Your Experience with Windows 10? - Mine Included

This should probably have been a blog post, I apologize in advance.

I've started this thread for people to discuss their experience with Windows 10 (good or bad) to give people who are considering upgrade some food for thought.

I write this after having upgrading to Windows 10 shortly after it was made available to the public. I was upgrading from Windows 7 and today I went back to Windows 7, reasons why:

- Numerous video games crashed often with Windows 10

- After my PC would reboot from being asleep it would crash shortly thereafter

- My USB inputs had driver issues, often when starting my PC the ports wouldn't work properly and not recognize my keyboard / mouse

- Constant AMD driver crashes, especially shortly after exiting a game or while alt-tabbing

Windows 10 is pretty nice to look at and it's definitely faster than Windows 7 but for me there were just too many compatibility / stability problems. The above issues may just be because my PC is 5 years old, so I'll have to monitor these issues with Windows 7 too, but so far so good.

How is everyone else making out with Windows 10?

To keep it short, bad.

1. Updated my video drivers on laptop without asking, hitting file > open in photoshop resulted in a BSOD everytime. Others with same issue.

2. A lot of applications do not function on 10. Clockwork tether for my phone isn't compatible with 10, my huion dwh69 tablet I use for painting has a lot of weird issues on 10. I have to use tablet emulation and it just randomly stops working in 10. Yes if I paid more for a wacom intuos pro I wouldn't have this issue, but Huion tablets are good for the price.

3. Can't disable driver signing easily like 7.

4. Incredibly buggy OS. I've seen people in my class have BSODs in lecture, on more than one occasion. The whole OS does not feel streamlined at all. I've had other BSODs as well besides the one with photoshop, my laptop tests out perfectly with memtest86+ and furmark + prime95. Worse off, they keep updating the builds instead of just getting it stable. You need Professional edition/Enterprise/Education to defer build upgrades, home users are SOL.

5. Startmenu sucks, it doesn't find any of the settings in the control panel. If you type "mouse" nothing shows up. I had to pay for Start10 to just get a workable startmenu again. A lot of junk is included on the startmenu as well. Start10 is a lot better than classicshell.

6. To actually become a full administrator like in Windows 7, you have to unlock the hidden administrator account. Doing this will prevent every single metro app from working. It's not a big deal for me, since I never use any of them. The benefit of using the built in admin account is that you never have to right click files to run them as admin. Also pasting files directly into the program files folder will not give you UAC prompts. UAC prompts show up even if you disable UAC in msconfig if you are not using the hidden admin account.

7. Windows Server 2016 has the same junk apps that 10 does. Why yes, I'd love to use my datacenter for GPS directions.

8. Windows Update sucks, you can't pick and choose the updates you want. This will force you to get driver updates unless you do workarounds that are way too much work.

9. If you have AMD, getting 4:3 stretched to work is a big problem. I don't use AMD or play 4:3, but a lot of CS:GO players are angry about that.

10. I can't get a stable framerate in CS:GO with my fps capped. This is consistent on every single computer I've tried, happens on both 8.1 and 10. Win7 I can get a perfectly flat framerate.

11. Quake Live has a lot of input lag because of DWM. It's not a true full screen app, so you're playing with vsync. If you have a gsync monitor you can avoid this though.

Edit: I just searched for a fix for the first time in a while, and it turns out that I just needed to increase the size of my System Reserved partition. I increased it to 1GB, and the Windows 10 installation finally finished...

The Windows 10 installer won't work with hard drives that have hidden partitions, such as my laptop, so I haven't even been able to get my free upgrade. It downloads just fine, but the install will not complete. The media creation tool will not work for me, either.

Microsoft tech support has been no help, with some people being downright rude. Some of their people will put me on hold until I hang up, send my call to the beginning of the Queue, or have showed such a lack of technical knowledge that I just thank them and end the call. Nobody at their call centers seem to have any suggestions or fixes of any kind for people having issues with installing Windows 10...

@SuperClocks: well based on my experience and that of JigglyWiggly I think you are probably better off not getting the upgrade.

Pretty good.

Though, like my cell phone, I am probably missing out on 90% of the features.

Definitely still miss Windows 7 though.

