Poll: Are you happy with Windows 10?

[Orphia Nay]

I spoke too soon. My Start button somehow stopped working, and the only solution I could follow required me to reinstall Windows 10 which meant I needed/need to reinstall all the programs/apps I use.

I still like it enough to keep using it, but that's probably due to fear of change.

 

[quadraginta]

This is interesting, because I read a lot about the privacy concerns early on but no so much in a while. So has the whole privacy thing proven not to be as big a problem as first reported, or do most people not really care?

I'm personally holding off on the upgrade for no real reason except that I am in no rush, but would be interested in an update on the privacy situation from the knowledgeable folks.

The privacy concerns were hyped scare journalism by pontificators intent on finding something wrong because Micro$oft.

The install process invites you to turn off most of the cited issues while it is running. Nothing is mandatory, and what info they are trying to collect is essentially harmless anyway.

It blew over (quickly) basically because there was no substance to it and even the most dedicated of panic journalists couldn't keep up the pretense without looking more like idiots than they already did.

As M$ bashing went it was more than normally embarrassing for the bashers.

 

[Denver]

Mine crashes from time to time. I forget the error, but i think it has to do with the disk. I googled it and found others who started getting it after upgrading.

Any commonality noted so far?

I was experiencing this mostly using Chrome to stream Hulu. Since I switched to IE, it hasn't crashed yet.

 

[rdaneel]

Tried it for a few days last month then switched back to Win 7. It ran fine but I hated the way it looked and most of the changes. I'll probably upgrade it before the deadline, but hopefully by then, there will be more third party Win 10 compatible skins available that can restore it's appearance back to the way I like it.

 

[psionl0]

I clicked "Yes, no problem with installation or using" since this is true (by MS standards). Having recently acquired a powerful PC with 8GB ram, I finally have a machine that can cope with the demands of an MS OS.

However, I only run it for 1 - 2 hours per day. This is mainly so that I can keep up with the updates (both OS and antivirus). The rest of the time, I run my preferred OS - Slackware Linux which, fortunately, Win 10 happily co-exists with.

 

[KDLarsen]

No problems* here and the fact that I could even upgrade to 64-bit for free only sweetened the deal for me. I'll have to reinstall soon though, as I'll be getting a new motherboard & CPU in january, which should result in Windows no longer accepting the old authentication.

* ok, so there is one small issue that is annoying the living daylights out of me. Whenever I unzip a .zip or .rar archive, all the files within have their "Last changed"-date set to the time I unzipped them. Apparently this was snuck in by the backdoor a while ago. I had the same issue pop up in Windows 7, but at least then it could be avoided by right-clicking the archive, selecting properties, and ticking the 'Unblock this file'-box. No such luck in Windows 10.

 

[El Greco]

No problems, but that means pretty much nothing. Of the 3 machines I regularly use (XP, 7 and 10), I still prefer the XP. I was expecting this to be an exciting release, but I somehow knew that Microsoft would AGAIN shoot themselves on the foot. And so they did, with not really unifying the Operating Systems of smartphones and desktops.

Anyway, that's besides the point. I was prepared for the usual UAC stupidity, the reservation of a recovery partition without even asking me whether or where I want it, and the stealthy downloads for updates. Once I sorted these out everything was more or less as I expected. It's still mildly exciting that I can have a full Windows system on a 20cm tablet, but I would be really excited if I could have on a 13cm phone as well. Why does MS have to decide for me that 5" is too small for Windows 10 ? Why won't they let ME decide this ?

Anyway, I guess they are saving this feature for the next big release of Windows.

 

[Damien Evans]

No problems, but that means pretty much nothing. Of the 3 machines I regularly use (XP, 7 and 10), I still prefer the XP. I was expecting this to be an exciting release, but I somehow knew that Microsoft would AGAIN shoot themselves on the foot. And so they did, with not really unifying the Operating Systems of smartphones and desktops.

Anyway, that's besides the point. I was prepared for the usual UAC stupidity, the reservation of a recovery partition without even asking me whether or where I want it, and the stealthy downloads for updates. Once I sorted these out everything was more or less as I expected. It's still mildly exciting that I can have a full Windows system on a 20cm tablet, but I would be really excited if I could have on a 13cm phone as well. Why does MS have to decide for me that 5" is too small for Windows 10 ? Why won't they let ME decide this ?

Anyway, I guess they are saving this feature for the next big release of Windows.

This is a good thing. I don't want my desktop dumbed down. And there is no next big release of Windows coming, if Microsoft are to be believed.

 

[El Greco]

This is a good thing. I don't want my desktop dumbed down.

This has nothing to do with it. Just specify some minimum hardware requirements other than screen size. If the device meets those, let it install even if it is a watch. Many tablets that come with Windows 10 are much less powerful than some smartphones. After this, let the software developers decide whether they will bother with a small-screen version of the application or not. Even if they don't, users can always connect their smartphone to a monitor, keyboard and mouse and work from there if they so wish.

But of course if they did that at this point, then nobody would be buying Windows smartphones (which are already doomed anyway) because everybody would want the "big" Windows on their phone.

