Several people asked me yesterday about the Windows 10 update, but we didn’t have time to discuss it, so here’s an article covering the Windows-10 upgrade.
There’s a lot of things to like about Windows 10. The user interface is back to that of Windows 7, with the taskbar and start button. You’re not going to have to learn a new user interface. If you use multiple displays, they’ve extended the taskbar into the other displays, and you can set it so that the icons for individual windows show up on the taskbar for the display where the window is displayed. That’s very useful! There’s also display background slideshow options that have really gorgeous photos that change from time to time. There’s a new feature for the start button where you can right-click on the start button, and get a menu that includes most of the administrative tools like Control Panel, networking, computer properties and so forth – handy for people like me. There may be some other nifty features that I didn’t run across in my almost two months of running it.
Alas, there are also issues.
There’s a new search feature called “Cortana” – apparently Microsoft’s answer to Apple’s “Siri” which is very intrusive and cannot be disabled or removed. Basically it ships much of your activity to Microsoft to enable a better experience or something like that.
Another issue for me is that “Windows XP Mode” is discontinued. XP Mode is a virtualization tool that allows running a copy of Windows XP in a window on Windows 7. I believe that was only available on Win7 Pro or Enterprise – the “Home” version didn’t have it. If you need to run legacy applications that only work on Windows XP as I do, then you need XPMode. There is a workaround for this: it is possible to set up Hyper-V services and create a virtual machine in HyperV that will run Windows XP. HyperV is actually a much more robust virtual engine. But you have to have a licensed copy of Windows XP to install, and there’s a fair amount of work to get it going rather than having it built-in with XPMode.
As usual, some of your older devices aren’t going to work on Windows 10. I had problems with my Seagate external USB drives, but not my Maxtor or Toshiba drives. One of the Seagate drives is brand new, so it’s not an issue of it being older technology. I also have a USB network interface which didn’t work on Windows 10. It’s not that old either. So it’s likely that some of your peripherals aren’t going to work on Windows 10.
Finally, and this was the real kicker for me: it absolutely killed performance on my laptop. My laptop is an AMD 4-core 1.6Ghz with 12Gb of memory. It’s about 4 years old – not new, but reasonably good performance machine. After Windows 10 was installed, the CPU was mostly pegged at 100% or close to it. About the least I could get it down to was 30% what with getting rid of background tasks as much as possible and so forth. I just couldn’t remedy the load. So my performance is poor, my fan runs at high speed all the time, and I have poor battery life when running off the battery. Windows 7 averaged about 20% or lower unless I was actively doing something to raise it. For this reason, I backed it down to Windows 7. Thank goodness for good backups!
My recommendation is as follows. If you are buying a new computer that has Windows 10, you’ll probably be very happy with it as long as you’re prepared to replace some peripherals, especially older ones. If you need to run a virtual XP instance for legacy applications, that can be done too – if you have a licensed copy of XP.
If you have an older computer that isn’t really high-powered, it’s likely to render your computer almost unusable. I’d recommend against doing the upgrade. If you do decide to do it, make sure you have a full backup that is capable of restoring your computer to its pre-Win10 state. I used backup software that creates a recovery disk that I could boot from and then restore the Win7 image. I also took a backup of all my files from Win10 just before I did the restore, because the restore process was going to put the computer completely back to the pre-Win10 state – which would lose any new files or changes done since the Win10 upgrade.
It is possible to turn off those pesky Windows-10 nagware pop-up windows, but the solution is a bit technical so I wouldn’t recommend doing it yourself for the casual user. We can help with getting them turned off.