@whitey_rolls: Yeah, I'll probably end up skipping Windows 10 as my main OS. I would still like to dual boot Windows 7 and WIndows 10, though, just to try it out, familiarize myself with it, and test out DirectX 12 performance differences in the future. But, it looks like the free upgrade window will expire before they make the installer compatible with my laptop...

I did a massive upgrade to my PC when shifting to Windows 10 from Windows 7 so I can't give a like for like comparison. I upgraded from a Core 2 Quad setup to an i7 SkyLake setup so obviously I can't comment on speed differences. Obviously I did a fresh install.

So far I am loving Windows 10 the only complain I have is that my PC simply does not sleep but I haven't tried to troubleshoot this yet.

Software wise the only thing no longer working is the XboxExt app which gave the functionality of turning off the Xbox 360 wireless controller. Currently there is no solution for Windows 10 so I just leave my controller to turn off itself due to inactivity.

Apart from these 2 minor issues I literally have not had any issue with Windows 10. I have actually played a few "old" games as well and have had no issues so far. I also love some of the native Microsoft apps.

But I know plenty who have issues.

Not really a fan but we're about to deploy 10 at work so may as well get used to it.

Only issue so far is that I had to download a third party driver for my Asus Xonar Sound Card (which works fine with that driver).

Other than that, the updates are a bit too constant, but that's due to the way Microsoft is delivering this Windows, as a constant update service. (I turn updates off and do it once a month or two anyway).

All my friends have it and no major issues, except the occasional thing or two from a brand new OS which hasn't matured yet.

Just use a virtual machine if you want to "try" Windows 10.

When I updated to win10 it was fine for about a month. I had to disable searchui.exe and cortana so I wasn't being spied on all the time, then for some reason the sound would turn itself off at random, and would require a restart. The system would also restart out of nowhere if left idle for like 5 mins or so. It was a nightmare. I bought a new 3tb hdd, and tried to migrate windows to it, but no matter the program I used, it would fail. So I just did a clean install on the new hdd, and disabled all the spy crap on cortana, and it's been working without problems for the last 3 months or so.

I've also had nothing but bad times with Windows 10. I'm still forced to use it on some moble devices that are hardwired for it... but on my main PCs i've stayed far clear of it since initially testing it back at its release. But even with it off my main pc, im still suffering often on my other devices with it.

Had same problems as you did, a lot of crashes in games and apps. Also the update system is very bad, it delivers huge updates too often instead of the small efficient ones that have always come with windows 7. And forcing the updates just makes the whole thing even worse. I lost a lot of important data from the pc doing auto restarts on me.

The data mining and advertising collection microsoft has built into this thing is disguisting. To counter all this privacy invasion I started using more and more apps to block all ip's i don't need to be open. Basically running my pc in a state which makes any attempts by microsoft to steal data from me very difficult if not impossible... and this will all come in handy at a point when i will have to set up a partition on my pc to run windows 10 for dx12 games, but that is far far down the road and by then im sure there will be lots more ways to block microsoft from spying on me.

I'm not sure how you can say its faster than windows 7, i found it slower and a lot of my older games ran worse in it or not at all. A security app i had bluescreened often and used up almost twice as much cpu resources. So windows 10 is not backwards compatible with the software and games i use daily and using it as my main OS would block me from using a lot of things.

Windows 8 had similar problems i listed here, but windows 10 inflates them. Win 10 is an expansion on an already bad OS that was windows 8. And at least there is some control for updates in windows 8.

When it comes down to it, windows 7 is superior in everyway except one. It can't run dx12 games, and in the end i'll be sacrificing some space for a win 10 partition but its gonna really suck when i have to do that.

Also was mentioned above, but the retarded way you have to go through multiple steps just to be able to install an unsigned driver is laughable. Windows 7 lets you do it in an instant with no hassle.

@Yams1980: I mentioned Windows 10 being faster, not necessarily for gaming just overall use. For example booting my PC with Windows 10 was much faster than with Windows 7.

With respect to DX 12, I honestly forgot all about that. Will DX 12 make that much of a difference that it's worth dealing with all the Windows 10 headaches?

Its decent, I wish it had more file support and I didn't have to download 12 different unzippers though.

It has its issue, I spend good hour disabling as many as possible privacy options and getting rid of all the additional features I never use. Pretty much took me few hours in total to get back to the power user. Outside of some comparability issues Win. 10 is working pretty fast.

