Anyone following the Windows 10 previews?

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Denyer
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Anyone following the Windows 10 previews?

Post by Denyer »

It's bearable enough at the moment to have me seriously considering a freebie upgrade rather than wait another five years with Windows 7, although I strongly suspect ClassicShell would be one of the first things I installed. Anyone tried it for more than a casual mess around?

The progressive forced obsolescence of the Control Panel in favour of a tablet style Settings application that's still missing most of the functionality is less of a selling point, but would assume there's a way to go and more bugs and configuration issues will be shaken out in the first six months or so. The preview has naturally concentrated on restricting what users can change in order to emphasis interaction with Microsoft's latest and greatest interface abominations.

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Warcry
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Post by Warcry »

Between Win 8 and Vista before it, that's two out of the last three operating systems that have been absolutely horrible to use right out of the box. So right now I have zero interest in being an early adopter of any new Microsoft OSes. Unless it gets amazing reviews, I'll probably stick with Windows 7 on my laptop until it dies or MS stops supporting it with security fixes, whichever comes first.

Honestly, I thought they were barking up the wrong tree with the whole "one OS for PCs, tablets, phones and Xboxes!" idea to start with and absolutely nothing that Windows 8 had to offer has changed my mind. Especially since Windows phones and tablets are almost comically unpopular compared to their IOS and Android competition, which leads me to believe it's not even a good mobile OS and the compromises on the PC end were all for naught.
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Skyquake87
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Post by Skyquake87 »

Has anyone taken the plunge with 10 yet? I've been wondering about reserving the 'free' upgrade, but my girlfriend's laptop is a bit of a mess from the last 'free' update they offered (Vista to Windows 7 - wont run any windows updates, and each time I've tried to troubleshoot it, you get a new error message) and some people at my work have encountered hardware problems from downloading it (laptop mouse pointer thingies disappearing and/ or not working being a common problem), and I don't know if there's going to be much advantage for me over what 7 offers.
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Denyer
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Post by Denyer »

The ****ers have probably already downloaded it silently to take up a few gigabytes of space regardless of any reservation, judging by other people's experiences.

Early reasonably positive experience with the previews was unfortunately marred by the state of things when it actually got released. Plus one of the last previews ****ed the VM I was running it in completely, becoming unbootable.

I'm waiting to see how things settle down by next year for systems I actually need, and have fed a sacrificial laptop to 10. Brief write-up here;

http://virtualdebris.co.uk/blog/03572A34

Other people I know got stung by the 8.1 upgrade and driver issues, and similar issues are being reported with this one. 10 isn't as much of a change going from 8.x but it's fairly horrible as an interface change from 7.

Barring any hardware mishaps, I might coast on through to 2020.
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Skyquake87
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Post by Skyquake87 »

Thanks, that's really helpful! :) I don't do a lot of computer stuff (posting on here, emailing and doing the odd bit of shopping is as sexy as my online world gets), so there doesn't seem to be much of a need to get giddy with an upgrade. Especially as I wont be using a tablet anytime soon (I like having buttons to press, rather than a screen to jab at like a caged animal trying to obtain food from a dispenser. Your experience of touch screen may vary.).

What was most of interest was all the stuff they don't tell you about. The file sharing and broadband leeching were interesting.
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Denyer
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Post by Denyer »

Tablets are great for bits of video or looking things up (Android's had swipe predictive text entry for ages, so not too much pecking with a stylus) but I've just gotten a small separate monitor for watching anything longer -- all done through one cable, which is feasible with a good USB 3.0 hub. That's touch screen as well, although haven't bothered trying to set that part up.
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