I upgraded my main desktop the Saturday after Windows 10 came out July 29th, mostly out of curiosity and a little bit of peer pressure from the yellow taskbar icon that had been nagging me for a month. It's been about two weeks now and I've had enough time to poke through the settings menus and figure out what I want on and what I want off. If you're one of the people who follow this blog for actual practical advice instead of me complaining about things, this one's for you.
Wi-Fi Sense. This is the feature that, by default, shares your wifi network with your Outlook.com contacts, Skype contacts, and Facebook friends so they can connect automatically without you having to read them the password off a sticky note. Sounds convenient. Also sounds like a great way for your ex-coworker's plus-one at a party to get on your home network without you ever finding out. You can turn it off under Settings, Network and Internet, Manage Wi-Fi Settings — there's a toggle for "For networks I select, share them with." Untick it. Took me four seconds and honestly should not have shipped on by default.
Feedback and diagnostics. Microsoft calls it that under Settings, Privacy, and there's a dropdown that goes Basic, Enhanced, Full. Mine was set to Full out of the box, which as far as I can tell means Microsoft gets a decent chunk of telemetry about how I use the machine, including things typed into search boxes. I dropped mine to Basic. I don't have a strong conspiracy theory about this, I just don't see why my typing habits need to leave the building.
Cortana is the one I went back and forth on. I actually like it more than I expected, the natural language stuff for setting reminders is genuinely useful, way better than the Windows Phone version felt a year ago. But it only works if you let it see basically everything: your calendar, your location, your browsing history through Edge. I left it on for now, mostly because I wanted to see if it'd get less useful over time the way most software promises get less useful over time. Ask me again in six months.
One thing that annoyed me more than the privacy stuff was background apps eating battery on my laptop. There's a list under Settings, Privacy, Background Apps, and by default a good dozen apps I've literally never opened (Money, News, Get Office, whatever) were allowed to run in the background. I went through and flipped off everything except Mail and Calendar. My battery life on the ThinkPad went from barely making it through a coffee shop visit to something closer to respectable, though I didn't run a real before-and-after test so take that with a grain of salt.
Small tangent because I can't help myself: my mother in law's wifi network is now apparently shared with three of my cousins because of that Wi-Fi Sense default, and untangling that over the phone with someone who still calls the taskbar "the bottom bar" took about forty five minutes on Sunday. Worth it for family harmony I guess.
I'll say this for the upgrade itself, separate from the settings menu archaeology: it's fast. Boot time on the desktop is noticeably quicker than 8.1 was, and I haven't had a driver crash yet, which given my track record with Windows launches is basically a miracle. Everyone's still talking about Google turning itself into a holding company called Alphabet this week, which is a much bigger story than anything I just wrote here, but my inbox has been full of "how do I turn this off" questions from people who upgraded and never touched the menus, so this felt more useful to actually sit down and write.
If you upgraded and haven't touched a single setting yet, give yourself twenty minutes this weekend. Start with Wi-Fi Sense. Do it before your cousins show up.