Hopefully more drivers are being worked on, a long way to go to reach Win. 7 support.

outstanding since since day 1

@whitey_rolls: I looked late last night and found a fix for my laptop. It turns out that it was actually the System Reserved partition that was the issue. I increased it's size to 1GB, and Windows 10 installed just fine. I've been trying it out for about an hour.

I already have some complaints...

1) I'm not liking all of the clutter in the Start Menu, but I haven't tried to see if I can remove any of it yet. The Metro buttons are just huge. There should be different modes for the Start Menu (desktop, tablet, phone). I do not need any huge touchscreen buttons on the start menu.

2) Everything is loading much slower than it did in Windows 7. It takes about 10 seconds for a system window to open. My laptop has an i3 CPU and 4GB of RAM, so I thought it would be faster than Win 7.

3) There were a ton of privacy settings that I had to change, and I had to block a ton of apps from accessing my camera and mic.

4) It seems like Windows is trying to copy google and monitor everything that you do. They're even targeting ads like Google. They're giving up a major advantage that they had over Google, which was not looking over everyones' shoulders 24/7.

5) My wifi didn't work at first, even after I tried installing the Win 10 drivers. I had to uninstall my wifi from the device manager and then scan for hardware changes before Windows would accept that the drivers worked.

So far, I prefer Windows 7. I still need to disable a ton of services, block every windows component in Windows Firewall, and block all but 3 ports outbound. Then, I'll start digging around a bit more, and probably find more things to not like. Hopefully, I've found the worst of it already...

At the beginning I had plenty of problems, mostly with audio drivers not working properly and Cortana/Start Menu crashing randomly. Right now it seems fine, the last problem I had was like three or four months ago when (I think) an external hdd had a power problem and it suddenly disconnected when I was watching some videos from it, giving me a blue screen. Well that and when I try to play a mess called Fallout 4 that either crashes/recovers my video drivers, kills my video signal forcing me to reboot or sometimes even gives me the odd red screen(luckily since the patches this one doesn't seem to happen anymore). :P

I have had no problems what so ever. My friend had trouble with his network adapter after upgrading though.

Cortana brings up mouse settings and other Control Panel settings. I think Run reverted back to opening executable files only. Might as well use Cortana because it's right up front.

Just install 7-Zip, you don't need 12 different unzippers.

@FelipeInside: I did

I tried out the Windows 10 technical preview and also the final Windows 10 in a VM. Lets just say I have never treasured my Windows 7 license as much since I tried it out.

Then what kind of files are you trying to open?

I have 7-Zip for zipped files, the rest Windows opens fine.

@FelipeInside: jar for one thing

7-Zip opens JAR files.

@FelipeInside: Mostly I wasted 5 hours trying to get windows 10 to stop failing to open files

I have no idea how you spent 5 hours on something so simple.

- Install 7-Zip

- Go into 7-Zip options and set Windows to default to 7-Zip to open compressed files.

Total time needed: 3 minutes.

@whitey_rolls: My Experience so far is actually good. Windows 10 isn't the best OS but it's certainly better then Windows 8.

It's gone really well so far. There were zero upgrade issues from Win7 or Win8.1 for me. Although I have had to reset Windows on one (of four) machines; and that was over with MUCH more quickly than reformatting.

A Reset IS a reformat, lol...

I kept trying to open files and windows just said "missing [blalabla]" every single time. I don't even know how I fixed it.

Yep, you definitely didn't go into 7-Zip and set the file extensions to open by default with that program.

No, it is not. At the very least, it's much more automated than before.

That has nothing to do with Windows10.

@JigglyWiggly_: It worked fine on every other OS without any hastle

Yes it is, lol. A reset is the new name for a clean install. It does a quick format of the HDD and then reinstalls Windows.

http://www.howtogeek.com/132428/everything-you-need-to-know-about-refreshing-and-resetting-your-windows-8-pc/ (that link is for Win8 but it works roughly the same on 10)

I should've taken notes on my experience with it. From what I remember, here's what I like and don't like

+ Boots Fast
- Start menu sucks
- Took a lot longer to navigate system options because of the "simplified" control panel
- More difficult to add start-up items
- Can't perma-disable Windows Defender

Other than that, seemed the same. Except a little bit uglier due to the boxy aesthetics.

