I did, after making sure everything I felt was important was backed up. I reserve my opinion of it until I've had more time to play around and tweak it. But for now it's OK

 

I'm running the insider preview in a virtual machine. I'm in no hurry to upgrade, I'm happy with Windows 7.

I'd recommend you wait to get the free upgrade till they bring out "Threshold 2" sometime this fall. The initial release does have some bugs and incomplete apps.

 

I'm using the free upgrade on my laptop that had win 7. Some stuff is useless to me, like twitter and other social media apps. Don't use them on my phone so why do I need them on my PC. Also the one drive crap is a joke, don't want it, don't need it. I just upgraded to try it. Did not need it, just wanted to check it out, in time support for win 7 will go bye-bye and we will have no choice but to upgrade.

 

Even when support ends, you don't "have" to upgrade. There are still a lot of XP boxes out there in daily use.

Here's one for you:

 

Yeah, I know. I was running an XP box up to about a year ago. As time goes on and eventual hardware failures crop up it makes less and less sense to keep running an old OS, especially after there is no more support.

I'm just glad microsoft saw the light and brought out an OS that I can live with. If they would have kept pushing win 8, then when my machines failed beyond repair I would have made the switch to apple.

 

Win 8 is just awful. I held out with XP till a few months ago, then I built a new box and put 7 on it. I still have the XP box on a KVM and have turned it into a dual boot XP/Linux box.

 

I did the upgrade the day it came out. Seems to be alright but I haven't messed with it much. Only thing i use my laptop for is pics and internet browsing.

I actually liked windows 8 after I was able to put the start menu on it.

 

I have it bootcamped on my Macbook (not vm'd) and like most other folks I havent used it much. The keyboard shortcuts on the Macbook don't work so adjusting the keyboard backlight and other function keys are useless for now yet it worked in W7. I like how W10 automatically adjust the brightness of the screen but I find it odd that certain areas have the classic W7 look like the control panel but other settings have the new W10 gui.

 

I've upgraded all three of my PCs to Win 10. The 8.1 to 10 upgrade on my laptop was completely trouble-free.

The attempt to upgrade Win 7 Pro on my main PC was not as simple. First, I was told the System Partition could not be used and after an internet search, I found I needed to increase its size to above 400 Mb. I did that, then the upgrade "stalled" at 32% (while installing drivers). After another internet search I found the solution was to install Win 10 from a bootable medium, so I created an installation DVD. I booted the system with it and got another error message that told me, during the install process, that I needed to use it from within Windows. So, I rebooted Windows 7, clicked on the installation executable on the disk and finally Win 10 installed successfully!

I simply clicked the Win 10 installation .exe on disk on my other, triple-boot PC (running Win 7 Pro, Ubuntu Linux and Linux Mint) and it installed without fuss.

One thing I discovered, when it asked for the System Serial Number, it did not like either of the Win 7 keys, so I simply bypassed that step. (Both Win 7 systems were legal installations BTW).

So far, I think Win 10 is fine, although I don't like the Start Menu it provides. I've installed Start10, from Stardock, which is an inexpensive addon that gives a Start Menu that looks like the one in Win7. Interestingly, the Start8 menu I used on the 8.1 machine is working on Win 10 without further upgrades.

I think Win 10 is somewhat faster in booting and most programs seem to open slightly faster. I'm having a problem with one game (World of Tanks) which I can't seem to get to operate at the correct screen resolution.

- Jack

 

What we were told about 10, I wouldn't have it if they paid me. WE do a lot video streaming. Media Player is gone in 10. WE also do not allow uncontrolled program updates, mostly due to spam and viruses coming in with updates. Adobe is well known for this. Windows 10 you have no control over updates- yer gonna git 'em like it or not. Windows 10 comes with a keylogger that records all keystrokes, saves all emails, monitors any digital messaging such as bank accounts, credit cards, etc. Just to say it straight out, there is zero privacy with 10. This comes for our folks that rip these programs apart before we are allowed to use them. They say don't install it. Here's some of the article in Newsweek:

From the moment an account is created, Microsoft begins watching. The company saves customers’ basic information—name, contact details, passwords, demographic data and credit card specifics —but it also digs a bit deeper.

