Are you loving or hating Windows 10? Need your feedback

Hi Peter, although the free upgrades are finished, there were a couple of methods that did still work. You might want to check before shelling out the big bucks. Details are/were available on CNET somewhere and I guess that's what Bob P. is referring to. From what I can recall, one involved the accessibility options (which you don't have to use) and the other involved downloading or creating with the Microsoft tool, a Win10 ISO, doing a cold install and giving it the Win7/Win8.1 product key. These Windows of opportunity (sorry, couldn't resist!) will surely close, if they haven't already, so look up the CNET article soon.

Disclaimer - I don't use Win10 productively, just installed it to help support a relative.

I didn't go to Win10 because three of my machines didn't support it from a hardware standpoint and I didn't really want a mix. But I took one of Bob's suggestions and picked up a small SSD and swapped it into my primary laptop. Installed the Win7 Pro, for which there was a product key on the base and then scraped under the gate for the free upgrade to 10 Pro. Process took longer than expected but it all worked with no issues and the machine booted up very quickly from the SSD. I've used it as a test machine for the relative and it's been stable (1511) and is usable for the purpose.

Do I like it? No, I have no urge to upgrade anything else. It's really a question of whether you are prepared to invest the time in the learning curve to gain the level of familiarity you have with your existing system. If you decide to go to 10, you need to do that and you won't want to go back. Ultimately, if you intend to stay with Windows, 10 is in your future.

There have been numerous problems reported with he anniversary edition, on 10 Pro, I'd be inclined to wait for the Business stable releases that follow about three months after the consumer stables - you don't get this choice on 10 Standard.

I don't like the idea of the increased level of metrics Microsoft collects and I have turned off all I can find on my test system - improve the user experience on somebody else's machine, Microsoft, this one is mine!

I don't like Cortana and I turned "her" off but that's not an option with Anniversary edition, I believe.

So how's my relative getting on? Compared to the mess that Microsoft made of Win7 updates when they were pushing 10, she finds it much simpler with the consolidated patches. Yes, we still have a couple of problems to solve but she's customized her system UI to her liking and is relatively happy with the system. That's taken her about 4 or 5 weeks.

My primary laptop? OpenSuSE Leap (Linux), so the 10 disk only gets installed to chase my relative's issues.

Good luck, which ever way you decide.

I liked the first version of Windows 10. I liked 10.1 better. And now, with the Anniversary Edition (which in more primitive times they might have called Windows 11), they have really gotten it right.

Everything is where it logically should be now (which may be different from where you're used to it being, but such is the nature of progress). It is stable, reliable, and predictable to a fault, and it is almost infinitely configurable to one's personal tastes. It is resource-efficient, legacy apps all work fine (at least the ones I use), and it makes everything feel faster and cleaner.

I have now updated all of my computers, some of which date to 2005, with Windows 10 Anniversary Edition. Even the really oldest ones are running better than they have done for years.

Microsoft got this one right.

It came on a notebook I purchase recently. Unless your whole world revolves around social media, web surfing and streaming services, the goofy interface is basically useless. It's just the latest case of MS trying to force people to use computers how they think you should and it's definitely not designed for doing anything productive. It is designed to push you toward their "cash-cow" products and services. I can't imagine how MS is going to convince most businesses to make the switch, due to the steep learning curve and the emphasis on time-wasting apps (good luck with that).

As has been well documented, it's riddled with built-in spyware, so the first thing I did was to use Spybot Anti-Beacon to shut off as much of it as possible. Next, I installed Classic Shell so I didn't have to deal with the stupid interface. After that, uninstalling as much of the crap I don't need (including the prompts to install more MS spyware, their Office 365 "rip-off-ware" and other garbage like McAfee) made it livable. Essentially, the more you make it look like Win 7, the better it works.

With all of that done, it's tolerable, though it's still frustrating that MS moved many of the configuration functions and settings to unfathomable places (something they do with every new version, apparently just to frustrate PC Techs). Performance wise, it's generally fast, but it's hard to tell if that's because of the new OS or the new PC that it's on (more than likely, it's the latter). I've noticed that Firefox and Thunderbird tend to hang up more frequently than they do with Win 7 and I haven't found the cause yet.

I haven't tried installing drivers for legacy devices that were problematic in Win 7, as it's unlikely that they'd be any easier in Win 10. It works fine with USB devices such as cameras and external drives and an older Brother laser printer, which is good enough for my needs, as I have a desktop and another, larger laptop that I use for real work with other peripheral devices. Those machines run Win 7 and will not be updated (it's not an "upgrade") to Win 10. Hopefully, they'll come out with a more business-oriented version of Windows at some point, which would be much more appealing to me.