 

[El Greco]

One of the many articles that explain more or less the same thing: http://www.computerworld.com/articl...ft-lays-its-smartphone-ambitions-to-rest.html

If MS want to sell Windows smartphones, then that Windows will have to be the full version. The mobile one is already dead.

 

[schrodingasdawg]

Windows 10 is smooth sailing for me. My favorite thing about the Windows 10 upgrade is that it left my boot sector alone, unlike the 8.1 upgrade. Has Microsoft finally acknowledged that OSs other than Windows exist, and that users should be allowed to multiboot?

 

[rjh01]

<snip> And there is no next big release of Windows coming, if Microsoft are to be believed.

I would like a new release every month or so. It would have only one or two new features. That way a person can learn about the OS and quickly learn about any new features. Who knows what features are in 10 which we as individuals know nothing about?

 

[El Greco]

And there is no next big release of Windows coming, if Microsoft are to be believed.

Yeah, well... do you believe them ? I'd bet everything I own that there WILL be a "next big release of Windows".

 

[paulhutch]

I've always suspected that the "Windows 10 is the last version of Windows" statement was mostly about marketing.

My guess is that the next major version will be Windows 10.1 followed by 10.2 all the way up to Windows 10.99. The new releases will be free to end users if their hardware is supported but if your hardware isn't supported you'll have to buy new hardware and that will come with a new OEM license. So end users will no longer buy new versions of Windows directly but instead the tying of the OS to hardware will help stabilize or slow the current decline in PC sales.

 

[alfaniner]

There's already a "service" pack out, this upgraded to my three laptops without incident. It appears to be nearly a completely new install, so allow an hour or so if you decide to start it.

 

[CelticRose]

There's already a "service" pack out, this upgraded to my three laptops without incident. It appears to be nearly a completely new install, so allow an hour or so if you decide to start it.

Yep, the "Fall Update". It's actually a whole new build of the OS. http://www.windowscentral.com/whats-new-windows-10-fall-update

Had to reboot my machine to get Avast to work properly again, but otherwise it installed okay. I had to go through all of my settings again and readjust some of them and uninstall some crapware new apps. Also, the notification center now seems to think I have Bluetooth turned on even though my machine doesn't have Bluetooth (clicking on the tile just takes me to settings). Other than that, it's been smooth sailing.

 

[Rrose Selavy]

Yeah, well... do you believe them ? I'd bet everything I own that there WILL be a "next big release of Windows".

That as well goes against the implied statement they would support Windows 10 for the life of a device (but only now within the usual support time scale of previous Windows versions) What if your device is still alive after 2025?
So much for Windows as a service....

What does lifetime of the device mean?
This is still being debated, but the logical conclusion is as long as the machine is operable, it will continue to support it with updates. So, if the machine still works 5 or 10 years from now, revisions and updates to Windows 10 will be made available to it. Please note that Windows 10 uses the same life cycle policy of 5 years mainstream support and 5 years extended support (10 years support).

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...g/5f53a6b6-e844-47e5-850c-98cf843c02bf?auth=1

 

[El Greco]

Of course anyone can predict that new technology or a new generation of security threats will make a next big release of Windows unavoidable. But it appears that in MS they ALREADY know that the support of this release will be no different than any other and that at some point Windows 10 will become obsolete. The question is, if they already know that, then why talk about "the final version of Windows" ? I could speculate it's a marketing trick, only the OS is free for the vast majority of users. It looks more probable to me that they would like to justify the new status of unavoidable, continuous and often stealthy updates (or "updates"). And why would they do that ? Data mining ? Advertising ? Product pushing ? Probably something along these lines.

 

[yodaluver28]

My overall impression of Windows 10? Meh.

It's better than 8 or 8.1, so I'm glad I updated my Win8 computer. But I still had to install Classic Shell because the "returned start menu" is just a small version of the metro screen glued onto an inefficient imitation of a real menu.

The Metro apps might be okay on a dinky cell phone but on a real computer, they're incredibly lame.

I still hate the schizophrenic Control Panel/Settings setup. All of that stuff should be in the same place, preferably Control Panel.

I hate the forced updating, especially since it seems to take forever in 10.

I won't be "upgrading" any of my Win7 Ultimate installations to 10 and I'll be taking impeccable care of those computers.

 

[Fizil]

I have been fairly happy with Windows 10. Primarily exciting was finally having full support for virtual desktops.

However I do have a major slow memory leak, and haven't been able to track it down. Like right now, my memory usage is 12GB out of 16GB. What is running? Firefox.

The total of all my processes in tasklist is around 3GB. The total pooled and non-pooled memory in poolmon is about 2GB. I have no idea where the remaining 7GB have gone, and am not familiar enough with diagnosing such an obscure sort of memory leak to figure out what else could be going on.

edit: Actually a little digging with RAMMap showed me that a major contributor may be my Page Map (not Page File, the Page Map is actually in physical memory). It is sitting around 4 GB usage, which is insane. It seems that every terminated process leaves behind a 20KB zombie entry in my page table, which never gets cleared out. I have no idea why though.