After burning my fingers a number of times on brand-new software, I'm always reluctant to jump into early versions of any software. As well as that, we are supposed to have 12 months in which to decide to take advantage of the free upgrade. OTOH, Windows 10 seems to be getting good reviews, so I was wondering if any brave souls had yet taken the plunge.
As for why Microsoft are giving away this upgrade, this article gives an interesting insight.
Finally decided to bite the bullet and installed Win10 about 7 days ago now. Everything works and haven’t had any real problems at all. I’m quite surprised but relieved!
I only commented yesterday (as OH has gone from 8 to 10) that 10 looks much more like my 7. I never bothered going up to 8. He seemed to like it but I preferred 7. We have 2 laptops one with 7 & one with 8 (now 10). I always preferred to pick up the 7.
I think MS have listened and as you say tried to avoid losing face but i'm happy with 10 so I will also upgrade when the kids go back to school.
Now that the operating system backs up its own mistakes and re-uses them after a reboot the age-old Helpdesk solution of advising the user to reboot to solve problems has bitten the dust. The sfc tool is taking over, aided by the "Repair" facility in Control Panel, Programs. All Win10 users will soon become very well acquainted with both these, I suspect.
I hear that the Microsoft login is causing problems as well, possibly the Critical error one Peter Bird describes above. MS are looking into it, several suggested fixes are proven failures, and yet again one wonders how this wasn't fixed before release - discussions about it started soon after beta testing commenced, and continued up to late July this year. Perhaps, as in the past, MS need a larger sample of machines reporting the error to diagnose, and if you have not disabled the facility for MS to be alerted to all errors, they will be examining all affected machines - if they can be booted up to log on to the internet.
My ex-win7 machine is reporting a mismatch of drivers/software in the Dolby Advanced Audio, an old chestnut which first surfaced when Win 7 was launched. I will ignore it for now.
Thanks Brian just did that and infected files were found and repaired. I'll see what happens next ..
Thanks again
This is just the sort of thing I've come across so frequently with newly released software. However much testing is done in advance, today's software can meet just so many combinations of circumstances that it's bound to fail sometimes.
As I understand it, the 'free upgrade' offer will last for 12 months, and I'd prefer to wait. Does anyone know if it really is 12 months, or is that just a rumour?
Windows 10 downloaded ok and all went well for the first couple of days then, out of the blue I had this message in a red pop-up read
" Critical Error - Start Menu And Cortana Aren't Working"
"We'll try To Fix It Next Time You Sign In"
This basically blocked the machine which gave me no access to the menu etc So I had to force the shut down. I restarted and had the same problem. I closed down again and left it. I eventually got the system back to normal after a further two attemts.
There seems to be a bug in the system which provokes this problem. Has anyone else had this problem with W10 ?
I'm seriously considering uninstalling W10 and going back to W8.1 whilst I have the one month rollback option.
Any thoughts anyone ?
After successful upgrades to all but one Windows 8.1 laptop, I bit the bullet and downloaded Windows 10 to the Windows 7 one, also our oldest, which had never received an invitation to reserve Win 10. This went smoothly too, Office 365 worked without a hitch and so did everything else.
I would still advise any non-techies to back up all files and settings, to check they have installation media or know where they can download all important programs, and to detach any USB drives during the upgrade. However, it is a DIY job and if anyone is reluctant to do the job on their own, and can log in here on an alternative machine, help will be here while they upgrade if the more technically experienced know in advance that they need to be on call. I, for one, would be happy to help. Send a reply to this note if you need a bit of moral support. If you prefer to wait a few weeks or months, that's fine.
Upgades all going fairly smoothly here.
I forced Windows 10 onto 2 machines rather than wait.....
Dell M6500 laptop: Only suffered from sound crackles which is common. No big deal and doubtless will be patched soon
Home brew Asus X99 5820K: Perfect install, No problems at all.
3 more machines have now also been done with no problems at all following the reserve and wait method.
Dell T3500, 16GB Ram GTX660
Dell OptiPlex 745 Q6600 4GB Ram
HP DC7800 SFF Q6600 8GB Ram
Only half a dozen to go now :)
Ps, Anybody need a Dell T7500 with a 6 core Xeon 5670 and 24GB of ram? If you edit video this thing scrubs back and forth through 1080p footage like a boss.
Good luck!
Hi Diana,
Thanks for that, I too have no real desire to offer Microsoft any more than the strict minimum, it is bad enough Google knowing more about me than I'd like, and as for this forum, well let's just say that I'm not overly fond of every post being replicated on Facebook, but hey...
