Windows 10

[Alan Douglas]

The same topic is running on several forums I frequent. I've asked the question whether my 7 desktop and icons would all be the same after an upgrade and the answer seems to be yes. The main reason for switching would be continuing support past 2020. I expect I'll wait a year and see how things are going. It wouldn't surprise me if the "deadline" was extended, since Microsoft's object is after all to attract as many users as possible.

[AlanBeckett]

2020 my life, I might not last that long

Alan

[Alan Douglas]

When I was five or six (late 1940s) my aunts used to give us kids old pocket calendars/memo books that were out of date. I remember one that went to 2000 and couldn't wrap my brain around that, it was so far in the future. Now it's 15 years in the past.

[Mende]

The question is, how do I implement the dual boot option? Any advice, please?

It's a long time since I used Windows and I'm sure there will be people here who know much more than I do.  The first question for me is in what sense 10 is an upgrade.  Do you have to install it over the top of a previous version?  Will it do a full new install if you just show it your old installation disk?  Does it give you a new product key and if not could you have two OSs installed with the same product key? 

Windows never liked being dual-bootable with other OSs.  Usually when you install it it installs its own boot manager.  So I guess you would need to have Windows 8 on one partition, 10 on another and then install a boot manager program to enable you to select between the two.  

Personally I have always preferred to buy a new hard disk for a new installation.  That way you don't mess things up and you can always access the old disk from the new system, or reboot the old disk.  Disks are quite cheap nowadays.

Even better, use Kubuntu.

[Mark Hennessy]

Have a look here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/Windows-10-faq

As it stands now, it is downloaded as an update, providing you are running a qualifying OS. Once you have allowed the update to happen, you are then in a position to create recovery media should you ever need to reinstall (e.g. to a new HDD).

If you don't have a qualifying OS, you can buy it.

Windows dual-boots with other OSs with no problem. Before I rebuilt it recently, my old laptop used to triple-boot between XP, 7, and Ubuntu. You just have to be careful about the order in which you install each operating system, with the general rule that you put the oldest on first...

I agree that it's usually worth buying a new disk for a clean installation. Once you're happy that everything works and the old disk is securely backed up, then it can be "trickled down" to the next oldest PC. As disks generally get quicker as well as bigger, then all machines benefit.

[Mende]

Windows dual-boots with other OSs with no problem. Before I rebuilt it recently, my old laptop used to triple-boot between XP, 7, and Ubuntu. You just have to be careful about the order in which you install each operating system, with the general rule that you put the oldest on first...

I think the main problem is that Windows thinks it owns the computer.  If you install Ubuntu then it looks around for other partitions and any it finds with a bootable OS get added automatically to the boot menu.  If you install Windows then it uses its own boot manager.  If you previously had Ubuntu installed then after installing Windows you'll probably find that Ubuntu has disappeared and can't be accessed. 

If you use two disks then you can have one for Windows and one for Ubuntu.  Boot from the Ubuntu disk and the boot menu will allow you to select Windows if you want.  If you need to (re) install Windows then you can unplug the Ubuntu disk and boot directly from the Windows one.  Ubuntu will be safely inaccessible on the unplugged disk.  When you have finished, you can plug the Ubuntu disk back in again and boot from that as before.  

[Mark Hennessy]

I suppose you could put it that, but I'd prefer to be a bit more even-handed.

Windows doesn't - unless it's changed recently - make any attempt to understand Linux boot managers, and I think that is actually fair enough. When they write an installation routine and commit it to CD/DVD, it has to work reliably for the life of the OS - 13 years in the case of XP. In that time, competing boot managers might change considerably, and Microsoft would have to update their installation routines and ship new CD/DVD media for people to use - or support the downloading of ISOs containing new builds - or incorporate the updates into a new service pack and expect users to "slipstream" new media themselves (been there, it's not straightforward!). From a commercial point of view, it would be a lot of work, just to support a tiny proportion of their market. A lot of work to support a competitor. Not exactly a good business decision!

Contrast that with Linux, where new distros are being released all the time - every 6 months, of course, in the case of Ubuntu - so it's much easier for them to ensure they are compatible with other OSs that they have to co-exist with. Linux is growing in popularity, but in the desktop arena it is very much a minority OS, and is likely to remain so for many years - while they have that position, then of course they will have to ensure that they "play nicely" with other OSs. Again, it's a business decision. You can bet that it would be different if the situation was reversed!

In practice, as I said earlier, it's very easy to ensure that Windows can coexist with Linux.

I use both Windows and Linux (even the Unity desktop manager in some cases!), and both have pros and cons, and neither is perfect. It's important to remain objective - which rarely happens in Windows vs Linux conversations because many people have strong opinions. With that in mind, please let's try to keep this thread on-topic

[Yorkie]

Yes, the basis of the thread is whether or not to upgrade to W10 at this stage. There was a clip on the 'Click' programme on BBC TV this morning showing the 'facial recognition' facility by which simply sitting in front of the PC monitor caused it to recognise the authorised user and the PC booted up instantly.  From what little I could glean from the clip, disregarding the facial recognition, the fast boot up would be a real boon.

I'm not personally interested in other operating systems - I think that's for enthusiasts who enjoy tinkering with software (loosely equivalent to wanting to know what goes on under a car bonnet). I just want my PC to come on when I press the button and to stay on till I switch it off, and in that regard, I've always been very satisfied with Windows as an OS right from the outset, but I skipped Vista and W8. (Went from '98 to XP to W7). W7 has never skipped a beat, neither did previous MS OSs. I think the much vaunted ability of W10 to work across other platforms is more about the survival of MS, who have rather been asleep at the wheel when it comes to the rapid expansion of tablets and smartphones, along with the steady decline of PCs, but that's an irrelevance to the likes of me.

I use Explorer but use Mozilla Thunderbird for e-mails.

I'm sure there will be lots of enthusiastic 'early adopters' of W10 who will soon be gracing us with their homespun wisdom.

No doubt some forum users will be giving it a spin before too long, and will keep us posted!

[Stockden]

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

[unrealdave]

Thanks for that Hugh