I was inspired to write this after reading a ZDNet article about Windows 10: Pushing my MacBook and iPad aside
My main computer is a 2014 Mac Book Pro (top of the line), that runs OSX and Ubuntu 14.04 alongside. Windows 8 never appealed to me as a desktop OS, and I run an android phone/tablet shop, so I never found the need for a Win8 tablet, although I admit their UI seemingly fit perfect for mobile devices. The desktop, on the other hand, was a complete failure. Hence, my desktop and Lenovo laptop remained with Windows 7 (and Ubuntu, of course).
Bad parts
After upgrading my beastly, yet older desktop to Windows 10, I was very pleased with the installation process; it was flawless. When complete, it looked great, and familiar, BUT my wireless mouse and keyboard that worked on every prior machine did not work. Looking further into it, I saw they were installed, they appeared in device manager, but just did not work. Wow, not a good start.
I turned it off, haven’t gotten back to it yet. Now I have upgraded on my Lenovo laptop from Win7 to 10, thinking I don’t have a wireless mouse and keyboard to worry about. A whole new set of problems arose: 1) My sound card apparently doesn’t work, no sound comes from the machine what-so-ever, and 2) The resolution was stuck at 1024×768?! My full HD, several thousand dollar laptop?!
Attempting to set the resolution (after finally finding the different settings), I notice that the resolution drop down box is disabled, and stuck at this resolution from the late 90’s. After much head shaking and neck slapping, I open MS Edge to give it a shot, and after 30 seconds for it to load, my resolution decides to automatically change to HD out of no where. Problem solved, but not sure how.
MS Edge boasts of several cool things, including the fact that it is a brand new code base, which doesn’t have any legacy code from our beloved legacy IE browsers. As a developer, I needed to test some things on a site in Edge to debug, yet it is missing several components from the developer tools. First, no resources tab, so I can’t see what scripts are loaded on the page in a convenient manner. Also, the dev tools wouldn’t dock, it stays a separate window.
And guess what, the best app ever created doesn’t work. That’s right, YouTube crashes everytime I try to play a video… on both machines (it’s not like I could hear the audio anyway). Multiple other people have reported this as well.
Lastly, I was told that the OS made everything snappier. I guess this came from Windows 8 -> 10 users, since I had quite the opposite experience. My computers slowed down by at least 200%, which is the most important part to me.
Good parts
Microsoft made Win10 better than Win8…. that was easy.
I was excited to use Cortana but since audio doesn’t work, it is worthless to me at this point. I hope to get that fixed to use this soon, as I have heard good things.
I really love the live tiles in the start menu, it really personalizes the experience for you in the operating system. It feels like they took many good features from different Linux desktop environments (heads up display, web widgets, etc) and incorporated them, which is a good thing.
Other than that, I will have to report back when I get things running a bit more smooth. So far, I am not substituting my Mac or Chromebook for a Win10 machine anytime soon.
My Suggestions
Get Linux on your machine. Linux Mint seems to be the most popular consumer-based Linux, followed by Ubuntu (www.distrowatch.com has the latest). Chrome OS also out-sold Windows laptops this past year, and is becoming the most popular laptop worldwide! For the price, you are getting the absolute best computer on the market! Dell also released their Chromebook for business, which is quite intriguing at their price point.