Windows 10 – Good/Bad/The Same compared to Windows 7?

Did a quick search and couldn’t see anything on this . . .

Mrs Spekkie and I have identical HP Laptops running Windows 7. I’m happy with everything my laptop does so when I installed an update some time ago and the Windows 10 icon appeared on my Taskbar I removed the update responsible . . . I’ve been as happy as Larry ever since.

Mrs Spekkie on the other hand said I was being paranoid (not wanting to be told what to do by MS blah blah blah) and left the update on her machine saying “it wasn’t doing any harm”.

Now some time later I’m still happy while she’s in a world of hurt . . . Windows reminds her to upgrade to Version 10 ever time she uses the computer, she’s struggling to install Windows 7 updates, she being told how much Version 10 will cost after the end of this month etc etc etc

So, any version 10 uses out there – is it fine to upgrade to, or do I need to roll back her laptop and unravel the fix she’s got herself into?

Windows 8 on my work laptop put me off ever wanting to upgrade again. It was a happy day when I left that laptop behind me 🙂

Cheers.

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

or rolled back using the backups he made?
Or the roll back tool?

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

Project? Should be under 2hrs

Damn right. takes less than 2hr to fit new SSD, install W7, update enough of W7 to be offered the upgrade* and then install W10

*(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)

Yes a winter project!

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.

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?

thread drift alert…
For me, Cinnamon (and a vanilla install of that will most probably give you Gnome3 as well – select which at login)
Others prefer MATE
Others prefer Unity
I don’t advise Cinnamon on a machine that’s got limited resources though.
Best thing about Linux is you can install and try them all, and ignore the ones you don’t like.
Or just play with one directly from an install CD or USB stick.

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.

It was rather satisfying deleting everything I possibly could from Win8.1
I mentioned 2 icons above. Actually it’s 3 in Win8.1 – one to start a game, one to start the Polar “app”, on to go to desktop mode. I think under 10, that last one is no longer needed?
The rest can go.

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

Nvidia graphics (and the snooping) is the single main reason I didn’t update. I knew there was a problem, and my card was almost certainly one of those that would be affected.
Probably fixed quickly, but just shows how flawed the whole thing is regarding updates.

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.