That little Windows icon has been sitting in my system tray since some time in June, nagging me to reserve my free upgrade, and I finally gave in this weekend. Windows 10 shipped last Wednesday and I figured I'd let the internet find the horror stories first before I touched my own machine. By Saturday night nobody I follow had lost a hard drive to it, so I pulled the trigger on the ThinkPad around 9pm.
The actual install was less dramatic than I expected. It had already downloaded most of the files in the background over the past week or so (my monthly data cap didnt love that, but whatever), so the install itself was maybe 45 minutes of restarts and progress bars. It did hang at 32% for about ten minutes at one point and I nearly went and made a sandwich out of pure anxiety, but it finished fine. No blue screens, no missing files, nothing.
First impression: the Start menu is back and its actually good. Not "good for Microsoft" good, just genuinely fine to use. Small tiles you can resize, a normal list of apps on the left, search that works instantly. Compare that to Windows 8s full-screen tile wall that I spent two years complaining about on this blog and its not close. I know some of you are going to tell me you liked Windows 8. You are wrong, but you're allowed to be wrong.
Cortana is turned on by default and I let it stay on mostly out of curiosity. Its fine? Its Bing with a microphone. I tried asking it a couple of things Friday night and felt vaguely ridiculous talking to my laptop at 11pm like it was going to judge me back, so I mostly just type into the search box like a normal person. Maybe that changes once I actually need hands-free stuff, which for me is basically never.
The one genuine headache was my printer. I've got an old Epson all-in-one that's probably five years old at this point, and after the upgrade it just refused to print anything, showed up as "offline" no matter what I did. Took me about twenty minutes of uninstalling and manually grabbing a fresh driver off Epson's site before it worked again. Not the end of the world, but if you've got old peripherals, don't assume the upgrade handles them gracefully. It didn't for me.
The thing that actually annoyed me was digging through the privacy settings. A lot of stuff is opted in by default — advertising ID tied to your account, typing and speech data going back to Microsoft to "improve" things, location sharing turned on. None of it is secret exactly, it's all sitting there in Settings if you go looking, but you do have to go looking, through several different screens, and the defaults are all on the side of sharing more rather than less. I spent a chunk of Sunday morning clicking through toggles with my coffee getting cold. If you're upgrading this week, budget fifteen minutes for that before you do anything else.
I also poked at Edge for about twenty minutes. It imported my Chrome favorites without complaint, which was nice, and it does feel snappier than old IE ever did. But there's no extension support yet, no ad blocker, nothing, so it's not replacing my main browser anytime soon. It's sitting on the taskbar as the thing I'll open if a site is acting weird in Chrome, which is basically the role IE has played in this house for the last three years anyway.
Overall I'd call it a good upgrade, genuinely, which isn't something I say about Microsoft releases very often on here. The free-upgrade window runs until next July if you're on 7 or 8.1 and haven't bothered yet, so there's no huge rush. I'm going to hold off on doing the desktop for another week or two just to see if anything weird shakes out of the woodwork first — old habits from the Vista days die hard. But that tray icon is gone now, and honestly that alone made the weekend worth it.