Other information Microsoft saves includes Bing search queries and conversations with the new digital personal assistant Cortana; contents of private communications such as email; websites and apps visited (including features accessed and length of time used); and contents of private folders. Furthermore, “your typed and handwritten words are collected,” the Privacy Statement says, which many online observers liken to a keylogger. Microsoft says they collect the information “to provide you a personalized user dictionary, help you type and write on your device with better character recognition, and provide you with text suggestions as you type or write.”

http://www.newsweek.com/windows-10-r...ry-move-358952

It won't be going on any of our units and not on any personal PCs I own. So did anybody read the agreement before installing?

 

Media "player" is not gone, media "center" is.

Microsoft has released a utility that will allow you to defer updates.

There are a lot of privacy settings you can manage. Of course, everything is enabled by default but you can turn them off.

 

I haven't tried it yet. So far I'm one of the 5 or 6 people that don't mind using Windows 8.1.

As for the privacy policy, they are going nothing that google hasn't done for years. If you use any Google product they already have all of this information and possibly even more. The difference is MS uses it to improve the product experience (for now) but google sells it for advertising money.

EDIT:
Here's a LINK that takes you step by step through the security/personal settings for Windows 10 and shows how to tweek the settings or turn them completely off.

 

Not quite. Google doesn't sell your personal information the same way survey or sweepstakes companies do. They do crawl all the data you create / provide, in the form of your emails, youtube history, search history, etc, and display ads that it thinks are relevant to your interests. They aren't going out to xyz advertiser and saying "here is 'wookie', he's into Ford Trucks, beer, and big booty women, show him all your ads that apply", instead they send an user id token, some keywords, and the ad engine decides what to show.

Other online ad agencies may retain a cookie in your browser that identifies you, so that retailers that are part of their network can tie you to their order history, and recommend ads based off of what you have bought online... I think that is a bit more invasive.

 

I don't like change went it comes to Windows. Loved XP for years, and now win 7 is great. I will keep win 7 as long as I can. May be windows 12 will be out by the time I need to change again LOL If you want to remove the win 10 icon on your pc, remove this from your windows updates. (KB3035583 , KB3031432 ,Kb2990214 ) I turned my automatic updates install off so I can install them as needed. At the end of XP, some of the windows updates messed up my pc, so I don't trust Microsoft, I like win7, don't want to have to go to win10 because of an update! Has anyone try LINUX OS? or Ubuntu ? http://www.ubuntu.com/

 

I've tried three flavors of Linux: Ubuntu, Mint and Lite. I put Lite on an old netbook with an Atom processor and it runs far, far better than Windows XP ever did. It's also an easy OS to adapt to, since it looks a lot like Windows. It comes with Firefox, Libre Office, and other apps that give you the functionality you had in Windows along with the additional Unix tools available in Terminal that are far superior to what you have in the Windows Command Prompt.

Mint is also an easy flavor of Linix to migrate to if you've been using Windows. It has both a 64 and 32-bit version and the 64-bit version runs very well on my old Pentium D box. Again, it installs with Firefox, Thunderbird, Libre Office and other commonly needed apps. You can also install other things like Chrome, if that's your preference when you use any flavor of Linux.

Ubuntu is good, but it has a somewhat steeper learning curve. You have to learn how to use the "Dash", and before you can do that, you have to learn how to find it! Things are a bit different in it too - one difference is that the window controls are in the upper left corner of windows rather than in the upper right. Still, it's not THAT bad, just different.

It's very easy to try them out using an installation on a CD, you don't even have to install them, but things will work rather slowly. It's also dead simple to set up a dual boot so that you can run Linux or Windows, your choice, when you turn your PC on. I think things work faster on Linux than they do in Windows.

- Jack