I have been using windows 10 on my Toshiba Satellite L10W for a few months now and overall I have been very happy with its performance and abilities. I have upgraded a number of laptops and overall it has been a fairly painless process. I know there were some reports of failures when upgrading but most could be tracked to antivirus updates or malware causing a glitch in the process.
Pros
- Upgrade process was reasonably painless, provided you have a reasonable internet link.
- Provides a start menu for users used to Windows 7
- Handles touch screen and tablet functionality really well.
- Starts up really quickly compared to windows 7
- Seems to recognise most printers without having to load extra drivers, and handles most USB devices really well.
- Graphics and movies seem to work really well.
- Patches are automatically installed as available. For enterprise networks this may not be desirable, but for the average home user this is a bonus.
Cons
- Privacy - one of the major issues that many people have is the amount of information that is pushed back to Microsoft with the default installation. Luckily most of these intrusions can be turned off for minimal loss of functionality. See this link for an explanation of how to do this.
- You will need to create a Windows (Outlook.com) login. Some people find having another login to remember a problem.
- Some older machines can have driver issues.- fortunately Windows 10 checks for this during the pre-installation process, however given the wide variety of devices out there there is always scope for something to be sufficiently different to cause an issue. This link provides some information on the basic requirements for the upgrade.
- Make sure your antivirus package is compatible and updated to the latest version. One machine I upgraded had Symantec version 12 installed and this needed to be uninstalled before the update would proceed.
- The download is quite large (~ 3Gb) and can take quite a while. If you are on a restricted link it can take many days for the Reservation process to complete the download. Also if your download limit is quite small this download could easily exceed your download limit.
- The Windows Easy Transfer utility has been removed. If you need to move from an older machine to a new machine, this was a great way to get your profile across. Fortunately you can cheat and use the Easy transfer from your old machine to load your profile on your new machine.
OK so you have decided that you want to proceed, what should you do?
First of all I recommend doing a full backup and ensuring that any files that are irreplaceable ( those photos of your kids as babies) are backed up to a separate external drive or USB stick. This may sound like basic IT advice but even I, as an IT professional, have been caught out by an untimely hard drive failure. Preferably you should have copies in multiple locations for redundancy. Make sure they are located in different places so that should the worst happen, you have a copy from which you can restore your data. With the recent wildfires in WA , we have seen how quickly a location can be overun. The use of services like Dropbox or OneDrive can ensure that you have an offsite backup of important files.
Click on the Windows 10 upgrade (Reservation) screen and select the option to reserve your copy. This will start the download and the upgrade screen will pop up when the download has completed.
Once you start the upgrade, Setup will check the compatibility of various softwares and drivers and signal if there are any obvious showstoppers. Then it is a case of just clicking OK as required and letting the machine restart as needed.
One thing that can be handy is ensuring you have a second machine with internet access should you run into a hitch and need to download some drivers. It can be a terrible problem if the driver you need happens to be the hardware driver for your network connection and you have no other way to access the Internet. For this reason, should you have multiple machines, it is also recommended that you do each one individually, and ensure that Internet access is available on the new machine before starting the install on the old machine.
A bonus is that Windows 10 gives you a rollback option should you find that you just can't survive without that specialised piece of software that has not been updated.
As an IT professional, I can recommend the Windows 10 upgrade as a simple way to improve your machine performance, with the added bonus that automatic updates will ensure that you are always up to date with system updates. For a home user this provides a great way to ensure that you are protected against some of the nasties out on the Internet and don't have to call your friendly support person except to talk to them, especially when that IT person is family :)
From an IT perspective, the remote access and remote assistance options are still available, up to the point where your device will not connect to the internet :( . At this point you are going to have to lay hands on, or talk your remote assistant through trouble shooting and re-establishing connectivity.
A bonus is that Windows 10 gives you a rollback option should you find that you just can't survive without that specialised piece of software that has not been updated.
As an IT professional, I can recommend the Windows 10 upgrade as a simple way to improve your machine performance, with the added bonus that automatic updates will ensure that you are always up to date with system updates. For a home user this provides a great way to ensure that you are protected against some of the nasties out on the Internet and don't have to call your friendly support person except to talk to them, especially when that IT person is family :)
From an IT perspective, the remote access and remote assistance options are still available, up to the point where your device will not connect to the internet :( . At this point you are going to have to lay hands on, or talk your remote assistant through trouble shooting and re-establishing connectivity.
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