So I’ve finally made the leap on my main home machine and upgraded to Windows 10. What have I found out so far…
- Nvidia Really really really don’t want to support older Graphics cards anymore. I had to change my ageing but perfectly usable (under Windows 7 and Window 8/8.1) 7800GTX card which came with a Dell PC that I previously owned. The Get Windows X tool told me that my graphics card wasn’t compatible and that was that, no upgrade for me. After pulling that Graphics card out and replacing it with another fairly old (but supported under Windows 10) graphics card I thought that re-running the GWX.exe tool would elicit a “Ooooh, you’ve changed your graphics card to a supported one; you can now update to Windows 10”. Well I guess that would be too user friendly for the arrogant Microsoft… nope I had to dig around in the registry and change the “UpgradeExperienceIndicators” from Red to Green as listed here: http://www.askvg.com/fix-get-windows-10-upgrade-app-icon-is-missing-in-taskbar/ then re-run the GWX.exe tool. It was difficult to know if this was going to work but it did for me.
- System Restore is disabled by Default. Another major change by Microsoft without properly informing users. For years, I like millions of other Windows users around the world, have relied on System Restore (Similar to Time Machine in Mac OSX) as a get out of jail free card when guarding against updates upgrades gone wrong or against dodgy driver updates or other risky tasks. I think we all know that it is no substitute to a proper backup strategy (just like “Snapshots / Checkpoints” aren’t in Hyper-V, VMWare etc), but for Microsoft to quietly disable it on a machine that has been upgraded where it was previously switched on is arrogant at best if not downright nasty towards their installed user base. “Hey we’re giving Windows 10 away for free, we can do what we like”. More arrogance from a company that is slowly but surely losing the plot.
- Search doesn’t work on my PC and coupled with the extremely inflexible and un-customisable new Start menu it becomes downright frustrating.. previously rather than work ones way around the start menu to find an application we could simply type the first few characters of the App name and search would almost always find Applications first. It now appears to not bother searching apps at all. To top that off, it seems that Windows 10 refuses to let a myriad of apps occupy space in their precious start menu.. so far I can find no trace of “Putty”, “Visio” or “Notepad++”. Despite reinstalling Notepad++ I can still find no entry in the start menu and the lack of search is just ridiculous considering it always just worked ever since Vista. More Microsoft arrogance or a bug in the upgrade? I guess I’ll have to find out. So far I seem to have just managed to break search completely by following instructions found online for regenerating the search cache. Probably related to the fact that Microsoft tell me Cortana isn’t available in my region (UK / British English…. erm what?!?) !
- I can’t possibly tell yet if it’s related but I have Hardware RAID in my main PC with two Raid 1 mirror sets, one of which promptly broke straight away after the Windows 10 upgrade. After two failed rebuild attempts it has in fact managed to rebuild itself. I’ve no proof (yet), but my beady eye is looking in your direction Microsoft !
To sum up my experience so far? Mixed. PC seems ever so slightly slower. As per usual Microsoft appear to have changed a number of things for no good reason (which is my experience of nearly every Windows upgrade since day one (possibly bar the Original Windows NT / NT4 both of which I found a joy to use after the astonishing mess that was Windows 3.11). I guess Satya Nadella still has a very very long way to go to turn the juggernaut that is Microsoft around.