Everybody has their own view of this system for their own perso9nal reasons.
That said then mine is yes its a good OS, but you will have a nice learning curve figuring out what to turn off and where it's located, especially for privacy reasons.
I'm not one to really have any reason to hide my shopping preferences of what else I do, but still like it to be my choice.
Some things you have no choice in and windows is making a fortune off of the marketing info it is selling to it's advertisers. OK well free is not really free.
I did an upgrade over my win 8.1 initially, after making a clone copy. I later went back and did a clean install. The different builds that came along all had glitches that either I fixed or they eventually did. Can't say any of the operating systems I have experienced were without a bug or two.
Yes some things are no longer supported, but workarounds are usually available from one source or another. I am fortunate enough to be able to chase blogs and forums around a lot for other friends and customers and have found resolutions for them all "eventually".
I only use the tiles to check the weather as they did away with the desktop gadgets.
If I chose I can just have the eight tiles that I might want, but are on desktop where they belong too, so why bother.
Am I happy with it yes, was everybody else that I know upgraded "No" have we found solutions to their unhappiness "mostly".
Advise the clone backup for easy restoration in a pinch.

Since I read all the things about windows 10 and how good it was, i decided to upgrade and i wish i hadn't, I should have stayed with windows 8.1, the games i used to play on-line don't work on windows 10, It's just like all the other versions of wondows, they say it's faster more reliable until you get it and try it but it is absolutely rubbish, I don't like it and it's too late to go back now.

I've written before about the total failure I had on upgrading one of my desktops. That computer had 3 hard drives with Win XP on one , Ubuntu on another and Win 7 on the 3rd. They are SATA selectable on start up. The Upgrade of Win7 to Win 10 and I lost the sound , SCSI , internet access , usb bus and video control. In that upgrade the computer worked fine on the other operating systems. I switched back to Win 7 and blocked further upgrades and it works fine.

Now that being said I did upgrade my laptop to Win 10 and it has been frustrating because I keep losing control of my Laptop. Just this week it started acting up and I stopped running programs and a check on Updates and found it was downloading another uncontrolled update. Very often when I'm through using my laptop that it will not shutdown and I can't put it away because the hard drive light is on with Win 10 doing another update. It was dead in the water for over an hour downloading the update even though I have 100 MBS service. It then installed the updates and eventually the screen went to the dreaded spinning circle of death. Three hours later it was still doing it. I went out for several hours and when I came back it was still spinning in circles which by this time was over 6 hours. It would not respond to any inputs from me. I finally held down the power button and waited until it shut down but it never happened. I then pulled the battery out to kill it. My neighbor has had to do the exact same thing with his laptop. When I powered it up it said "Recovering install " and then immeadiately showed it was 19% done. After several minutes it went back to the spinning circle of death. I left it alone at 8 PM and the next morning at 8 AM it was still spinning. Again I had to pull the battery to get any response. This time it said it was 75% done. It got to 80% and then went spinning for another 3 hours. This time holding done the power button and it turned off. Upon starting up it changed the start menu and then sent me a message that Norton Internet Security was incompatable with Win 10 so use Windows Defender instead. I cheked with Norton and it said it was up to date but it needed two Windows patches. Again the spiral of death for two hours as the patches were applied and again the only recovery was to hold down the power button and it shut down. It finally restarted and Win 10 said it was fully updated and working fine. In short it was dead in the water for a day and a half. My neighbor who often works from home via his laptop has lost hours of productivity because Win 10 just does updates with zero control and often kills his laptop.

In short unless you have a plain vanilla laptop or desktop and it is less than 3 years old don't waste your time doing the upograde. I run multiple programs as does my neighbor and Win 10 pukes trying to run them. Also we found on both our computers that many of the drivers revert back to the original drivers when you do a Win 10 upgrade. I found going to vendors web sites they had drivers newer than the Win 10 versions.

By the way a business person in Colroado that ran a travel company sued Microsoft and won because it did the upgrade to Win 10 and she lost the use of her entire office for days.

There is people out there that will tell you that Win 10 is the greatest thing going. There is also people that will tell you that you have to get the latest technology which means "get rid of any older computers". If you check around you will also find a lot of people that refuse to do the upgrade "again" because of the troubles they had. That is why a lot of people downloaded GWX control panel to block the constant nags about Win 10 updates.

It's up to you but I would back up everything you have and expect the worse.

I took the free upgrade a little over a year ago, when my pc had a version of Windows 8 on it. It is pretty reliable and finds threats on its own. It seems that there is more intrusion by Microsoft. I was up in the middle of the night once and was reading a book. My pc was asleep, it woke up by itself and began running for a while and then went back to sleep. I suspect that Microsoft has it set up to do that.

Sometimes there are updates that I don't know about until I manually reboot the machine. I think this may be a setting, but it used to notify me that updates are available and ask me if I wanted to reboot.

Generally, the machine behaves well, however, the hardware is only a year or two old and I'm surprised that there are times that I click on a link and the machine is running full bore on some background activity and is slow to respond. That is the main thing that I find disappointing at times.

