[Closed] Windows 10 - Good/Bad/The Same compared to Windows 7?

Been hundreds of threads but in summary
Excellent OS
Some security spying concearns - google easy to evaluate and change
Free Upgrade runs out soon
Faster & Smoother than win7, much better than 8

MS kill a kitten everytime you refuse to upgrade.

W10 user and no issues at all.

Al might disagree tho.

Fine for me on 4 laptops. Even my 75yr old mother-in-law gets on with it!

I was about to buy a new laptop due to it running slow and generally being a pain to use. Installed Windows 10 to try as it couldn't make things worse. Still using same laptop, Windows 10 brought it back to life. I would definitely recommend it.

It's very good. Only thing I would say is that it needs a bit of setting up to get the start menu right. MS want you to use a lot of online stuff and the menu is biased that way. Easy enough to change though.

Lots of theeads here and much dicussion on the internet. Many people suffered a world of pain after upgrading to 10 and went back to 7. If it where me I would not do the upgrade due to following experience

We are all Mac but my BIL upgraded his work computers to 10 and myself and my wife (both reasonabky tech savvy) spent two full days trying to sort out problems the main one being that printer/scanner/fax stopped working and refused to start again despite new drivers etc. The end was that the business has had to throw away two perfectly good bits of kit which don't work anymore - no scanner functionality

My computer takes an age to start up and doesn't wake from sleep or hibernate anymore. HP pavilion. Suspect I just need to do a fresh install. But I'll wait till I decide to buy an ssd before I go through that hassle.

Other than that much of a muchness.

Jamba, do you have a Mac by any chance? 😆

The only problem I've had with Win10 is that my printer (an old Sony MP160) is no longer supported - which means it's useless, it won't even work as a "generic" printer...

Not a huge problem as I still have a Win7 laptop in the house, and the printer was dying anyway, but could be something to check before upgrading.

Edit: same problem as Jamba's

Was going to just do mine at the end of the month. But then I don't really use Windows - it's just there to be able to play one game and use one app. I don't care what it looks like or how easy it is to use - it just needs 2 icons.

Will be deactivating every possible snooping feature though, if I can remember the link.

I hope it's not going to whinge too much about me nuking secureboot.

The end was that the business has had to throw away two perfectly good bits of kit which don't work anymore - no scanner functionality

There are some printers that don't work, if it's critical or expensive google the name of it.

I've just done a clean install on my work desktop as I swapped a few things round, up and running in under an hour, it's the most impressive install I've done in a while. All of the hardware is updating it's drivers as I go once I did the wireless card.

@seaso 🙂 yes I said so (sadly my 2009 Mini will not be capable of taking the new Sierra release announced this week but not bad 7+ year old machine running all the latest software, it will of course keep running 2015 El-Capitan)Your SSD idea is perfect, just put SSD's into three mac book pros (laptops) the oldest from 2008 and they are very speedy now (£60 for 250GB and £110 for 500 - Samsung Evo plus a caddy to reuse old disk/ease instlaation)

@mike yes he could have done that, we suggested it but he had another newer printer/scanner/fax and was worried about the roll-back not working so made that choice. The problem for him is they scan all paper-working coming into the office so he had built up a major backlog in just a few days. You just don't get these sort of issues with Mac's, not in my experience

Is there any free upgrade path from Vista to 10?

Prefer Windows 7 for its reliability but have been using W10 when it first came out.

Too many bugs still in W10 but it does load quick and it is not resource hog.

Apps are good but nothing special.

@spekkie if you have some free time in the midst of all the building work then maybe yes, also check what printers you have and if they will work with W10. In theory the printer/scanner/fax was supposed fo work but it didn't despite new drivers, it would print but not scan, it would work with another new bit of software but that would cost £50 to buy

If you want a winter project buy an ssd and upgrade to that and w10, my 2 cents

If you want a winter project buy an ssd and upgrade to that and w10, my 2 cents

Project? Should be under 2hrs

*(I'm not ecen sure you need that anymore; the old W7 activation code would probably work without any updates, maybe even from a clean installation of W10 onto a brand new drive)

[quote=mikewsmith ]If you want a winter project buy an ssd and upgrade to that and w10, my 2 cents
Project? Should be under 2hrs

[url= http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/help-windows-10-install-on-new-sdd-in-new-laptop ]Yes a winter project! [/url]

Just done it this afternoon... Now I'm in the pub letting Dropbox, Google drive and creative cloud do their thing

wicki - Member

Is there any free upgrade path from Vista to 10?

