So the world's kind of on fire today: Greece shut its banks over the weekend, there's a referendum coming, capital controls, the whole mess. And meanwhile I spent forty-five minutes of my Sunday clicking a tiny Windows flag in my system tray. Priorities.
You've probably seen the icon too if you're running a legit copy of Windows 7 or 8.1. It showed up in the taskbar sometime back in May, and if you click it you get this little "Get Windows 10" window with a big friendly button that says Reserve Your Free Upgrade. I'd been ignoring it for weeks out of pure stubbornness, but Microsoft made it official on June 1st: July 29th is the day, and it's free for the first year if you're upgrading from 7 or 8.1. That's a month out now. Felt like it was time to stop being difficult about it.
I clicked reserve on the desktop machine. Not the laptop. The laptop's been running Insider Program builds since the fall, and honestly it's been fine, better than fine most weeks, but I'm not putting the "free upgrade guaranteed on day one" bet on a machine I already broke on purpose.
A quick complaint about the reservation app itself
It asks for your email so it can "notify you when your upgrade is ready." Fine. But then it also wants to send you a confirmation, and the confirmation email took almost twenty minutes to show up, and for a while there I genuinely thought I'd mistyped my own address, which, after eleven years of having the same email address, felt like a personal failing rather than a Microsoft one. It arrived eventually. No harm done. Just one of those small pieces of friction that makes you go huh, is this thing actually ready.
Because that's the real question, isn't it. Not whether the reservation system works (it does, eventually) but whether the OS itself is ready. I've been on Insider builds long enough now to have opinions, and my opinion is: mostly yes. Cortana finally landing on the desktop instead of being a phone-only thing is the feature I didn't know I wanted until I had it — I use it constantly now just to set reminders while my hands are covered in dishwater, which is not a use case anyone at Microsoft probably had in mind but here we are. The new Start menu doesn't make me want to throw the machine across the room, which after three years of Windows 8's full-screen tile situation is honestly the bar clearing itself. Task View is basically just virtual desktops, which every Linux user has been quietly smug about having for two decades, and now Windows has caught up, and that's fine, I'm not too proud to say catching up counts.
What's not ready: printer drivers, in my experience, and a weird bug where the volume icon in the tray just stops responding to clicks until you restart explorer.exe. Small stuff. The kind of thing that gets patched in week one and everyone forgets about it by August. I'm not worried.
What I am mildly annoyed about, and I'll say this once and move on, is how much the reservation flow leans on that free-upgrade-for-a-year framing like it's doing you some enormous favor. It is a nice thing to do! I'm not ungrateful. But every screen in that little app has the tone of someone who wants a thank-you card, and I don't really need my operating system upgrade to have a personality. Just tell me the date and get out of my way.
Anyway. The desktop's reserved, the laptop's already three steps ahead of it on some Tuesday build nobody outside the Insider Program has heard of, and in a month I guess we'll see if the actual release feels as smooth as the last few preview builds have. I've been burned by "it'll be fine by launch" promises before (anyone remember Vista at RTM) so I'm not going to sit here and declare victory a month early. But for the first time in a long while I'm not dreading a Windows upgrade. That's worth writing down, if only so I can come back and laugh at myself in August if it all goes sideways.
Back to doomscrolling Greek bank news now. Some days the small stuff is the only stuff you can actually do anything about.