So it finally happened. Windows 10 rolled out this past Wednesday, July 29th, and I'd had my upgrade reserved since sometime back in June when that little "Get Windows 10" icon showed up in my system tray and wouldn't stop nagging me every time I opened my email. I didn't get the notification that mine was actually ready until Thursday night though, which tells you something about how staggered this rollout is. My brother in Ohio got his Wednesday afternoon. Mine sat there "preparing" for almost 30 hours.
I finally sat down Friday around 11pm, after everyone else in the house was asleep, figuring I'd let it run overnight on my old ThinkPad (a T430 I bought used off Craigslist two years ago, still going strong except the fan sounds like a hair dryer under any real load). The download itself was something like 3GB, and the actual install took close to 90 minutes with two reboots. Around 1am I gave up watching the progress bar and went to bed. Woke up Saturday to a working Windows 10 desktop, more or less.
First impression: the Start menu is back and it's genuinely fine. Not amazing, just fine, which after three years of Windows 8's full-screen tile nonsense feels like a relief. I never made peace with Windows 8 on a machine with an actual keyboard and trackpad, it always felt like software built for a device I didn't own. This one feels closer to something a person who types for a living would actually want.
Cortana I turned off within about ten minutes. Maybe she's useful on a phone, I wouldn't know, but on a desktop having a search bar ask how my day is going feels like a bit much before I've had coffee.
The part nobody mentioned
The thing that actually annoyed me, and the reason I'm writing a whole post instead of just tweeting "installed windows 10, its fine," is the privacy defaults. Go through the express setup, which is the button Microsoft pushes you toward, and it quietly turns on a long list of data sharing: your typing and speech get sent off for "personalization," your advertising ID gets shared across apps, your location history goes to Microsoft, and there's a setting buried under Settings > Privacy that shares your WiFi passwords with your contacts through something called Wi-Fi Sense, unless you dig in and shut it off yourself. I only found out about that last one because a coworker mentioned it Friday afternoon. Otherwise I'd have blown right past it without a second thought. Took me a solid twenty minutes clicking through eight or nine different toggle screens to turn most of it off, and honestly I'm still not convinced I got everything.
I get that some version of this exists on every phone OS at this point, and I'm sure somebody will tell me it's all opt-out and perfectly standard now. Doesn't mean I have to like it, and it definitely shouldn't take twenty minutes and a tip from a coworker to find the switches.
Edge, the new browser replacing Internet Explorer, got opened maybe four times total before I set Chrome as default again. It's fast, I'll give it that, noticeably faster than IE ever felt on this laptop. But half my usual extensions don't exist for it yet, and I've got no real reason to fight through that when Chrome already works exactly how I want it to.
One thing I didn't expect to care about until I looked it up: the free upgrade offer runs through next July, so if your machine hasn't gotten the notification yet, there's no reason to stay up until 1am like I did. You've got almost a full year. Though if you're on an older machine, it's worth checking the driver compatibility situation first, my printer driver flat out vanished after the upgrade and I had to go pull a fresh one straight from HP's site.
It's a genuinely solid release, honestly the best Windows has felt on this laptop in years. I just wish getting the data settings right didn't feel like a scavenger hunt tucked three menus deep. If you're upgrading this weekend, budget the extra twenty minutes for the privacy screen before you touch anything else.