Basically, seems like a downgrade from Windows 8. Good thing I didn't have to pay for it I guess. It would be amazing if Microsoft released an OS where you pay for the things you want and avoid the things you don't, instead of constantly being strong-armed towards an OS which only has a couple of things I need and tons of things I don't like.

In my case it boots slightly faster than my Windows 8, and my Windows 8 is on a slightly faster SSD (Samsung 840 Pro) and faster PC. It's possible I'm not using the default Windows 8.1 menu, I might've swapped it out so fast that I don't even remember. What I have is basically the classic start menu but with some extra functionality. Is the regular Win 8 start menu the one that fades the screen black? I barely remember. As for the Windows 10 start menu, it feels like it takes up my entire screen, yet all that's on it is a bunch of useless pre-installed bloatware and apps. Why is it so damn huge? It couldn't possibly be any uglier. Half the time when I type my search into the start menu, it searches the internet for what I'm looking for instead of my PC, and I can never figure out why. I can switch it over with a click, but usually the following time I search it just goes back to the internet. In general it hasn't worked consistently - I had to restart the Cortana process on multiple instances to get the search to work properly. As an easy way to add start-up items, Windows 8.1 has a folder in the start menu that you can drag and drop things for them to start at boot. To do the same thing on Windows 10, I needed pull a run-command from the internet to bring that folder up.

It's all small stuff. Could probably be fixed just by installing some interface program, so it's no big deal. Could be a lot worse really, it's mostly the same operating system.

One big positive actually that I forgot to mention is that the Win 10 install was my favorite install yet. It was incredibly brief. Like, 20 minutes?

- Win10 Start Menu isn't huge. For the first time in history you can actually resize it both horizontally and vertically.

- The pre-installed software can be uninstalled

- It searches the internet because you have the setting on to search online. I don't remember where it is but you can tell it to just search your PC.

- Start programs: http://www.softwareok.com/?seite=faq-Windows-10&faq=28 (there's a few different ways to do it)

No it isn't, lol. I read that link and others. A reset is the new name for an automated clean install. It is not like the traditional reformat. Like I said, it's much more automated than before.

I never said it wasn't automated, but it basically does a reformat of the HDD.

i had windows 8.1 and it gave me a free upgrade....i liked it more the 8 right away....the look of the ui...the start menu was back... all my games still worked. no issues.

when i got my gaming pc in november i got win 10 OS clean install right from the start. no issues so far.

never used 7 or vista.

My experience with Win 10:

Got a lot of memory BSOD, depside downloading latest drivers or reverting back to original ones.

Went back to 8 and everything is a ok.

You're saying the start menu is WORSE than Windows 8? No way.

hmm , for me windows 10 is better than windows 8.1 , but i have a lot of problems with my labtop , its heavy on it even with i5 and 8 gb ram , mien Desktop nothing so far , but with amd driver it was crap , with most of the new games run good but most of the games I did play was 2014/2015 .

the UI is not that tempting for me I dont know its not that big step i guess , but I still wish that we had more support in linux so we could have more options .

Where did I say that? I just said it sucks. I recommend switching it out with the classic shell, like I did with Windows 8. I didn't even give the Windows 8 start menu a chance. This time, I've had the default start menu on for a week and I still can't wrap my mind around it. It's like they took everything useful off the Start menu and replaced it with shortcuts to stuff I never use. Considering how easy it is to switch out the Start menu, it's a pretty minor thing to care about.

I honestly don't understand where you find the Win10 menu so difficult.

It's basically identical to the Windows 7 Start Menu only that it lets you resize it and also add the Metro Apps on it (and remove them as well). Everything else works the same with a few things in different places which Microsoft always moves around with a new OS.

Never noticed the option to re-size it, or ever heard anywhere that it was resizable. I'll give it a shot when I'm at my Win 10 PC. The reason I find it difficult is because of the "All Apps" replacing where "All programs" used to be. When I press "All apps", it just shows a few some pre-installed "apps", rather than an overview of all the programs I have installed on my computer. Whenever I create start menu shortcuts - they aren't showing up in this apps section. In general, this section is a lot bulkier and harder to navigate than I feel it should be, but I guess I'll have to see if there's any way to customize that too. Might just be easier to throw on the classic shell.