No sadly, but you can buy Win7 Licenses cheaply online of dubious legitimacy - when you upgrade to 10 you switch from a license to an 'allowance' and everything is legit.

I work in IT Support, whilst my role is mostly non-technical we've had over 200 end users make the switch and it's mostly painless - the wizard that updates from 7/8 to 10 is *reasonably* good at telling you whether 10 will run on your hardware and the early issues with display drivers is now resolved.
As an OS - whilst it's called '10' it's more like 7.5 - it takes the bits people liked about 7 and the bits people liked about 8 and mixed them to produce a well-liked OS.

If you’re worried about compatibility, then most Win8 drivers will well with Win10 – if your hardware doesn’t have Win8 drivers then it probably won’t work with 10 at all, it’s too old.

Office Suites from 2007 onwards are supported but you can run pretty much any office on them if you really want to – Office ’95 supposedly works.

But if you’re not interested Windows 10 it’s not the end of the world, MS stopped mainstream support for 7 last year, so no new features etc, but extended support runs for another 4 years.

W10 as an "upgrade" to 8.1. I was one of the rare users who liked the 8.1 interface and have more trouble finding things in 10. You can only type what you want into the search if you can remember what you want is called. All the initial driver problem are now solved apart from one, the nvidia graphics thing. I get pop ups telling me to update but when I click the links the update is incompatible "silver something" IIRC.

Graphics seem less fluid in 10 perhaps because of the driver problem and the machine is generally slower, especially the boot. Having to click back in every time it sleeps rather than just moving the mouse is annoying.

[quote=nickjb ]It's very good. Only thing I would say is that it needs a bit of setting up to get the start menu right. MS want you to use a lot of online stuff and the menu is biased that way. Easy enough to change though.

Yes, turned all that off straight away.

The only other thing I don't like is the weird mixture of Settings, Control Panel and the Sidebar of Shame. Bit of a mishmash.

Other than that it's much like going from XP->7. No huge changes, just incremental improvements across the board.

Been faultless on three computers until last week when my system tray (start menu and sound/date) have all stopped working, grrrr!

Edukator, if you run in tablet mode it's quite like 8.1

(click the notifications icon down by the clock and then click on tablet mode)

Taking the time to organise your start menu will really really help. If you leave the tiles as the defaults you'll be annoyed by stuff you don't care about.

I've got W10 on a 2009 laptop which works superly; also on a 2007 netbook which is so slow that Chrome struggles to deal with Facebook, but W10 itself still works smoothly.

@mike if you've seen @spekkie's thread you'll understand why I said winter project. First ssd I did took all day. Also see @cynical's thread

Yes, Scardypants, except that it's vertical rather than W8's horizontal layout and doesn't fit the screen.

ah, I have my screen vertical 😳

bit surprised you can't change settings though

Was happily ignoring the constant prompts to upgrade for free on my Win8 laptop. Unfortunately my partner was using it and upgraded for me. Ach balls! i thought, but decided to give it a go. Things went better than i expected (i wasn't expecting much btw) but issues with video playback (kept stuttering and freezing) made me think about changing back. The straw that broke me was the track pad kept being turned off, rendering the laptop useless and it is impossible to find the setting to turn it back on without some sort of controller. Had to borrow a mouse to fix. This happened a couple of times a day so i switched back to 8.

I was put off upgrading for ages, but bit the bullet a few weeks ago.

I don't currently have time to spend ages fiddling about & configuring stuff, which was the main thing putting me off.

Mainly, it went OK.

The vertical slider bit at the side of my trackpad doesn't work with all programs now. It works with some though, which makes me think the driver is OK, but it's some kind of setting/configuration that's out. I have looked for updated drivers, but don't think they are available.
No big deal, but a minor annoyance.

I had to uninstall & reinstall Chrome & there was a weird issue where the Google installer would start, but then it wouldn't download Chrome, but just sit there saying it's about to start downloading.
Must be a fairly common thing as there was loads on the internet about it & there's an 'offline install' workaround that I found.

