Windows 10 upgrade - yay or nay?

[rogerzilla]

Win 8 sucks a very large one so Win10 terrifies me.  When's the end of extended support for Win7?

EDIT: 2020.  So I won't be going for Win 10!

[Afasoas]

I still don't know what's wrong with Win 8/8.1 (relative to Windows 7). The under-hood optimisations really make up for the ill-thought out UI.

Currently in the throes of upgrading developer machines here from Win Server 2008 (Vista) to Win Server 2012 r2 (Win 8.1).
I rue the day when I'll never set eyes on Vista again.

[David Martin]

Apparently windows 10 will run on a raspberry pi..

[Zipperhead]

I still don't know what's wrong with Win 8/8.1 (relative to Windows 7). The under-hood optimisations really make up for the ill-thought out UI.

I use 7 at work, 8 at home (latest of versions of both). I find 7 to be much more reliable, my work machine gets rebooted every two or 3 weeks, normally it's patches that cause reboots. Home machine rarely goes more than a week before it has to be rebooted to fix some broken part of windows.

My home machine is much newer hardware than work (6 months vs. 12)

[barakta]

I sent out the following to all our students who have 'assistive software' on their computers which may not be 100% compatible for the first few months of win 10 rollout.

(click to show/hide)

Microsoft will soon release an automatic free update to Windows version 10 for computers running Windows 8.1 or Windows 7 Service Pack 2.  The update is irreversible and may cause compatibility problems with assistive software such as JAWS, Dragon, Zoomtext, Texthelp etc which you may have provided through DSA or similar.

We recommend that you avoid this windows 10 upgrade for two or three months until assistive software developers have had an opportunity to update their software to be fully compatible with Windows 10.

You may wish to follow the appropriate software developers' social media (twitter, facebook) or contact them directly to check the compatibility of specific software with the new Windows before you upgrade. You can usually search for the name of your software and Google will show the supplier – their social media is linked from their website. Many of them are active and friendly on social media if you ask questions.

If you have an ongoing DSA award and you are advised by the software developer that your hardware or software version is too old to work with Windows 10, contact your DSA Needs Assessment Centre for advice. Tell them your name, customer reference number and the specific software which is not accessible. 

[Kim]

I sent out the following to all our students who have 'assistive software' on their computers which may not be 100% compatible for the first few months of win 10 rollout.

(click to show/hide)

Microsoft will soon release an automatic free update to Windows version 10 for computers running Windows 8.1 or Windows 7 Service Pack 2.  The update is irreversible and may cause compatibility problems with assistive software such as JAWS, Dragon, Zoomtext, Texthelp etc which you may have provided through DSA or similar.

We recommend that you avoid this windows 10 upgrade for two or three months until assistive software developers have had an opportunity to update their software to be fully compatible with Windows 10.

You may wish to follow the appropriate software developers' social media (twitter, facebook) or contact them directly to check the compatibility of specific software with the new Windows before you upgrade. You can usually search for the name of your software and Google will show the supplier – their social media is linked from their website. Many of them are active and friendly on social media if you ask questions.

If you have an ongoing DSA award and you are advised by the software developer that your hardware or software version is too old to work with Windows 10, contact your DSA Needs Assessment Centre for advice. Tell them your name, customer reference number and the specific software which is not accessible. 

IOW "Don't come crying to me." 

[Afasoas]

I still don't know what's wrong with Win 8/8.1 (relative to Windows 7). The under-hood optimisations really make up for the ill-thought out UI.

I use 7 at work, 8 at home (latest of versions of both). I find 7 to be much more reliable, my work machine gets rebooted every two or 3 weeks, normally it's patches that cause reboots. Home machine rarely goes more than a week before it has to be rebooted to fix some broken part of windows.

My home machine is much newer hardware than work (6 months vs. 12)

If your corporate IT infrastructure is 'managed', then a lowly sysadmin probably gets the job of scrutinising each patch to see whether it's actually required and then only approving it once it has been tested on a workstation not dissimilar to yours. If so, this will somewhat smooth out the process.

