Windows 10 updates?

[Dave Britten]

I've upgraded three machines so far. The two Asus systems had an issue with updating the touchpad drivers (which are awful to begin with), requiring a trip into device manager to remove the touchpad device after installation was complete. Windows then automatically installed the updated driver after a reboot. My desktop at work didn't have any trouble, even with the weird ATI + Intel onboard video combo I'm using to run 3 monitors.

On my Asus T100 convertible tablet, the new "tablet mode" is a nice improvement over what 8.1 offered. In 8.1, "Desktop" was essentially one big app, so if you wanted to snap, say, Excel and Firefox side by side, you'd have to go to the desktop, and fiddle around with sizing the windows. Now that "metro" apps are windowed just like any other Win32 apps, everything is much more consistent. Switch to tablet mode, and all apps run full screen and can be snapped side-by-side just as you'd expect. Very nice. They've also really cut down on the constant bezel swiping to get to hidden menus, and the taskbar remains on screen in tablet mode, not unlike the soft key bar on an Android tablet.

The new "task view" button by the start menu works like Expose on a Mac, showing you thumbnails of all your open windows. Nice to finally have that capability. And another minor thing I noticed is that it'll tell you the estimated time until your battery is charged if you float the mouse pointer over the battery icon.

OneDrive has been switched back to a desktop sync client like in Windows 7. This is great for me, because syncing in 8 and 8.1 required you to sign in to the computer using a Microsoft account, and I need to stick with local accounts. I was using a 3rd party app to handle the sync instead, but it wasn't terribly reliable all the time, and eventually totally stopped functioning on my T100.

The one major annoyance is that the upgrade clobbered my start menu tile layout, lumping them all into one big column/group. I don't have so many pinned tiles that it was a huge time investment to reorganize them at least, but doing it on 3 computers was tiresome.

The new Edge web browser seems promising. If they add some kind of extension capability and AdBlock makes it over there, it might be a contender. It's definitely not the IE engine with a fresh coat of paint; I loaded up our company Reporting Services site and saw all the typical rendering problems of a non-IE browser like Firefox or Chrome.

So in a nutshell, I like it so far. But if you do upgrade, make sure you dig through ALL the privacy settings and turn off all the stuff that has no business being on by default.