I upgraded to Windows 10 the day it came out, July 29th, mostly because I wanted to see what the fuss was about before writing anything here about it. Three weeks later and I'm still finding weird little surprises tucked into the Start menu, the kind of thing that makes me wonder who exactly signed off on it.
Microsoft put a number on the rollout last week, something like 75 million devices running Windows 10 in the first month. That's a genuinely fast pace for an OS upgrade, faster than Windows 8 ever managed, and I get why they're proud of it. The free upgrade thing clearly worked. My mother-in-law is running it now and she has never willingly upgraded an operating system in her life, not once, so that alone tells you something about how frictionless Microsoft made this.
But here's my actual complaint, and it's a small one, though it's been bugging me for two weeks straight: Candy Crush Soda Saga showed up pinned to my Start menu right after the upgrade finished. I did not install it. I did not ask for it. It was just there, sitting next to my actual programs, like Microsoft decided I needed a nudge toward King's mobile game empire on day one. Unpinning it takes two clicks, sure, it's not hard. But that's not really the point. A fresh OS install on a machine I already paid for shouldn't come pre-loaded with a freemium game tile I have to manually evict myself.
This isn't entirely new. Windows 8.1 did something similar with sponsored tiles if I remember right, and I complained about that here too at the time. But I guess I'd hoped Windows 10 would be a clean break from that stuff, given how much Microsoft talked about listening to users through the whole year of Insider Preview builds. Instead it feels like the same old instinct, just carried forward into the new coat of paint. Free upgrade, quiet ad placement through your own Start menu. I don't think it's some sinister plan, I just think somebody in Redmond decided a little cross-promotion never hurt anybody, and I happen to disagree with that math.
Setting the Candy Crush thing aside, the actual upgrade process was smoother than I expected going in. My desktop, which is closing in on four years old now, took about forty minutes start to finish and kept every program I had installed without a hitch. My old Steam library came through completely intact. The Start menu is back, which everyone already knows and has written about a hundred times by now, so I won't belabor it here. Cortana is switched off on my machine because I don't especially want my desktop listening for a wake word all day, though I know that's a controversial opinion among people who actually like the assistant features.
The GWX icon, that little Windows logo sitting in the system tray nagging anyone still on 7 or 8.1 to reserve their free copy, is apparently still tripping people up. I've read a few accounts of people accidentally triggering the whole upgrade just by trying to close the notification window, because clicking the X in the corner registered as acceptance instead of dismissal. That's a genuinely bad interface decision if it's true, and I believe it, because I nearly fell for something close to it myself before I actually read the fine print on my own machine.
Three weeks in, I'd call this a good upgrade with an irritating little asterisk hanging off it. The OS itself is fine, better than fine honestly, noticeably snappier than 8.1 was on this exact same hardware. But I keep coming back to that Candy Crush tile, because it feels like a small tell about where this is all heading. Free software has to make money somewhere, and right now it looks like that somewhere is going to be tiny nudges toward games and apps sitting in places you never asked them to be. I'd rather just pay outright for my OS and never see a Saga anywhere near my desktop again, but that ship sailed a while back and nobody seems interested in turning it around now.
If you upgraded already and haven't found your own surprise tile yet, go check the Start menu. It's probably in there somewhere.