thin client applications. But the quirks and limitations have caused me to move back to my trusty Thunderbird Mail client with Google calendar plugin, and Chrome browser which, once started, seem fast enough in comparison..................................

Mail app and Edge are not ready for prime time.
You have made the right decision to switch back to T-Bird and Chrome.
You like them best, stay with them.

 

Thank you for the suggestion. sfc /scannow did not find any issues.

 

Great review. I am used to 7 but got new machine with 10. I give it a 6 out of 10 at moment. Aesthetically it looks good and performs pretty good. Combined with an SSD fast startup boot is incredible. Goes through bios and login screen is instantly there. I like start menu too.

things irritating me...
1. Very, very occasionally after restarts mouse pointer is unavailable. Either a reboot or pulling USB out and then back in fixes it.
2. Windows update - I want to choose if I want to take an update and especially don't want it doing driver updates for me when the current driver is doing just fine
3. Quiet hours icon on action centre - same issue as the OP
4. Securom/safe disc blocks rendering some of my old games uninstallable or unplayable. I hate securom but I really dislike old games I like being consigned to scrap heap (esp if there is no digital download alternative)
5. No native DVD playback. Ok I have cyber link power dvd BUT a side effect is media player no longer plays mpg files or generate thumbnails. Again cyber link has a software that plays them but I want native support. I don't want to have to fish the net for dodgy codec packs to make this work.
6. NAS drives on my network. If I am in outlook and choose to save an attachment and go to one of my mapped NAS drives Windows is slow to open the drive enabling me to save. Subsequent usage and attempts are fine but initially it's like it's struggling to open the drive. On 7 this is no issue and is always instantaneous. Other than that networking is fine, all drives/computers are visible.
7. Edge browser. Featureless, very occasionally clicking to open just brings nothing up. Subsequent open attempts do nothing. Workaround is to reboot or go into task manager and kill edge. After that all fine. This is pretty rare but annoying which makes me prefer Mozilla or IE 11.
8. I miss games explorer, DVD maker and movie maker. I know you can get these but they should be integrated. Pointless removals in my opinion
9. Threshold updates every few months. It'll be like upgrading your OS on a regular basis. Major upgrades like this are pretty stressful and can obviously break a lot of stuff. I want to be updated but I don't like playing Russian roulette with my system on such a regular basis. Patch Tuesday is bad enough but I'd take this method of keeping Windows updated over the threshold way.

 

On a whim I decided to try the Windows 10 Mail app again. It appears that Microsoft addressed a couple of shortcomings.

• They've added the ability to multiselect mail messages using ctrl- and/or shift-click. Now you can multiselect and delete or otherwise operate on multiple messages.
• There's now a right click context menu item for folders to "Empty folder". This works most of the time. It seems to fail for my IMAP roadrunner (Time Warner Cable) account, but honestly, that account's implementation of IMAP has always been just a little wonky and has a few other niggles, so this may not be the fault of the Mail program.

Woo hoo! Welcome to the 1990's, Windows 10 Mail! *Smile