7/30/15 3:45 PM

Thanks, Andy. I will watch for that.

7/30/15 4:51 PM

John C.

I am not an expert but I do have an opinion.

I am assuming that W10 has Defender built in as did W8. I have used Defender and it's predecessor for over 10 years and have been very happy. It is light on resources and requires little to no hand holding. Search your system, me guess is that it is there somewhere.

7/30/15 6:51 PM

Yins have bigger kahunas than me. No way I'd jump on a new Windows OS if I had a pc. I'd wait several years.

7/30/15 7:33 PM

Been 'jumping' since DOS. The only real criticism I had was ME. XP on I have been fine with. I do have a 'Charm Bar' irritation generally and registry hack that sucker into submission post haste every time. I started on a MAC FWIW.

7/30/15 8:45 PM

are gone in Win10!

7/30/15 8:58 PM

Waiting on the upgrade, I must be at the back of the line. ;)

7/31/15 12:27 AM

Well, I upgraded a Windows 7 machine running in a VirtualBox VM to Windows 10 to see if it was worthwhile. As there are several machines in the house to eventually upgrade (I won't be upgrading any of the real machines for several months), rather than have the VM download the update files, I did the following on the host machine to avoid each machine having to separately download the ~3Gb install:

1. Go to https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10 and download the appropriate MediaCreationTool for your existing OS (32- or 64-bit).

2. Run the MediaCreationTool and choose "Create installation media for another PC"

3. Choose the Language, Edition, and Architecture that you need for the upgrade (I downloaded both Windows 10 Home and Pro images as we have both Home and Pro editions of Win7/8 in the house.

4. Choose USB flash drive or ISO file. I chose ISO file as I could mount that directly to the VM for the upgrade and can burn a DVD later to upgrade the other machines in the house.

5. Click Next, choose a name and location for the ISO download and wait for the approximately 3Gb image to download.

The upgrade went completely without incident. You get the choice retain both data and apps, data only, or nothing (I chose both data and apps so I didn't have to bother reinstalling stuff in the VM).

Several things I don't like about Windows 10:

1. The start menu is shit: I immediately shelled out $5 for a copy of Stardock's Start10 to replace the start menu with something more reasonable (ie more like Windows 7). Classic Shell is a free program that performs the same function.

2. By default it spies on just about everything you do and shoots the information back to MS. During the install I turned off every choice I had about beaming information back to Microsoft - the default is that they are all enabled.

3. You have absolutely no choice about not installing updates. Given Microsoft's track record in putting out bad updates, this is a disaster waiting to happen - in fact it already has happened - there have been two bad updates for Windows 10 delivered in the past few days (e.g. see http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2015/07/27/windows-10-automatic-update-security-problems/ ), and I had the nice experience a few months ago of having to completely reinstall my laptop after a bad update from MS prevented it booting successfully.

Edit: Here's a good guide I came across on how to minimise the amount of your data that Microsoft slurp from your machine in Windows 10: https://fix10.isleaked.com/

Last edited by Nick Payne on 8/3/15 3:03 PM; edited 1 time in total

8/1/15 8:04 PM

I've downloaded the .iso file and trying to upgrade Win 7 Home Premium.
It continually hangs at the 32% / 6% mark of installing features and drivers.
Internet advice seems to suggest this is when the display drivers are being installed and there is talk of conflicts with Nvidia display drivers so have now unistalled them too. The next try after that crashed the install with a blue screen and a machine_exception_error at the same point.

Think I might just give up and wait a while...