Again, is this Win 10 Pro, or Win 10 home, which cannot network with a domain?
Grin! Good to know, and thanks! Aye, I do all my file-storage in top-down directory tree format like that. Photos, then broken down by year, with file-names that contain the subject/location and the date. “Yosemite Valley Bridalveil Falls 20020829.jpg” Or Correspondence, then incoming or outgoing, and, again, using self-documenting file names.
(I think I’m probably a Unix geek by instinct and nature. I really ought to migrate to Linux some day.)
(I grew up during 8.3 file names, and YVBV0208.jpg is really awful to have to work with! I laughed for hours when I first encountered 256 character file names!)
Are you backing this up to a DVD or something?
Quadruple bypass…er, backup.
Two separate 2 TB USB hard drives;
an online service (Backblaze – anyone have any strong opinions on Backblaze?);
and DVDs of the really important stuff.
(And my system has an “Are you sure y/n” safety question on deletion of files.)
The Charms are GONE!!!
It’s not great, but it’s a million times better than 7.
These are my primary concern. There are some significant issues here. I jump through some hoops to keep Facebook et al off my system and out of my information—WIn 10 seems like it could be much more intrusive. Sample article that touches the surface here, but there are lots of sources.
I’m also leery of Microsoft’s business model–the parts we’re not privy to. My steadfast example is the Miserable Ribbon in office products. A clear, unequivocal marketing move cloaked in threadbare rationale of making things ‘easier’. It stretches credulity to think that Microsoft is giving away its flagship product without some long-term ideas of monetizing it. IMHO selling/using personal data is only one aspect of it; time will tell.
The above is high-intensity scepticism, but not an absolute bar to upgrading if things eventually shake out to my comfort. So I’m nonetheless keenly interested in Win 10 and what it can offer. I’ve been as happy with Win 7 as I was with XP. Can you give a quick idea of what you find are improvements?
Well, I haven’t found 7 to be unstable or anything. I just hugely disliked the interface. At first, everybody kept telling me that I would get used to not having a Start Menu and all that, but I never have. 10 has sort of amalgamated the “Start Page” from 7 with the old Start Menu, so that it’s tile-y and adjustable like a phone desktop but scrollable and useful like… well, like a Start Menu.
ETA: I use a laptop with a mouse and with the touchscreen disabled. If you are on a tablet or use a lot of touch features you might feel differently; the new menu is probably too fiddly for fingertip control (which is what makes it so much better for mouse control).
RE-ETA: I’m also not really concerned about data mining.
RNATB, you’re mixing up 7 and 8. 7 was the old start menu, 8 was that tile POS.
Oh, fuck me. I am. Okay, I take that all back. 7 is pretty okay. 10 is really not much different interface-wise.
There are definitely privacy issues, and I hope MSFT locks those down quickly. Anyone on Windows 10 should read this and follow the suggestions where appropriate for your situation. It’s a decent non-biased analysis of the privacy issues and how you can configure Windows to mitigate some of them (if they concern you).
Two takeaways from it: first, MSFT isn’t doing much that Apple and Google don’t do. This is in no way an excuse, but it does mean that shifting to one of those OS’s isn’t the answer (cue the Linux and Ubuntu fans). Second, I hope that some of the security issues in Windows 10 are simply due to a poorly written, overly general privacy policy and that MSFT doesn’t actually plan on doing all the stuff they say they can do with data sharing. But until they make that clearer, it’s best to assume the worst and take precautions.
Fyi, if you ever use torrents, it’s been reported that trackers are starting to ban Win10 machines over privacy concerns:
https://torrentfreak.com/torrent-trackers-ban-windows-10-over-privacy-concerns-150822/
Beyond that, I work in legal and need to be able to attest to data security. Not a chance in hell I’ll be upgrading given the currently ambiguous privacy situation.
Yes… any thoughts on the EULA clause that gives Windows 10 the authority to block “unauthorized hardware” (conveniently not defined)?
I’d like to upgrade while it’s free, since my main workhorse computer is a home-built and I will only replace hardware piece by piece as it wears out. I have my concerns about how this all works, though – I HAVE the physical install disk for Win7 in case my hard drive crashes – because I have had crashes without an install disk because Dell never gave me backups for the OEM installations, and wow did that suck – but what about for Win10? And then is this inching towards a subscription model where I have to continuously pay for it? (Which I can’t afford – buying it once and using it for as long as possible is ultimately cheaper than monthly payments forever, which is why I still haven’t upgraded my Adobe suite… no idea what I’m going to do about that.)
So while free is better than paid, what am I getting on the hook for?
The free upgrade is only for Home so far.
So far, I really like Windows 10, and I upgrade immediately after it was released. I did have some one initial issue with my display driver that was hurting performance, but once the latest one was released after about a week, I haven’t had any problems. In fact, I’m seeing significant performance improvements over Windows 7 and Windows 8. It seems to pretty much be the best of both with a few other small tweaks and better performance.
So, frankly, my suggestion is that unless you have a compelling reason not to upgrade (like pirated software), I’d recommend it.
No, the Pro versions of 7 and 8 are included too. Here’s the details:
Perhaps Skywatcher means that the free upgrade has only been released for the Home version? Admittedly I’m basing this on the fact that I have Win 7 Pro on two machines, and neither one has given a peep about upgrading.
My Win7 Pro machine hasn’t given me the “click to reserve your upgrade” icon either, as another data point.
Please inform me why it is any of Microsoft’s business to know what software I’m running.
Good question. How would I know? What is an icon editor? It used to be you got a computer, you got a manual. Nowadays, all you get is a help menu which is useless if you don’t know what the thing you are looking for is called. I remember trying to find the file associations before I knew what it was called. Impossible. If you had a manual with contents, you could browse it, find the general area and zero in on what you were looking for.
I guess it was the start screen I objected to. But I couldn’t answer the question because I had no idea what it was called. I am used to a desktop, have gotten used to it over the past 20 years since I got my first Win-95 computer (which I still have and have even turned it on fairly recently to search for some old files). Now I am required to learn a whole new computing paradigm. I’m too old for this.
I assume from the question that if it is the home edition, then I cannot network with my wife’s computer. Or is that not a domain? What is a domain?
I especially love it when I am asked to see my sysop. I am my sysop.