02-08-2015, 04:17 PM
(This post was last modified: 02-08-2015, 04:18 PM by Stockden.
Edit Reason: Typo
)
Having installed it on a spare machine at work on Wednesday I can confirm that the Win 10 upgrade installs itself over the top of your existing win7/8.1 installation and (as far as I can tell) keeps all your existing apps and settings. What follows is based only only 2 days or so of playing with it so very probably contains faults & misconceptions. E&OE!
The installation took some time and involved several reboots but went pretty smoothly. There were a couple of hiccups, it installed the wrong graphics driver (which produces odd effects when scrolling images in Firefox) and it told me that I needed to update Onedrive and then told me that, before it could proceed, I had to install the existing version because it was newer...
Other than that it went well. I can't remember how long it took (because, despite it's exhortation to "sit back and relax" I did some work while the installation was going on), it wasn't fast though.
The look and feel (a sort of cross between Win 7 and Win 8) is well publicised so I'll confine my comments to the fact that, so far, I'm reasonably impressed and it's certainly easier to use on a PC than Win 8 was. Most of the things I'm used to in Win 7 are there and can be found very quickly by typing their name into the search box, which (on the machine I tested) seemed to be permanently attached to what used to be called the Task Bar. The new start menu is different to Win 7 and not immediately to my taste. It's not difficult to work with though and I suspect I'll get used to it pretty quickly.
On the other hand I don't like Edge, the new web browser. To me it looks unfinished, with flat, rectangular tabs and Chrome like minimalist menus. Perhaps I just haven't found all the settings yet. Some of the legacy menus (Control Panel for instance) looked odd, rather as though they were a picture of the menu rather than something that had been rendered from fonts & icons. That may have been an issue with the graphic driver (as mentioned above) of course.
Will I update my Win 7 computers at home? Almost certainly yes, though I suspect I'll wait for a month or so for the mass Beta test that is the Win 10 rollout finds all the obvious bugs and I'll probably have to keep a Win 7 machine for things that won't run under 10.
If you do decide to install it I very strongly advise against accepting the default settings. Unless you really want to share all sorts of information (including you wifi passwords) with all and sundry there are several things that need to be turned off. That's pretty easy to do (as long as you choose the right install option) and the things are fairly obvious when you see them ("Send all my secrets to Microsoft On/OFF").
Happy to update this as I learn more...
Hugh
The installation took some time and involved several reboots but went pretty smoothly. There were a couple of hiccups, it installed the wrong graphics driver (which produces odd effects when scrolling images in Firefox) and it told me that I needed to update Onedrive and then told me that, before it could proceed, I had to install the existing version because it was newer...
Other than that it went well. I can't remember how long it took (because, despite it's exhortation to "sit back and relax" I did some work while the installation was going on), it wasn't fast though.The look and feel (a sort of cross between Win 7 and Win 8) is well publicised so I'll confine my comments to the fact that, so far, I'm reasonably impressed and it's certainly easier to use on a PC than Win 8 was. Most of the things I'm used to in Win 7 are there and can be found very quickly by typing their name into the search box, which (on the machine I tested) seemed to be permanently attached to what used to be called the Task Bar. The new start menu is different to Win 7 and not immediately to my taste. It's not difficult to work with though and I suspect I'll get used to it pretty quickly.
On the other hand I don't like Edge, the new web browser. To me it looks unfinished, with flat, rectangular tabs and Chrome like minimalist menus. Perhaps I just haven't found all the settings yet. Some of the legacy menus (Control Panel for instance) looked odd, rather as though they were a picture of the menu rather than something that had been rendered from fonts & icons. That may have been an issue with the graphic driver (as mentioned above) of course.
Will I update my Win 7 computers at home? Almost certainly yes, though I suspect I'll wait for a month or so for the mass Beta test that is the Win 10 rollout finds all the obvious bugs and I'll probably have to keep a Win 7 machine for things that won't run under 10.
If you do decide to install it I very strongly advise against accepting the default settings. Unless you really want to share all sorts of information (including you wifi passwords) with all and sundry there are several things that need to be turned off. That's pretty easy to do (as long as you choose the right install option) and the things are fairly obvious when you see them ("Send all my secrets to Microsoft On/OFF").
Happy to update this as I learn more...
Hugh
