With Windows 10 now released and available for free to users of Windows 7 or later, I was keen on test it out as a new user would. As I am not yet ready to upgrade my work computer, so I decided to try it out on my home machine. Because I am not waiting around until Microsoft gets around to giving me the upgrade on my home computer, I jumped the queue by going direct to Microsoft at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10. You can do it too if you have Windows 7 or 8 and if you do not mind the 3GB of download. Clicked and down it will come.
Then I started the upgrade on my personal computer.
This is where I held my breath! Will it work?
When it finished I checked it out.
The monitor lost most of it clarity, the second monitor did not work. I discovered the video driver it picked was incorrect for Windows 10. So I downloaded the Windows 10 drivers for the main monitor and tried to force it to accept it. It rejected it. After about an hour and a half solid work, I finally got it to accept the video driver. It was not easy. My wife did not make it an easier by continuously going on "I told you to wait until the problems in Windows 10 are worked out!" She is right, but I am not going to wait while the world moves forward.
After the video problem was solved I then tested a few other points.
I had a lot of trouble trying to get a virtual machine running, this maybe a big problem with people with old software, for example, I have a particularly good mortgage rate analysising software written many years ago that I could not get to work in Windows 10. If you intend to run old programs, I would not recommend upgrading.
I also found that the administrator accounts were on my computer deactivated, and now it was using my Microsoft accounts. I was quickly able to fix this problem but since people do use the administrator account for SQL, this will be another problem for people upgrading.
User access was turned on, again easy enough to fix but another point to watch.
Although I did not have this problem, a few people have reported to me that the time zone was changed during the upgrade, again not a big issue to fix but something to watch.
I then tried a few other software packages to see whether they worked. Many had small issues such as the sound system was changed, and my favourite video program had problems playing sound. It turned out to be an option in the video program, which I had to work it out myself as it was not documented on their website.
After a few hours of upgrading and a few more hours of fixing the problems, I was ready to tested our software. It worked like a charm not surprising as we have been preparing for Windows 10 for a while. While running I did notice a small but significant speed increase. Luckily I did not experience any driver issue with printers or scanners but to be fair I did not test many models. In the past, this has always been a major problem with windows upgrades. Our program works fine but some of the hardware, particularly if they are old no longer works.
Working Windows 10 after being on Windows 8 was a real pleasure. I really liked that the speed of starting up was faster.
Overall little has changed from Windows 7. Windows 10 is very much a return to Windows 7 from Windows 8.
My recommendation is that as there are still problems in doing the upgrade to hold off it you can, afterall you do have a year to do the upgrade.
If you do intend to upgrade to Windows 10 now, you do need to be or to have a window professional to do the update as there does appear to be problems. Furthermore, I expect that while running you will find some more problems too in using it as there are too many switches and options to check.
Having said that our software does run on the latest Windows 10 upgrade well.
Note: Although I do not recommend it, after upgrading from Windows 7 or 8 systems to Windows 10, if you do not like it, you can bring your old system back as Microsoft have made it easy to downgrade back.
