So there's this little white flag-shaped Windows icon that's been sitting in my system tray for about a week and a half now, right next to the volume and the clock, and until yesterday I genuinely didn't know what it was for. I assumed it was some update nag, ignored it, kept working. Turns out it's the "Get Windows 10" app that Microsoft's been quietly pushing out through Windows Update since late May, and yesterday (June 1st) they finally said the actual thing everyone's been guessing at: Windows 10 ships July 29th. Free upgrade if you're on Windows 7 SP1 or 8.1, and you've got a year to claim it before it presumably goes back to costing money.
I clicked the icon this morning at the office, mostly out of curiosity, and it walks you through reserving your copy so it's ready to download the day it launches. Reserving. Like it's a restaurant table. There's something a little funny about a piece of software making you RSVP to your own operating system.
I want to be into this, and mostly I am. My daily driver machine at home still runs 7, because I never bothered with 8, and I know I'm not alone there. The Start Menu debacle scared off a lot of people I know personally, myself included honestly, I tried 8.1 on a work laptop for about three months back in 2013 and went back to 7 the first chance I got. Charms bar. Who asked for the charms bar. Nobody I've ever met has said "you know what my desktop needs, a hidden sidebar that only appears when I accidentally brush the right edge of my trackpad." So the fact that 10 is bringing the Start Menu back, and apparently running the same interface whether you're on a desktop or a tablet without forcing tiles into your face the whole time, is genuinely good news to me and not just marketing.
What I keep going back and forth on is whether "free" actually means free-free or whether there's a catch buried in the terms I haven't read yet. A full year window is generous, I'll give them that. Compare that to past upgrade cycles where you'd pay eighty, a hundred bucks for a retail license and it always felt like a toll booth on your own computer. If this really is a no-strings, one-click upgrade for anyone already running a licensed 7 or 8.1 machine, that's a pretty big shift for a company that's made a lot of its money historically on exactly those license fees. I don't fully buy that it's pure altruism. My guess, and this is just a guess, is they got burned badly enough by how slowly people moved off 7 (and XP before that, for years) that they decided the smarter play is to just get everybody current in one shot and figure out the money some other way, subscriptions or services or whatever comes next.
Anyway. I reserved mine. The icon now has a little checkmark next to it instead of the flag, so I guess that means I'm in line. No idea if my ancient graphics card is going to be happy about any of this two months from now, but we'll find out in July I suppose.
Small unrelated complaint while I'm here: I spent forty minutes last night trying to get a USB drive to actually eject cleanly on this same Windows 7 box, the "safely remove hardware" dialog kept telling me a program was still using it when nothing obviously was, and I ended up just yanking it out like an animal. If 10 fixes literally nothing else I would like that specific interaction to stop happening to me. Small ask. I don't think it's unreasonable.
Also, completely separate thought that's been rattling around since last week: Google's unlimited free photo backup thing they showed off at I/O is eating my phone storage anxiety alive in the best way. I've been uploading years of photos off an old external drive just because I can, at full resolution, for nothing. That's its own post probably. I keep getting distracted mid-upload wondering how they're paying for the storage costs on the back end, but that's a problem for people smarter than me at a company much bigger than me, so I'm choosing not to worry about it today.
Back to the reserving-my-OS thing. Feels weirdly formal for a Tuesday.