Interesting that you mention CCTV and IP cams, I recently watched a really interesting BlackHat Con talk on the vulnerabilities of a whole gammut of IP cams, ranging from the very the cheap to the very expensive - highly enlightening, although very un-reassuring !
Good tip about Office 2013 / Office 365, will keep that in mind.
Very strangely this did not crop up immediately but this evening my spouse reported that he could not send mail - he is the main user of Outlook for our household as I use webmail.
I went straight to the techie forums and Brian English's option 1 worked. If you do not select "Command Prompt (Admin") it will not work, even seasoned techies have skipped this and failed.
Thanks for publicising it, Brian, it is causing headaches throughout smaller businesses, which is heartbreaking to me as no competent IT team should be rolling this out without adequate user testing which would have shown this up. That Microsoft were not aware of it until TODAY is absolutely incredible - Outlook is hardly an unusual third-party application, for heaven's sake. I did wonder if my easy ride into Win 10 had been too good to be true! No doubt more weevils will crawl out of the woodwork in time.
Option 2 appears to have worked for me. Mind you it was half an hour getting there.
I turned off all the available options during the install. No, I don't want MS to be kept informed so that I only see relevant advertising, I have Ad blocker installed. I don't need to tell them which URLs I read either, so I have Disconnect installed. (The latter speeded up performance of the BBC News page enormously since Auntie started monitoring which of their articles won most readers). I do worry about nosey old Microsoft, and nosey old Google, and am a bit concerned about Facebook's ambition to tell everyone everything about everyone else but what the heck, my whole family tree is published on line and my mobile phone will tell anyone who wants to know where I am and probably who I'm with. However I live in a rural French village so I have no secrets: most of my news is known throughout the population before it reaches me, and I like it that way!
Btw, I have installed Windows 10 on all my Win 8.1 laptops now except the one in England, only my own Win 7 machine is awaiting the download but as the home network is working fine and all the necessary data files are visible to all machines, with One Drive files shared successfully, I'm in no rush. Both the Swann CCTV systems are controllable from all laptops as are all IP cameras in UK and France. Logmein is working fine on the French and UK hosts.
Only slight problem was fixed by a chat with Microsoft and arose from installing Office 365 following upgrading to Win 10 on a laptop which already had Word and Excel 2013 installed. I didn't want to lose the original licences in case we don't continue with the Office 365 subscription, and since the upgrade neither installation of Office appeared in Apps (and desktop icons disappeared) so couldn't be opened. I reported this to MS and was advised to find the programs in Control Panel, Programs and repair Office 365. This did the trick and safeguards my licence while enabling me to use Office 365.
Can't quite believe how easily this rollout has gone.......
Hi Carol - thanks for your reply. Strangely enough, I have reloaded Windows 10 in an attempt to get my missing Icons back (in Start Menu) but, was unsuccessful. However, Money now works perfectly. I checked the registry and the value is 9.11.10240.16384 i.e. it is working with the ending of 5 digits. Odd, but I am happy to have Money return. Now I have to look for an answer to my missing Icons.
I have a Sony Vaio laptop with Windows 7 on it. Apparently Sony don’t own Vaio any more and won’t be providing drivers and support for 10 for some considerable time, if ever. I’ll probably stick with 7 unless they have a change of mind. I would imagine there are a lot of angry Vaio owners out there.
Totally agree with this. I have done the free download. After the hours and hours of whirring and clicking and grinding involved, the end result was pretty disappointing. Nothing fantastic - you just have to spend ages rearranging icons and getting all your preferred choices, favourite places and Go To places etc into a place where you can find them again. I honestly cannot see much difference from Windows 8.1. Considering it is offered free it cannot be too much sought after!
I see nothing in the current discussion about privacy concerns, or the amount of personal data that users willingly give to Microsoft. By default, Win10 sends a lot more of your personal to its servers. Has anyone here any experience in reducing the amount of data harvested ?
Following with interest. I have downloaded the upgrade but not yet installed it. I am waiting until I have more time to do so.
I know I know I never was a fan of 8. But I currently have my pc modded to look like a mac (I can dream!) even if it works like windows. I did like 10 and will definitely go back to it but I honestly tried everything with the audio but nothing worked. I made edits to the registry, I tried multiple drivers, old ones, new ones, windows ones, MSI specific ones, realtek ones and absolutely nothing worked for me apart from downgrading the quality and running that batch file every time I woke it up. I was learning to live with that until I discovered that running a virtual machine was nigh on impossible. I guess WIndows wants you to use Hyper-V (Yes I also uninstalled that but no good). The only thing I am not entirely happy about is having less freedom with some settings. C'est la Vie as they say somewhere abroad ;-)
Maybe I need a bumper sticker for my monitor "My other Pc is a Mac!"