Aside from that, I feel that there's a lot of things that have changed, but I haven't had time to really fiddle with it. I have never used a Windows 8 system, so the tile thing in the start menu is new & a bit odd to me; not sure I can see the point of it? I take it tiles on your desktop aren't the done thing anymore?

And apps....erm....on a laptop? How does that work? Presumably it's just the modern name for a program?? I keep thinking I should look in the 'store' but don't really have any need to.

Perhaps I need a Dummies guide....

One thing that does cheese me off is the new 'photos' app. I don't find it very intuitive.
If I use Explorer to browse to a folder of pics & then double click on one, it opens the picture, but doesn't give me any way of scrolling left/right through the pictures in that folder.
I have managed it a couple of times, but don't know how & suspect it was luck, rather than any skill.....

Our Win 10 machine has started to but to a black screen I then have to press the power button it shuts down or appears to then I press the power button again and it flashes to logon immediately like it was asleep strange I cant find anything wrong but then I wouldn't know it if I saw it.

Thinking about Linux for the other box whats the best gui at the moment?

And apps....erm....on a laptop? How does that work? Presumably it's just the modern name for a program??

Not quite.

"Apps" in this context are small utility things like apps on your phone. You download them from the store. Different to big software like Word or Photoshop etc.

So it's a Facebook app that is a bit better integrated than using the website - you get popups on the desktop and so on; and for stuff like the BBC sport app - it can run in the background and notify you of goals or whatever, and has a different possibly slightly better user interface. Apps on W10 can also have 'live tiles' i.e. a small thumbnail which displays some information, that sits on your start menu. So say the FB app shows you if you have notifications or the weather app shows a daily icon etc.

Thinking about Linux for the other box whats the best gui at the moment?

Taking the time to organise your start menu will really really help. If you leave the tiles as the defaults you'll be annoyed by stuff you don't care about.

All the initial driver problem are now solved apart from one, the nvidia graphics thing

A few work computers here that I didn't want to rock the boat on with windows 8 - running lots of Adobe software. Was very reluctant as I wouldn't even do anything other than a clean installation... Curiosity got the better of me and I did the upgrade on one machine.

It went perfectly well - no issues at all despite several printers. Glad I did now.

Best OS in a while.

Cheers guys. Sorry for the repeat, I did suspect that there had been threads but further back in time than I looked 🙂

@Jambalaya - good tip but we left / gave away all the old printers & scanners we had in SA when we left so we'll be buying new when the time comes and the budget allows.

Looks like we'll be trying this update on Mrs Spekkies machine first and I'll keep my as it is for a week or so and see how things go.

Thanks again.

Others prefer Unity

I find that hard to believe...

I have W10 running on a HP ZBook and find it OK apart from some issues with my Nvidia card (Quadro I think) and sometimes issues with monitor detection. I have an HD monitor for Solidworks and sometimes it won't get detected. The desktop is displayed but just isn't configurable. A couple of reboots usually sorts it. Have updated all the drivers but no luck.

Others prefer Unity

I find that hard to believe..

Might grovel under the desk tonight and plug the M$ SSD back in and have a fight with UEFI secure boot nonsense to see if I can get both W8.1 and Arch Linux booting. If W8.1 doesn't complain, I'll upgrade to 10 at the weekend, and hope that doesn't complain either.

Others prefer Unity

An option for 32GB in the high-end model would make the XPS line feel a bit more future-proof, especially given how RAM hungry Ubuntu's Unity interface is. [b]Doing absolutely nothing but displaying the desktop and running terminal window with the "free -t -m" command, Unity manages to use more than a gigabyte of RAM[/b]

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/the-xps-13-de-dell-continues-to-build-a-reliable-linux-lineage/

Nice laptop, that.

I'd take no notice of how much RAM is being used by any application or program or GUI. That goes for any OS. RAM is there, and it's there to be used. If something else memory hungry comes along, the OS will dynamically dish it out more fairly. No point having 32gig if 28gig is sat empty, so Unity/Firefox/IE/whatever will ask nicely if it can use it as buffer space.
Unless of course it has a massive memory leak.

edit: oh and that XPS13 got pretty positive review on Bad Voltage podcast, although tbf the firs thing he'd do is reformat it and use a distro where that power would (a) be overkill, and (b) with a GUI that would use naff all resources.

Was going to play with the upgrade last night (or at least preparing for it).
Drank some beer instead and watched telly.

