Wednesday, August 5, 2015

The WIN TEN Experience



This is a blog of the experiences I have Installing and navigating the new Windows 10 Operating System.

Windows 10 was available to most Microsoft users on July 29, 2015, at no charge if loaded within one year from that date. Most technical reviews were highly favorable of the OS as a “step backward” from the Windows 8 (and 8.1) OS which was cited as overly tablet centric for a desktop or laptop. Most technical writers, who generally had been advance users of Win10, lauded the return of the START button as a major retrograde improvement.

Tech Specs:
I am using a Hewlett-Packard Pavilion 17 Notebook with 12 gigabytes of RAM, an AMD A10-5750 APU with Radeon HD Graphics running at 2.50 GHz. The machine is running a 64-bit OS, Windows 8.1, prior to Win10.

Microsoft is pushing eligible customers to upgrade to Win10, but the web page where you request the upgrade states that “Your notification to upgrade could come as soon as a few days or weeks” which does not inspire new users to act quickly. Most reviewers recommend you wait a few weeks or months while Microsoft works out the inevitable kinks of a new OS. I made my request on Monday, August 3 – five days after the initial release. Let’s see how that works out.
I requested the upgrade at about 11:00am on the first Monday after release, figuring that would be a good stress test on the Microsoft delivery system. Told to wait patiently for “days or weeks,” I went to lunch. When I checked back in at 1:00pm that day, I had the notification that my Win10 was ready for me to download.
July 29 had been a busy day for Microsoft servers, and I expected some speed issues with the download. While some users report that the Win 8.1 upgrade was 6.08 GB, my install directory is only 4.08 GB. The download took ten minutes, beginning at 1:02pm. I benchmarked my WIFI download speed at about 40 MB/second.
Of course, downloading is not installing, so Windows recommended I relax while it activated the installation – which took about 45 minutes. After numerous progress bars, cozy messages form Microsoft, and lots of blue screens and restarts, the deed was done. I logged in using my previous credentials, and bingo…it looked pretty much like Win 8.1. My custom desktop, home screen background, and task bar were almost identical. Clicking the START gave me an abbreviated Win 8 “Tablet Tiles” on the left third of the screen, which scrolled down through the tiles instead of left-right
Almost. There were a couple of changes in program icons on the taskbar, a readily accessible search box, and the old paned window start button at the bottom left of the screen.
Oh – and I soon discovered, there was a glitch or two in the OS…
More tomorrow.

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