Windows 10 - More Clarification About Who Does And Who Does Not Qualify For A Free Version

a reply to: Hefficide

If you're thinking of going with W10 I'd pass until the service pack finally comes out to fix all the problems and bugs the early adopters will inevitably weed out. This is Microsoft's track record with OS's, rush it to the market and then fix what's broke with a service pack.

Revisiting this because the wait is over and I am now several hours into the Windows 10 experience.

First, however, an observation: I created this thread, better than a month ago, as a means of trying to share some, what was then, "bleeding edge" information. Sadly that information was valid, then invalid, then valid again, then invalid again... endlessly. In fact nearly every bit of information about Windows 10 seemed spurious. It was almost as if Microsoft was having a schism, an internal war, and the different factions were engaging in in-house propaganda wars. One executive would do an interview, or send out a Tweet saying something definitive - only for another arm of MS to issue a contradicting statement hours later.

As bad as that is, it gets worse. Windows 10 is now out and many of the questions asked a month ago have yet to be clearly answered.

Amazing, that. No?

The specifics remain so muddy that it actually led me to behave like Microsoft. Over the past several weeks I've scheduled the upgrade, cancelled my reservation, rescheduled, cancelled... over and over. Ultimately, earlier today, curiosity got the best of me and I decided that upgrading was fairly low risk. I've got 3 Tb of external storage, where I keep almost everything that matters anyway... so I dove in.

Here are my first impressions:

1) DirectX 12 is impressive. While I have yet to play too many games on it, those that I have are visibly improved. Quite a feat in this day and age for a single upgrade to make a stark and immediately noticeable change to anything on a PC.

2) As much as I championed the Metro UI previously, I wound up turning it on, and then back off rather quickly in this version. This is partially because the Metro UI in Windows 10 is different and not as easy to maneuver through and partially because the new Start menu is really well designed.

3) Cortana ( one of the big draws for me personally ) needs a lot of work. She is no Siri. Beyond replying to questions about the weather, I have yet to find anything else she seems programmed to do... aside from simple voice recognition / web search. And that is just not enough.

4) My biggest praise... I had a partition table become corrupt last week. Ironically I think that a Windows update caused it.

Given that my PC is pretty new, the restore and back-up images were stored on that drive, in separate partitions. This error killed both of those partitions and no rescue media I could find ( Several Linux distro's included ) would access the borked partitions. This left me with no choice but to do a Windows reinstall from external media. And this sucked because the straight Windows lacked the proprietary software that came bundled on my PC - including the proprietary sound suite on my PC. Without that software my sound was barely audible and totally unbalanced. The background sounds were much louder than the voices - and even then full blast was barely a whisper.

Worse than that... the messed up partition table would not repair. My reinstall was a ticking time bomb. Yes, it was booting... but it was only a matter of time until the partition failed and I would be locked out of my PC again.

Frustrated, I went through the steps of ordering a physical copy of my preinstalled software and resolved myself to making due until that media arrived.

Amazingly Windows 10 apparently found the data on those corrupted partitions, during the upgrade, and put everything back to right. Even the partition tables. The proprietary software is back on my machine. The restore partitions are healthy and there. Everything is back to factory specs - only with Windows 10 instead of Windows 8 - AND the vast majority of the third party software I'd been using survived the upgrade as well.

By far and away the easiest and most rewarding upgrade I have ever had - with any operating system!

In summary... so far I am quite pleased with Windows 10. The desktop environment is clean, responsive, intuitive and well designed and the underlying software seems very nimble and stable.

I'm glad I took the plunge.