I have several PC's in my house. Currently, my workhorse PC has Windows 7, one laptop has Windows 10, one laptop has Windows 7, and one desktop has Windows XP. The desktop with Windows XP will probably be donated to a charity. At the moment it's really only good for surfing the net, email, and playing old games that I just can't break away from. That leaves Windows 7 and Windows 10.

The Windows 10 laptop was originally a Windows 8.1 laptop. I upgraded to Windows 10 because I just could not stand Windows 8.1. I found that it was good (not great) for using the built-in apps but really bad for developers. Since I write software this was an untenable option for me so I continued to use my Windows 7 pc's. When Windows 10 came along, I waited until close to the free expiration date to upgrade the Windows 8.1 laptop. I wanted as many bugs as possible worked out and I wanted to hear about the reviews for Windows 10.

Is Windows 10 better than Windows 8.1? In my experience Windows 10 is better than Windows 8.1 and it continues (but slowly) to improve. Is Windows 10 better than Windows 7? In my experience the answer is no. It is more difficult to find drivers for Windows 10 so that I can upgrade my Windows 7 applications. It is more difficult to find switches and options to turn features on and off. Additionally, there are some features in Windows 7 that are not included in Windows 10.

If you like talking to your computer, Cortana in Windows 10 is cute but useless to a developer. There are other additions to Windows 10 that an average user might find to be fun. But a developer is not an average user.

So, in answer to your question, first ask yourself what you want to accomplish with your computer. Then decide whether or not you want to upgrade.

I've tried it on a laptop and just can't get it to cooperate. I really have tried but it seems very un-user friendly to me. I'm still using XP on my main computer. So, rather than fight with Win 10, I'm going to switch to an iMac.
I should mention that I'm not new to computers -- using them for about 25 years, so have been through many versions of Windows, including ME, which I actually liked. So, bye, bye Windows! If they had kept XP, I'd still be a Windows person.

Dear Peter:

If you stop to think about it, there must be a reason for Windows to go through all this troble and hype to get all PCs in the world runnig Windows 10. They have even acted pushy to get people to "upgrade"...
I believe Windows needs to cut its support costs, and supporting a myriad of Windows versions must be expensive. Besides, they do not want to have a number of teams developing for those versions. It makes economic sense.
What does this mean? Sooner or later, and I believe it will be sooner, they will stop supporting older versions of Windows. So, if you stick with an old version, like Windows 7 (I loved it !), you will run out of support and out of upgrades.
Also, developers will stop creating and7or upgrading their products for older windows. You woud be stuck in the past, software-wise.
As for which is better, I believe it is a futile discussion. Yet, I have used Win 10 for almost a year and I have found only two reason to complain: my folder explorer windows closes with no apparent reason, sometimes, and I have to reopen it. And the system grows and grows, using up more than 25 Gb, which has turned useless a friend's brand new Acer notebook which came with only 32 Gb of solid state memory.
I have three notebooks, and all three have Win 10 now. No problem whatsoever, the start real fast, and in general the user interface is much friendlier that before.

In brief: I do not love it or hate it. I just accept it as a fact of life. And it is not the worst thing I hava had to accept.

I was one of those dinosaurs who wouldn't part with XP Pro until I had no choice but to go to 7; my curiosity got the better of me with the free upgrade to 10.
I'll never go back, and I'm in the process of pulling all the files from my old XP hard-drives with the use of a hard-drive dock and converting everything to 10.
It's faster and very user friendly; I'm 72 and accordingly to my wife I hang on to everything until it's an antique.

JUNK Every time they force the anniversary update my desktop I5-6600, 16gig ram, 256 gig ssd, high end asus motherboard it freezes on start up.

I am thinking about making my machine LINUX and running windows 10 in an emulator, at least I will get some use out of the desktop. Have abandoned the PC in favor of their PHONE and tablet.

"If it ain't broke", then why replace what you have for something else? Well, you want to know if it works better for you, so the best thing you can do is to try it out yourself. Try to find a way to test out Windows 10 yourself and see if you like it. Why care what others think? Personally, I think Windows 10 is the best Windows OS yet, and the upgrade from 8.1 to 10 worked flawlessly on my HP Elite x2. But there are going to be people who tell you it's terrible for personal reasons as well. Try to find your own personal reasons why you love/hate it. If you want to see if it works on your machine, image the harddrive first, try out the Windows 10 upgrade, and if you don't like it or it has problems, just reimage your harddrive to get back what you had before.

We have two computers, both have unacceptable problems!

My wife has a pc and shortly after we downloaded win 10 she had an upgrade that made it impossible to acquire the apps that are on the left side of our screen. We can click on the window at the bottom left of the screen and on occasion they will come up but immediately drop back down.

I contacted Microsoft help for assistance in correcting the problem and was told that I would have to pay for their assistance. I informed them that it was their action that caused it. Did not matter, I would still have to pay.

Recently we both had an up grade where if we now open a news article that has a photo, the photo will descend down the page if we scroll down for any reason.

Again, we have a PC and a laptop running on Windows 10 and using 365 for the programs.