When I got into work this week, my laptop had decided to throw a right wobbly over the weekend. Unable to see VM samba shares, Windows update mechanism completely borked, really wonky behaviour. Unable to get any work done at all. Would it be too cynical of me to suggest that M$ are deliberately ruining W7/8 boxes to 'persuade' people to upgrade to 10? Hell, that's what I'd do ;-)
Anyway, faced with a choice between defenestration and some other desperate measure, I burned a W10 Enterprise DVD and upgraded.
MAN, have they not streamlined that process! 4 hours to upgrade the OS? Blimey. Eventually the deed was done, my immortal soul pledged, evidence of the crime hidden.
You get a choice as to what to share with the cloud/M$ on first start, i.e. as little as possible (diagnostics stuff seems like a good idea, but pretty much nothing else). I got really annoyed at the stupid Cortana thing in the task bar; something that looks like a search box and which says, "Search the computer and the web' (or something like that) should be a bloody search box. So Cortana got disabled. Nice. Not tried the new Edge browser yet, AIUI it's a complete re-write not an IE re-skin. I had to go back to using Firefox recently despite it's ludicrous resource hogging as Opera has really lost pace with current website development and just doesn't work properly with a lot of websites any more, which is a real shame but they just don't have the resources to keep pace. I intend to see how Edge behaves wrt Firefox.
Other than that, it's same-old, really. New skin. I now know where Presonus got their idea for the Studio One v3 UI design. Bonus: the bloody horrible Metro UI crap has gone. Good riddance to bad rubbish; stop shoe-horning tablet/touch-screen UI's into full fat machines ffs. They have tried shoving a reduced version of it into the start menu, which I find annoying. 'Life at a glance'? Who comes up with this garbage? Fortunately I have a very sophisticated built-in Marketing BS filter which runs in tandem with my British Ultra Cynicism (TM). You can unpin stuff from there, but have not started doing that yet as I'm not currently sure if the icons will just be auto-replaced with even more annoying stuff. Pictures of bloody cats, most likely.
I like the thinner, tighter windows-edge lines. I like the fact that the command line has finally been given some attention and is now actually a proper window. It still ain't no Unix shell, but it is better.
For some inexplicable reason, the VirtualBox-side network settings got borked during the upgrade process, so I had to reconfigure DHCP and such but that was only a couple minutes work.
One thing I don't like (perhaps this can be configured) is that hovering over icons in the systray area no longer pops up tooltip-like information as to the state of the utility (was that part of aero?) e.g. if I hover over the Pulse VPN client icon, it no longer tells me if I'm connected or not, or as another example, hovering over the volume icon no longer tells me the current volume setting.
[Aside: Guthrie Govan is a bit good isn't he]
System Endpoint Protection has been replaced with Windows Defender. Um, didn't Endpoint Protection previously replace Defender? I think it's pretty much the same software under the hood tbh, there's a bit more 'corporate' stuff behind Endpoint Protection perhaps.
So...do I plan on upgrading any of my personal machines (my work laptop is actually my own machine, 'cos work are tight-asses who try to fob Dell garbage off on me)? Maybe...I might upgrade the HP 360 Chrome Book Killer, and *maybe* my full-fat laptop, but my W7 Pro main DAW machine? No. Not broken, don't need to fix.