[quote=gofasterstripes ]XFCE FTW

OpenLook master race checking in.

The bad: spent four hours updating a Vista PC with an unused v8 which was fine, followed by auto updating to 10. Could it find the NVIDIA driver? 🙁 SOoved eventually at 1 AM this morning with 353.63 for 32-bit and a manual driver update. Otherwise I really like Windows 10. Now to work out how to disable the auto updates.

And I couldn't find the 353 driver on the NVIDIA website 🙁

Now to work out how to disable the auto updates.

arstechnica and howtogeek seem to actually include some content. jeez there's a lot of things to disable.

seems you can set any network connection as metered and it won't download updates. that's what I'm going to do. presumably there's a way to force it to block updates on a single app/driver?

@TiRed this is what drives me nuts with Windows vs Mac, just like Coldplay said;

Nobody said it was easy, no one ever said it would be this hard

Oh take me back to fhe start

seems you can set any network connection as metered and it won't download updates

... until you connect it with Ethernet as it won't allow you to set wired conenctions as metered.

Why don't you want updates?

Why don't you want updates?

Some people have apparently had issues with updates breaking software so would like to be able to choose whether to sintall as per Win 7/8/8.1.

Most of the updates seem to be Windows Defender updates though and I wouldn't want to be without those.

until you connect it with Ethernet as it won't allow you to set wired conenctions as metered.

and then no doubt be forced to apply updates every time I boot.

and then find one spacks the entire system.

Why don't you want updates?

Windows 10 running well on our old laptop that was very slow running Vista. In the end only cost £30 to upgrade...bought Windows 7 off Amazon for £30 then did the free upgrade to 10 straight away

When does the free upgrade finish? Our aging desktop is dying, but we're hanging on for now with 7 as I'm not sure it will be happy with 10.
Q6600, 8gb ram,

29 Jul, apparently.

I'd be surprised if Windows Updates of drivers break legacy hardware. The biggest problem there is that there aren't certified drivers in the first place, you're unlikely to suddenly get a driver appear in Update that's both newer and unsupported.

No doubt someone's going to prove me wrong and say it happened to them, but the risk of enforced updates is generally far outstripped by the risk of not updating (Conficker, anyone?), it's one the best thing that's happened to Windows in years.

You're bang on about the RAM comment on that ArsTechnica site BTW Andy, I was going to say the same thing myself. That entire paragraph is ludicrous.

Our aging desktop is dying, but we're hanging on for now with 7 as I'm not sure it will be happy with 10.

Upgrade, if you don't like it you've 30 days to roll it back, and you've then "qualified" for W10 if you change your mind in the future.

ike it you've 30 days to roll it back, and you've then "qualified" for W10 if you change your mind in the future

the risk of enforced updates is generally far outstripped by the risk of not updating (Conficker, anyone?), it's one the best thing that's happened to Windows in years

Totally, for every hundred users who want to control when updates take place only a handful will have any idea what the risks are of turning them down. MS is trying to push the user base as a whole towards a degree of herd immunity.

And I do remember Conficker, it took weeks to clear it out from the outstations where local sysadms had clearly had an "unenthusiastic" approach to patching.

We've got a laptop running Windows 7 that's starting to slow down a bit. When at home we also use an external monitor connected to the laptop via a HDMI cable.

Did the upgrade to Windows 10 and the laptop no longer recognised the monitor, so had to roll back to 7.

Bit of a disappointment

We've got a laptop running Windows 7 that's starting to slow down a bit

That's not due to W7 itself.

CPU just feeling a bit tired?
Or just psychologically feels slower since newer things are faster?

And I do remember Conficker, it took weeks to clear it out from the outstations where local sysadms had clearly had an "unenthusiastic" approach to patching.

Indeed. And home systems were arguably worse.

A slightly more recent reason, from yesterday:
https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2016/06/16/badtunnel-a-vulnerability-all-windows-users-need-to-patch/

We'll have to agree to disagree - yes RAM is there to be used by your programs. I don't count the GUI as a program, I count it as an overhead.

Unity has been criticized elsewhere as bloated. If it's eating 1GB just to run the WM/GUI then good luck getting that 1GB back for another program to use. On a 32GB system this isn't a big deal, but on an 8GB one? I want that RAM free for something useful, thanks, hence XFCE installs on my systems which boot with <1GB RAM in use.

