So the little Windows icon finally won.
It showed up in my system tray sometime back in June, this little white flag-shaped "Get Windows 10" thing that just sat there blinking at me every time I glanced at the clock. I ignored it for weeks. I told myself I'd wait for the "real" release, whatever that meant, and then Microsoft actually shipped the thing last Wednesday (July 29th) as a free upgrade for anyone running 7 or 8.1, and I ran out of excuses. Thursday night, around 11pm, three beers into a very mediocre Thursday, I clicked "Upgrade Now" and went to go do dishes.
It took about 40 minutes on my desktop, which isn't bad, and about twice that on my old ThinkPad, which I fully expected because that laptop wheezes doing basically anything now. I want to talk about a few specific things because most of the "Windows 10 is here!" posts you've probably already read ten of this week, and I don't have much to add to the general take. What I do have is a list of small, specific things that annoyed me or delighted me, in no particular order.
The privacy screen is a lot. When you first boot in, there's a settings pass where you can choose "Express Settings" or go through and set everything manually, and if you go manual there's something like a dozen individual toggles, most of them defaulted to on, covering stuff like ad personalization, location, typing and speech data going back to Microsoft, and a few things I genuinely didn't understand the wording of at 11:40pm. I clicked through and switched off basically everything except updates. Took me maybe four minutes. My mom is never going to do this and that bugs me more than it probably should.
Cortana is fine, I guess. I asked her what the weather was going to be tomorrow and she got it right. I have not used her since. I don't talk to my computer and I don't think I'm going to start because Microsoft put a circle in the taskbar.
Edge replaced Internet Explorer and I keep forgetting it exists. I use Chrome, like everyone else with a pulse, so this is mostly a non-event for me, but the icon looks nice and it opened fast the two times I poked at it.
The Start menu is back and it's genuinely good. This is the one unambiguous win. Windows 8's full-screen Start tile situation was one of the worst UI decisions I've used a computer through, and having a real menu with a list of apps on the left and live tiles on the right, in an actual window, anchored to the corner like a normal operating system, is just correct. I know that's not exactly hot news at this point since it's been in the preview builds since last fall, but using the finished version on my main machine for the first time felt like exhaling.
And then there's Solitaire. Somebody at Microsoft decided the built-in card game that's shipped free with Windows since 1990 needed ads now, or a $1.99 a month subscription to make them go away. I'm not even mad about the ads existing, ads exist everywhere, I'm mad that this is the hill they built a monetization strategy on. Solitaire. The game you play for four minutes while you're on hold with your insurance company. That's the one they decided needed a business model.
Anyway. My old ThinkPad is running noticeably hotter than it did on 8.1, fan spinning up doing basically nothing, and I haven't figured out if that's a driver thing or just an old laptop being an old laptop. If anyone's seen the same thing, especially on a machine with an aging Intel HD 4000 chip, let me know, because I've got three tabs of forum threads open and none of them agree with each other. I'm not reinstalling anything tonight though. It's late and the dishes are still only half done.