So its been four days since Windows 10 dropped and I finally caved and let the update run on my main laptop Sunday night. Not my desktop, the desktop stays on 7 until I trust this thing, but the laptop I dont mind experimenting on. Its a four year old Dell Inspiron that already sounds like a hairdryer when it thinks too hard, so if anything was going to break it, this seemed like a safe place to find out.
The upgrade itself took about an hour and forty minutes, most of which was just sitting there watching the little gear spin while it told me it was "getting things ready," which is a phrase I now hate. I made coffee, came back, it was still going. Made a second coffee. Eventually it rebooted itself twice and landed on the new desktop, and okay, I get why people are excited. The Start menu is back. Actual Start menu, with actual words in it, not the full screen tile wall Windows 8 forced on everybody. I complained about that tile screen for years on here and Im not going to pretend I wasnt a little relieved to see it gone.
Cortana is fine, I guess
Cortana wants a Microsoft account and wants to know your name and location before itll do anything useful, which, sure, thats how these assistant things work now. I typed a question into the search box mostly to see what would happen and it gave me a Bing search result with some extra formatting on top. Not exactly magic. Havent tried the voice stuff yet because I dont love talking to my laptop while my roommate is in the next room, thatd just be weird.
Edge, the new browser replacing Internet Explorer, is genuinely fast to open, Ill give it that. But half my bookmarklets dont work in it and there's no extension support yet, so Im back in Chrome within about ten minutes of poking around. Maybe that changes later this year. For now its basically a browser I open to check that its there.
The thing that actually annoyed me
Heres the part that got under my skin though. Windows 10 ships with something called Wi-Fi Sense turned on by default, and what it does is let your PC share your wifi network password with your Outlook contacts, Skype contacts, and (if you opt in more) Facebook friends, so they can connect automatically when they're near your house without you typing the password out for them. Microsoft frames it as a convenience thing. I frame it as "why is my router password sitting in a Microsoft server tied to my contact list," and I turned it off within about five minutes of finding the setting. Its buried under Network settings, Manage Wi-Fi Settings, and its two separate toggles you have to hit. If youve upgraded and you havent checked, go check.
Aside from that, the privacy settings screen during setup was doing that thing where "Express Settings" quietly turns on a bunch of stuff, ad tracking ID included, and you have to click through to Customize to actually see whats being flipped on. I dont think this is some grand conspiracy, its just the lazy default that gets picked when a company assumes most people will click the big blue button and move on. Most people will. Thats sort of the problem.
The upgrade nag icon, the little Windows logo that's been sitting in peoples system trays for weeks now telling everyone to "reserve" their free upgrade, has apparently been rolling out since May. I'd been ignoring mine on the desktop this whole time and now I feel slightly guilty about it, like I ghosted an invitation.
Anyway. No crashes yet, no driver disasters, printer still works, wifi still works (safely, now, thanks to me turning off the sharing thing). Battery life seems about the same, maybe a touch worse but thats probably just Windows Update chewing through cycles in the background doing its first-week housekeeping. Ill give it another week before I even think about touching the desktop. If youre on the fence and you've got a spare machine lying around, thats the move, dont do your main box first. Learned that lesson the hard way with more than one OS over the years and I dont plan on relearning it in 2015.