I 'try' and do a similar thing here, however it's been some months since I've approved any updates on account of general busyness and upcoming OS upgrade.

I've three boxes running Windows 8.1 at home and the only problem I've had with updates has been the occasional over-writing of the boot partition on my multi-boot desktop. That said, given the issues I've seen documented with Micro$haft patches, I accept I've probably just been lucky.

Apparently windows 10 will run on a raspberry pi..

I very much doubt this will be a 'full' version of Windoze. Most likely a reincarnation of Windows RT which IIRC only ran Metro style apps.

I sent out the following to all our students who have 'assistive software' on their computers which may not be 100% compatible for the first few months of win 10 rollout.

(click to show/hide)

Microsoft will soon release an automatic free update to Windows version 10 for computers running Windows 8.1 or Windows 7 Service Pack 2.  The update is irreversible and may cause compatibility problems with assistive software such as JAWS, Dragon, Zoomtext, Texthelp etc which you may have provided through DSA or similar.

We recommend that you avoid this windows 10 upgrade for two or three months until assistive software developers have had an opportunity to update their software to be fully compatible with Windows 10.

You may wish to follow the appropriate software developers' social media (twitter, facebook) or contact them directly to check the compatibility of specific software with the new Windows before you upgrade. You can usually search for the name of your software and Google will show the supplier – their social media is linked from their website. Many of them are active and friendly on social media if you ask questions.

If you have an ongoing DSA award and you are advised by the software developer that your hardware or software version is too old to work with Windows 10, contact your DSA Needs Assessment Centre for advice. Tell them your name, customer reference number and the specific software which is not accessible. 

I'm curious to know what accessibility improvements (if any) are included in W10.

[Zipperhead]

If your corporate IT infrastructure is 'managed', then a lowly sysadmin probably gets the job of scrutinising each patch to see whether it's actually required and then only approving it once it has been tested on a workstation not dissimilar to yours. If so, this will somewhat smooth out the process.

Nope, this is a small company so my PC at work updates with patches from Microsoft as and when they are available.

To clarify though, it's not the patches that have caused problems (and the reboots are when the patch requires a reboot to finish installing) it's in general running that I see the differences.

With Win 8 I sometimes see a drive (D) go to 100% usage, but with incredibly poor throughput - 6k per second. Or it seems like the equivalent of explorer hanging occurs, so switching between tasks is impossible.

I do prefer the win 8 task manager though

[RichL]

Not for me.  I'm using the enterprise edition of W7 with the XP emulator so that I can develop & run legacy stuff from around Y2K, written in VB6. Chances are that'll all go down the tubes with W10.

Win10 will still have Compatibility mode AFAIK

[contango]

Since it's free, I'm going to give it a go ASAP.  I can always roll back to W7 very easily if I don't like it.

I'm very tempted to install it on a virtual machine to see how it works, on the basis if I hate it I can just trash the VM without having trashed my main PC.

[Zipperhead]

Well I ran it up on a VM yesterday, several times in fact.

It looks ok, it looks like despite having some win 8 interface elements they've learnt and the start menu is there (actually there twice because a right click gives different options). Once you start playing with some of the admin options then it's just win 8/7/NT again.

It insists that all users should be identified by email address, and allows pins instead of passwords.

But, after all this time Microsoft still apparently haven't learnt. Whether you go for the simple install or the custom install there's no way of having users home directories on another drive. Everything on drive c again.

It looks like there are ways of doing it, but you have to really go into a custom setup (press a magic key combination at the right point), then write a config file for the installer.

[De Sisti]

Would installing classic shell help?

[Zipperhead]

I need to play with it a bit more to see how the UI is after installing some programs, but the fact that there's no easy way to control which drive users accounts go onto either at install time or afterwards is a major design failing.

<microsoft>look how pretty the new UI is?</microsoft>

<me>but underneath the skin not much has changed and its still built around PC design and hardware from 20 years ago</me>

[Mr Larrington]

It insists that all users should be identified by email address, and allows pins instead of passwords.