I am also going to go on the record as saying I disagree with several of you about "Windows doesn't slow down after years of use" - it absolutely does!

Windows, whether through it's own patches and/or through user installed software, gradually accumulates extra background tasks as the whole ecosystem is biased towards installing extra programs/features and NOT towards enforcing system cleanliness rules eg correct filesystem and registry cleanup. Things get left behind, things get added "just in case" [eg HOW MANY programs now want to run/load at boot in msconfig ??!]

The longer you've had a windows install the more crap you'll find it's trying to do. As a reasonable example we have a 3year old Win7 install in the house which can't be messed-with as it's the only reliable way to drive the scanner and printer. It's actually not had a lot of software added to it, and much of what has been installed has been uninstalled again - it now uses >1.5GB of RAM to boot [up from circa 900MB on my usual fresh win 7 config] and takes about 5 minutes to hit the desktop. The HDD light stays jammed on for the first 15 minutes after boot, and you have to go and find something else to do after you ask it to open an explorer window if you insert a USB drive.

Now, it may be that 90% of this is from programs the user has chosen to install, or from bad choices made by software authors - but to the end user it doesn't matter. In a typical Windows environment, for whatever reason, after a year or two your machine will have collected pointless threads that take away your foreground processing power and waste RAM or HDD seek priority that should be in use by your tasks.

Regular reinstalls are the simplest and most complete way to reverse this, and this is also part of why people jumping from W7 to W10 find it so much faster - they're also ditching most of the unnecessary crap when they make the leap.

PS if your WM using more cycles+RAM really doesn't bother you, then why are you chuffed that W10 is leaner and has less overheads? Smaller load times, less competition for cache and RAM and less wasted cycles is a good part of the reason W10 feels faster. This is what happened when they slimmed the codebase down and targeted the RAM use towards lower end systems [and mobile devices too]. Less overheads - more user cycles available - "Win., win.", you could say.

We'll have to agree to disagree

That's fine, I have zero issues with you being wrong. (-:

Y'know, Windows memory management is one of the biggest areas of assumption, misinformation and downright wrongness on the Internet. ZOMG IT'S USING RAM!!1!

Here's the thing. As Andy said, having empty RAM is pointless. If you get a half pint in a pub and pour it into a pint pot you've not actually gained anything. However, if you ask the barman to fill it up, yay, more beer!

As hardware technology has improved and costs fallen, we've gradually moved from systems constantly starved of physical RAM being the norm to systems commonly having surplus memory. Those clever people at Microsoft realised this, and they took their half empty pint glass and started filling it up with lemonade. It will load things like file caches to make disk access faster, and try to anticipate what you're going to do next. Your memory usage goes up. This is normal. This is [i]good.[/i]

What everyone misses whilst they're obsessing about numbers and crying about bloat is, when demand on the system increases and RAM starts running low, Windows will actively start dumping all those clever caches and temporary information in order to reclaim that space; out goes half a pint of lemonade*, in goes more beer.

(* for the purposes of analogy, it's magic lemonade that doesn't mix with the beer. Or oil or something. It's not important, roll with me here.)

I know considerably less about Linux memory management, but I believe that recent versions behave in a similar fashion. You may know better than me here though, I'm a Linux dabbler is all.

Back to the subject of caching for a moment, regular reinstalls can actually [i]counteract[/i] this. Windows learns usage over time. It learns when you regularly access data / files in a particular order, and adjusts its caching accordingly. If you wipe it, you lose all this history (but hey, surprise, you have more empty RAM, woo!)

As for the comments about files and registries and the like: So what? In and of itself files don't make the system slower any more than they make the disk heavier. Despite what "cleaner" vendors will tell you, your registry isn't dirty, leave it alone.

Slowdowns over time: Whilst "anecdote" is not the singular of "evidence," my primary laptop started out life as a Vista machine, survived a faulty hard disk that caused it to lock up until it was replaced (by cloning the original), was upgraded in situ to Windows 7, survived an overheating problem which caused random shutdowns, and was still running as sweet as the day it was born (eight years ago). It wasn't rebuilt until the day I bought an SSD and it then got its first reinstall from scratch. And the only reason I did that then was because I wanted to go from i386 to x64 when upgrading to Windows 10, there was nothing wrong with it.

