I reserved my “free” upgrade to Win10 from 7 after Microsoft stealthfully installed the sign-up widget in my tray disguised as an update a few weeks ago. After reading a post on Lifehacker last Wednesday on how to skip the wait and go ahead and update now, I took the plunge.
Downloaded it and installed it on Thursday evening. The start menu was some sort of hybrid between 7 & 8 and I tried modifying it to my liking, but by yesterday evening gave up and downloaded a 30 day trial of the beta of Start10 to get back that Win7 menu love. The real deal will cost about $5, which seeing as the Window upgrade was free, an easy pill to swallow.
Like Windows 8, if you have a tablet or a phone all that touch screen goodness is still baked in, but unlike 8 if you have a plain ol’ laptop (or desktop) it isn’t forced down your keyboard. So far it runs just fine on this 1.3Ghz laptop with 3G of RAM. It starts up marginally quicker, but takes longer to shutdown. The upgrade was painless with the exception of Windows Mobile Device Center was incompatible which we use to sync our ancient IPAQ for geocaching. But I plugged it in, some perhaps newer version installed and it went ahead and synced up.
There have been a few teething problems, mostly involving Firefox (surprise) the icon disappeared from the task bar (fixed) and the Firefox label in the upper right-hand corner of the browser randomly pixelates (not fixed.) All the file associations were kept, but the first time you open a program by double-clicking, a file a dialog box pops up asking if you want to keep the default program or use a Windows 10 featured program or download an “app” from the Store.
All in all I like it and will probably do the desktop when Microsoft gets around to offering it to me. There are several other items of note that you should be knowledgeable about before taking the plunge, so if you want to get the latest version of Windows, do some reading – start here: Everything You Need to Know About Windows 10