Win8 already allows PINs

But, after all this time Microsoft still apparently haven't learnt. Whether you go for the simple install or the custom install there's no way of having users home directories on another drive. Everything on drive c again.

It looks like there are ways of doing it, but you have to really go into a custom setup (press a magic key combination at the right point), then write a config file for the installer.

This is a Massive Fucking Annoyance.  While you can relocate some directories under the "Users" tree in Win 8, if there's a way to move the whole lot it continues to elude me.  Ironic given the debt NT owes to VMS

[RichL]

You can relocate all the user-accessible folders from an individual user profile (Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures, and so on), easily. For example: http://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-7-and-ssds-cutting-your-system-drive-down-to-size/.

You *can* relocate your entire user profile using some enterprise tools - sysprep and such - but it's really not recommended and apparently can have side effects, such as inhibiting OS upgrades/installs

[Biggsy]

Why can't you relocate the whole lot with a junction or symbolic link?  Should be no side effects then.

(I appreciate it might be difficult to make the link from inside the installation, but it should be possible from outside at least).

[RichL]

It's a bit more fundamental than a symlink.

Here's another link to another thing on the interwebs that gives me uncontestable authority in this matter

http://www.zdnet.com/article/dont-move-your-windows-user-profiles-folder-to-another-drive/

[Biggsy]

That doesn't convince me.  They've tried altering settings of where Windows looks for the profile, but missed some, so of course it doesn't completely work, whereas a junction should redirect everything.  Has anyone actually tried it (not just tried to make the link, but succeeded in making the link but with the link failing to work)?

Otherwise I'll try myself when I eventually install W10.

Anyway, moving individual folders will solve people's storage problems.  Doing the whole profile would be just proving a point.

[Mr Larrington]

I had a look at a Several of sites yesterday and all agreed that relocating the Users folder in its entirety was Considered Harmful so having relocated the ones which Windows makes easy to move I decided to leave it at that.

[Vince]

I had issues with XP, where a high latency on a waking disk drive cause Windows to lose your profile and substitute its own empty one.

[Mr Larrington]

For reason I cannot fathom Windows has decided to rename some of my folders so I cannot find them.  On Wednesday that one was called "Bangin' Choons", Mr Ballmer, and I did not give your permish to change it to the rather prosaic "Music".

Now stop it.

[Dibdib]

Quick heads-up for anyone upgrading to 10 - the installer apparently silently uninstalls antivirus/antimalware software, and by default, shares an encrypted version of your wifi passwords with Facebook friends and Skype contacts:

http://reviews.gizmodo.com/why-the-hell-is-windows-10-sharing-my-wi-fi-passwords-1719900675
https://twitter.com/nexusfandom/status/626505811708219392

[Kim]

Quick heads-up for anyone upgrading to 10 - the installer apparently silently uninstalls antivirus/antimalware software, and by default, shares an encrypted version of your people you know's wifi passwords with Facebook friends and Skype contacts:

FTFY (apologies for the crime against grammar)

[Dibdib]

Good point. That's enough for me not to upgrade any time soon, I don't have the energy to find what else they've ballsed up.

(Does buying a Mac a week ago count as sufficiently smug for this kind of thing?)

[Kim]

Good point. That's enough for me not to upgrade any time soon, I don't have the energy to find what else they've ballsed up.

Not upgrading to Windows 10 doesn't solve the problem, though.  You can always upgrade and turn the damn thing off.  The problem is your friends, with whom you've shared your wifi password, upgrading to Windows 10 and them propagating that to all *their* friends.  Much like how Google have your phone number, even if you never gave it to them, because one of your friends almost certainly has.

(s/friends/employees/ if you don't think the "the friend of my friend is not my friend, the friend of my friend is quite often a tit" rule is enough reason that this is a bad thing)

I suppose we all have to change our SSIDs to $ssid_optout now, or frisk people for illicit Windows devices before allowing them access.