I agree completely that it was a problem historically. The best thing you could do to a Windows 95 box was wipe it and start afresh every six months. But I reject absolutely that "Windows slows down over time" on a modern NT6 family OS. There are plenty of older Server 2003 installs still in active service even, which is the same beating heart as Windows XP; if that were true they'd all be on their knees by now. And yes, that's arguably an unfair example as the desktop is a different environment, but the biggest difference here isn't the architecture but rather what's sitting in front of it. A PC [i]can [/i]slow down over time, sure; but it's not the foregone conclusion you're suggesting.

I'm speculating, but from that limited description your 20 minutes-to-boot PC suggests either a dying HDD or RAM starvation to me. Assuming it's not got some sort of infection, ofc.

20 minute boot sounds like my old work laptop. According to the logs it was waiting for something over the network, and the timeout was something like 1200 seconds. I just didn't turn it off.
I suspect it was something poorly configured by our (external) IT people. All they seemed to be able to do was run a virus scan.

that article was a useful review until let down by that one paragraph. then it stank of someone who doesn't know how a modern OS works, but by dropping in a command line command makes them look clever to the lay person.

free -t -m on this very PC... whoa jeez, Chrome and Cinnamon are using a whole 3.6 Gb RAM between them!!!! Bloat-tastic 🙄 Crikey! That's more than the available RAM on my work Windows 7 laptop (32 bit so ca. 2.9gig usable out of 8gig installed) !!!

Now if that author had had the decency to show both RAM used and RAM that is shared and buffers/cache, I'd believe how bloated things are a little more.

Oh 1.7Gigs buffer. Those numbers might not come under the "free" column, but every last byte there is available for other things if needed.

Now why is about 3.5Gigs of my RAM sat there, unused, and hasn't even been touched?

Sure it's sold as a developer machine, and a bit more RAM than a standard laptop is nice or even essential, and more CPU cores too, especially once doing huge compilations over multiple cores and running multiple VMs.

But right now I have 2 applications that a typical user would think are massive bloat, and only 8Gb RAM, but more than half is effectively free.

Swap space. 4Gigs. 0bytes used. I'm happy with that RAM provision and usage.

I appreciate your writing, however I fear you have missed the ponit I am actually making - I am talking about GUI overheads.

Yes I understand how windows cashes files, and even makes quickboot images. It is also possible to observe [i]what[/i] the memory is actually being used for as well, and I have observed growth in threads and non-cached memory in all older installs I have ever observed.

Maybe it's not a forgone conclusion, but it's certainty a trend in my experience 🙂 You can also contrast your Server 2003 example with the vast majority of users who will at some point install crapware or utilities which begin to complicate the system. RE the registry - yeah it doesn't get heavier, but it [and other files used by windows in a similar way] will accumulate cruft and complexity, incompatibilities and patches [even from M$ themselves] leading to longer processing and read times when consulting and reading/writing to/from it. Overheads, scribbled notes and crossings out.

I suspect the only reason Linux seems better at this is there's less code, and less badly written programes installed by clueless users.

SMART status of the HDD in the other machine is OK, it's just trying to concurrently process a huge number of items after boot. Ram is 1.5GB in use for boot from 4 installed on 64b OS. All unneeded items are uninstalled, it's just a really messed-up install that needs leveling. It's also a dual boot with XFCE and takes about 1 minute for the HDD light to go out and the system to be fully responsive with Mint.

Well, we've got two separate issues here haven't we.

Users installing crap is a moot point, a distraction even. This isn't the fault of the OS, and the solution is glaringly "stop doing that then." A ten year old car will probably have more dents a brand new one. Do we conclude that cars dent over time, requiring periodic resprays?

GUI overheads is a more interesting subject. It may well accumulate "cruft and complexity" but I say again: so what? Any performance hit due to registry growth is as close to zero as makes no odds to anyone outside of benchmark software writers. This is simply out of date thinking; it was relevant on Windows 95 machines that shipped with 4Mb of RAM and no L2 cache, but if a modern PC is on its arse because of registry issues it's far, far more likely to be because someone has hosed it trying to "clean" it. Compatibility issues with old file versions? That's what WinSxS is for.

If you eat an apple, does it take longer to eat if you've taken it out of a fruitbowl? And even if it takes you a moment to find it amongst all the oranges, does that matter in the grand scheme of things? Do you find yourself thinking "wow, I really must throw away all my fruit, finding an apple when I've already got three bananas and a mango in there takes ages"? Or is it actually more efficient to think "I fancy an apple in a bit, so I'll go and grab one now"?

