Having been an IT consultant before I retired, it will not
be a surprise that I was one of the first in the queue to get Windows 10
installed on my laptop. As no doubt other less technically enthusiastic souls
will be considering it in the weeks and months to come I thought I’d share my
experiences and views after a month of using the new version.
Firstly, the upgrade. I was impressed at how easy and clean
Microsoft had made the process. You could say it is in three parts.
Part One happens once you ask Microsoft to give you the
upgrade. To do this, look for the Windows 10 icon in your system tray – that’s
the bit at the bottom right hand end of your screen. The W10 icon looks like a
perspective monochrome picture of the English St George’s flag. If you don’t
see it there, you are not up to date on updates to your current Windows
version, and you really should be, as mostly these are about fixing security
flaws. For more info, follow the instructions on this Microsoft page: http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/windows-10-upgrade.
Anyway, once you have requested the upgrade, you will need to wait a few days
as Windows 10 software will download to your computer in the background. It’s
about the size of a third of an HD movie, so won’t happen quickly.
Part Two is preparing for the upgrade. You should take a
backup of your computer as there is always a small risk of things going wrong
enough that you need to recover your previous version. If you are already
backing up your files to the cloud (e.g. Google Drive, BT Cloud or similar) –
and if you are not then you should be! – then all you need to do is create a
‘Restore point’. See Microsoft’s instructions here: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows7/create-a-restore-point.
Otherwise, Google ‘create a Windows system image’ and follow guidance. Note
that a system image (essentially, a complete copy of your hard drive) will
require an external storage device with as much capacity as your current hard
drive usage.
Part Three, at last, you kick off the upgrade – Microsoft
will let you know when it is ready and provide a nice automated process. Mind
you it will take a long time: in my case a couple of hours, and you need to be
around to answer the occasional prompt.
But having done all this, is it worth it?
Well, Microsoft claims to have much improved the boot-up
time, but although it might be a bit quicker, there’s no significant gain. The
home screen comes up quicker, but there are still things going on in the
background and response times initially are a bit slow. Just hum “You’d be
surprised what I can do, When I’m starting Windows” to George Formby’s well
known ditty whilst you wait.
Overall the look and feel is a bit more modern and clean,
albeit a bit too small at times (the slider bars at the right and lower edge of
a window are quite hard to find and require more precision to click and drag
accurately).
As with Windows 8, you have to work much harder on setting
up the launch screen than in earlier versions, which were based on the Start
menu or on desktop shortcuts. However, the desktop shortcuts work just as well
as ever and remain in place after upgrading. You lose the ‘recently opened
programs’ list – oh and don’t forget that programs are now called Apps. I find
it hard to think of Word or Excel as an app, but that’s modern thinking. I
would like a notifications panel for things like latest emails and upcoming
appointments, either in the Start menu or on the desktop, but I haven’t worked
out yet how to make that work properly. The available information on how to set
up and optimise your desktop for your preferred way of working is pretty scant,
even from the Googlesphere.
Then there are the new features: Edge and Cortana, both of
which aren’t great at the moment.
Edge is the new
browser replacing the late and not much lamented Internet Explorer. It is
fairly quick, but spoils the effect by waiting for images to load before it
lets you scroll. At least you don’t seem to get the annoying movement up and down of
text as the browser rearranges the page to put images in, like you get with
Chrome.
One issue to note with Edge: if you currently use IE, it
will import those bookmarks. If you use Chrome, and you try to import your
Chrome bookmarks, it annoyingly reverses the order of them. And once there, it
is nearly impossible to change the order or rearrange them – for some reason
Microsoft hasn’t put that facility in. I am still sticking on balance with
Chrome and occasionally Firefox. Maybe it’s that Microsoft wants you to use
Cortana to access your favourite web pages, except that...
Cortana, the much
heralded ‘digital assistant’, isn’t available yet for UK
users. So you can’t use it or try it out, unless you are prepared to set your
Windows location as the USA, and accept all the Americanisms that go with that.
One last point about Windows 10 is that just like Google, it
assumes the right to collect and use all sorts of personal data from your
usage. If you are nervous about Privacy issues, click here for a useful TechRepublic
article that explains these and how to increase your own protection.
So for an overall summary, I’d say make sure you do upgrade
to Windows 10 whilst it is still free (Microsoft says it will be free for one
year, so upgrade by July 2016), but don’t feel the need to hurry in the short
term – Microsoft is still developing some of the features and there are rough
edges. Good luck and happy computing!
