So Windows 10 came out yesterday and I've been putting off writing about it because everyone and their uncle is doing the "here's what's new in Windows 10" post this week. I don't really want to be that. What I do want to talk about is the actual experience of upgrading a real machine that I actually use for work, because it wasn't the smooth thing Microsoft's keynote made it look like.
Quick backstory for anyone who hasn't had a Windows PC open since May: there's been this little white flag icon sitting in the system tray for weeks now, part of the "Get Windows 10" app (GWX, if you've seen people call it that online). It reserves your free upgrade and then just sits there. Mine had been nagging me on and off since early June with a little popup every few days asking if I wanted to "reserve" my copy. I did, mostly to make the popups stop, and then didn't think about it again until yesterday morning when it told me the download was ready.
The actual install on my desktop, an aging i5 box I built back in 2012, took about 55 minutes from clicking "upgrade now" to landing on a working desktop, and that's after a roughly 2.8GB download that had already happened in the background over the previous week without me really noticing. Not bad, honestly. My laptop was a different story. It hung at 33% for close to twenty minutes and I genuinely thought I'd bricked it before it finally crawled forward.
Here's my actual complaint, and its not a small one: my Brother laser printer, which has worked fine through three separate Windows versions on this machine, just stopped printing after the upgrade. No error, no dialog, it just silently fails and the job disappears from the queue. I had to go dig up a driver from Brother's site by hand because Windows Update wasn't offering one. If you're planning to upgrade a machine you actually need for work tomorrow, maybe don't do it on a deadline day like I did.
The good stuff is genuinely good though, and I don't want to undersell that. The Start menu is back and it's the thing I missed most about Windows 7 for the entire miserable Windows 8 era. Cortana works reasonably well for setting reminders, though I still feel a little weird talking to my desktop computer. Edge, the new browser replacing Internet Explorer, is fast and feels like it was built in this decade, which after years of IE is honestly kind of a big deal even if nobody's going to write a whole post about "browser feels normal now."
The thing that bugs me, and this is the part that actually matters longer term, is that Windows 10 Home doesn't give you a real option to defer updates. They just install. There's a lot of talk in forums already about the update and telemetry settings buried in the privacy menu, the ones that are opted in by default and take a good ten minutes of clicking through submenus to turn most of the way off. I get that Microsoft wants this to behave more like a service than a product you buy once, but I like knowing what's happening to my own machine before it happens, not after.
One dumb thing I'll admit: I spent longer than I'd like to admit trying to figure out why my desktop background reverted to that hideous default Windows 10 wallpaper after the upgrade, before realizing it just didn't carry my old one over. Not a big deal, just mildly annoying in the way small settings resets always are.
If you're on the fence about upgrading right now, my actual advice, not the "wait and see" hedge everyone gives, is this: do it on your secondary machine first, not your main one, and definitely not on a day you need to get anything done. I like where this is heading a lot more than I expected to. I just wish the first 24 hours with it hadn't involved me elbow deep in a printer driver folder at 11pm on a Wednesday.