All this talk of "crossings out" and "overheads" sounds good I grant you, and there is a logic to it. But the bottom line here is that it simply doesn't apply any more. And I hate to say it, but it's the same arguments employed by the anti-Windows folk who still think "M$" is hilarious. Most of it was probably true at one point, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away but as I said at the outset, times have changed. If you've got performance issues due to "overheads," then you've got wider issues than overheads.

Two things:

On topic -

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/07/27/1714213/you-cant-turn-off-cortana-in-the-windows-10-anniversary-update
...more bullshit, more overriding of users's settings and wishes. Been here before haven't we?

Off topic - my gods you should see how much faster W7 is on that laptop since I replaced the drive* and did a reinstall. I appreciate your technical know-how Cougar, but most users will install piles of stuff onto their machines, many of which will try to load at boot creating more HDD thrashing. Memory in use has dropped a bit too, because there are less threads running. Yes yes, disk cache etc, but memory in use is related to how many processes/threads are running and that's the real problem with old installs.

*with a slower one, because that's what I had.

So, is it worth installing Windows 10 ?

Today!!!

I can't say it's been beneficial in any way compared to 7, for work.

Multiple desktops? Not that I use it, and I think you can hack that on W7. Boots a little faster, but then a clean W7 boots pretty quick and you can always suspend.

Finally installed it, purely to qualify while it's free.
It functions. Looks like 8.1 to me, but without the need for the "go back to desktop mode" tile.
Disabled everything I possibly could (Cortana etc., and as much phone home nonsense as possible).

Then swapped some SATA cables about and went back to Arch Linux. And yes it does all work fine with all the UEFI BIOS secureboot nonsense turned off 🙂

I guess if Cortana turns itself back on, it's no big deal, I just need to remember not to search. I'm sure there'll be some way to force it off again (especially as the educational version of 10 removes Cortana and the Store).

W10 won't support IR without some (minor) cmd prompt fannying about. Not a concern to most but I've an old(ish) Polar bike computer I've no intention of replacing until it breaks so it mattered to me. Seems to work fine now.

On an older laptop running 32 bit W10 it crashed every 5-15 minutes or so with an IRQ message implicating dbgmsg.sys. I couldn't work out what that was associated with but removing the registry entry seems to have fixed it.

Other than that it was just a matter of spending 5 minutes deleting pointless tiles and various bits of foistware and it seems all good.

Other than that it was just a matter of spending 5 minutes deleting pointless tiles and various bits of foistware

the start menu thing too. delete the lot, and add in what I want (which is not very much).

Oh and the 1 program I use, is the Polar App. And that is only there because while the Android app lets you do all the day to day syncing etc. you still need the Windoze/Mac app and a USB cable to register a device and flash new firmware. Mine fortunately is one of the newer devices which is supported in 10, but I did see that some older devices are either not supported at all any more because of 10, or are supported by means of faff.

Looks likes it's not worth the bother for marginal benefits. Everything works OK on my W7 box. I dont want a headache today so I'll leave it.

If it was not for a couple of Windows specific programs I'll would be using Linux all the time. WiNE will get them working, but it's just not the same.

I just need a computer to do jobs, like a hammer. Not to rule my life and be permantly connected for ever to a corperate giant.

I did it a couple of weeks ago. Took a while but everything works and it's definitely quicker. My next plan is to do a clean install to get rid of some of the crap I've accumulated in the years since I installed Windows 7.

At the moment the conversion rate is down on what MS were after - the plan is to get rid of old versions so they can stop supporting them - support costs money.

Having swapped all 4 boxes over to 10 from 7 I'm pleased. It's been painless, 10 works well and just about does what it needs to. My work machines get used hard and they are standing up to it They are faster than they were on 7 and the updates are even less of an issue as most things go through without a restart.

I think we'll give it a go . . . What's the worst that can happen 😉

I did it to my home laptop a few months ago, no issues.
To my back up workstation a few weeks back, no issues, actually much more stable.
To me everyday mobile workstation on Monday, really good for 2 days, some good improvements over 8.1 but now have the start button / edge not responding issue.
The powershell fix doesn't work, grrrrrrrr