I’ve been clinging to my Win7Pro like a child with a blankie. As the deadline looms, I need to fish or cut bait.
Do I want Win 10? I don’t have any issues with Win7.
StG
You will have to move on to Windows 10 at some point in your life. Do you want to learn to use it now, or later? (I say “learn” but navigating Windows from a user standpoint has not changed dramatically) Later will come, unless you plan to give up computers when your current computer dies or your current computer becomes difficult to use with changing technology. The web alone can and will develop past what your Win7 computer can handle. And something as simple as getting a new computer peripheral can mean no compatible drivers with Win7. So, Win10 will happen to you sooner or later. Ultimately, if you don’t get the free upgrade now, in order to not feel like a chump paying for it when you previously had a free option, you’ll have to wait until your next computer purchase to get Win10.
If you are like me, and your compliment of hardware/software is all 6+ years old, stable, and unlikely to upgrade piecemeal, then don’t upgrade. I have no complaints about how my system runs now, and I have no interest in discovering after the fact that a certain peripheral or piece of software doesn’t have adequate drivers/support for Win10.
But, if you’re more current on things, then totally go for it and future-proof yourself. Not upgrading means committing to a legacy system.
Ah the voice of doom and gloom.
Windows 10 is unavoidable if your current system has to be replaced in a couple of years. “The web alone” may scale out of reach of out-of-date hardware, but nothing in Windows 10 software is an antidote to that.
In the long run, Windows 10 will be the Windows. Macca26 is advising you to prepare for the long run now. Unless you have philosophical or practical* reasons to decline, it’s not a bad idea.
*Practical reason: old hardware that isn’t going to be well-supported in Windows 10, which is just a way of saying “I’ll use Win 7 on this device until it breaks or is too outdated to use, at which point I’ll switch to new hardware and Windows 10.” But anything in the last 5 years will probably work OK with 10.
My current computer isn’t very old - my nephew built it for me about 6 months ago.
I guess I might as well suck it up.
StG
The main reason I refused to move from WIn7 to WIn10 was the fact that upgrades to Win10 can occur at any time without consultation.
I hope this means I can stop worrying about an unwitting installation of win10 when my laptop is unattended.
If you want to keep using Win7 (and I don’t blame you a bit), it would still be smart to do a full backup of your boot partition, and upgrade to Win10 before the deadline. If I’m not mistaken, once you upgrade and register, your hardware signature is in the Microsoft database, and you can do clean installs of Win10 any time after that. So after you upgrade and register, you’re free to restore the Win7 partition and keep using it as long as you want, and you can still switch to Win10 for free when you’re ready, or when you buy some new device that won’t work with Win7.
ETA: if you don’t have backup software, I’ve had good luck with the AOMEI Backupper freeware.
So why not upgrade to Windows 10 at a time of your choosing? I did it after making multiple system backups, although the upgrade was clean and I’ve had no issues in the months since.
Sorry, I was ambiguous.
Once Win10 is installed, all further upgrades to Win10 would be mandatory and not at a time of my choosing
It’s easy to circumvent that. Just go into Control Panel => Administrative Tools => Services, and disable Windows Update. Done. No more updates, or even notifications of available updates, until you re-enable it. You should probably keep an eye on tech news to see if you’re missing something really important.
I seem to have stopped getting the Nagware telling me to update. What is the least painful way to upgrade to 10 without a window yelling at me to click here?
mmm
That’s not true. Microsoft will turn the service back on after a little bit. Heck, they already did that on Windows 7.
The one thing that sorta works is telling Windows 10 that you are on a metered connection. But that technically just tells it to avoid any but the most important updates. And it will still nag you.
There may be some app that will stay resident and kill the service every time that Microsoft tries to start it back up. But I never found one back when I was on Windows 10.
I hate it even more because of these stupid 3GB updates that take hours and undo your customization, and then cripple parts of the OS that used to work. I lost the ability to disable the shitty Microsoft driver for my display and use the one from Windows 7 which still worked just fine. I lost all the font increases I made to make the screen legible at a proper viewing distance (about 3 feet away. Pretty much gets rid of eyestrain.)
All because Microsoft can’t make a proper update system that actually works gradually without restarting your entire computer. In fact, Windows 10 updates want to restart more often than Windows 7 ever did! There’s no reason most updates couldn’t just restart whatever service is being updated. There’s no reason for so much being tied into drivers.
I mean, Linux can actually update it’s freaking kernel while the system is live.
BTW, did you know that Cortana will now be mandatory in the latest 3GB update? Just like they took away your ability to use Google, now you must use Cortana. Which still can’t do file searches as well as were done on Windows 7.
Wait, you can’t choose a search engine in Win 10?
StG
About the mandatory updates
This particular article is from July 2015, so perhaps things have changed, but I think not:
“The latest Windows 10 build does not include any way to bypass automatic updates, Ars Technica reports. While this has always been the case with Windows Insider Preview releases, build 10240 is reportedly the one Microsoft will provide to PC vendors, suggesting that updates will be mandatory for anyone who purchases a PC running Windows 10 Home. (Windows 10 Pro users can delay feature updates by up to eight months through a “Current Branch for Business” update cycle.)”
I don’t think that’s true, and I just used Google in Microsoft Edge (the replacement for Internet Explorer) to search for “How to disable Cortana in Windows 10”.
It is absolutely true. My updates have been turned off for six months.
There were a whole bunch of articles that came out shortly after the official release of Win10, that gave a different way to turn off updates. It was not as easy as what I said, and it didn’t work for long. That might be what you are talking about.
That article is wrong. It’s true that the official option to turn off updates was removed from the Windows Update screen, but disabling Windows Update from the Services screen, which is not something you will find in the help file, works.
The only other thing I can think of, and I’m too lazy to check it, is that maybe you don’t have an easy way to get to the Services screen in the Home version. It’s two clicks in the Pro version.
I was thinking of upgrading one of my computers; but the upgrade checking software said my monitor wasn’t acceptable. I checked for a more recent driver; there was none. So I decided not to upgrade since I would have to buy a new monitor.